Call Me (6 page)

Hi,

saw your advert and felt it was time to answer one after all these years of reading. I am forty years of age, fit and able. My main interests are leather and all it entails. I have plenty of gear, accoutrements, toys etc. Am into jocks, shorts, etc etc. Like oil massage, safe sex, have some experience with Domination, S&M or whatever. Brand new video with exciting tapes sits awaiting your arrival. Photo taken only last week. 0171 498 –– for a fab time. (Beware of the answerphone.)

Chris.

(Safe Sex Stud.)

Verdict: No chance. Not a hope in hell.

Sitting on his leather Chesterfield, darkest green velvet curtains soaking up the light, Ikea bookcase bursting with impressive reading, he looked like a nice chap. Though concerned about his gut (holding his stomach in like a collector's item pin up) he managed a smile.

The beer gut would have been less obvious if he'd been clothed. A circumcised gentleman who'd felt more than just the one surgeon's knife. Again, the intimacy and stillness of a self-timer photograph, shot with available light. I wondered what the reject photos had looked like.

On a plain postcard he'd laid down his particulars in more huge capitals.

MOTTO: Pain Is Pleasure

AIM: To Experience Pleasure

LIKES: Smooth Skinned Muscular Types

AGE: 40

BUILD: 5′11″ / 11 Stone / Moustache

NAME: Paul

TEL: 0171 813 ––

Verdict: N-O. The intensity of one self-timed photo after another was wearing.

The amount of feeling and crafting which had gone into presenting each image, at such expense of time, energy and pocket, was remarkable.

From perhaps only a ten minute walk away came an intelligent hand and an astounding outpouring on two A4 sheets of economy file.

#–, Block ––

–––– Estate

–––– Street

London N1

0171 704 ––

Hi,

I liked your provocative and enticing ad in
Boyz.
Your physical description is certainly eye-catching. I actually own black, skin-tight cycle shorts, currently idle in my room as a token to my once obsessive hobby. Yes—I do like them!

My name is PJ. I'm 28, 6′ 1″, weigh 11 stone and have a slim physique. I have enclosed a photograph that will flesh out this description.

I am a newcomer to London, having grown up in Northern Ireland and in the last two years travelled through Europe with the bold ambition of eventually visiting every country on Earth. I originally came to London simply to raise cash, but I have since decided to settle here, find a job and a place to stay, reconsidering my future. At the moment I'm staying with my sister just off Essex Road, Islington.

My job is defined as Hotel Night Porter. Not great pay but I get by. I work in rotation so on alternate fortnights I'm free to do as I like. Movies are my great escape from the routine of daily existence. This is the first and singular passion in my life and to some extent casts a shadow over my other interests. I read
Empire
and
Première
each month though don't really take much notice of the critics. Who does?

Music means more to me than just background noise. There are only a few artists whose entire work I love: U2, Simple Minds, Peter Gabriel, REM—but I'm more into singles than albums—nothing beats a great new song.

This is the first time I've actually sought to meet people and it feels odd to sell myself so candidly, but there is a deeper reason for this than just building up social contacts. To meet a guy who is gay is a major step for me. Without exception all the gay men I have seen in my life have appeared as effeminate, which I loathe. I'm just not like that at all. Living a regular lifestyle, privacy and discretion are extremely important to me and something I won't compromise on, but I need proof that to be gay is not only to be unhappy or camp. Sometimes I think I'm the only straight-acting gay guy in the world. Being gay goes against the grain of my upbringing, religion etc. It'd create hell with my family if they ever found out.
(So please be discreet when phoning.)

I don't frequent pubs or clubs; they are just not my scene. Cafes and restaurants are better. Best of all is going out to events, day or night, be it sport, theatre or a concert, and just grabbing a take-away. This is how I would like my social life to be, with a share of movies and quiet nights in (or both). Basically I'm looking for a guy of like mind and heart. A boyfriend (how strange and wonderful that sounds to me). A friend and a lover. The two of us trying to figure this world out. It's difficult to present you with a picture of myself that, however imperfect, is truthful without being superficial. If I have given you some idea of who I am and how I feel then this letter has been worthwhile and hopefully will strike a chord with you and impel you to reply.

If you would like to meet me, please reply to the address below. Just a short note would do (with a photo of you in cycle shorts?) If we don't seem compatible I'll understand, but would you please let me know.

Yours faithfully,

PJ Healy

Verdict: Lovely letter, probably a very nice guy, but uh uh. I didn't want to pricktease anyone with a drop of sincerity in them, anyone I could have had some chance with. I just wanted to feed upon and be fed into the dreams of the not so nice one-timers.

The majority of respondents would have benefited from tips on how to play the game in ad-land. Some of the scraps of stationery weren't fit to be bird-cage liners. As for the writing and horrific choice of photographs enclosed, well, I felt like phoning a few of them up just to put them on the right lines. Getting them on the right lines, of course, might have required a referral to a structured therapy programme at the Portman Clinic, the Maudesley, PACE or some such place.

From the toilet seat I could see the letter-box, external flap up, letting in the usual smelly breeze. It was this which finally got me moving.

The balcony overlooked a post office, a Chinese takeaway, an Indian take-away, an off-license, some sort of everything-you-could-possibly-want-for-your-car shop, a general store, a bus stop, a pub called the Shakespeare's Head, a one-way street in which traffic went further and further away, and a triangle of sky. Ray and I once had people round on Guy Fawkes Night. It wasn't a great view. Two or three floors up it was probably something.

Returning to the bedroom for another four hours, slightly scared, I lay stewing: my scalp hurt. I thought I had a brain tumour. Later on I got the hoover out and reached into every corner like a good boy.

In the privacy of my minimum involvement accommodation, I was an unhappy independent. I could have been dead in there for weeks before anyone would have suspected, more weeks still before anything was done about it. Only the smell would bring police intervention, as is so often the case.

Good Friday.

It looked like spring had finally got going. All over London people were getting on with a spot of decorating. I felt triumphant, mine was all done. The pores of my skin were feeling the change in the weather.

Hair removal was as per instructions on the Immac spray can. I used a GII for the final tidy-up job—discouraged in the instructions. An invitation to irritation. Even those little hairs around my arse got a careful spray of the lemon-scented stuff. As stringent with my body as with my interior decorating, I got down to the business of cutting fingernails and toenails right back. Three different toothbrushes, each with all-important functions, went into action.

As I was lying in the bath, all kinds of memories hit me. My scars were apparent, silvered on my hairless skin. I remember the day the incisions were made. I insisted on watching. Tubes were inserted to filter in blue dye before the repeated back-and-forth scanning. That dye gave me a fabulous blue-grey complexion for a year—the total cancer victim look. I don't fill out a pair of Levi's the way I used to, having only the one testicle. Lying there, still, water cooling, I must have looked like a piece of performance art.

I was early, prepared as if for an audition. Coach loads of tourists were doing Kew. Placing my bike upside down beside me, I sat, then lay, on a chained-in area of lawn near the cricket pitch by the entrance, wondering if prisoners ever sunbathe. With the peak of my cap turned round to the back I did my best to strike an erotic pose, lying down beside my bike, head on pannier, making believe the sun was a spotlight trained on me.

Over the years I'd blagged a lot of teeshirts out of PRs. When I'd successfully acquired one, it would be stored away in polythene for a special future time. That time had come. For each rendezvous I'd wear a different teeshirt, fresh as the day it was wrapped. They became part of the ritual, more individual than the shiny rayon available at Avis Cycles.

That day I wore a Blur teeshirt. Nothing special, just B-L-U-R in silver grey on powder blue. Being an XL it came to just below crotch level. Teasing. The clothes, bike and preened body felt more perfect than awkwardly new. I waited with my eyes shut.

I was made aware of Stephen's presence first by the gentle click of his well oiled chain, then by a cooling shadow over my face. I ignored him for a while, then opened pretend-sleepy eyes; he was tall, backlit and nervously excited. It was boredom at first sight.

Setting a time limit at the outset, I explained to Stephen that I had to meet up with friends for tea later. It laid a foundation of tension which I enjoyed and established my power to dictate the pace of events. The subtle gradation of power in this first rendezvous was soon to be taken for granted. There was a conflict of desires: to me this young Stephen was just the first of many human specimens to tease, while I felt that to him I was, at first anyway, some sort of possibility.

That mouth of his: a shallow, narrow cavity, low roofed, with over-active salivary glands flooding it to brimming. Possibly sweet, clear saliva. His speech was impaired accordingly, the stomach-turning feature in an otherwise acceptable, usable body.

In the Temperate House that mouth told me Stephen's fascinating life story. Maybe I was mean not to offer him a shoulder to cry on. In the Tropical House the same mouth babbled on about what turned him on. Almost certainly I was rotten not to wink him towards the Gents to let him wet my dick. And he
was
turned on, I could tell, but trying hard to look bored. Perhaps more obvious than the occasional sexual excitement evident in the lycra shorts was his acute self-consciousness at being head to toe in favourite erotic get-up while the perfect excuse for wearing it all was chained to the railings by the main gates.

Eating ice-cream back on the grass where we'd met—distanced from the crowds—he moved in for the kill.

“You've got lovely legs.”

“Thank heavens for Immac,” said I.

This clouded his face.

“That's what my mum uses,” he said disapprovingly.

I quickly pursued this small route of discomfort, hoping to turn him off as easily as I'd turned him on.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” I asked.

Squelching an awkward laugh, he didn't have an answer.

“It's just that … I've been wondering, if there is such a thing as reincarnation, what do you reckon Joe Orton came back as?”

“That's a bloody weird thing to come out with,” he sprayed.

After that I felt relief as the mutual discarding process began. I was glad when he started whining on about his boyfriend and the problems they were having. How he didn't want to move in, how he didn't want to be
out.
How he didn't fancy the relentless clubbing, the Es, being peed on.

I finally shook him off with the “I'll call you up sometime” line. We both knew I wouldn't and I didn't.

*   *   *

I was fifteen minutes early. Someone sat, back turned, in the PS-worthy garden. I rang my bike bell instead of the doorbell and walked straight in, wheeling my bike over the lawn to lean it against a cherry tree in full bloom. The turning figure, mid-to-late forties, grey crop, was the cockney.

“Didn't think you'd come,” he said, smiling like I was a long-haul passenger about to be strip-searched at Customs. “I'm Eric, by the way.”

I nodded with a weak smile, like I'd arrived for a job interview that I'd changed my mind about. Taking a seat in a worn wicker chair, knowing it would line my arse through the lycra, I could smell him and he smelled nice. He'd recently been working with wood or putty. He rubbed a thick wrist over his unshaven face as I put on the teeshirt I'd removed at the end of the road to make a bare-chested entrance.

“Blur,” he said. “Crap if you ask me.”

“That Damon's pretty shaggable though, don't you think?”

It was a shame Mok was about, I would have quite happily lowered my arse on Eric's face providing he shaved first. We sat without smalltalk, enjoying five minutes of blue sky through the fruit trees. The lawn was a battlefield, not mown but butchered—torn short.

I heard Mok before I saw him, smelled his hairspray before I felt his soft hands in a firm handshake. Encased head to toe in his favourite cycle fetish gear he was a hideous sight. His Ever-Ready top was a sad contrast to the poster in the basement changing room. The lycra only emphasised the cargo of his unpleasantly collected anatomy.

I turned the peak of my cap to the front for a moment, then back again nervously. The old poof liked all that. Relaxing into the back of his chair, Mok let his guts sag out and down, slipping over the top of his cycle shorts.

“You look absolutely lovely. I'd very much like to suck you off,” he announced.

I gave him an empty glare for a good five seconds then looked away towards the garden gate. After a fit of coughing he enquired about the response to my ad, whether other cyclists had replied and if they'd sent pictures. I said nothing at first, then:

“One. I'd like a hot, sweet, weak cup of tea, asap. With biscuits. Two. Give me a tour of your house, keeping your hands off me. Three. Tell me the story of your fascinating life. Four. Make an imaginative indecent proposal within the hour.”