I concluded it was time to leave the city when a gay man insisted I meet his girlfriends back at his hotel room; It quickly transpires I’m in a brothel, one of the ‘staff’ sits her four year old son on my knee to act the puppet for her inquisitive line of questioning - read sales pitch. ‘Aldy, say: where’s you girlfriend?’, Aldy’s eyes find me like blameless beacons in the seamy smog ‘where’s girlfwend?’ he recites brightly through his chubby smile, ’are you maweed?’ ‘Howold are you?’ ‘Are you my daddy?’ I answered his questions with tickles, and a smug smile toward his mother. As I sat on the foot of the bed, I listened to my whereabouts for the last week of nights retold from a room full of ten strangers. ‘You were in this bar’, they said. That bar. Early night, that night. Shop. Internet. You spoke to her, shook his hand. Aldy’s hugs and handshakes were my only escape from the tumbling reality, so I smothered him with attention. He was polite and his hand was warm with innocence, in an inescapable environment that drifted on a river of love, but respect among kith was the ragged survivor of the rivers rapids. It had a story to tell. Continue reading ‘A Harlot and a Holiday’
Archive for June, 2008
Back when I was a boy - when war was settled by Thundercats, when all we had to play with were a Commodore 64, Sega Megadrive, a Spectrum ZX and a Gameboy, when Eclipse jeans meant u waz kool and Timmy Mallet got kicks out of striking the dumb kids with a big hammer - I stuck a pin in a map and announced to Chucky (my plastic-faced ventriloquist doll) that ‘I’m going to Java’. ‘Really? That’s great, I hope you have a wonderful time in Java’ we said ‘I will, Chucky’ I promised. In the years following my declaration, hair began to grow in strange places and my redheaded friend rarely uttered a word. The truth is, he became the victim of a number of violent beatings at the hands of my fiendish teenage friends and me, and in 1999 he was cruelly doll-napped and fatally run over - twice - on the quiet country road to my house by a friend’s Vauxhall Nova. Nine years since his assassination, I’ve made it to the Indonesian island of Java and in a cruel twist of fate, Chucky’s pinned me with revenge. Continue reading ‘Chucky’s Revenge’
It was a classic play. Some would say a suave snatch, others a seductive triumph. Each time I look back at the moment, I applaud and tip my crown in respect. I’m newly single, ‘off women’ and emitting that couldn’t-care-less, rough attitude that comes with unkempt hair, sparse stubble, a loose tongue and yesterdays t-shirt. I saw the way she looked at my friend, it was a look of assurance. Her eyes rolled him around and left me playing the dutiful observer in her royal court. As we turned to leave however, she revealed her bluff and made her move – on me. Jackie is a gorgeous redhead, typically passionate and playful. As my back was turned, she placed her hand assertively on my shoulder. She was guilty of intent, while I was innocent of any invitation. Within seconds she’d wrapped her legs round my waist, allowing her warm paunch to sink around me and tighten almost every one of my muscles. There was nothing I could do, other than the same as any English gent born of the eighties – I lowered her gently onto her back and into the classic Missionary Position. Voyeuristic photographers stood their ground but as I looked over her bust and brow, her devious play dawned on me. She was making him jealous. Him being an enormous, fully-grown and worryingly wild orang-utan. The authority of the Sumatran rainforest, and I was deep within his territory. Continue reading ‘The Flirt of the Forest’
