I Diary2

Diary 070603

Woke up at 6 o'clock. I lay there for an hour and thought about the
story I was working on. I've discounted the aliens now. I like the idea
but if I had aliens then I would also have to have a visit to an alien
spaceship and then a battle and then the characters would have to come
back to Vegas. It would all be too much. And anyway I've decided what
to do with the gay gangsters.

At 7 o'clock I got up and made me and Gary a coffee. It is always me
that makes coffee but that's ok because it is Gary who does almost
everything else. When I saw him yesterday at the train station
involuntarily I had a sharp intake of breath. It's nice when after a
year that still happens. Gary asked what I had been doing. I told him I
had been writing and that I'd posted my diary on abc.

I don't know why I did that, especially because I had written about my
father.

A long time ago my father told me not to write about him. He said that
patricide was a sin. But what about suicide? All that Courvoisier and
all those Gitanes, they couldn't have helped.

Dad used to write; poetry, short stories, the lot. But he was quite
shy about it. He was a poor working-class boy who somehow got into
Cambridge. He didn't fit in where he was but he didn't fit in there
either. The whole Cambridge thing was something that he never really
talked about, not until much later. He didn't collect his degree until
the 90s and only then because he needed it for some job he was going to
'get respectable' doing. I think he was joking, because there was no
chance of that.

Dad used to keep his stories and poems down by the side of his bed
along with his collection of porn magazines. Sometimes I used to sneak
in there and have a look. At both. I remember one of his stories was
about a private detective. It was good, great even, even I could see
that, and when I started writing I stole whole chunks of the dialogue.
I showed that story to dad after it got printed in the magazine at
school (a mean feat, because after all, I was the editor). If he
recognised there what he had written then he didn't say. Mind you, when
he had written it, he had probably been drunk. He usually was.

There are so many funny stories about my father.

There was the time when he put on a yellow dress and yellow hat and
walked down the street of the Greek village where he was spending the
Summer holding hands with his friend John.

There was the time when he got lost on the Greek mountainside wearing
only a wetsuit and frightened some little children who probably thought
he was some aquatic embodiment of the SAS.

Or when he woke up in a police cell and he had lost one of his socks.
Not a shoe, but a sock.

Those stories make me smile now and I wish that I had been there with
him more. For the last eight years of his life I didn't see him. Except
at the end.

That last time when I went to Greece and he was in the hospital his
friend Dmitri met me at Larissa station. It was early in the morning
and too soon to go to the hospital. Dmitri gave me the keys to my
father's flat and told me he would be there later to pick me up to take
me to see my father. He told me to make myself at home. I was, after
all, family.

One of the first things I saw when I entered the flat was a page from
Woman's Weekly blue-tacked above my dad's bed. I recognised that page
because on it was a story I had written. It was the first thing I had
ever got published and paid for. That made me sad a bit.

After coffee this morning I set about finishing the Darts story. At
one point Gary came in and glanced at the screen.

"The Loop Garoo Kid," he said, "are you writing about yourself?"

The Loop Garoo Kid was the name I used to use on gaydar. Gaydar was
where me and Gary met. I was scared back then. I'd been writing for
years and I didn't I know how to speak to anyone anymore. I stood him
up twice before I made the plunge and met him in KFC.

I explained to Gary that The Loop Garoo Kid was a character from a
book that I've written but before that The Loop Garoo Kid belonged to
Ismael Reed, a black writer from the 60s in America who wrote
subversive genre fiction. I explained that The Loop Garoo Kid appeared
in a book called Yellow Back Radio Broke Down. He was a black cowboy
taking on Bo Schmoo and the neo-social realists.

By this time Gary's eyes had kind of glazed over. Gary doesn't read
what I write and I like that. I know that I'm not going to turn up at
his house one day and find something I've written tacked to his wall. I
couldn't stand that. Not again.