Autobiography - A (relatively) brief history of my life
Blazing Saddles! - The 1990's
In 1990 Clare Athfield of Athfield Architects talked to Kay Roberts, my dealer, about doing up Aurora House, a disgusting 1970's sardine tin on The Terrace. She wanted to delight people working there with a series of doorway artworks, and I was on. Ruth Richardson, the Minister of Finance, criticised doing more than a basic repaint. Miss Richardson was one of the key spokespeople for the New Right political thinking which saw the Arts as uneconomic therefore government involvement was frivolous and irrelevant but Clare adapted her budget and still managed to include the work of twenty odd contemporary artists and sculptors. The refurbishment was declared totally off-limits to 'The Media'. I wonder if what we did is still there behind the banned East Berlin wall? I've lost my negatives and photos of the project.
I'm often jolted by how casually Wellington's creative intimacy is ignored, destroyed, given away. The dismantling of the TV studios, the destruction of Broadcasting House, built in a time when it was thought creativity, our music and drama, deserved the very best studio space possible.
Occasionally there were newspaper updates about the proposed new (main) Wellington Central Library, and suddenly I found out all about it. Its budget keeps being whacked back. It is utterly discouraging for its architects Ian and Clare Athfield. I think they were visualising an ocean liner - linking the city with our harbour beyond together with Civic Square, at a time when people are starting to realise how dramatic these linkups can be - a welcoming, enriching experience.Many librarians think it will be very un-British having a mezzanine floor cafe ... what if patrons go berserk, and shower us and our books with triple chocolate cheesecake, Pea Soup with wild mushroom oil and parmesan cheese??
Despite their budget uncertainties, they're utterly determined to re-employ me. Clare wants me to do the Junior Adult section. Create four floor-to-ceiling canvasses around the video and children's story telling area. I would also coordinate hundreds of inner Wellington primary school children picturing aspects of their Wellington.
$25,000 for the project! Nobody has ever offered me this much before. The minute I say Yes, I'd love to work with you again, Clare gives me the rarest of all artistic privileges - total trust, but realistically says You need to come up with a concept proposal I can show City Council Administration.
Without having to think about it, I seem to know Ian and Clare Athfields' commission is called WORDS - Words can rip life empoweringly open. I thought of people who don't feel welcome - they might not be deaf like me, but they're at the bottom of their school class, of life all the way through because they're Maori or Polynesian or ....
Endearingly, I'm watching a Polynesian workman in ripped, old overalls, dancing to his Walkman. He seems to not know fun in libraries is banned! and I'm putting my reading of Steve, the primal man at Organic Foods into the image, using my writing to fuse the two, create my core of truth - about me.
Yes, he's got no arms! I drew our dancing Samoan from memory and he demands a flowing fluid genie out of a bottle shape.
I sketched Steve's face because here was this man who looked like he had just walked out of the bush in his tramping gear. Here he was among all the suits and well heeled. He really screamed out. Primal Man!
I just had to paint him!
I LIKE YOU
You challenge me
crouching
in your ripped red
shorts, showing me
two Swiss sore throat
remedies for
New Year sunny day
misery.
Just back from the bush
No wonder you're
pissed off
and you like sax
players
in my library bag
best
at Homestead Health.
"What else is there ... to discover?"
The endless
thrill
of a house,
a house on a
hill
made of love in
your lyrics.
And you have this
Astounding good
image of
yourself.
It took me years
and one good prayer
to get started
learning
I'm a lovable bloke.
Like you ... Steve.
Clare is looking at me - she has Steve pegged up in their home - she's saying "Isn't he fabulous. He's so strong
Can you understand what I am saying
He is going to tie up all this morass, this tangle of shelving, this crisscross of traffic - this fabulous man ..."
I needed to delegate the artist in schools coordinator part of the project to the Athfield team - I was too ill, too frail with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to do this. They decided they'd adore two more canvases. Clare is saying Do a painting that sums it all up for the front corner facing the street, of the children's section.
I was thinking about my next canvas in my living room, playing Charlie Parker on the boom box when Elizabeth Brown (the wife of Abraham, my Brooklyn flatmate friend) and their children Andrew and Amelia called in to see me.Andrew Brown knows how to dance to bebop's Charlie Parker, he knew exactly how to move. He's on!
Behind him is woman of colour, Ernestine Anderson, glimpsed in a transcendent set of photographs from a library book I am loving. What is she singing?
I've adapted Cole Porter's song ...
Marvelous
much too marvelous for WORDS
I borrowed a love song from the
(library) ...
It's my key painting!
I think my paintings succeed because I've painted a safe space, for children of all ages to walk into, to enjoy. It's pleasurably luxurious looking at each brush stroke. Depending on the colours (they cost different amounts) I'd disbelievingly, appreciatively mutter This is a ten dollar one, and that one next is a thirty dollar one.
Excruciating problems with the City Council persisted. They weren't going to pay me the small startup grant to buy paints, materials. After relentless persuasion from the entire Athfield team, they mailed me the cheque. They had taken so long, I had to smash out a painting each week for the November 1991 opening deadline.
There is barely enough room for me on the edge of each canvas on my studio floor. Painting in a booze, black jazz induced coma to ditch C.F.S. misery could be artistically disastrous, but as I pray about the projects merciless deadline, I see painting bigger is to be simpler when I reinterpret earlier smaller paintings which left me feeling there is more to explore here.
How did the $25,000 get spent? Easily! Kay, my dealer, was always most conscientious about looking after her enthusiastic and lovable employers, Stuart and Katherine Brooker, as in making sure they received their commission. Business ethics - I learned heaps I had not thought about from Kay. The disappointment Dealers feel when the best paintings they've picked out for an exhibition are sold to friends of the artist ...There was a massive rearrangement, repainting. Smaller kids found primal Steve scary. Others thought my Espresso Blues friend on a benefit looked like a transvestite. So my payments got diluted over three financial years, which meant I didn't get my tiny benefit cut.
Wellington city council decided they didn't need an architect to give waterfront redevelopment panache. They fired him. Planning got shunted over to the bizarrely dire Lambton Harbour Management team. Their only vision was to obliterate all signs of our heartbreakingly ancient, resonant harbour and its rewarding crevices, with crammed in ugly buildings they could make millions on.
While WORDS was winding down, Lynette McKay and Susanna Parry, at the Newtown Community Centre, and I are trying to put an arts festival profiling the creativity of Newtown together. We are battling astoundingly mean people, who think we should pay for it ourselves. Lynette summed up our feelings when she said It's going to look humiliatingly tacky. I don't want us to go ahead. I didn't either, but each week we keep meeting. Two years later, Labour weekend of 1992 - it's happening. There is a tiny $500 to pay a multimedia artist to set it all up. (We grabbed all our muscled friends to be security). Artists of all ages, from the just starting school age are on show - it's more than a showcase! It should be an annual event but Lynette and Suzanna both lose their jobs. Centre staffing is slashed to one part timer.
It's the middle of Labour weekend and I'm on my own. I've jumped on a bus to go downtown to church, to meet people, to maybe have a cup of coffee with somebody after.Nobody says hello.
On my way out, I have picked up a copy of Crosslink, and I like the photo of this smiley looking man. I am trying to imagine somebody 
who can share being Christian and Gay, in a church newspaper. I want to meet him. I want this courageous person, who enjoys life, to get one positive letter in a box full of hate mail.
Next Sunday I'm reading poetry with my music mate Bernard Wells playing recorder at a poetry and music performance I call Anguish and Rapture. Afterwards the smiley man from the Crosslink newspaper come over to me and said My name is Bill. I knew we would be friends!
There is my photojournalist buddy, Tony, surging in on my front door, shouting with excitement - "Me and Vanessa have news for you - we are going to have a baby!. Pastor Mike is going to marry us and we want you to read your poetry at our wedding."
To the naked eye I'm Bolivian style grilling Groper, guts and all, on our living room fire. I'm processing Tony's information, reshuffling my spiritual and sexual frameworks. I thought a strict Pentecostal church chucked people out at the merest hint of a moral misdemeanour after disciplining them. I'm sure most of my Christian friends who are couples, illicitly (from the churches point of view) include sex in their loving compatibility printouts! I'm supposed to disapprove!! but I'm fascinated by the Old Testament's often embarrassingly gritty blazing saddles accounts of lust and love ... the way God again and again asserts their validity.
I'm writing a New Year's Eve poem - doing my realistic validity assessments of Elim Church life. Harshly. I'm not interested in the Howareyoumate,allright? but not listening to what I might want to say.
WHY AM I WALKING
home in the rain
in the southerly
from Lyall Bay
if going to Elim is
as fabulous
and tremendous
and wonderful
as I think it is?
Rotting posters
slap up against me
and Richard won't
be pleased to see me
when I get home
and If I
fill up on junk food
I'll wreck my teeth.
But it warms me when
Pastor Mike says "Fergus
You're a real man after my own heart"
and hugs me
with his huge little boy at a party
smile
Then I decide
that's not enough
it's not nearly enough
walking home
alone
on New Year's Eve.
Elim's pastor, Mike Knott, is telling my friend Abraham's brother Simon, all gay people should be shipped off to a concentration camp on an island where they can't get away. It's a harshly judgmental sentence with no possibility of redemption, but one I still find useful in talking to Christians, as an instant way of finding where they are on human rights issues. Often I feel their Bible version has the Book of Acts snipped out.
One of Bill's (of Crosslink) ongoing concerns is the crippling isolation, the spiritual ostracism gay men and lesbians endure from their Christian Church backgrounds - if they consider them worth trying to persevere with! He kept talking to people, liaising - there's John Murray, the Minister of St. Andrews on The Terrace, who is a Wellington Christian churches pioneer in personally accepting people — of any persuasion, colour, creed, race, sexuality ...whatever. His wife Shirley summarises the scintillating uncertainties of God who is within me, who is in modern living, in her hymn writing.
A couple of years later, in May of 1992, Hattie's flying in from Sydney on the flight that gets into Wellington the evening of St Andrews first ever Galaxies service for Gay people and their friends. I've decided to get back to her and I'll reuse those classic words - There is something I've gotta tell you. And she's bowled me over. She's saying I love you for your honesty. It's suddenly a lot easier understanding why you can be so on, then totally off.
I felt very vulnerable going to Galaxies that first night. I knew no other gay people. What if ... there was a furore — lots of angry people wanting to bash our brains in with placards nailed to sturdy wooden planks... some of them are likely to be people I know! Chas went to that first Galaxies service and invited me home for dinner the next night. Afterwards we started exploring each-other, but before anything explosively volcanic could happen he looked at his watch and said I have to run down to my job... I should have been there seven minutes ago.
Later in the week, when Chas was at my place looking at my paintings he asked me if I would do a painting of him. Like my full frontal self portrait I had hanging in my hallway. Here is the first one I did of him. After a couple of months my sixth sense tells me us is over. We have this fight over whether it's okay for me to come to the Country Music Festival in Gore with him. There is all this other stuff we can't resolve underneath ...
Next year - I met Clove from Washington. Here for three months . He's always dreamed of doing this. He has got a Fulbright Scholarship, and he's come to Galaxies to see if he can meet an artist. Heartbreakingly after being short-listed for a professors job at Massey University in Palmerston North, it fell through and he was unable to get his visitor passport extended. September, October, November, December, January, February — it's too hard to smile.
In 1995 I met McGregor again at Marg Layton's Hey I've Been Singing for Twenty Five Years retrospective. Erin, whom I'd met McGregor with at John and Louise's, was dead. He had AIDS.
We had two years, one month and three and a half days together. Time that was made disgustingly difficult by Pharmac's refusal to fund most of the drugs that deter, and destroy, or at least slow the HIV virus down substantially. (Pharmac is the Government's non-hospital pharmaceutical Management Agency)It was very painful for me last year (2001) reading the listener interview on a person with HIV, Greg Soar, who talks about how sick the drugs made him, and (this is medically substantiated) how expensive, and stressful (because it's illegal) it was buying joints to control the nausea. McGregor had to do this too. I put together a petition. I got my mates at The Space to sign asking that Marijuana be legalised, as a start, for people where it is beneficial for their health problems. We sent it to the Commission of Inquiry looking at decriminalising the use of Marijuana.
I remember ... McGregor making a fire in the Living Room, each night of the winter of 1996. I startle people when I tell them he looked after me. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ices me up totally over the winter months.
RUNNING, GUSTING RUSHINGOff the Picton Ferry
Mataura mainstreet winter.
Fucking me!
My Hands. My
feet. You numb me. Freeze
me. I ache when I move.
You want me
to fall
over and
die.
But if I
get enough
back rubs enough
hugs
enough
love
I tell you this -
Winter
Bad bastard from Mataura
get packed
get out
get lost
Take your mate
from Tapanui.
Telling people about us. There was no longer time to squash my life into two messily overlapping boxes, one about my real life, the other stifled one of feeling I'd lose all my friends if I let them into what makes my days and my nights go.
I DON'T KNOW WHETHER TO TELL YOU
McGregor is dying
Maybe I'll say —
He's going blind
It takes a bit of getting used to.
My friend
I'm terrified
of losing you
Your touch
Your fun
Your trust
There's no time to
explain
It's bloody hard
mate
muddling through.
What we remember and treasure is McGregor's fun, his courage. The last few months I'm seeing radiance. He's putting it all together from being a small boy the Salvation Army scooped up for picnics on the edge of the sea out of Glasgow. Of being unafraid of going to be with Jesus. People who meet him keep falling in love with him, right up to the finish ... his best mate Joss's 40th birthday party, where he ingested massively enjoyable over amounts of drugs and drink. Noisy parties being too hard to hear, I stayed home to paint a disinterred slab of birthday cake.
After McGregor died, we painted his cheap, chipboard coffin in my studio - then when the funeral was over we all retreated into our bereaved, drained boxes.
I start to heal, to write about us, in the sociable September living room of a Cambridge colour therapy clinic. Friends were convinced Alan and Margery could fix the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and wrote and wrote, plugged into a switchboard thing with tired mushroom and hideous gravy mix colours. Recognition - those are colours Mum knitted when I was little - but only on off days. I drew retro Catlins yearning landscapes, skies swirled through sycamore and silver birch branches. Trying out oil pencils McGregor's friends John and Louise gave me. A line in one of the poems gave me the title - PAID NO ATTENTION AND GONE!Did colour therapy fix the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? I didn't do the languorous six weeks after care they stressed was essential. I was much too lonely. Their equipment didn't show I have maximum lead poisoning, maximum mercury. When I did the detox treatment (It's American and mindbendingly expensive) all 2000, I started moving into well-being.
My friend Nik Bullard said Fergus this looks interesting... It's a wee blurb about a book being put together by Martin Doyle, of Wellington City Council's Safer Communities team. It sounded dull but when she set up a meeting for us I realised I was very enthusiastic. I've been burgled. Several times. The 5 am iron bar assailant of a young man on his way to pray at the Mosque, further down my street, has never been found. It's assault, not murder, although he never regained consciousness...
Martin was interested in me too. He's saying Newtown explodes with artworks, in churches, on walls. You can introduce them ... I found every third building had something which challenged me -
Did NEWTOWN! succeed? The people who talk to you in the book love living here. Run businesses with endearing country general store first name relaxedness. I count out the screws I need for putting bits of a driftwood trash-art work together at Union Hardware. I can look at art over a entree sized piece of Arkansas toffee peanut square at John Street Bar & Grill. Next door at Neut Gallery, you'll find Jason either painting, or working out something on his piano to startle people with, up the road at The Space, a New York styled loft performance venue. Jeff or some of the other Spacies will welcome you, make up a free espresso. Importantly, City Council backed the book with street improvements that welcome walkers with better lighting and islands where pedestrians can pause before taking on another subsection of the days 30,000 cars.
Negatively, developers have obliterated astonishing percentages of absent minded murals that enfolded garage shed sized garden centre/bus stops.
Busses continue being badly timed. If there's a wedding dress, or a slightly tired 1920's lounge suite that's irresistible, it's bloody impossible trying to park off the bursting arterial routes ... reassuringly, there's enough people around Newtown to look safe.
That's as good as it gets!
Christmas 1998. There's a hint that a gamma globulin treatment my doctor has been trying out, may have helped me survive a terrifying C.F.S. relapse that week after I turned fifty. Then there is Nest and his splendid sense of fun. His endless willingness to do far more than his share of housekeeping so I can put my Art Book together.
My publishers Roger and Christine of Steele/Roberts kept me massively on track working on my Art Book. It is an autobiography as well as featuring my paintings, writings, and drawings.Fairly early on the title cascaded out of the music I paint to, that keeps me awake, that makes my brushes dance ...
How did it get started? Roger and Christine lived in Rotorua and visited friends of mine, performers Brian Potiki and Jill Walker, who had some of my paintings on their walls. One was of lovers in the back of a red pickup truck. The music? Billie Holiday singing We lived a little glamour. They came to see me when they moved to Wellington, around 1986. I'd just finished painting Angel sparked by a Northern Irish movie (about musicians) that I loved, and Delia who was looking after Brooker Gallery while Kay was away, had sweepingly said It's far to glum to show our people, in fact we don't want them to see anything of yours that isn't happy.
I knew Angel is an honest painting, one of my best, and I was so pleased when they ran back to my front door about 75 seconds after they had short-listed several to say This is the one we love the most.
Roger steadily got into publishing. There's the solid (now biography) of Sir Frank Renouf, much poetry, art treasures of fresh New Zealand writing, particularly poetry they are passionate about and they continued to be vigorously enthusiastic about me. Probably about 1995 they suggested doing a stunning book. New Zealand equivalent mid-career artists don't get collector's item style tributes about them while they are still alive ... I was honoured by their vast enthusiasm, and started a carefully chronological account of my life. Initially it didn't matter too much if the paintings that fitted (50-60 out of hundreds I've sold and done) looked only average in my photos - we'd redo them professionally.
After Creative New Zealand refused us funding, Roger and Christine kept dreaming. Then he said We'll do a smaller version. We're determined not to let the project die. But you'll have to do the photos. So, that summer after McGregor's death I had scores of photos spilled out on my living room floor, some kept pushing the ones beside them into the background. This is fun, it's zany, I decided. What happens if I group them like this in the book, so I whacked non-linear paintings off against each other. Dissonance! The way life usually is.Roger and Christine keep approaching Creative New Zealand, any sponsors we could think of - Fergus Collinson is an artist who has been described as the Van Gogh of Newtown. A wild description in terms of painting style, but there are similarities in the uninhibited passion in the artist's work, and the lack of official recognition accorded them. He's given everything he's got to his vision of painting. He paints on, a profound role model of a gay man overcoming barriers bringing colour to Wellington's Central Library and hundreds of other walls, and joy to lives.
Friends bought paintings for a fund we set up. Roger and Christine put dollars in. I put dollars in. In 1999 Creative New Zealand put dollars in too.
Keep complaining about the insultingly paltry couple of million dollars Creative New Zealand personnel have to sub-sub-divide each year.
Here's Michael Parmenter, and Douglas Wright, both very differently at the top of New Zealand's world recognised modern dance creatively talking We're friends, but our endless funding nightmares appear designed to make us enemies. We are expected to create work that is cheaper, that undercuts each other. We're not prepared to do this.
In 1999 my darling publishers Roger Steel and Christine Roberts produced Bouncing with Billie Dinah Ella Bunny Louis Benny Mahalia, on the fortieth anniversary of Lady Day's (as Billie Holiday was affectionately known) death. The launch was enthusiastic, the day after the General Election. (Roger had major concerns no one would turn up after following the election results ...late ...late .. late into the night!!) The Space was not spacious enough and threatened to overflow. Glorious chaos, people, talk, opinion, music, poetry ...
(Er)nest, my partner, began with a poem:-
The Tail of Ella ... (and Fergus!)
Fergus was an artist
A blue 'n' yella fella
A blue 'n' yella fella
With a cat name Ella!
He painted day and night
By sun and candle light
And sometime-
(for a laff!)
He'd take a photograph
of the things he'd painted
...
She'd sit and watch him paint
Hour after hour
Regardless of hot sun
Or cold wintery shower.
... (for the full poem click HERE)
The half-arched widow didn't quite push out as people queued and jostled to get their hands of a brand new autographed copy of my book. Behind me Roger and Christine busily unpacked boxes of books, which had only just arrived from the printers in Christchurch as the launch was starting.
The reviews briefly said:
Otago Gaily Times/John Robinson - Fergus Collinson is a steamtrain in springtime,the 190 picking up speed. Buy or borrow a copy of BOUNCING WITH BILLIE. It's a rewarding ride.Skirt/Anna Livesey - The work in Bouncing with Billie, both the poetry and the art, is highly biographical and personal. Collinson uses names of friends and family in almost all his poems, talking to or about them, questioning them, thanking them, telling them they are precious ... Many of the poems have a clear social message. Myself thinking features the issue of discrimination against people with disabilities, drawing on Collinson's experience as a deaf man.
JAAM15/Jenny Powell Chalmers - ... Collinson's paintings demonstrate a variety of stylistic and technical approaches and drew my attention well before the poems that accompanied them. The delight of wallowing in rich color, unexpected subjects and changes 
in the emotional tone of the paintings make this book well worthwhile even before considering its poetic components.... Flowers frequently feature in Collinson's work, and I am happy to say his are the finest paintings of flowers I have ever enjoyed.
Peter Coates headlined me twice on TV1's INSIDE OUT Sunday morning disability program. The first time to get the raw excitement, the sheer pleasure of sighting a funkily presented book that has the heightened awareness that goes with disability, of life's highs and lows. There's an afternoon romp through Newtown's annual street fair, and upstairs to The Ballroom Cafe for caffeine, and a 'purely accidental' romantic catch-up with Nik, and Mike and Helen, where I draw them.
I look so ancient being interviewed amongst The Space's sequence of paintings from Bouncing with Billie - I'm thrilled Peter has added in extra material from five years earlier. A presentation he called A Special Kind of Sensitivity of disabled creativity. I look hunky with my shirt off painting Beryl's pet Citroen car, to Dinah Washington's operatic range of jazz moods. From her haunting Blue Gardenia, to the You better shape up Bud, amused menace of Is You/ Ain't You My Baby True?
I truly love this when Peter says: People who are deaf will want to save this episode - I'm putting what you say into permanent captioning, not just teletext. I like. Teletext doesn't video. I'm always sleeping when INSIDE OUT comes on. So are all my friends. Maybe if I can get enough of us to complain, we'll be able to get an evening repeat... Queer Nation is now in teletext. The dialogue is intelligent, and you would never get this conversational depth downtown in the ultra noise/pick up place aura gay dances and downtown bars have.
While you wait, do have a look at Rachel McNee's un-advertised, undisplayed unreviewed book People of The Eye. It's got Bruce Connew photographing us throughout - the man who did my most favourite white and black photo of laughing big West Coast coal miners soaping each others backs.People of The Eye are massively deaf people I've only glimpsed till now for a two reasons. I needed to learn their voluble hand language - but their world seemed far more marginalised than mine and I felt the deaf people I started to meet in the 1960's seemed stuck in a deaf slot they were happy with and would always stay within!
In her smartly written A Moment in the Deaf World preface to People of the Eye, Rachel McKee notes Before I left New Zealand for America in 1987, the highest occupations in the signing deaf community were skilled tradesmen (many without qualifications because of literacy barriers), and a small 
handful of white collar workers.... America is a thrilling shock. I met deaf teachers, lawyers, scientists, post-grad students, administrators, film directors, travel agents, actors, psychologists - no-one seems to have got the message these were not possible vocations.
The sixteen life story excerpts are harrowing, hilarious, horrifying and hopeful. Perry Meets The Law is my favourite. Statistics talk about the big percentage of deaf people in prison - Perry talks about being beaten up in a police raid, punching the policeman who was kicking his ribs in, not knowing who these people were, because he couldn't hear what they were saying...
I found Perry's two and a quarter pages, and Rachel's sentence Typical is the scenario here a police officer misinterprets a Deaf person raising their hands to sign as having violent intentions, or a Deaf person gets on the wrong side of the law by apparently 'ignoring' a verbal instruction explained why my encounters with police have either been very accepting as in car crashes, or deeply, unusually malignant, as in McGregor and me being the sole people walking along Courtenay Place on a Monday night, and we thought it would be so romantic to light our way with lit candles ... They slid in behind us, two policemen in their car, wound the window down, and started yelling at us to put our candles out. I thought they were abusive drunks. Initially I ignored them. McGregor didn't do too well explaining what they wanted - his blurry soft Glasgow drawl was drowned out. Then they careered off, without explaining why what we had done was wrong.
I'm still shook up trying to describe what happened. My guess is our real crime is we were holding hands fondly.
Here's commonsense advice from a "Safe Seminar" group I went to - "All gay men can expect to get beaten up at least once. If you walk towards traffic, its easier to get out of the way."
Six years on, I sometimes see downtown women stride caressingly along, arm in arm. Never men.