Just like my home-state senator, Elizabeth Warren, I’ve had plenty of family members tell me over the years that I’m part Native American.
But my 23andMe results beg to differ, telling me I’m 100 percent white, and about 88 percent British and Irish.
I grew up in Boston, and there are reminders of the OG country all over the place here — in the architecture, in the names of towns and cities, and in the historical sites, dating all the way back to colonial times, that you see all over.
England is never too far from mind in this place.
And London has loomed large in my imagination ever since I was a kid, watching Mary Poppins sitting on a cloud, floating over the sights of the majestic, watercolor city.
There are lots of other children’s movies with London at their center that I loved, too — Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Peter Pan, and The Chronicles of Narnia are a few that I can think of.
And when I was young, I loved anything to do with knights and castles, kings and queens, sorcerers and magicians. I had every single related Playmobil set you could think of, and would spend hours, alone or with friends, dreaming up palace intrigue, and epic conquests, in the name of king and country.
This led to an interest in British history as I grew older — from Domesday Book to Churchill, from the Norman Invasion to Brexit.
Also, when I was thirteen or so, I fell in love with The Beatles. Falling in love with The Beatles also led to an interest in the other bands of the British Invasion, and with the culture of Swinging ’60s London.
These are all reasons that, despite settling in quite well by my junior year at Georgetown, I was still eager to spend a semester studying abroad in London.
So I applied, and was accepted, to the Erasmus program at King’s College London, which is located in central London, on a central artery of the city known as the Strand.
I signed up to take British history, geography, and war studies classes at the school, which, like NYU, has a decentralized campus that is integrated with the rest of the city.
My best friend Ryan, who I went to both high school and college with, also got accepted to the program. And after arriving, we made close friends with a classmate of ours from Georgetown named Asher, who was tall and handsome, with dark hair, glasses, and a very endearing silent laugh.
Asher grew up in Beverly Hills, the son of an entertainment lawyer. The three of us shared a sense of humor, and a thirst for travel and adventure, and would be partners in crime for most of the rest of our time in London.
I still count Ryan and Asher as two of my best friends today.
♦
King’s gave us a few options of where we could apply to live, some of them more centrally located than others. Asher and Ryan were placed in the Great Dover Street apartments, which were located near Borough Market, and much closer to our classes and the excitement of central London.
But I chose the Hampstead campus, in North London, because it was located in a quiet, bucolic area, with stately brick homes, that had been lived in by people such as Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh.
Hampstead has an illustrious literary pedigree, and I thought it would be great to soak up the vibes there. The area is populated by academics, artists, and media figures, who repeatedly returned Academy Award–winning actress Glenda Jackson to Parliament, as a member of the Labour Party.
And the lush, green Hampstead Heath is a notorious gay cruising spot, immortalized in many works, such as The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and tabloid stories about George Michael.
I didn’t explore the Heath in this way when I lived there, but I made an attempt, years later, when I was visiting London for a long weekend, during law school.
That particular day had the only good weather of the whole trip, and I spent all of it strolling the Heath, trying to find places and opportunities for cruising. I had gone online and looked up some places, like the swimming ponds, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any opportunities.
I plan on going back one day, and doing the Heath right. You haven’t really seen the place until you’ve fucked a guy in the ass there. Or had a guy fuck you in the ass.
♦
Classes at King’s were not exactly difficult.
The experience of university is quite different in the UK (and in Europe) than it is in the US. In the UK, you’re basically given a long reading list to complete, and are expected to show up to class a few times over the term, for discussion and some lecture. But compared to the US, there isn’t nearly as much lecturing from the professor, and you spend much less time in the classroom, overall.
It’s more laissez-faire, which is nice, but also a little bit “What is my money paying for here?” too.
And our professors gave us a lot of leeway, as study abroad students, to turn in papers late, or do just-OK work and still get a pretty good grade (that did not count toward your GPA back at Georgetown, anyway).
It was a pretty stress-free situation.
Our geography professor, who had a thick Caribbean accent, was constantly giving excuses for canceling class. She had every illness you could imagine, endless misfortunes, countless relatives dead.
It’s not like we cared; we were happy not to have to come to class. We thought it was hilarious, though. We’d wonder what her next excuse would be, and think of something outrageous. Nuclear attack? Drugs binge? Recruited by MI5 to kill a Malaysian diplomat?
Our British Medieval History class was a bit more rigorous. Our professor was an ex-banker who had become a prominent medieval scholar, and there were only four of us in the class — me, Ryan, Asher, and a guy named Mike, who was on study abroad from BC.
The professor would get pissed at me, and call me out for trying to bullshit, when I hadn’t done the reading. It was extremely embarrassing to be aggressively called out in such an intime setting.
I’d tried in earnest to do the reading at first, going to the magnificent King’s Maughan Library, down Chancery Lane, by Fleet Street.
I spent more than a few hours sitting among the stacks, checking out heavy, dusty tomes, filled with medieval names and numbers, professions, places, and dates.
And it got really fucking boring, really fucking quickly.
I guess I’m not an historian — leave the primary source work to the real heads.
I did spend quite a bit of time in the computer lab of the King’s library, finding sites that were offering illegal free streams of this show I had been hearing about, Arrested Development.
I died laughing to Jessica Walter’s epic side-eye as Lucille Bluth in one episode, and played it, again and again, at 2 or 3 a.m., with tears streaming down my face.
And when it came down to it, I did enough work to write some pretty good papers in British Medieval History. I got an A- in the class — the product of a few intense all-nighters at various points throughout the term.
♦
King’s had a nearly month-long Easter break, which Ryan, Asher, and I added another ten days or so to, to undertake a 40-day excursion around Europe and North Africa.
We visited places in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Monaco, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Morocco, going from city to city, and having a very memorable and majestic trip that made me fall in love with Europe, its culture, and history.
I’ll write about that trip in another essay.
♦
Dining out in London was tough on a student budget, back then.
Pretty much the only places I could afford to eat at, as a student, were chains like Pizza Express, or the rather good hole-in-the-wall places on Brick Lane. I also loved the ham and cheese baguettes at Paul — made with unsalted butter. Simple perfection.
Oh. There was also… Wetherspoons.
Literally every fucking pub that you think is its own establishment in London turns out to be a Wetherspoons — same menu, same sad drinks, same rowdy, alcoholic crowd.
We accidentally wound up at Wetherspoons so many times that we eventually gave up, and stopped trying to avoid them. London may have been able to survive Hitler’s blitzkrieg, but it was not able to avoid the Great Wetherspoons Invasion.
Over time, I started to think maybe even Parliament was a Wetherspoons. But I doubt that, considering how well the company seems to be doing.
I relied on the McDonald’s in Trafalgar Square for many drunken late-night meals, while I was waiting for the night bus to arrive. It was a busy McDonald’s, but a good McDonald’s. The chicken nuggets were always hot and crispy.
When visiting me, my friend Lily fell on the ground drunk, and we hand-fed her Chicken McNuggets, one by one. She loved it.
Aside from the chains I mentioned, we often ate dinner out on Brick Lane, which is famous for its South Asian population and restaurants. It’s almost as though these communities have reverse-colonized their great colonial power, constituting a huge part of the population of the surrounding area, and boasting world-class Pakistani and Indian food.
One time, we went there with a university student who Ryan was dating. She was pre-med and a huge alcoholic, and as we were leaving our huge group dinner, in which she’d drunk everyone else under the table, she got caught by the restaurant staff trying to pilfer the beer stein she’d been drinking from.
She then belligerently argued that she had spent enough fucking money at the place and should therefore be able to take the bloody mug. And they ended up relenting! I was tremendously impressed.
♦
English food doesn’t have the best reputation, but I love it. Some of my favorite dishes are the ones with the fun names, like bubble and squeak (potatoes and cabbage), toad in the hole (sausages baked in Yorkshire pudding batter), and bangers and mash (sausages and mashed potatoes). Meat and potatoes, basically.
Also, fish and chips are a beer-battered delight, and the mushy peas are a cheery bright green addition to the meal. And I love the way that Brits love mayonnaise.
I curtsy to it, as though I were a woman standing in front of Her Majesty the Queen.
♦
One interesting place I ate and drank at a couple of times in London is Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which sounds like a Disneyfied version of an old English pub, but is in fact its real name. And it happens to be the oldest pub in London, serving pints in a spare, but warm atmosphere, in a tiny, ancient building, among the imposing monumental buildings of central London.
And when Ryan’s parents visited, they took us to Simpson’s in the Strand, a restaurant so old the characters on Downton Abbey once dined there. The servers wear tuxedos, and they roll over an elaborate silver cart, from which they plate warm pieces of beef.
The food was good, but I found the whole thing a bit over-the-top, and Ryan’s dad was extremely disappointed he could not get a good old-fashioned American Budweiser at the place. (They did have Bud, but it was some European version that just didn’t taste right to him.)
♦
Asher is now married to a lovely lady named Julia. I even played a little role in their meet-cute, drunkenly forcing them to share a cab with each other, at the end of a long night, at Beauty Bar, in Union Square, in NYC.
Julia likes to tease Asher about his well-to-do, Beverly Hills upbringing. And one of the stories she likes to tell to give an example of his privilege is how, during study abroad in college, one of his buds (me) rented a suite at the Mayfair Hotel to party in, just for the hell of it.
I now realize what an impression this must have made on my classmates. All the ladies were certainly impressed — and I think the other guys thought that this was the point.
The truth was, Ryan and I had taken to saying “posting up at a plush suite at the Mayfair!” in a posh British accent, either after conjuring it ourselves, or hearing it somewhere, and I wanted to make the line a reality.
That, and the simple fact that I was a gay in need of a luxury hotel moment.
The summer after my sophomore year of college, I lucked out and got a job doing travel writing with this Web 2.0 company, Panraven, that was based in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A decade and a half before working remotely became a widely done thing, I was able to earn very good money from London, writing for Panraven, which I then used to blow on booze, travel, and luxury hotel moments.
Just like the greats, like Keith Richards, had done before me.
We actually didn’t get too crazy at the Mayfair. But it’s a gorgeous hotel, in the Mayfair section of London. I spent most of the weekend in a plush white bathrobe, ordering room service and watching Charles, then Prince of Wales, talk about gardening on the BBC.
♦
But since I was having a luxury hotel moment, I decided I needed to have a posh night out, too. So Asher, Ryan, and I made plans to go to Mahiki — one of the hot clubs in Mayfair where the tabloids were always reporting Prince William, his girlfriend Kate Middleton, and Prince Harry were partying.
I wanted to party with royals, so I went to Topman (the men’s equivalent of Topshop) and got a cool black velvet blazer, a silky white shirt, and a pair of dark jeans. I didn’t have Harrods money, so I had to make do on my budget. But I figured it was enough to get in. It was an early aughts look par excellence.
The first night we arrived, Asher and I were able to get in, but Ryan wasn’t. He was able to get in another time, though. Overall, we went there two or three times, and it was really fun.
It’s small and tiki-themed, and the music and cocktails are very good. Mostly, we chain-smoked, counting on the high we got from the cigarettes to save us money buying cocktails.
We never ended up running into any of the royals, not even Prince Asher. But we were there on the same night as Madonna, once. I like her music, but really didn’t give a shit about meeting her.
♦
The drinking culture in the UK is more ingrained, intense, and forgiving than in the US, and this included King’s having a student pub known as The Vault, on the top floor of one of its main buildings on the Strand.
There also used to be a student-run club called Tutu’s — named after Desmond Tutu, one of the school’s most famous alums.
Our crew would go to the student pub almost every day, and drink gin and tonics, beers, and the campus favourite — the famous Snakebite, a drink made with equal parts lager and cider, and occasionally dashed with blackcurrant cordial. Snakebites are reddish-coloured, sweet, unsubtle, and pack quite a punch.
Another place that the study abroad crowd frequented was this Australian chain bar called Walkabout.
Walkabout is essentially a massive sports bar, with a huge dance floor and DJ booth. It played top 40 music, and catered to what I would call a non-intellectual, alcoholic crowd. But we did not know better, or maybe even care, back then, because we were college students and tourists. So we ended up spending at least part of every weekend there, when I would get drunk, chain-smoke, and sing and dance to songs such as “London Bridge,” by Fergie, and “The Sweet Escape” by Gwen Stefani and Akon.
♦
I’m not sure if it was at Walkabout or some study abroad student event that I met Audrey — but it was at Walkabout that she made most of her moves.
Audrey was very pretty, with short, brown hair, intense eyes, and about average height for a girl. She was a student at the all-girls’ Smith College, back in Massachusetts, and quite obviously regarded her semester abroad at King’s as her one chance to get some dick.
And I can’t say I blamed her — I kind of had the same thing in mind.
But unfortunately for me, she decided that mine was the dick she wanted.
And being closeted, I felt a lot of pressure to reciprocate her obvious interest, and give in to her advances. Ryan and Asher were horny as fuck, and constantly engineering ways to meet girls and hang out with girls, so I’d look mighty sus if I didn’t take advantage of this very easy opportunity with a very good-looking girl.
So I didn’t turn her down. Which was my mistake. I really should’ve thought up some nice reason to turn her down, one that didn’t involve discussing my sexual orientation. We both would have been better off.
But unfortunately, I panicked a bit, and this led me to do nothing. I let her stay interested.
This didn’t mean I intended to let anything happen, though.
And my sangfroid about the entire thing made Ryan and Asher think I was operating on a completely different level, like I was the ultimate stud of all time, or something.
To this day, they still quote me back to me, when talking about a particular night in London.
The three of us would usually get together, at Ryan’s dorm room in the Great Dover Street apartments, and watch episodes of the incredible comedy Peep Show, on which Olivia Colman got her start, while we pregamed.
As usual, Ryan and Asher were also texting with the other guys or some girls about where to meet up later, while I sat around and drank, and thought about sucking off Robert Webb.
Invariably, either Ryan or Asher would ask me to text some girl and try to get her to show up. Once they had seen how seriously Audrey was interested in me, they viewed me as a vital resource for getting her — and thus her friends — to show up to the places we went out to.
So that night, as we downed our lagers and Red Bull and vodkas, they repeatedly asked me if I was going to text Audrey, and invite her to the rock club in Shoreditch we were going to.
To which, to their utter bafflement as two heterosexual, 20-year-old males, they say I responded by flippantly biting off one of my nails and announcing —
“You know what, guys? If she comes, she comes; if she doesn’t, she doesn’t.”
Boom. Whole. ’Nother. Level.
They were flabbergasted. Just how did I achieve that level of chill?
Obviously, the reason was that I really didn’t give a shit if she came or not. In fact, I’d have preferred it if she didn’t. She was a perfectly nice girl, but trying to fend her off was starting to drive me fucking nuts. If she didn’t show up, it would mean I wouldn’t have to spend the evening trying not to get dragged back to her dorm room.
But by the time we would arrive at Walkabout, we had typically already been drinking for a few hours, and my defenses were down. After getting swept up in singing along with “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba, or busting a move to “Pon de Replay” by Rihanna, I would be in an alcoholic, people-pleasing mood, and over time, she wore me down, and I found myself on my way to her apartment.
We got into her tiny room, and she immediately pushed me onto the bed, and started tearing off my sneakers, then my pants. Then she crawled on top of me, and grabbed my dick through my boxer shorts. They were a pair of dark blue J. Crew boxer shorts, with little orange turtles all over them.
She leaned in to kiss me some more — the kissing had started on the dance floor — and began unbuttoning my shirt.
“What was the first thing you thought when you saw me?” she asked me.
I have no idea what I answered.
“Don’t you wanna know what I thought?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, playing along.
“I thought you were the cutest of your friends.”
“Aw, thank you,” I said.
“And I thought I wanted you to rail me,” she added quickly, aggressively.
Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph, I was in hot water now.
Audrey was a good kisser, if a bit overenthusiastic. So I enjoyed that part of things. But I immediately started panicking about being able to get it up, both because I wasn’t sexually attracted to her, and also because I was drunk. I might be gay, but I still have my male pride, and I did not want this chick going all over Londontown saying my dick didn’t work.
Audrey had taken all her clothes off, and I could feel her wet pussy on my leg, as she played with her nipples and stroked my cock. It felt nice, and I grabbed one of her breasts, and started gently squeezing it in my hand.
I’m always amazed by how incredible boobs feel, and how fun they are to play with. Even on my gayest day, I do love a boobie. And you can quote me on that.
But despite all this, my dick would stay hard for only a moment or so. Every time we tried to slip a condom on me, I went soft.
And I was sloppy drunk, and ended up accidentally kicking and breaking Audrey’s heater as we were fumbling around in the dark.
When it became clear I wasn’t going to successfully fuck her, she started sucking me off, and as I got close to coming, I pushed her onto her back, and fingered her pussy while I gently nibbled and sucked on her tits.
I wanted Audrey to get at least something out of the night, because, damn, I had never put as much energy into hooking up with someone as she had with me in my entire life.
She asked me to kiss her while we masturbated, and we both came — me, not enough for a big finish, but a respectable showing nonetheless.
When we woke up in the morning, I apologized to Audrey for breaking her heater, said a polite goodbye, and got on the tube to go back to Hampstead, just wanting to be alone for a bit.
♦
I made no effort to call or text Audrey, or otherwise show her that I was interested in a repeat to-do. But she continued to want to meet up, continued to want to go on dates, continued to text and call. I was really starting to dread seeing her name coming up on my phone, or running into her at Walkabout, or the student pub.
I humored her for a couple of dates. We went to a really good Pakistani place on Brick Lane, and took a Jack the Ripper tour with Ryan and some of our other study abroad friends (Ryan was and is still obsessed with Jack the Ripper, and could probably give the tour by himself at this point).
And we wound up back in her dorm room a couple more times, too, under the same circumstances, and with the same basic result.
Honestly, I have problems with wearing condoms even while sober, and even when having sex with dudes. That’s why I have Cialis and PrEP prescriptions, and also get tested for STIs on a regular basis. I have a lot of fun — but I try to be as smart and safe about it as is reasonable.
I never told Audrey “I’m not interested in you at all,” but I showed it in a million ways. She never accepted it, though, and never gave up on pursuing me, including by engineering a meetup with me and Ryan at the Dedham Mall in Massachusetts the summer after we had arrived back stateside.
What that meant was that she spent a lot of time pining for someone completely unavailable, feeling bad, and probably feeling insecure, as a result.
Which I feel bad about. But I was feeling like I was being smoked out of my fucking foxhole, and I was too terrified to tell the truth, and too nice to just tell her to go away. And too panicked to do the rational thing and make up a nice reason to let her down.
As someone who has been on many dates, broken many hearts, and had my heart broken dozens of times, let me give the younger generation some advice: read the signs. If a person does not return your texts or calls, do not reach out more. If a person isn’t excited to hang out with you, then they are not interested in you.
No moves — Audrey tried nailing another guy on our program and throwing it in my face, to which I was more or less like, “You go, girl!” — are going to change the facts.
Delulu is not a virtue in dating.
But I hadn’t learned that lesson at that point, and neither had Audrey. You have to go through these kinds of sad, awkward, and yes — hilarious — situations, and situationships, before you arrive in a place where you have your wits about you with dating and relationships.
It takes work, self-awareness, and the courage and fortitude to put yourself out there again and again, until you meet someone who’s a good match and is interested in you, too.
Ryan told me a few years ago that he’d seen on Facebook that Audrey had gotten married to a tech bro, and lives in San Francisco now. I’m happy for her, because the more obnoxious my behavior seemed to be at Walkabout, the more attractive I was to her. And I’m confident that a tech bro can deliver the kind of sustained immaturity that I put on display when I was 19 years old, and reckoning with alcoholism and my sexuality. Mazel, Audrey!
♦
As I mentioned, I was reckoning with my sexuality in London, and this included having my first adult same-sex experience.
On nights alone in Hampstead, I’d be working on a paper, or listening to music and chilling, and suddenly I would feel incredibly alone. So I eventually took to Craigslist’s personals section, in the men seeking men and casual encounters categories, looking for someone to meet up with who didn’t seem too creepy or intense.
I wasn’t really ready to do anything substantial — just to try something with another guy. And finally I found a guy, about a half hour away by cab from where I was. He was in his mid-30s, average height, not attractive or unattractive, and claimed to be straight and experimenting, which at the time seemed a safer type of person to me.
For the record, it’s definitely not, but nothing bad happened that evening.
I ended up taking a very expensive cab ride to his flat, handing two 20-pound notes over to the cabbie, Queen Elizabeth II’s face glaring back at me like, “Are you sure about this, babe?” and nervously walking up the flight of stairs to ring his buzzer.
He let me in, and was a very non-intimidating but also un-arousing presence, with glasses, and a receding hairline.
After we exchanged pleasantries, he took off his clothes, removing his underpants and letting his hard cock bounce.
He asked me if I wanted to touch it, and I said yes. I grabbed it with both hands, and it felt warm and stiff. And I had never seen an uncut cock before that. Truthfully, I didn’t like the way it looked — it reminded me of the creature from the Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi — but I liked the way it felt in my hands.
He then told me to take off my shoes and socks, pants, and underwear, and lie, stomach-down, on his bed.
Even though I was nervous, the guy was polite and respectful enough, so I basically trusted him, and there was something quite arousing about taking orders from another guy. He explained that he didn’t have penetrative anal sex — thank God, because I was not ready at that point to do that — but said he liked the sensation of his penis sliding through ass cheeks, and he wanted to run his cock through mine.
So I let him.
It felt fine. I could start to imagine how having a cock in you could feel quite good. But a few trips up and down were all he desired, and it was all over pretty quickly.
That was it.
As I dressed and left, he kept his eyes on me almost the entire time. He seemed to be wondering about me, or pitying me. It was clear that I had taken a very expensive cab in the dark of the night, to do hardly anything with a total stranger. And it was probably clear that I hadn’t done anything with a guy before that night.
I bet he was wondering what was going on in my head, if I was going to be OK.
And honestly? I don’t remember exactly how I felt that night, but I knew for sure that I was OK. I had taken a tiny little step out of the closet.
The next morning, I woke up in incredibly good spirits. I had planned a long weekend to Belgium with Asher’s friend Naomi, who was also from Beverly Hills, and studying abroad at the London School of Economics.
When I met Naomi at Waterloo Station, she asked me why I was so peppy.
“I don’t know. Just excited for Bruges, I guess,” I said.
For the record, there is absolutely no reason to be excited for Bruges. I was simply feeling liberated by having taken my first baby steps out of the closet. And as it turns out, I liked having a juicy secret that none of my friends, or anyone back home, knew about. It felt radical and naughty, and made me feel alive.
♦
My most memorable gay experiences in London have happened on more recent trips.
A few times, I have gone out to Heaven, the gigantic gay club under Charing Cross Station, in central London. Heaven is featured in many of Alan Hollinghurst’s novels, including the excellent The Swimming-Pool Library.
Heaven consists of several stories, and is packed on several nights of the week, with boys looking to dance, do drugs, and fuck. Many guys go from there, boogeying down to ABBA and Kylie Minogue, to having chemsex well into the next afternoon.
I never joined in on that. But I did once meet a cute, drunk boy there, who I sat next to, and had drink after drink with, while he repeatedly told me that he really liked me, but was not going to go home with me.
I told him that this was perfectly okay with me, because I had fucked guys the previous two nights, and was kind of fucking exhausted and over it, at that point.
But as the night wore on, and I began to collect my things to leave, he grabbed me by the arms and kissed me, and asked me to go back home with him.
“But literally every other word you said was I am not going home with you,” I said. “What changed? Your level of intoxication?”
“No!” he protested. “I have just been absolutely charmed by you, and you’re so sexy, and I really don’t want my time with you to end, quite yet.”
I thought for a moment. He was really cute. But he was pretty drunk. The hookup was not likely to be good. And if he didn’t sober up quickly enough, it might not happen at all. I don’t know why I said yes. I guess because I’m a guy? But I said yes, and soon we were on a night bus back to his place.
We boarded the bus, headed towards Wimbledon, which is almost a full hour outside of London. I had figured we were going somewhere in the immediate vicinity that was on the Wimbledon route, but my friend had neglected to fill me in that he actually lived at the site of the famous tennis tournaments, far outside London, and far from where I was staying.
Fuck my life.
Thankfully, the length of the ride did give him time to sober up, as we passed by the sights of the English countryside, and he said I really like you over and over and over again. He was half English and half French, and his accent would slip into a posh dialect of French every once in a while, as he said you, yewww.
We soon got to his flat. It was spacious, but a total mess, with clutter everywhere. We made our way to his bedroom, which luckily had a very big bed that looked relatively clean.
We got in it, and stripped down to our underwear. He was wearing one of those stringy numbers that turn me off, but when I saw his cock come swinging out, all my doubts about whether or not it had been a good idea to go there were assuaged.
The thing was almost eight inches, with a beautiful, slightly curved shape, and about two inches around.
I took it into my hands and held it, like it were Excalibur or something. I slowly stroked his shaft and tickled his balls, and he quickly began falling asleep.
I tried sucking him off for a bit to wake him back up, but it was no use. So I gave up, and joined him to get some sleep.
In the morning, I woke up feeling very hungover. He was still drunk, but a pleasant, conversational drunk. He asked me all sorts of questions about myself, while I held his cock, passing it back and forth between my hands and my mouth.
It felt like having a cute new kitten or puppy dog around. You want to hold it and play with it forever, it’s that much fun.
But I did have to get back to my friends in London, and so I had to bid him farewell. I took a long bus ride back to the city, and when my friends guilted me over what they correctly assumed was a one-night stand, I smugly lied, and said, “I got up really early to check out Wimbledon, and then I went to put a rose at Princess Diana’s grave.”
Oh, they all said, looking like they felt like assholes.
♦
One of the highlights of any visit to London has to be the museums.
London’s museums have artifacts from all over the world, many of them brazenly stolen. And they are almost all free to visit. You could spend days visiting each one, taking in history from the BC era to today.
Some of my favorites are the Tate Modern, which is housed in an old power station along the Thames, and features prominently in one of my favorite films, Match Point; the Imperial War Museum; the Victoria & Albert Museum; the National Portrait Gallery; and the British Library.
This Playmobil boy also loved checking out the crown jewels at the Tower of London, and touring Buckingham and Kensington Palaces. They both strike you as run-down and slightly disappointing, even as a kid. Still, the pomp and circumstance of things like the changing of the guard and the elaborate costumes and ceremonies were captivating to me.
I think my favorite educational place overall was the British Library, where you can see an original copy of Magna Carta, and also things, like cocktail napkins and airline sickness bags, that the Beatles wrote lyrics to their songs on.
But the National Portrait Gallery is also a great place to spend an afternoon, reflecting on the lives of greats, and then back on your own life. And it is right in Trafalgar Square, a beautiful central location, with a famous monument to Admiral Nelson.
One time, my friend Lily, who has the same last name as me, and I humped on the lions in Trafalgar Square, to freak out an acquaintance of mine, who thought we were actually brother and sister.
And we never told him the truth, either.
♦
There are plenty of other things to do in London.
I liked to go shopping at the street market on Portobello Road, the subject of one of my favorite songs and dance scenes from Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
I also went to Abbey Road, several times, with visitors, and took pictures on the famous crosswalk, from the front of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album. I always took Paul’s spot, because he’s my Beatle. I even took my shoes off, the couple of times I could. The cars on the road are incredibly patient with the picture-takers, although their patience does have its limits.
Get it in one shot.
Ryan and I are both huge nerds, so sometimes, we went to Anglican services at night, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, just to hear the choir singing Evensong, or hear the preacher give the sermon.
The sermons in Anglican services are much more secular-feeling than those that I’ve heard in Catholic masses over the years. One time, there was a reading of selections from Shakespeare’s works, in partial reflection on the then-raging war in Iraq that Tony Blair saw his popularity disappear over, overnight.
♦
Every Sunday morning, I’d go somewhere on the high street in Hampstead, buy all the tabloids, order a full English breakfast, and read away, while I gorged myself on the delicious black pudding, baked beans, tomato, fried eggs, ham, and sausage. So good.
And the UK tabloids are just so entertaining. They’re trashy, but they can turn a phrase, and they are ruthless in attacking the establishment, and in making complete fools out of the royals. Back then were the Waity Katie days, when everyone was wondering if the hottie par excellence Prince William was going to propose to his longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton.
The coverage wasn’t particularly flattering to Kate, making her look desperate and dependent on Wills for validation.
What ended up happening before I left London, though, was that William dumped her. Cad! There she was one day, on her way to her job at Jigsaw, a sullen expression on her face, as she stared down life as a mere commoner.
At the time, I joined along with everyone else in feasting on the drama of her downfall. I was probably a little jealous of her, to be honest. Fortunately for her, though, Kate, like me, is a survivor, and of course, she got him in the end.
For the record, I’m not jealous anymore — who would want to be in that family? — but I still think she’s killing it.
♦
The tube closes earlier in the evening than many bars and clubs, so night buses provide much-needed transportation in the after-hours. And boy, can they be rowdy places. Trust me, I’ve seen some shit on the T in Dorchester. And I’ve been scared by whackos screaming Lord knows what on the subway in NYC. But it’s only in London that I have seen a bus driver stop his bus, get out, and refuse to continue on because the passengers were so drunk and rowdy.
I was drunk myself, but even I was scared.
After that, the bus driver literally never returned to the bus. It wasn’t the end of the line, that was for sure. So I was forced to go find another night bus to make my way home.
On evenings when there wasn’t a mutiny, I loved sitting on the top floor of the bus and taking in the sights of London by night as I made my way back to Hampstead. London was my gateway to Europe, and I was seeing and experiencing so much, so fast, I practically had stars in my eyes. Those moments, listening to music on my iPod, taking in the nighttime city, I could reflect on how far I’d come from my hometown of Weymouth, Massachusetts, and how I had grown as a person.
They were beautiful, gin-soaked moments, the feeling of which I tried to recreate for years, to no avail.
♦
I had a great moment of connection with a Beatles song in London, once.
I was in the city the morning news broke that Amy Winehouse had died, in a house not too far from the place I was staying. I had spent the previous night out at a club, doing coke with some rich guys from South Africa I met, and taking one of them back to my room to fuck.
I was ragingly hungover, and the agonizing struggle Amy had with alcohol had always haunted me, considering my own troubles. So I was really feeling it that day.
It was a grey, drizzly afternoon, and I decided to take my mind off things by going to Notting Hill to see a movie. The dampness brought alive the colors and scents of that cheerful neighborhood, setting for many people’s favorite rom-com. Through the mist, you could see the cheery, pastel-colored rowhouses, and smell coffee wafting out from one of its many quaint cafes.
I walked up to the movie theater, an old theater, with a grand lobby and a massive marquee out front. I bought a ticket for Beginners, which I was interested in for two reasons: it was about someone coming out, and it starred Christopher Plummer, Captain von Trapp from my beloved The Sound of Music. It was a wonderful movie, and Plummer ended up winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for it.
The theater mercifully sold booze, albeit expensive booze; but what does money matter when you have a hangover and existential dread to deal with, right? So I was given a fairly generously poured glass of good whisky, and took my seat right in the middle of the empty theater, on one of the red velvet–covered seats.
No one else ended up coming in for the movie, and I took in the beautiful red and gold wallpaper and gilding of the ornate theater, while steadily downing my whisky, as various British rock classics played over the house speakers.
I had arrived kinda early, as is my tendency, so this went on for a while. I ordered another whisky, double this time.
And I took my seat again. Sometime in the next few minutes, the Beatles’ song “Because” came on, and the combination of the hair-raising harmonizing, haunting guitar, and beautifully simple lyrics of that song, from Abbey Road, combined with the buzz I had from all the whisky, put me in an incredible state, where I felt my soul leave my body, and ascend to the sky, surveying the beauty and majesty of all of existence, as the long notes and the Fab Four’s synchronized voices sent chills down my spine.
It was sublime. I don’t think you need drugs or alcohol to reach this state, either. I’m sure there is a spiritual or creative process that can bring this sort of divine communion with art.
♦
Traveling outside of London is nice, the pretty countryside scattered with old villages and grazing sheep. I really enjoyed seeing Bath, with its ancient Roman baths still extant, but do not recommend continuing on your journey from there to see Stonehenge.
It takes a while to get to Stonehenge by train, it’s a pricey ticket, and then you get there and you’re like, here are some big stones, standing up, all in a circle. You do wonder how they got them that way and what it meant, but you don’t need to go all the way there to figure it out. You can stay put in your plush suite at the Mayfair in your robe and slippers and think about it there.
Oxford is interesting to walk around in, but other than look at the ancient buildings and maybe take a trip down the Thames or spend the afternoon drinking in some pub, there is not much to do.
I suppose now that Grindr’s a thing, it would be cool to go and fuck an Oxford student. Hear tales from school, check out their Harry Potter regalia, see if I can have a romance to rival Nick’s and Wani’s, or Sebastian’s and Charles’.
♦
There are no other cities quite like London, which blends the bustling and diverse international element of New York with the quaint orderliness of English life. It’s quieter and cleaner, and less rowdy, in London than it is in New York. And London’s a quick gateway to Paris, which is much less hospitable to Americans, but still a lovely place to visit.
I love Brits for their sense of humor — Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag being a prime example — their wit, and their lenient, if not defiant, attitude towards alcoholism.
I also enjoy the soap opera that is the royal family, and recently finished the final season of The Crown.
And the food reminds me of home, and makes my tummy feel full and warm.
To this day, Ryan says I am every European’s favorite American, and if that’s true, I think it’s because we share the same spirit, and the same cultural sensibilities. I make the Euros feel just a little bit more at home in America, not so marooned in a cultural wasteland. And for me, a new European friend is a passport to all sorts of interesting conversations, fun hangs, and possible adventures in Europe.
I began having those cross-cultural exchanges in London.
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You should absolutely spend a semester studying abroad. If you speak a foreign language, maybe go somewhere more challenging than London.
But no matter where you go, once you’re there, fully embrace your existence abroad. Don’t be half at home, half wherever else you are. Ideally, do not be in a monogamous relationship (or one at all — who wants to spend the whole semester on FaceTime?). Don’t try to have one specific experience of the place you’re in. But embrace meeting new people, especially locals, and trying new things while you’re there.
I hope to get back to London soon, perhaps for an extended stay, like I have in other cities. I have some friends I could look up, and I’d also like to see how the city has changed since I was there ten years ago.
I’m sure I have many adventures left in London, and many more tales to tell. ♦