Drug Colors
Drug Colours is a punk tale of 1978 London and was published in Cleis Press’ “Where the Boys Are” (nominated for a 2007 Lambda Award) and will soon feature in Lethe Press’s “Best Gay Short Stories 2008″
London is black and white in 1978. It’s a violent hurrah - a feeling that the world is going to hell, but that’s all right, because you can get there with Johnny and Sid and it won’t take that long. Just three chords, blue pills and we’ll all die trying.
A Bolshie freedom slides through the city with a brash over-confidence. Clubs proliferate and the straight and the not-so-straight and wish-they-weren’t-straight all come-and-come to congregate at the places where the queers are.
Mike passes out his Sobraines. They impress as they were meant to do. Mike buys them cheap; packetless and slightly dented, from a man in a turban down Brick Lane. They add a tawdry glamour, which would be the band Mike would start if he could be arsed. He exhales and stubs out his black Sobraine on the leather-boy on his left and kisses the boy on his right. The boy is flat-top blond and pretty and his vacant eyes glow like tonic water under ultra-violet. The boy’s hands fumble beneath the table; a promise of later or just a cock-tease? Hard - hard to tell. Mike demands payment. Their lipsticks stick like glue, just for a second - and Mike contemplates whether he should taste him again but before he finishes the thought he’s forgotten it. The table is crammed with young men, cute as puppies in baskets and desperate to be debauched so they can write home and tell their friends how wicked they are. And Mike’s glad of it.
Such a few short years, Mike thinks, watching the blow-ins from Oxford and Falmouth as they shrug off the jeans of their respectability and smear themselves with the eye-liner of the city. From underground we come, and step blinking into the light, still negative, still neutral. These boys come, never ending waves of slender, Doc Martin wearing nymphs, not for the work - but for the dole. For the music. For the cock. For the freedom. For a place that isn’t the village hall on a Friday night where you’d be grateful for a fumble from anyone. For a city that swallows them all to the root, swallows them whole, then spits them out onto the Meat Rack so they can facilitate their own destruction.