Culled from the ``Features'' section of the March 17, 1997, internet edition of The Times.
Our recent series, Aspects of Love, found women talking candidly about their relationships. This week it is the men's turn. Writer Tim Lott exorcises some exquisitely embarrassing memories and, on the next page, novelist Frank Ronan's ambivalent take on the normality of gayness
The best thing about memories is that, with a little effort, you can forget them. Painfully, there are exceptions. In my case, these phantoms usually recall a darkened room where bare desire has been transmuted into naked embarrassment.
Perhaps it is in the hope of exorcism that I intend to make confession of some of these tenacious hangovers. But before doing so, it helps me to remember that the afflictions of the past are universal.
This brings me to the tale of Martin Waterman, a friend with whom I once shared a school desk. At the time he was living with his parents, Frank and Olive, in Ealing. I knew them as kind, somewhat anxious, respectable people who were keen to see proprieties observed. The father would delight in showing off his Airfix models. The mother was a rotund, shy woman, and a home cook and housekeeper of great virtue. She kept her hair stiffly permed.
Martin had taken up with a new girlfriend whom, incredibly, given what was to follow he later married. In order to impress her, he had taken her to see a Russian art film in the West End. But after half an hour of considering the sway of wheat fields, he gave up and decided to surprise his parents and introduce them to his girlfriend.
They entered silently through the half-lit surburban hallway. I recall that there were etchings of cathedral towns standing above a collection of Lilliput Lane miniature cottages. Then into the living room, where he switched on the light and ushered Mary in.
Ta da!
His parents were illuminated, performing quite naked. The 26in TV in maple cabinet, towards which they were both aligned, was exhibiting a single freeze-frame of perhaps the most objectionable moment of a famously obscene hard-core flick.
They did not move, as if cast in a 1950s burlesque tableau. Martin's mother could be seen reflected in the TV screen. Then, horrifically, Frank gave a slight but unmistakable nod of greeting. Michael resisted the temptation to nod back since this would clearly act as confirmation that what he beheld had truly taken place. Instead, he switched off the light and silently retreated, a different person into a transformed world.
Compared with this, my memories are momentarily toothless. Until I remember them, that is.
One that consistently stabs at the heart involves a woman who, despite a long relationship, I never felt was attracted much to me, but who at the time I always hoped could be won over by tenderness and persistence or, more typically, blackmail.
One night perhaps because it was my 23rd birthday she gave in to my ministrations. Her closed eyelids fluttered; her breathing deepened. She succumbed relaxed into the moment.
I used all the tricks that I had read in a borrowed Cosmopolitan tongue, fingers, whispers, kisses, constructed a fugue; when the moment of completion came close, I felt I had entirely beaten down her indifference, alchemised all the base material that customarily separated us and would loosen the moorings that held her within.
I then became aware that the sound I had taken to be representative of the wakening giant within her a strengthening, deepening pattern of breathing, rising and falling in volume alongside my own rhythm, had altered. Now it was less reminiscent of the exaltation of the soul and more like the dissection of knotted lumber with an old breadknife.
I stopped. The noise continued, loudening, harshening. Under her closed eyelids, rapid eye movement. After a few more seconds, the snores died away, leaving an empty space into which I could tenderly collapse into ruins.
I have always been possessed of the power to bring forth the quality of Zen detachment in women. One partner, who, despite the bookish, rive gauche appearance that attracted me to her in the first place, liked to relax by watching junk TV. She had EastEnders on at a time when my libido began to broadcast insistent messages both downwards and outwards.
She eventually gave in to what I can only characterise as my persistent whining; the TV was left switched on.
After 15 minutes or so, during which time she appeared to be advancing theatrically towards what I took to be a common purpose, I noticed that her left hand was still holding the TV remote control implacably. Then I caught the slightest movement of the thumb. I dismissed it as an involuntary reflex.
This rationalisation became impossible to maintain when, minutes later, the same movement occurred again; and I noticed for the first time that Grant Mitchell's voice was becoming more and more audible above the clamour of my imprecations. ``You're bang out of order. Leave my mum out of this. Or you'll have me to contend with for starters.''
Or something along those lines.
If only things had improved after the closing credits; but she turned out to be an equally committed viewer of Children's Hospital.
I compensate for these moments with other, nourishing memories of women who have seemed more genuinely enthusiastic. But you can never be sure. One, a demure advertising copywriter whom I thought I had driven beyond the frontiers of her reticent personality into impossible, fibrillating, almost violent ecstasy, turned out merely to have suffered a two-minute epileptic fit brought on by too much alcohol.
Alcohol is my favourite weapon in getting women to sleep with me. If caught at the point just before unconsciousness, they are quite suggestible, but drink is a very crude instrument. One particular seducee had been drawn to me by mutual enthusiasm for the literary wino and olympic regurgitant Charles Bukowski. Thus, when she moved to meet my embrace, then vomited reprovingly on each of my knees, I should not, I suppose, have been as taken aback as I in fact was.
Not that I was discouraged. Because, oddly, I retain a sort of addiction to even the worst of my recollections, for all the discomfort they assail me with. And I remain happy to keep on piling them up, blunders and all. This is because once they were the present; so it is the present, that most ridiculous speck, that I am addicted to. And if you are not prepared to be ridiculous, you are refusing to acknowledge what it is to be a person or perhaps more pertinently, what it is to be a man.
All the names have been changed.
The Scent of Dried Roses by Tim Lott is published by Viking, £16.