His face was familiar, I just couldn’t place it.
Never been great at facial recognition to be honest. My mate Glenn once commented he was surprised I even recognise myself in the shaving mirror of a morning.
Yet… I definitely knew this guy from somewhere.
This familiar face was across the bar from me at Boltz.
We caught eyes a few times and I noticed a similar hint of recognition.
He was middle aged… and blessed with Middle Eastern, or possibly North African, good looks.
Finally, the penny dropped. It had been a while.
I strolled over and introduced myself, “Hello, I think we cruised each other in the toilets under the ramp when we were teenagers.”
The concrete slope, which leads from New Street to the shopping mall above the station, is simply known as The Ramp to the residents of Birmingham. Before the bronze bull appeared at the entrance to the Bull Ring Shopping Centre, it was the number one meeting spot in town.
There can’t have been many a teenager in the city that hasn’t uttered the phrase, “Meet ya at the Maccies on the ramp.”
Beneath The Ramp were vast toilets, in constant use by guys seeking guys. The busy urinals and stalls seemed to stretch into infinity.
The first couple of toilet cubicles had massive metal doors, which clanged shut like prison cells. On one occasion, I remember a young lad coming in and having to shout for help when he got trapped! I told him to make sure the latch was unlocked and to stand back, before booting the jammed door open from the outside.
The toilets were closed in the early 2000s. They are missed.
I still see people from those subterranean cruising days out on the scene:
One over-excitable young buck, with a voice like a screeching kettle, is now a moaning man in his 50s… and still talks in a tone only bats in the attic can hear.
Another chap was so on trend with style and fashion that he looked like the ubiquitous gay member of every boyband. He now runs a chain of performance venues across the country. A few years back, I cheekily asked, “With all the years we’ve been knocking around together, surely, I’ve earned free tickets? I’ve certainly put the work in.”
I was granted lifelong freebies on the spot.
I’ve never actually taken him up on the offer.
At Boltz, I continued to reacquaint myself with that familiar face from my teens.
“Nothing actually happened between us,” I told him. “We left the toilets together and flirted by that row of telephone boxes next to the taxis.”
“You have an amazing memory.”
“Not really, but you made quite the impression, and besides, you tend to remember the ones that got away.”
A quizzical frown touched his brow.
“One of us had to be somewhere, so we arranged to meet at the same spot at the same time the following week,” I explained. “I turned up… but you never did.”
It was our An Affair to Remember moment. Brum’s answer to Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr… but meeting at the Maccies Ramp, rather than the Empire State Building.
“Oh God… I’m so sorry!” He had no recollection.
“Don’t be daft, it was over thirty years ago. I don’t harbour a grudge. I’m just explaining where we met.”
I went on to tell him how our paths had crossed on occasion over the subsequent years.
“We walked by each other outside the library in Wolverhampton about twenty years ago… and both turned to check the other out. It was the first time I’d seen you since you stood me up. You’d barely changed.”
I promised I hadn’t been discreetly stalking him for the past three decades, but…
“Then, about half a dozen years back, I stood to get off the tram, only to realise you had been sat behind me.” A flicker of recognition passed between us, then I got off… Funnily enough, at the stop by The Ramp.
Fate had clearly been against us… until tonight.
I had been in awe of him at our first meeting. He was stunning, with eyes of caramel, and soft chocolate curls… like a Cadbury Curly Wurly.
But tonight was the night two passing strangers could finally connect.
A liaison over thirty years in the making.
The remembrance of a boy who had turned my head a lifetime ago.
He was still just as handsome.
I invited him to join me in a more private area of the club.
Then came a sentence that took the wind out of me like a gut punch.
It felt like I had been hit by a truck… Ramped up to the full!
“I’m sorry, but you… are not… my type.”
Tales of the Second City 