Authors: Jeremy Reed
Jim remained too tense to let go of his senses. His consciousness shifted in and out of the music, got caught up in it, then resisted. When he looked around again the lights had been put on dimmers and the room had darkened. He heard the door open and caught sight of the man he assumed to be Slut entering the room. The emaciated but defined figure was, as Danny had warned him, blindfolded. His naked torso was tattooed with interlocking serpents, and he wore jeans slashed to threadbare ruins. His shaved head showed a blue grizzle of hair-roots around the ears, and his multiple lip and nipple piercings enforced his evident masochistic traits. Jim backed off from any idea of becoming associated with such a cult. If, as Danny had led him to believe on their way over, Slut was periodically crucified on Hampstead Heath, then he looked the living image of his legendary status. Jim found him repulsive and fought again with the impulse to get up and go. He found it hard to believe that this primitive ceremony was taking place above a pedestrian Soho alley. The whole thing was so out of context with his own life that he wanted nothing to do with it.
When the music stopped Slut began intoning his own mantra. Jim kept his eyes open and watched the whole circle now focused on their leader. Slut was contorted into some form of expositive dance, like an urban shaman attempting contact with tribal spirits. He held an arrow in one hand and appeared to be working the point into his chest in imitation of St Sebastian. Danny and his circle looked on enthralled as the arrow went home, leaving a residual trickle of blood. The first arrow secured, Jim watched horrified as the man
began working a second and third into his torso. He showed no sign of pain as he continued with his ritual of self-inflicted torture.
Jim had little doubt that the ceremony would culminate in an orgy, and he wanted to avoid the possibility at all costs. The room was becoming suffocating, and bad vibes fizzed in his head. He got up abruptly from his cushion and made for the door. The group were so concentrated on their leader that not even Danny turned his head to watch him go.
Jim found himself back outside on the badly lit stairs. The doorman looked at him menacingly but made no attempt to have him stay. He simply fixed him with the same inscrutable expression, the same glacial blank.
Jim ran down the three flights of stairs, opened the heavy security door and hurried out into the alley. He didn’t stop running until he was safely back in the pedestrian flux of Dean Street. When he slowed up he was glad only of his freedom and continued for a while walking in a state of directionless shock. He found himself back in Old Compton Street, its hologrammed bars swimming up at him like the tropical tanks in an aquarium. Men were pressed up against the windows, staring dumbly out at the night crowds, engaged in watching a reality movie. He felt himself for a moment to be part of the same footage. He needed to be alone in the night and decided to walk it back to his studio flat in Paddington Street and use the exercise as a means of offsetting the effects of shock.
He knew without doubt that he had to break with Danny. Even the panic triggered by the prospect of being alone again seemed preferable to the option of continuing a relationship under these circumstances. He flexed his mind to take in the idea of loss and the inevitable carve-up to his nerves that would come from the split. Already he could sense the damage like broken piano-strings in the pit of his stomach. He wondered how many times he could stand up to being radically deconstructed by partners. He walked briskly, fooling himself as he went along that he was aimed for a new purposeful future. He had his doctoral work as pivotal support for the ruptured days ahead, and he might, he promised himself, take a short break in Rome and sniff out some vestiges of his enigmatic
subject’s posthumous legacy. For some reason he found himself linking Heliogabalus with Passolini as he walked into the night. He reminded himself that both had been murdered in public toilets and that both had survived as metaphors for a distinct archetype in the gay world.
He kept up with his thoughts, and instinct guided him in the direction of home. It was starting to rain again, bittily, but without persistence. He hurried on, taking in nothing and seeing nobody, elated by the night air and in his mind determined to be free.
Rome was everything Heliogabalus had anticipated it would be. After the long haul through violently changing seasons and countries he was welcomed at the capital by shocked crowds who threw flowers. He had arrived, flexing the muscle on the way of six white horses which conveying the image of his god and was given an ecstatic reception. He had dismounted to pick up a rose coloured a particularly deep burgundy and had held it out to a youth who had caught his eye by reason of his perfect looks. The boy’s archly camp expression and dyed hair had him assume he was rent or else the adopted heir to an older benefactor. He was determined to find out more and mentally put the youth’s image on file.
With his minders looking on apprehensively, he had repeated the gesture, again stopping to present a flower to a boy made up like a butch cabaret artist. He could sense the suspicion on the part of the spectators who observed the incident. They were clearly passing judgement on his sexual preferences and categorizing him as a fag.
The sun was starting to break through a low-cloud ceiling, spotlighting him in his moment of triumph. His only thought was for his mother and that she should be appointed his principal adviser. It was she who had guided him all along and prepared him stage by stage for the role of emperor. All the preliminaries of his education in rhetoric, the part he had played in the Emesan priesthood, the tangy introduction to hedonism that she had encouraged, her choice of tutor, all of it had formed the baseline to her plan to see him rule over the Roman Empire. The whole thing seemed unreal as the city crowded in on him with its mad celebrations. He could feel the sun on his face, and he thrilled at the prospect of coralling pretty boys from all over the city. It occurred to him that, of course, he would be forced to go through the pretence of marriage, but he knew as he stood there picking out faces in the crowd that a woman could never offer him the intense emotional high that came of a
same-sex union. He knew this from his chemistry and from the encouragement given him by his mother, who had pointed him towards liaisons with his own sex.
Already in his mind, as he confronted the excitement of the crowd, he had decided to build a high-rise temple to his god on the south-eastern edge of the city, in what were the lowlife suburbs. The building would face the rising sun and attract solar energies to its heliocentric god. He had planned it after having seen maps of the city while
en route,
and now he gave his attention over to the musicians who were accompanying the procession. The band played a variety of instruments ranging from castanets to barrel-shaped drums called tambours, to Egyptian rattles used in the worship of Isis, to silver trumpets known as hasosra, as well as the kind of large harp known as nebels. He worked with the music, its rhythm building in him to the pitch of frenzy. He was fizzy on decibel-clusters and engagement with the beat. He knew that even on first sight he was a scandal to the people, not only because he had the audacity to wear jewels on his shoes but because he appeared openly to celebrate a marriage with death. He may only have been sixteen, but his upbringing had distanced him from everyday life. He knew the score only too well. He was a weirdo. A shaman. A ritualist. A religiomaniac. A magician. A pretty boy. A mythomaniac. A quasi-eunuch. But he was emperor.
He had also been told by his advisers that there was the belief common amongst the people that Nero would return and that, no matter the murdered emperor’s abuse of power and his atrocious crimes, he still remained an idol to the masses, who remembered him by placing roses on his grave. There was some hazy notion amongst the collective that Heliogabalus, as the newly appointed caesar, was in fact Nero’s reincarnation.
The palace, as he had been instructed on the road, was surrounded by a dense area of cultivated parkland. As they came within sight of the grounds he could see how a profusion of blossom had turned the park into a cerise blizzard of bitty petals. He felt himself caught up in the pink choreography of spring, as if nature’s regenerative energies were also his own. He insisted on stopping
under an arrangement of cherry trees, and for a brief moment Julian’s image returned so blindingly it was as if he had hallucinated him back into existence. He remembered Julian’s warning that he would come to nothing and die young. It came back to him now like a hex frying in his blood. For a second he was afraid before he let the reminder go.
As the procession approached Nero’s restored Golden House his mood brightened again. That he was to occupy a palace built proportionally to house a mad emperor’s ego was an impossible reminder of his chosen destiny. He knew from reading Suetonius that Nero, prior to torching Rome, had announced, ‘While I yet live, may fire consume the earth.’ And that written all over the city’s walls at the time were the graffiti pronouncement: Alcmaeon, Orestes, and Nero are brothers. Why? Because all of them murdered their mothers.
As he stepped into the entrance hall of the palace, originally built to accommodate a 120-foot statue of the emperor, he felt the full ferocity of Nero’s mania rush at his throat. He started to choke in a sudden paroxysm, which he explained away as a tendency to asthma. But the incident had come as a shock. No matter the emperors who had walked its blood-stained floors, something of Nero’s hysterical presence remained in the achingly empty rooms, spread out like the vast complex of an abandoned hotel. He took it as a sign and one that he would submit to his temple priests.
He knew from his reading that the place had been built with the illegal gains Nero had listed out of his subjects, promising in return the security of newly discovered gold from Ethiopia. Some of the walls were still studded with jewels, and most of the rooms were done out in red and gold, with the added detail of black marble floors. The kitsch, the hieratic, the looted and the mindlessly exotic were all scrambled together by generations of bad blood, who had fed in turn on the equally corrupt exploits of venture-capitalists.
As he journeyed deeper into the palace he noticed that the dining-rooms had fretted ivory ceilings and that the main dining-hall was circular, its ceiling revolving slowly, day and night, to match the movement of the earth’s tilt. There was a sophisticated ventilation
system that dispensed hot or cold air and a library stocked with Greek and Latin works as the core of modern knowledge.
He resisted the impulse to be tempted by too much too soon. It was as if he had been offered a box of candies the size of a swimming-pool and been asked to choose. Inwardly he wanted the lot, but he professed a lack of interest so as to conceal his inordinate need for kicks. He would like to have been left alone with his mother to enjoy the freedom of the place without being under the close scrutiny of an officious entourage. He was forced to conceal his nervous irritability. The exhaustion of having been on the road for almost a year was starting to tell. He had lived without a home ever since leaving Syria, and no matter the luxury of the villas he had used for short-lived stays he felt time-lagged from lack of a place to call his own. He had also been seriously ill and had come close to sweating out his life
en route
to Rome as doctors worked around the clock to lower his fever. He had hallucinated violent endings in his delirium and still remembered the fire that had ripped through his dreams like the fins of a torched city.
His body was road-mapped by the ups and downs of life. Getting to Rome had involved a transcontinental journey, so debilitating in its wear and tear that ruling the Roman Empire would seem small by comparison. That Nero had never left the popular imagination fitted well with his intentions. From his first infatuation with the idea of becoming emperor, he had taken aspects of Nero’s biography as the role-model for his future lifestyle. It was the decadent and sensational in Nero, rather than the vicious and homicidal, with which he empathized. It was the Nero who had gone through a marriage ceremony with the boy Sporus, liquidated the economy in the interests of self-indulgence, been the dedicatee of Seneca’s work ‘On Mercy’ and whose religious sympathies were also directed towards a Syrian cult who continued to colour his imagination. Again, as Heliogabalus stood looking at the suite of rooms he was personally to occupy he could feel Nero’s presence invade his system. It was like an interference with the electric noise in his body. He wondered if others could detect the disturbance when it came up in him and was careful to conceal his thoughts. Nero, he knew,
had worshipped the Syrian goddess Atargatis, until a fit of temper had him urinate on her image as a means of expressing his superiority. Nero’s inflation of ego was something of which he knew himself incapable. He made a silent promise, as he stood looking at his reflection in the marble floor, that he would never outgrow the influence of his god. If the union he celebrated of the divine pair Ishtar-Tammuz was to him a way of life, then he was determined to maintain the distinction between the divine and human.
Already, despite his exhaustion, he was beleaguered by requests, sycophantic compliments, bitchy asides and the naked intrigue of those hoping to gain office. He despised them for their scheming. He was only too aware that the empire he was inheriting was itself responding to a tropism of decay, a sort of ideological AIDS in which a pernicious retro-virus policed a declining organism. The problem, as he had been briefed on his circuitous journey to Rome, lay chiefly in the uneven distribution of wealth. He had learned of how both Tiberius and Caligula had attempted to solve the problem of big estates and dispossessed peasantry by a radical redistribution of land, but both had been frustrated in their attempts by the oligarchs, and the senatorial class had resumed its sway. He had been told that the wealth of the empire rested on looting, on slavery in the plantations and on provincial labour and that the contrast between the hedonistic pursuits of the aristocratic landowners and the abject misery of an institution of slaves was at its most acute. Living largely from a wealth derived from the land, the senatorial class were the opponents of any economic expansion which challenged its own position.