I met my old friend ‘Ernesto’ yesterday. That’s not his real name, but since his hero is Che Guevara, let’s call him that. Like his hero, Ernesto is clever, brilliant in fact. He’s kind, and patient, and generous, and very funny. Moderate in all things but charity, he’s a slight and slender sort of fellow, who’d give you the shirt off his back, and his last penny too, so the pocket wasn’t empty.
Read the room, belly-man
A few days ago, Ernesto told me he went out with some friends in Leeds. Ernesto has many friends and goes out a lot. Quite a few of his friends are young women – ‘the girls’, as they call themselves. The girls are fond of Ernesto. He doesn’t threaten them. He doesn’t leer at them. He doesn’t grope them. He doesn’t try to get them on their own. He doesn’t stare at them across the bar all night. He doesn’t follow them home, on foot, or in his car.
But other men do. Not just one or two of them either, but loads of them. In fact, if you go out a lot, Ernesto tells me, it feels like that’s what most men do. You come to expect it. It’s just ‘part of going out’.
And anyway, what are you going to do? There’s so many of them and they’re so big. They’re like a horrible tribe of hulking great, mad-eyed, steroid-pumped, coiff-bearded, cocaine-snorting belly-creatures. They communicate through seal noises: “Uy-uy-uy!”
They make frequent visits to the bathroom, too, and when they come back, sniffing repeatedly, they’re just that little bit worse than they were before. They stare more, leer more, touch more. They sit down at your table uninvited and won’t go away. They put their meaty hand on your leg. They nuzzle your neck. You, meanwhile, feel like you’ve encountered a rottweiler off the lead. You freeze. You hold your breath. You do absolutely nothing that could be interpreted as aggression. And of course, the cocaine belly-man takes this as a welcome. Reading the room is tricky for him at the best of times, let alone after a dozen lines of snort.
Off to the bathroom …
Anyway, before this gets too sociological, let’s return to Ernesto’s evening out. Ernesto and the girls and a few boys – nice ones, like Ernesto – went into a pub. They had a few drinks, they talked, they laughed, and they were mostly left alone, which does still happen, sometimes.
At some point Ernesto went to the bathroom, not for a baggie of cocaine, but for a plain old wee. Now, Ernesto, as many men do, favours the cubicle. Both were occupied on this occasion, so he waited. It was a long wait. There was a lot of laughter coming from inside those cubicles. Evidently, they were hosting group events.
Suddenly, Ernesto’s highly developed spider sense tingled. “You got gear?” said a voice behind him.
He turned and, sure enough, found himself confronted by two very large men indeed, of the variety I’ve described. Their question meant: “We believe you have some cocaine and we expect you to give us some, or else we will beat you up.”
Ernesto explained that he was just waiting to use the bathroom.
“No, you’re not,” said one of the men, leering. “You’ve got gear. Why won’t you share it?” (“Share” – you’re there ahead of me – means “allow me to steal”.)
As the man spoke, he and his companion manoeuvred Ernesto against the toilet wall.
Once more, Ernesto, in his friendliest, most rottweiler-placating tones, explained to the leering faces a foot-or-so above his own that he was indeed merely waiting to use the bathroom. ‘Gear’ wasn’t part of his restroom equation.
“Why don’t you go over there, then?” asked the man, indicating the urinal.
At this point, Ernesto might have explained that, as a trans man, the urinal just wasn’t going to happen. But that way, these days, death lies.
“I get a bit shy,” he told them, keeping things simple.
The two hulking men pushed closer, lowering over him like a cloud of poison gas, with added nose hair. Then the bigger of the two slowly smiled, as something amusing worked its way from one lonesome brain cell to the other.
“You a f**?” he asked, presently. (His word, not mine, or Ernesto’s, or yours.)
Ernesto has a biblical answer for moments like this, which crop up frequently. “What do you think?” he asked, with that disarming smile of his.
It was like magic. The man was suddenly disarmed. He took a step back, delighted with the acuity of his intuition. “Thought so,” he said, congratulating himself. “He’s a f****** f**! Well at least he admits it. He’s all right, this lad … even if you are a f******* q****.”
And there in the reeking pub bogs, the belly-men wallowed in a false, narcotic sense of gendered superiority, unaware they’d just been played by a weapons-grade dickhead whisperer.
As luck would have it, at that very moment a cubicle burst open, and five men tumbled out, giggling and wiping their noses. Ernesto took his chance and ducked inside. Even then as he was closing the door, a huge, hairy, tattooed arm reached round inside, but by then my sprightly friend had had enough. He made like his hero Che, kicked the door as hard as he could, and the arm, and its owner, slithered off back to the bar.
Back at his table, Ernesto told his friends what had happened. They sympathised, then laughed it off. They all knew what it was like. Men are just like that, they said. It was “part of going out”.
They’re probably like that for a reason, but so what?
When he told me about it, I was a lot less sanguine than my friend and his companions. My fantasy response, from a safe distance, involved a baseball bat, a set of shears, and a cobra. But Ernesto told me something rather remarkable. He said that when he finds himself confronted by one of these characters, he tries to imagine that person’s life. In that way he’s able to transfer his immediate sense of anger from the fool before him to the fool’s circumstances.
How f*****-up must a system be, he asks, how degraded must working conditions and living conditions and our sense of community be, that for a significant number of men, the only sense of dignity they get comes from snorting themselves stupid and backing smaller strangers against walls? I don’t think I could be so forgiving, but that is my friend for you.
He’s different about ‘the girls’, mind you. They have a system for them: no woman in their group is ever left alone in the pub, or the club, or on the way home. Any sign of a creep and all the friends close in, mob-handed. That’s commendable. Of course it is.
But why the hell should it have to be this way? Why should going out be an obstacle course of grim, offensive, aggressive, violent ‘man’ behaviours?
And it’s getting worse. Go to a city-centre pub these days on a Friday or Saturday evening and many of the men you see will be coked to the eyeballs, with all that entails. Women out for the evening, and those people who for one reason or another are vulnerable, just have to cope, grin and bear it, laugh it off, call it – all together now – ‘part of going out’.
A little less toleration, a little more action … before it’s too late
This is just one story of what it can be like to go to the pub these days. Telling it is about all I can do. But writing these events down does at least remind me how glad I am that there are people like Ernesto and his friends in the world, and in my life. Where there are good people, there is hope, as someone must have said.
My fear is that this is going to come to a head, one of these days. As dreadful behaviour becomes more ingrained and acceptable, as good people feel they have no choice, on pain of violence but to accept it, the chance of it leading to an event so terrible that we can’t ignore it anymore must be increasing. So, landlords, hospitality behemoths, metro mayors, how about a little less toleration, a little more action? Let’s head catastrophe off at the pass and instigate a little pub-based revolution, before it’s too late. I know some people who’d lend a hand on the barricades.
Finally, a little message, should they be reading, to the cocaine toilet belly-men themselves. My friend Ernesto is infinitely kind, patient, and forgiving. Karma, however, is not. And I’m a great believer in karma. So, I’d recommend you mend your ways, belly-man, or rest assured: there’s a cobra out there somewhere with your name on it. Ssssss …
