Free I'm Your Man by Sylvie Simmons Page A

wrote,
    Â Â Â Â  I want to be hungry,
    Â Â Â Â  hungry for food,
    Â Â Â Â  for love, for flesh.
    Leonard abstained from eating meat, but he was less restrained when it came to his appetite “for the company of women and the sexual expression of friendship.” 12 Sit in a taverna by the harbor in Hydra long enough and you could compile quite a catalog of who slept with whom and marvel at the complexity of it all and that so little blood was spilled. You might hear a tale of a woman, an expat, so distressed when Leonard left on the ferry that she threw herself into the sea after it, even though she could not swim; the man who dived in and rescued her, they say, became her new partner. “Everyone was in everyone else’s bed,” says Richard Vick. Leonard too, although compared to other islanders he was, according to Vick, “very discreet as a whole.” Vick recalls one evening in a bar in Kamini where he was drinking with his then-girlfriend and her female friend. Leonard and Marianne showed up. During the course of the evening it came out that both of the women with Vick knew Leonard intimately. The women, says Vick, told Leonard genially, “You know, Leonard, we were never in love with you.” Leonard replied equally genially, “Well, me too.” “Those were innocent times,” remarks Vick, but they could be difficult for Marianne. “Yes, he was a ladies’ man,” says Marianne. “I could feel my jealousy arousing. Everybody wanted a bit of my man. But he chose to live with me. I had nothing to worry about.” It did not stop her worrying, but she was not one to complain, and she loved him.
    I n March 1962, two years after he had left London for Hydra, Leonard made the return journey and moved back into Mrs. Pullman’s boardinghouse in Hampstead. He had found a London publisher—Secker & Warburg—for the novel he had begun writing there. At the publishers’ urging, he was in London to revise it. For someone who described the writing process as being “scraped” and “torn from his heart,” the cutting and revising of a manuscript he thought finished was torturous. He wrote to Irving Layton about wielding “a big scalpel” and how he had “torn apart orchestras to arrive at my straight melodic line.” 13 The operation was performed with the aid of amphetamines and the pain eased by Mandrax and hashish. But still, it was difficult going back over something he’d been happy with, like being locked in a room with an old love he had once considered beautiful but could now see only her flaws. He wrote to friends about his dark dreams, his panic and depression. The flat gray sky over London did not help. The King William IV pub was not the Bodeguita del Medio, and Hampstead wasn’t Hydra. He wrote a letter to Marianne telling her how much he longed for her. In his novel he wrote how “he needed to be by himself so he could miss her, to get perspective.”
    As he had during his last stay in London, Leonard spent time with Nancy Bacal, who had since moved out of the Pullmans’ house. Through Bacal, he came to know an Afro-Caribbean man from Trinidad named Michael X. Like Trocchi, Michael X was a complex, charismatic and troubled man. “Leonard was fascinated with Michael,” says Nancy Bacal. “Everyone was. He was an intriguing man, all things to all people. He was a poet and rabble-rouser and a charmer and a bullshitter and a lovely, joyous, marvelous man and a potentially dangerous man. And so Leonard was drawn to him, as I was obviously.” Before Nancy and Michael X became lovers in 1962, Michael de Freitas, as he was then named, had been a hustler whose résumé included working as an enforcer for Peter Rachman, a London slum landlord so notoriously iron-fisted that his last name has entered the lexicon. * Over time, Michael de Freitas had amassed his own