Guest Blog: Everyone I've Ever F*cked.
#8: Brian - Light of My Life, Fire of My Loins

Oh, I loved this one. He was soooooooo unsuitable. But it was the first time I fell in love at first sight, and despite the appalling way I treated him, I love him still. I have a horrible feeling that I was the most tortuous, demanding, repressive partner he ever experienced. Certainly it was some time before I spent a moment in his company that wasn't blitzed by a haze of uppers, downers, psychotropics or alcohol. He was so much fun.
We met at the Glastonbury Festival. I was returning home from a mystical and bad tempered sojourn in a Cornish forest, and stopped at Glasto en route. Arriving at the festival with Brian #5, a spare lesbian mate, a car and a crate of beer, two young Mancunians began tailing us about, pointing and shouting "Beer..."
Eventually, we relented; we charged them two E's per person for an equal share in the beer (remember that by day three of Glastonbury a black market barter economy is in full flow, where the most prized items are bread and chocolate, and the least a handful of magic mushrooms or a few dabs of whizz). By the time a frosted pink dawn seeped across the Tor, I was in love.
The lesbian and the car split two hours later, deciding Gay Pride was ... well, cleaner than this hettie mud wallow. Twenty four hours of feverish hand holding later, Brian #5 lost the scrap of paper containing Brian #8's telephone number.
I made him tear our belongings apart searching for it. I wept all through the three hour wait for a train. I wept while bunking the 350 minute journey back to London. I cried myself to sleep once home, trying to convince myself that the drugs had made me overemotional, that it was somehow unrealistic to have loved and lost within a twenty four hour trip.
Four weeks later, Brian telephoned unexpectedly. We talked, flirted and exchanged books by mail. I was spending seven hours a night on the telephone to #8 (who lived four hundred miles away), and #5 was beginning to suspect. I invited him to stay for the week of my twenty second birthday. Meeting him at the station (truthfully, by now I had forgotten what he looked like), my heart leapt directly into my mouth. He was beautiful.
He was folded on the floor of Euston Station, reading, and didn't look up immediately. When he did, I felt his eyes travel over my body, from my feet, along my legs, over the mini and T shirt, to my face. And he smiled. I knew then this was no Ecstasy side effect. Love at first sight. Amazing.
Brian #5 was the only one amongst the three of us with a day job, so constant munching of amphetamines allowed us two the freedom and excuse to stay up all night, and lie in bed together all day while Brian #5 worked. I remember a neighbour - now a famous movie critic who comes across on the small screen as an eminently reasonable man - but back then seemed a terrifically po-faced loser - hammered on my door at two in the afternoon. Was I aware that playing The Young Gods orchestral thrash punk records at top volume until six am could be construed as harbouring sociopathic tendencies towards one's neighbours? Where was my "fella"? He was ready to "punch the bastard."
In a rumpled, sweaty dressing gown, conscious of having made all sorts of noises, earlier, I slammed the door behind me, on a prostrate reclining, naked Brian #8; I flushed, wriggled, and protested that #5 was not here.
The look he shot me was utterly searching, his recognition of what was going on utterly transparent. His eyes registered "That Bastard Brian #5" had something worse, more craven and slippery than an angry neighbour to contend with. His eyes met mine for a brief second. "Bitch," they said, silently.
I didn't care. He was everything. A toxin that I welcomed. I managed another week before being caught out.
The only man I ever licked every single inch of. I wanted to consume him. My friends all loathed him. I gave not one fuck about that. His eyes were like a bolt of electricity to me. Even looking at a photograph sent a 200 volt shiver through me.
He would make me cassettes of music that reminded him of me when I wasn't there, which was often. He took cans and packets of foods and changed the labels to spell my name, then sent them to me, the contents already eaten. It was an all consuming, total, devouring passion. Even my father took the piss.
At the peak of my infatuation (sorry: drug-crazed frenzy), I callously dumped Brian #5, told him it was his fault for being so sexually repellent (cruelty! I actually uttered the line "sex with you is like milking a beast." Poor man. He never slept with a woman again) and was involved in a vicious fracas in Brixton. A gang of three guys jumped me, smashed glass into my eyes and drop kicked my face. A national TV soap star saved me (the extremes of life as a London drug fiend), and took me to hospital where a lesbian friend pilfered all the rubber gloves in a state of hysteria.
I felt nothing. Nothing. Nothing touched me like he did. To the degree that they had to prescribe me the most massive downers. That's how in love I was. That much.

Brian #8 took me to Paris in 1992, where in a dingy, frightening Bastille dive, I had my first tumultuous orgasm.
At point of extremis, I experience visions, always. I've never met anyone else who experiences (/admits to experiencing) this. They are uncontrolled, 3-D technicolour tactile smell-o-vision, and excruciatingly real. Different every time. A vision of a section of busted tyre, smelling of tar in the rain on a forest road, for instance. A nun with rotted teeth and gnarled knuckles laughing. That night I saw my first vision: a Swiss mountain road, in melting, mud-spoiled snow, with rotted sienna leaves half drowned in the ice, curling precipitously towards a peak. (And boy do these things make me suspicious of the religious 'ecstasies' of thirteenth century virgin martyrs. Bernini's Saint Theresa comes to mind....)
Exactly ten years later, still battle scarred by his year with me, happily married to a marvellous Japanese foxy girl, he emailed me out of the blue.
"Happy anniversary," it read, "Your first orgasm. Do you remember?"

Posted by Clytemnestra , as part of the Twelve Guest Blogs of Christmas