I Am What I Am, John Barrowman [smart ebook reader .txt] 📗

‘What exactly is wrong with you? And don’t describe what you’ve just read on WebMD.’

‘I feel like I’ve been beaten with a cricket bat. Even my hair hurts.’

‘Seriously?’

He nodded.

I placed the back of my hand against his forehead to see if he had a fever. I couldn’t tell, so I kissed the top of his head instead. It’s not a foolproof method, but it has the credibility of generations of mothers and grandmothers behind it.

‘Maybe it’s something you ate? Did you throw out the sausages that’ve been in the fridge since Easter?’

It was August. Scott holds the culinary misconception that if food has been refrigerated, even for long stretches of time (like years), it’s fine to eat the said food as long as you cook it on a really, really hot flame … and add fish sticks.

‘It wasn’t the sausages. It’s not that kind of pain. It’s more inside my muscles.’

I leaned over and kissed his head again.

‘Ow.’

By this time, our three dogs, currently Charlie, Harris and Jack, were thinking it was morning and they were scratching and whining to go outside.

I reached for the phone. ‘Do you want me to call someone?’

‘Yes.’

A few minutes later, Carole answered her phone in Milwaukee.

‘What are the symptoms for Lyme disease?’

As you know, Carole and I are close, but that wasn’t the primary reason I called her first. She lives in Wisconsin, a state with high instances of Lyme disease. I knew she would know the symptoms. Without so much as a ‘do you even know what time it is over here?’ or ‘my God, don’t you have doctors in England?’14 she told me: severe muscle aches, slight fever and, the most important one, a target rash somewhere on the body.

So, we looked for the target – very slowly and carefully. This distracted us for quite a while. Scott eventually forgot he was dying and fell asleep. Later, the next morning, I solved his medical mystery, and I have to tell you I’m including it here because the causes of Scott’s ailment are related to another essential element about being in a committed gay relationship that may interest you.

Gay men love to flirt, and we love to do it in the company of our significant others. To us, a nod’s as good as a wink and it’s as natural as smiling. We pass a hot male on the street, we do a double take, and then after the hottie has passed, we whisper to our partner that he missed something special. He, then, will insist on turning round and trying to see what he did indeed miss, usually just at the moment the hottie is turning to see who’s staring at him. At a party, if we see a hot male, we chat him up … together. We flirt with temptation because our intentions are generally pure. In fact, we have no intentions at all. We like to window-shop. While in a non-gay relationship, regular flirting with members of the opposite sex may result in sleeping on the couch – or worse – with Scott and me there’s no jealousy, no awkwardness, and especially no harsh recriminations when we get home.

This is not to say that gay men are less inclined to succumb to casual sexual encounters than straight men because I think the opposite is probably true; however, I do think that in a committed gay relationship, flirting is a behaviour that is assumed to be healthy and even stimulating to the relationship.

The morning after the ‘Lyme disease’ night, while Scott was enjoying his Weetabix, I spotted a phone number and a name on a scrap of paper on his desk. I picked it up and went upstairs to the kitchen, stopping Scott on his way out.

‘Hold on a minute!’

I passed him the slip of paper. He looked at it sheepishly.

‘You’re not suffering from any strange disease,’ I laughed, ‘you just couldn’t let a couple of hot young soldiers get one up on you.’

Under the pressure of my hilarity, Scott then admitted his aches and pains were a result of shameless flirting. Two days before, he’d run into an acquaintance, a twenty-something soldier with whom he’d worked when he was volunteering in Cambodia for the UK charity Cam’s Kids. Scott had been chatting with the ex-soldier when, out of the blue, he invited Scott to join him and some friends for a hike at a park the next day.

Scott naturally felt obliged to say ‘yes’. He is, after all, a man, and like all males, gay or not, he is prone to macho posturing every now and then.

It turned out that the park was not so much a place of picnics, ponds, trees and swings as it was an outdoor military obstacle course, with zip lines and rock walls; and the hike was not so much a brisk walk as it was frantic scrambles up ropes and competitive sprints in and out of paths made of tyres.

Turned out, Gillus hypochondriacus was suffering from Middle-Aged Musclitus. I kissed him on the mouth and gave his bum a love tap as I left the kitchen, because I knew how he felt. On occasion, I suffer from a similar ailment.

TABLE TALK #3

‘Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang!’

‘Blat! Blat, blat, blat, blat! Blat!’

During the first two seasons of Torchwood, Burn Gorman and I had this game we’d play whenever we were rehearsing a scene involving guns or weapons, and, on occasion, we’d play it in the parking area between our trailers at the BBC studios in Treforest, Wales.

Before ‘places, everyone’ and ‘action’ are called, the actors and the crew do what’s known as a ‘crew’ or a ‘camera’ rehearsal. This allows the director to be sure everyone knows where he or she is supposed to be during the scene,1 so that the boom-mic operator isn’t suddenly tripping over the camera-dolly operator because the sound guy didn’t know the camera was heading his way. Obviously, this ‘crew rehearsal’ also gives those