After two decades of seduction and self-loathing, Tom Shone relives his years as 'a tart, a slut, a tramp, a whore'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/29/tom-shone-confessions-serial-shagger
'I was a particularly non-threatening predator'. Photograph: Mike Kemp/Getty Images/Rubberball
We met through mutual friends at an Italian restaurant in the Village. She was tall, with pale skin, short, dark hair and freckles – the first Californian with freckles I had met.
"Aren't you supposed to steer clear of romance in your first year?" she asked me on our first date.
"First year of what?"
"Sobriety."
"Oh, that."
Just two months earlier, I had brought the curtain down on a 20-year drinking career, during which time I had seen my life go from a Renoir painting to a Jackson Pollock to one of those small black cubes that Rothko painted in the months before he opened his wrists with a razor. She was 29 and worked for an insurance firm, running background checks on bankers. Naturally, I imagined myself on the receiving end of one of her investigations, all my guiltiest secrets flushed out of hiding.
"You Euros are a slippery lot," she told me. "The ones you get over here, anyway."
"Everyone's on the run from something – is that it?"
"Oh, everyone."
Everyone except Samantha. She didn't seem to be on the run from anything. I'd come across versions of her before: women with a sympathetic look in their eyes, who gave to charities or worked for them, who practised yoga or knitted. I had always fled them as a vampire flees the cross – they seemed forever on the point of offering me something good. Give me someone with an air of heedlessness, like fast-burning fuel, as if they wanted to be anywhere but right here, right now, in their body – a fantasist, in other words, like myself. That I could work with.
It snowed that winter, transforming the city into a 19th-century version of itself, all the roads and cars beneath a big white blanket, as if a horse and carriage could turn the corner at any moment. We holed up in her apartment on the Lower East Side, where I entertained her with stories from my rakish past. I told her about the time I seduced two guests at the same dinner party, walking home one, a Swedish girl whom I kissed goodnight and arranged to meet again, before returning to the dinner party, pleading inability to find a cab. There, I allowed myself to be talked into staying by the second girl, with whom I was soon making out in one of the cabs I had, just an hour previously, found so scarce.
Later that week, I went on a date with the first girl, the Swede, only to find her accusatory and angry: the girls had spoken. They were friends.
Samantha shrieked when I told her this. "What did you say?" she asked, saucer-eyed.
"What could I say? I told her I had a problem and I needed to see someone about it."
"You did not."
"I did."
"You sought psychiatric help."
"No, no, no, of course not. I was just trying to get rid of her. What did it matter what I said? I was never going to see her again."
I had never before told a woman all this. Telling Samantha now was a way of buying us some insurance, putting some distance between me and my past, but it was also my way of reflecting some of Sam's own transparency, for she offered up her secrets like so much loose change. Her father was someone in Hollywood, an executive, or used to be, but now he lived in a friend's pool annexe. "Kind of skidding about the bottom," as she put it. The last time they met, he had been drunk and taken a swing at her, cracking a tooth with his wristwatch; she showed me the chip in her incisor. "I don't see him now," she said.
My own parents had separated when I was six and divorced when I was 12, my father making way for a boyfriend whom I hated – a bearded ex-hippy with a stash of Penthouse under his bed and who used his fists to win arguments with my mum. I would lie awake at night, listening to them, nursing a pure, jet-black hatred for all things male, bearded and boorish. He used to pee into the toilet bowl with such torrential force that, to this day, I pee sitting down, if I can.
If I could have been gay, I would have been. Raised mostly by my mother and sister – the hippy didn't last too long – I was among the first year of boys at an all-girls grammar school in Brighton, where I instantly fell in with the school's one obviously gay boy and a gang of girls, all of them netball champs or hockey captains – beautiful, towering Amazonians every one. I was in love with all of them at one point or another. They took us in as honorary females, made us privy to their boy talk and occasionally sent us on recces to gather information on this or that crush: the mod with the buzz cut and fluorescent socks, the Adam Ant wannabe. Our own status as sexual objects was, needless to say, negligible to nonexistent. At a sleepover party to celebrate the end of A-levels, one of their mothers was outraged to find James and me sharing a room with the girls. "What, snogthem?" the netball player cried, to a small riot of laughter.
It came in very handy later, this time as a sexual double agent, flitting back and forth across the gender divide, collecting information, intelligence. We watched Terms Of Endearment, all of us the sofa, all of us in tears when Debra Winger tells her son Tommy she knows he loves her. We went to see An Officer And A Gentleman and American Gigolo at the cinema, the girls crushing on Richard Gere while I made furious mental notes. Must buy Armani. Must learn Swedish. Must start doing upside-down abdominal crunches. And navy whites. Maybe I would look good in navy whites?
One summer, the girls returned from a holiday in Turkey and I happened to notice their beach reading: a novel called Harriet by Jilly Cooper. Spotting the same book on my sister's shelf, I took it down to have a look: it seemed to confirm every worst fear I had about women. And then, when I finished it, just to make doubly sure, I ploughed through any Jilly Cooper book I could lay my hands on – Emily, Prudence, Octavia, Imogen, Emily – becoming an entranced student of Cooper's rollicking masochism, wherein nice girls with big knockers always fell for the wrong men, the cads with the cruel mouths, only to find happiness in the arms of some Burton-esque stallion in need of their soothing ministrations and moussaka. I felt as if I was getting the inside dope, if not on what girls really wanted, then on their fantasy lives.
"But it's not true," Sam said when I told her this. "I like nice men."
"I'm not sure I qualify as a nice guy any more."
"Oh c'mon. What harm did you do?"
"I slept around. A lot."
"They probably liked it."
"I never saw them again."
"They never saw you."
"I lied to them."
"How?"
"By pretending I was a nice guy."
"You are a nice guy."
"No, I'm not, Sam," I said, turning to face her. "I'm really not."
"I should be afraid of you?" she said. "It's OK. I really don't care, you know. We've all been in the wars. You're the one who's still carrying this around. You should try letting it go."
Could I be forgiven so easily? It didn't seem possible, but then neither did the way I was feeling. Quitting drinking can feel a little like landing in Narnia, or Oz. Everything comes at you with a peeled-eyeball intensity, in Technicolor, as if for the first time. Your first hangover-less morning. The first time you don't hate birdsong. First summer. First snowfall. First kiss. First love. First heartbreak. You do feel like a kid again: a 16-year-old kid inside a 37-year-old man-suit. A "pink cloud", they call it. It was supposed to end, an event for which I was braced, while also wondering whether it hadn't already and what I was now experiencing was simply the result of being in love with Sam.
"You didn't tell me you were in the newspaper! Call me when you get a chance. Love you. Bye!"
It was Sam, calling me from work, something she never did. My gut plummeted. Fuck. Her job investigating Euros no longer seemed so cute. She had access to all the big databases at work. What had she seen? There was my appearance in Julie Burchill's autobiography, cutting a dash at the Groucho Club in the early 90s: "You just knew that Tom was brilliant in bed because the minute the talk turned – as it invariably did – to matters of sport, Tom would yawn, down his vodkatini in one and say loudly, 'God! I hate sport! Especially football! Why would anyone bother once they'd left school?' And all the girls would turn into steaming vats of oestrogen and draw straws in the Ladies' Powder Room about who was going to go home with him that night. (Tom, in the first flush of extreme youth, was my prettiest boy protege ever: a drinking, thinking man's Daniel Day-Lewis.)"
A flattering cartoon that bears a striking resemblance, I now see, to one of Jilly Cooper's cads, but like a lot of Julie's cartoons, it contains some truth: the lack of guy-talk. There's a line in Russell Brand's My Booky Wook where he recounts his decision "to act gay to attract girls" that made me slap my forehead in recognition. That was me. A first-generation son of feminism, the son of a working mother, who cheered your successes and empathised with your woes, whose party piece was getting drunk and wearing your dresses, I was a particularly non-threatening predator, those school years undercover now paying off as I popped up on your side of the divide, talking books and boy bands, mocking machismo in all its forms. I in no way resembled the kind of arsehole who would have sex with you and then discard you "like wet Kleenex", as one girl described it when I tried to make amends and with whom I ended up sleeping again (by way of apology?).
I was a tart, a trollop, a slut, a tramp, a whore. Only the female words will do. All of the male words – ladies' man, stud, Don Juan, lothario, womaniser – conjured smooth George Clooney types who seemed to enjoy their work and bore no resemblance to the permanently lovelorn shambles I felt inside. My psyche was a thin papier-mache of cliche. I was in love with you until you were in love with me; then I broke up with you, at which point I was in love with you again, because now the whole thing qualified as tragic. Now requiring punishment, I would throw myself at the feet of the nearest unavailable woman, her rejection relighting the flame of victimhood and spurring me on to fresh conquests to ease the pain. Like all lies, it worked only because I believed it: on some level, I was looking for love, just like everyone else. Those weren't one-night stands; they wererelationships that went splat on day two, that's all. A lot of them.
So I did not recognise the smooth operator I found in the pages of Toby Young's How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, stealing a dark-haired beauty from under Toby's nose. "As soon as he saw Syrie, he got that predatory look in his eye that I'd seen a thousand times before… (It's the wool-uf, it's the wool-uf!) I knew from bitter experience that there was no point in competing with Shagger when he was in one of these moods. No one could match his concentration and willpower."
Shagger! How I hated that name, its air of public schoolishness, of comradely backslap – its maleness. Fortunately, only one person called me that. Unfortunately, that person was Toby, the boy born with a loudhailer in his mouth. On the eve of my departure for New York, a journalist from the New York Observer had called me up, saying he was writing a story about the resurgence of the word "shag".
"Why are you calling me?"
"Uh… Well... It's just that Toby Young said…"
"Toby? Toby said what?"
"Well, that you might be… the man to talk to about that."
"What?"
"Shagging."
"I think you've made a mistake. Tell Toby I said hello." I slammed down the phone.
'Shagger! How I hated that name, its air of public schoolishness, its maleness'
The story hadn't run. But Sam had found another, putting me on the arm of a well-known British author – nothing too X-rated, but by this point I was livid with alarm. That evening, we had our first proper row, my anger made worse by the sure knowledge of how unreasonable I was being.
"But you told me half of those stories yourself," she protested.
"Telling you is one thing, but having you snoop around is something else."
"I ran one search on you, is all."
"Just don't do it again."
"It's not even…"
"Just don't do that again, OK, Sam? Just leave it alone! Will you do that for me?"
My volume startled us both.
Sam went suddenly very still: the body language of a woman expert in the art of not getting hit.
I wanted the ground to swallow me up. Whatever illusions I still held about myself were in tatters. I was not this woman's protector, her white knight, her English gent come to deliver her from the clutches of abusive men. Instead, I stood in their shadow. She forgave me much quicker than I forgave myself. For her, it was a quick shower; for me a small weather system that moved into my thorax and stayed there. I had found the flaw in the relationship – shows of anger were as unacceptable to me as they were to her – and in the weeks to come I would probe it, like a finger returning to a wound you can't quite leave alone. Somehow, I knew there was more where that came from.
Not for nothing is Salman Rushdie's novel about New York called Fury. It is the electrical current juicing up the entire city, a fantastical place, shimmering in the distance like the Emerald City, but run on pure will, as most fantasies are. You feel it when the taxicabs take the speed bumps too fast, their suspension unable to stop the chassis from sending sparks flying. It is a great place for the wheels to come off completely and reality to come and hit you in the arse.
I'd come out here to work for a magazine, but my reputation had preceded me. Some of the magazine's female staffers still slept with me, but with the mixture of wariness and curiosity with which you might treat an exotic primate: a monkey prince. One time, after tumbling drunkenly into bed with one of the editorial assistants, a condom broke and the look of sheer panic on her face saddened me to the core. We never saw each other again. I preferred the blurry curvature of illusions, my own as much as theirs.
About a year after I arrived, some friends introduced me to another Brit, a girl who immediately caught my eye: a curvy brunette, just my type.
"I don't believe we've met," I cooed in my best Clifford the Dragon voice.
"Oh, we've met, Tom," she said stoutly.
"Really? I think I would have… Where would we have…?"
"The Idler party? My heel broke."
Then it came back to me. A party in Clerkenwell some time in the late 1990s. I'd bought her a pair of shoes the morning after. I'd just forgotten.
The first step to overcoming a problem is realising it exists. That's what they tell you. In my case, the problems came nested within one another, like Russian dolls. Put down the booze and the love stuff would sort itself out. That was about the level of my thinking. Alcohol juiced everything, the great simplifier. Should I go out? Yes. Should I make a beeline for that woman? Yes. Should I make a pass at her? Yes. Should I go home with her? Yes, yes, yes. Even past the point of meaning it, when the answer to all these questions is really no, but you've lost the ability to hear yourself. Every Saturday afternoon, when I got up, I would peel back the blinds and look out on to the street below, at all the happy couples, loaded with shopping bags, pushing baby strollers down the leafy street. I felt as baffled as a Martian. How did they do it, these earthlings? What was their secret?
If you're finding it too difficult, you really can leave. You know that, right?"
We were about eight months in. The honeymoon period was definitely over. My pink cloud had vaporised. I was not finding work and I was angry. Where had everybody gone? How could people find more use for me drunk than sober? Sam couldn't be around me when I was like this; she simply shut down, so in addition to feeling like the world's guiltiest man, I was now angry with her for abandoning me. As the standard-bearer of all that was fucked up and clueless when it came to relationships, I had been looking to her for lessons in how you did this – how you stayed in them. I hadn't been counting on her being as clueless and as frightened as me. In fact, her exit instincts were even sharper.
"Why would you say that?"
"I'm just saying that, if you want to leave, you can."
"I don't want to. Why do you have to bring a loaded gun to the conversation?"
I can't remember the first time I thought, "I have to get out of this." It was a whispering campaign that started up softly, until one day I turned around and it was an actual voice: an old familiar fiend, intent on mocking my happiness. "Not this one," I would mutter. "This one I love. You can't have her." And I threw myself into ever greater demonstrations of commitment – a trip to London to meet family, friends – that only frayed things further. A promise to see a couples counsellor whizzed by, unkept. Looking back, I can see that I did everything almost exactly wrong, increasing, rather than decreasing, the pressure I was under. By the end, the rivets were starting to come loose, so hard was I trying to stay put. We broke up three times before it stuck.
"My feelings for you are greater… than my ability to be in a relationship with you," I told her finally.
There was a pause, during which she took this in, then she nodded, as if trying it out. "That sounds right," she said.
I don't know where that sentence came from. There's a book I have since come to treasure by a German psychotherapist, Erich Fromm, called The Art Of Loving, in which he makes the point that love is not a noun, it is a verb; an action, like riding a bike. "Love isn't something natural. Rather, it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice." It's the only thing that has come close to explaining how I felt in those last few months, how comprehensively overwhelmed I was.
We parted for the last time the next morning. I walked away on jellied legs, heavy with the certain knowledge that I would not do this again. I didn't have it in me. I was going to have to start again, top to bottom, all my habits junked, all my old ideas scrapped. I was a 37-year-old human male and I knew nothing about love.
As I write this, a sonogram of a three-month-old baby sits pinned to a board above my computer. My wife is at work. On my bookshelf sit the books Why We Love: The Nature And Chemistry Of Romantic Love, by Helen Fisher; Love And Addiction, by Stanton Peele; Love: A History, by Simon May; Falling In Love: Why We Choose The Lovers We Choose, by Ayala Malach Pines; and A General Theory Of Love, by Thomas Lewis. There's more. I've been busy in the years since Sam and I broke up, trying to solve the riddle of my seemingly constitutional inability to settle into something resembling shared happiness with another human being. It seemed an important thing to figure out.
Guilt is the only purely useless emotion, I've found – not just no use whatsoever, but actually the enemy. Here's another thing I've learned: when you fall in love with someone, MRI scans reveal a firework display in the caudate nuclei, a pair of shrimp-like structures located deep in the reptilian brain. This isn't where everyone thought love lived. For decades, everyone thought love was holed up in the limbic system – the place where infants recognise their mothers, and parents protect their families, and individuals feel loyal to their friends. No. It's deep in the selfish, self-seeking reptile brain, the same bit dealing with reward and achievement, which lights up like a slot machine when you make money, or win the lottery, or ace the final level of Grand Theft Auto.
Some researchers have reclassified it not as an emotion at all, but as a drive, like hunger. Romantic love, that is: Romeo-and-Juliet love, crazy-passionate-I-feel-like-I've-known-you-all-my-life-love, the kind celebrated in pop songs and movies as the holy grail of all human activity. The prize, no less, for being human.
On the subject of waking up next to a face you have seen a thousand times and trying to be as nice and kind to its owner as you can – the kind of love, in other words, most of us will actually attempt at some point in our lives – our culture maintains a deathly silence, broken only by the odd bit of Shakespearean verse: "So we grew together,/Like to a double cherry – seeming parted/But yet an union in partition –/Two lovely berries moulded on one stem."
Here are some of the things that didn't happen when I met my wife. It wasn't love at first sight (we both had moments of "meh"). My childhood and her childhood didn't sing each other's siren song (she has a great relationship with the men in her family). It wasn't a meeting of minds, or a melding of souls, or a beating of two hearts as one. (If anything, I was a little unsettled, as if sensing that the game might be up.) We didn't fall in love, we just walked slowly into it, and at around the nine-month mark I woke up one day and thought, "I do love her." That was my exact intonation when I told her. "I do love you." As if it were a piece of news we'd all been waiting on.
She is the love of my life, quite literally: the woman I have spent the most of my life loving – the most minutes, the most hours, the most days, the most time. Erich Fromm again: the man who waits for the right person to come along can be "compared to the man who wants to paint but who, instead, of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint it beautifully when he finds it." I know for a fact I am not her perfect man. Living with me, she says, is "like living with a 14-year-old girl", although I don't play Taylor Swift that loudly.
Earlier this year, we had an argument over what to watch on TV. She got back from work early to find me already ensconced on the sofa.
"What's going on?"
"Super Bowl."
"What time is it on?"
"Ten minutes." Her eyes narrowed.
"Oh honey, I wanted to watched Titanic. You know I did."
"We just saw Titanic!"
"That was the 3D version. It was awful. They looked a million miles away from each other."
"Sweetheart. It's the Super Bowl. The Baltimore Ravens. I've been waiting all week to see those 49ers get spanked… Oh, don't pull that face."
I got my way in the end. We watched Titanic.
• © Tom Shone, 2013.
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