Kevin (London – Nottingham, 10/09-10/10)

Flashback: London, Richmond, 02/01/09

“Is this a toilet Mummy?”
– “No darlin’, it’s a drain.”

It was a moment of divine eloquence, and I witnessed the little urchin attempting to direct her waste through the bars of a London drain while ‘Mummy’ happily scoffed down a Cornish pasty and puffed a cigarette. They epitomized the beauty of the commoner – that societal segment that does not seek to better its position, but contentedly remains a septic carbuncle on the hammertoe of society. “Garn”, I half expected one of them to say. I was transported back into the world of Eliza Doolittle, the My Fair Lady title track invading the alley as they waltzed together in low-rise stretch pants and jersey knit sweaters. They were the blue-collar, beer drinking, toothily smiling wench and spawn whom I love to observe, for they have never, despite the virulence of Western ambition culture, stepped foot into the self-help section.

Why is it that we, authors and readers of quality fiction, classic literature, travel guides and trashy crime, find the pull so great towards that corridor of hell, that proverbial purgatory of the ‘self-help’? Far from assisting society in dealing with its vice, the Internet facilitates the proliferation of such literature, committed to every avaricious psych major with laptop in tow and charisma on sleeve.

Kevin had a rocky past and a penchant for self help. Sad tales, melodramatic mania and loneliness converged upon poor posture and an earnest smile. He was a shell of a man who had been propped up by the rules of ‘Day Gaming’, stuffed top-toe full of catchy one-liners and blanket laws of attraction, and sent out into the world with band-aids where his psychiatrist’s professional sutures should have been.

Day Gaming is a sad, formulaic self-help religion that attracts desperate, partnerless males. Our frenetic urban realities are too far divorced from Jesus’ farm parables, and so instead, contemporary men look to modern prophets teaching Eve-attraction without the left-rib creationist mysticism. The nouveaux creed is based on simple sales techniques and the impression of confidence, but in practice, it requires much work and devotion. Luckily, the cock is a worthy god, and men need little convincing when the reward is sex and perhaps even a sandwich.

Day Gaming is at the heart of streets saturated with half-balding men, convinced they will soon be sucking on the nipple of the once unattainable twenty-something. Pitches are video-recorded for analysis by the professionals that move in packs around global cities, holding seminars, tutorials and practical application sessions.

Kevin made his Day Game approach as I was exiting the National Gallery. I accepted conversation, coffee and eventually, cocktails. He was somewhat unstimulating, but the alcohol flowed freely and the genius barman took my mind into worlds of sweet and sour cherry-strudel-whipped-cream-and-chocolate bliss.

Email sustained the dialogue after our travel-separation. He was erudite, eloquent and funny in written form. I rather fell into lust over our email communication. But he came to Nottingham with a sex goal and nil desire for friendship. He arrived with an awkward kiss and a cheap attitude, and the Game soon fell away. The man of the interesting emails was, in real life, an interminable bore. I spent the first night feeling rather sorry for myself, paying for dinner, and resenting the fact that I was no longer dating my web server. In these situations, drunken sex is usually a good option. That night, sex seemed like a worse fate. Drunkenness was viable.

Four entire days drunk would have suited the situation nicely, but unfortunately, it did not suit the budget. He ground up against me like a horny dog on a lamppost. I denied him intercourse, and he whinged his way through the stay like a petulant child. The story has a sad ending. Kevin was fucking blue inside. Stories of a tortured personal history flowed with exponential speed and darkness as the possibility of pity sex dwindled to nil. Manic depression or similar stirred by day four.

The emails that flowed thick and fast after his departure were commendable in their nod to day-time-soap melodrama. Excerpts from his monologue are here published.

This one demonstrates a unique sensitivity to rhyme: ‘I know that it’s a fucking mess, a real unspeakable fucking mess and it fucking crushes me more than any words can express.’

This one teaches us that hyperbole is always entertaining, even when framing a moment of intense sadness: ‘I exploded into tears when I read that, and couldn’t stop for about thirty minutes.’

This one moves into Lord of the Rings territory: ‘I’m drinking alone at this moment, trembling with an amped-up sense of indescribable, otherworldly dread.’

Now Jaws: ‘A tidal wave happened. Raw, blind panic, wanting to speed up – those were, among many others, the effects manifested.’

Now Mean Girls: ‘The notion of you seeing me as some bad guy who you bitch about to your friends is rather depressing.’

And the finale, which left me both entertained and irresistibly baited: ‘Just give me your word that you will never ‘publish’ anything, for goodness sake. I am assuming your quality of character would not permit that level of cruelty…’

I blame the literature. Oh Kevin, help yourself by getting your dick out of your hand and your nose out of the self-help section. Sounds like the next big title.

Kresimir (Fontaine des Innocents, Paris 29/09/11 – remembered, Oxford St, Sydney 25/02/12)

The transvestite trollops of Town Hall and Kings Cross hold immense potential for glamour in the postmeridian. In the morning, they are dogged by dysphoria.

This is the photosynthesis of an Oxford Street Iris. Sagging, almost torn throughout the day, she absorbs the rousing heat of the cars, the greasy restaurants and the endless cigarettes, emerging a glittering evening flower. Briefly blossoming, she will die spectacularly before daybreak. Intravenous tools of renewal catalyse recovery. They may cost a whole night’s tricking. It’s worth it for the extra-terrestrial light they guarantee.

Oxford St has always meant home. The flora and fauna are familiar. But returning home is unromantic. Getting lost becomes difficult. Postcard writing seems overindulgent. Reverse culture shock is less linked with culture than to the realisation that the adventure has found its denouement – ‘conflicts are resolved, creating normality for the characters and a sense of catharsis, or release of tension and anxiety, for the reader’. But normality is loathsome to both character and responder. Catharsis is overrated. Tension and anxiety are mere symptoms of a life well injected with spontaneity rather than the botulism of stability.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the holiday. My instinct is to harvest peripheral memories, to endlessly compare home to idealised befores. And so I think of Kresimir.

Kresimir Dujmovic was four hours of flirtation and cigarettes at the Fontaine des Innocents. It’s a loud fountain, but mostly, nobody notices. His legs were crossed and his pant leg skimmed just above his sock, exposing a little rectangle of skin. Apart from this, he was wrapped in black.

Extremity erotica. A Geisha.

Kresimir was a Croatian-born IR journalist with a weakness for cheating on his French girlfriend with women like me – wigged, naked-backed and stiletto-heeled. He was returning to his home in Berlin the next day, and I, to Nottingham. It was a traveler’s conversation, and a contemporary nomad’s goodbye, complete with a little post-encounter e-communication.

I hadn’t quite learnt from the Kevin Saga. Cluedo’s Miss Scarlet, I’m often too drunk on the promise of stories fresh, that I fail to see the semen being stewed up with blood, and bubbling away on the stove, while Colonel Mustard and Reverend Green have it off in the conservatory. In retrospect I taste the coagulating mass in the mail –

Clue 1: “Everybody’s rattling about the depression which takes over hearts and minds of the majority during cold season. Guess my melancholic nature will find it comfortable and pleasing.”

Clue 2: “One night I stood alone on the balcony, listening to the waves, and I came through the bar fence. Watching the protein fall into the abyss. Didn’t hear any screams from my wannabe posteriority though. Seems they are as suicidal as their wannabe father.”

Clue 3: “Maybe you could come over for a few days. I could point you to several places where you’d collect enough phone numbers and future blog chapters for a long time to come.”

Clue 4: “I’m a fucking elephant that will stomp on anything to reach desired goal.”

So he was going to sell me into sex slavery.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps in my attempt to harvest some interest out of my remaining memories, I’m decontextualising his references to cum, melancholy and elephants beyond that which is autobiographically licensed.

Either way, the giddy memories of an adventure untaken haunt me as I watch the Irises of a twilight Oxford St unfurl. Could I have been a heroine of the fountain, doused in vodka and tracked through Berlin, as lights went out and mine was just flinting?

I crave my own lost photosynthetic process. Settling for life of vicarious flora worship is not an option.

At least without the urban fauna at my watering hole, I can be guaranteed one security…

God forbid I ever catch the fucking Oxford St crabs.

Head of Security (Cordoba 01/01/12)

Religion (n):

1)            From the Latin ‘religare’: to bind fast

2)            From the Latin ‘relegare’: to go through again, read again

Attending church can be a religious experience. Bound to the pew, even the most zealous Christian will escape into passages of glassy-eyed, frankincense-induced delirium. It is a place for people-watching, where the women in mink coats are as weathered as the flooring and it is easy to spot the young – conspicuously in-bloom and invariably shackled to infirm relatives. Read and reread gospels induce divine syncope. It is the art and the extravagant grilles and monstrances that continue to bewitch, long after the fantasies of written Edens, Immaculate Conception and resurrection have lost their lustre. There is some greater grit in the barberry embodied in the grandiose goldenness of church booty.

Cathedrals litter Spain. Once envisioned as synagogues or raised as mosques, the edifices were conquered by the Catholics and converted into sites of Christian worship. The Mezquita Cathedral in Cordoba is a place where the three monotheistic faiths found peace, for a time, and worshiped together. Still intact, it is a relic of that lost era of concord.

The Head of Security at the Mezquita could have been rather handsome, but there was something incongruous about his assembly. It was as if his face had fallen, perfect and complete, through the floor of one designer’s sluice box and stitched to a body that had fruited out of a more practical vision of humanity. Here, the Italian chisel had met the German production line. Deo Design and Construction: under new management. Fuck aestheticism, we’re building human Volvos to get you through an age of terrorism. 

And terrorism was indeed what this man was fighting. More specifically, my mother the jihadist – all five-foot-two-inches clad in brown boots and corduroys, toting a recently doffed hot pink beret. So moved had she been by the emotional tenor of the place that she had decided to perform a full Islamic prostration, kneeling to the ground and bowing her head to the stone floor in the direction of Mecca.

The reaction to the display best parallels a dramatic reading of Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’. Crossing himself and moving with great speed to mother’s side, the guard urgently whispered into his walkie-talkie. Approaching her in rapid Spanish, the word ‘Mussalman’ was launched into the dusty, silent space before mother interjected ‘No habla Espanol’.

‘This forbidden in Spain. No Mussalman. This forbidden. You cannot do this!’

Mothers face went from one of fear to one of indignation.

Ever the star of international diplomacy, I scanned my limited Spanish vocabulary for helpful phrases:

1)            ‘¿Cuánto cuesta?’ – ‘How much?’

2)            ‘Poquito’ – ‘Little’

3)            ‘Rapido’ – ‘Fast’

4)            ‘Caliente’ – ‘Hot’

5)            ‘Muchas gracias’ – ‘Many thanks’

Listing them here brings the realisation that I am ridiculously well prepared for a sexual encounter in a Spanish-tongued city. Not so much for a run-in with the conservative Catholic Spanish church authority.

‘Mussalman, mussalman!’ the guard repeated, and we were surrounded by five other guards, armed conspicuously with large rifles and thickset shoulders. French, English and limited Spanish melted awkwardly together as mother accepted her God-appointed duty to educate the guards in the singular root of monotheistic faith. She was back at St Leos Catholic College in her classroom of teenage boys. She would get through to them. She would singlehandedly herald a renewed world order of religious harmony!

After a long struggle against her increasingly impatient audience, mother realised she was failing. In a desperate attempt to avoid expulsion from the cathedral, she pointed to her ring – rosary-beaded and purchased in Rome – a symbol of her Christian devotion. Security guard defensive mode evolved into deep perplexity. Mother was begrudgingly restored to the status of ‘odd tourist’. We walked around for a time and exited into the sun.

The next morning brought a new resolve to the heart of my flame-stoking, ever-pious parent. She would not depart from the land of the Mezquita without partaking in the Blessed Sacrament at the Bishop’s New Years Day mass. She wished to enter the centre of worship, which had been cordoned off and secured for the midday ceremony.

Sashaying up to our best friend, the Head of Security, she raised her voice an octave “Je suis proffessorio! I am proffessorio de religion!” She pointed to her rosary ring again. “I am the same as you. Same Christian.” By this stage he had realised, like most people who try to argue with my mother, that his only real option was to let her have her way. His team would maintain maximum readiness – alert, alarmed and most importantly, heavily armed. He repeated: ‘No bow. Mussalman forbidden. It is wrong here’. We quietly passed through the barrier and mother dropped to her knees in solemn prayer. She prayed for the miraculous healing of his intellectual hebetude.

Perhaps the Mezquita Head of Security showed wisdom on that final day of 2011. On more than one occasion, my mother has posed both a perceived and very real threat to the male demographic. And people associated with religious practice are more than usually aware of the dangers of castration.

On Sunday the 1st of January 2012, two Australian women left the historical seat of religious harmony with eyes trained on our backs.

Threat of arrest and repetition of the rights – attending church can be fucking religious.

Laurent (Paris 20/09 –30/09)

There is something profoundly transportative about chocolate. The intimate moment a woman shares with her melting cup is one that makes men envious. She’ll wrap her lips around the mug, dipping the tip of her tongue into the dark, inviting liquid, and if it’s the right blend, she’ll feel a pulse race down through her throat, from her chest down to her thighs, reaching the deepest recesses of her active mind until her clitoris throbs with pleasure and her earlobes twitch.

If only this were a woman’s response to cum.

Ejaculate is fucking repellant. Anybody who tells you that the taste of her lover’s semen is even close to tolerable is indulging in serious self-deception. Or perhaps she has her heart stuck so far up his ass that its smell overwhelms that of the white, salty substance flowing out the other orifice. I have always been a swallower. There is nothing pleasurable about keeping the flavour of cum on the palate any longer than it needs to be, and swallowing is the fastest way to remedy the situation. The post-oral-sex taste of number 5 Rue Jean Jacques Rousseau was masked by Marlborough cigarettes and Monoprix mimosa.

The apartment was quintessentially Parisian. There was a small gap between the bed and the roof; it was suspended in an Ikea-esque attempt to double the thirty-square-foot floor space. Climbing five wooden stairs to reach the mattress was difficult when drunk, and a feature charming only to a new resident. By the end of the week it was insurmountable – swallowing feet that had been danced into fatigue, devouring knees that had been bruised by too many blowjobs, and defeating a mind that had only prepared itself for obliging taxis and fast elevators. The apartment had one of those toilets that you couldn’t flush toilet paper down. An invention of personal slothfulness, a plastic bag rested beside the cistern for paper-waste, disposed of once in three days in fits of guilty tidying. Toilet paper itself was an unnecessary expense, and I was given to stealing napkins from restaurants. Often, I would forget to do this and run out of tissue, impatiently waiting for forgiving air-drying minutes to clock by. Once or twice I drunkenly groped for that plastic bag, searching for a napkin that could be reused – a not-quite-so-pissed-on motherfucking saviour of a towelette.

Frustration inspired by the accommodation was matched and exceeded by emotional complication. Laurent was a gay man. And so transgressions of nurtured sexuality and a fucking self-righteous toilet in an architecturally disobliging loft, defined many long days of Parisian sex.

By the time a stereotypically promiscuous homosexual male reaches the age of twenty-three, he has fucked in excess of two hundred men. The math is simply calculated by taking eighteen as the age of the legal clubbing debut, giving him five years to have fucked and been fucked – and conservatively multiplying this by forty – allowing for a weekly one night stand minus days off for illness or the holiday season, during which he may have returned to the paternal nest, taking a brief excursion into abstinence territory. The figure does not account for any number of sexual encounters clocked before adult sexual maturity, and it stands to reason that in most cases, this factor would significantly increase the number of sexual encounters within a veritable ‘little black encyclopaedia series’ attached to each gay male counted. It is understandable then, that when a twenty-three year old male who has operated within the cliché gay paradigm for some five years, fucks a girl, the rules are difficult to relearn.

The math is facile and the stereotype is heavy, but numbers are somewhat arbitrary; the ‘learned’ dimension of habitual sex exists after twenty-five or five hundred fucks. It should have come as no surprise then, that an intelligent gay male caught in the throes of a heated sexual encounter with a woman failed to remember that unprotected sex can lead to pregnancy.

The mundane simplicity of that biological factor caused hysterical laughter to punctuate a moment of sexual intensity as Laurent looked sincerely into my eyes and whispered that he had recently been tested. “We could go without protection”, he implored. It was a beautiful lightbulb moment when I replied, “If you cum inside me, my body and your sperm will work together to create a foetus”.

During those early days, we rotated the heteronormative ideal, turning it about like one turns a Rubik’s cube. The colours were impossibly muddled, but the sex was fucking good. Afterwards, I smoked, watching the spiraling loveliness of the cigarette disappear into the summer of the inside-outside space. The fractured French cliché was complete. Love and romance and sexual energy were conjured out of the cobbled streets below. The heat rose and fucking rose.

My orgasm came delayed. It surfaced post-sex, out of the smoke and my smudgy-eyed smoulder and his twitching muscles. Foreplay is overrated. Postplay is fucking heightening. Postplay is the remaining aggression of a well played sexual episode that refuses to die at the petit mort, but lingers in the gritty instinctual guilt of wet, sticky semen and skin and latex and sheets.

And when the mimosa is gone and when the cigarettes are over, we stain our sheets, we stain our mouths and we stain our lives with chocolate.

‘Richard’ and the Devon Set (London 17/09)

The Madonna-whore dichotomy is, in reality, more fucked up than even Freud would have us believe. Contemporary Madonnas swan about in subterranean clubs, wearing short, white skirts and occasionally refraining from the writhing vertical fuck-soup in order to maintain some perception of aloofness. We question whether they are prudes or cock-teases or Christian, or (perhaps, more believably) enjoying some inside game with irony. At any rate, Poe’s Lenore is too much hard work, sitting in her gilded frame with a stick up her ass where her lover’s cock should be. Meanwhile, the 21st century whore swings seductively above it all in a leather harness, calling down to the sweaty masses to climb the ropes and fuck the dignity. She too, dwells in a difficult space, beyond relatability and a little too tawdry for general consumption.

The accessible woman does in fact exist. She complicates things. She takes the weight off her too-high heels, using the pedestal as a leaning post and the man as her hooker-pole. She manages a delicate amalgamation of Freud’s unhappy characters, innocently keeping her eyes wide and her thighs open for business.

Far from bowing to the strictures of any such categorisation, I like to think I’m more of a sardonic falling* angel – promising moralising commentary and candour, produced by sexual experimentation and transgression; brought to you by gin and tonic. Another story is thus defined.

Approaching foreskin is a difficult task at the best of times. I should pause to thank the Jews for circumcision, and the Brazilians for their genius contribution to hair removal. This is my next resolution. I shan’t pray to Jesus, who sure as fuck isn’t listening, but I shall get down on two knees and thank the Jews and the Brazilians for their gifts to oral sex. It seems that the knees are so much more fitting a place to thank the gods of sex than the God of virtue anyway.

Neither the products of Jewish nor Brazilian invention were present on one particular night in London. The environmental conditions were equally unforgiving.

I met the Devonshire group in the reception of Palmers Lodge hostel, wearing the fur hat and a pair of brown thigh-high argyle socks. Seven boys and one leading female (the glue) filled the space with noise and cheerfulness. Accepting an invitation to join them for a night out in London was easy. Their familiarity and jovial candour was tribe-like, and I dwelled on the edge – enjoying moments of diffusion, but remaining for a time, near the semi-porous border. There hung a feeling that I would gravitate to one of the members, and so it happened, that a smile and a conversation flinted natural romance with Richard**.

Amstel beer is delightful in its amber colouring and lightness of taste, particularly when the drinker is slightly intoxicated and Carlsberg is the only alternative. I drank Amstel as Richard and I moved through a sweet and predictable courtship. He was clever and handsome and interested. Unfortunately, the human bladder takes to beer as a duckling takes to water – and not in the sense that they get on particularly well. Instead, one makes the other fucking wet, makes no apologies for doing so, and the latter (i.e. bird/bladder) flails around dumbly, getting wetter and wetter and wondering how its staying afloat. However, unlike the goddamn duckling, water eventually takes over the bladder. Pee is the only option. It’s all consuming. The feeling you achieve after beer-induced urination is better than an orgasm. No lady, whether whore, Madonna or type-3 undefinable, would challenge me on that. Bare ass to the road, denim shorts around my ankles, I achieved the ultimate alternative climax on a London street, somewhere between the warm courtship of the pub and entering Ministry of Sound.

The beat of the bass and the heat of the kiss are the two things I remember. They pulsed through me, and the Jäger bombs raced my heartbeat; I was hypnotised for a time.

The early taxi ride home was tipsy and happy, and the walk up the stairs to the dormitory inhabited by thirty other girls, curtained into their beds, passed in a similar fashion. Hostel living is not conducive to effective sexual encounters. The beds are small, the lights are off and the people are ridiculously close. Still, I liked him, and the sex was comfortable. When the first condom was used and the hope of a second quashed, the awkwardness of the oral exam began. The result was as follows:

1) Dissatisfaction after an unskilled, inebriated tongue earnestly attempted to pleasure me
2) Injury that can only be described as delicate foreskin meets drunken vampire

Embarrassed in the moments following a semi-pleasurable, semi-injurious war, we lay amidst post-hostel-sex shame and bloody towels (wasn’t kidding about the vampire bit).

I am too poor to buy a new white towel, so I live with the stains of the encounter and the memory of an ephemeral affair with a great guy and a truly fantastic tribe. The course of hostel lust never did run smooth. Freud that.

*but not quite fallen
**his name is here changed for kind anonymity

‘Matthew’ (London 15/9)

I have never met a man that couldn’t be fixed. Not changed. Neutered. It is easy to snip off his balls if you have the right tools and a roofie, but the inside was essentially cultivated by somebody else, or some circumstance else, years before you got to him.

Crudités for brains and a penchant for nipple manipulation are traits that add speculation to the path of Matthew’s* nurture. Fascination secured my acceptance of his invitation to a ritzy London club. I was a slave-like conduit to my art. Enduring his ugly mug and complete lack of personality, and dispatching my own nailed psychological abuse in return seemed appropriately sadomasochistic. I was ready to play a game.

He was a name-dropper and a fame-dropper with no reality behind the narrative. I toyed with his lies, escalating the complexity of my questions and reveling in his discomfort. He spread his embellishments stinking and thick upon every fucking surface, but eventually fell into tracts of sad dumbness.

What is the price of a good hooker? Certainly, Matthew managed preparations well. The car he arrived in was shiny. The club was well supplied with beautiful people, the drinks were well prepared and my evening well lubricated by gin cocktails. I can only speculate as to how he secured a room at Claridges afterwards. Perhaps if he hadn’t aced the timing, a wealthy couple would have returned to their room to see Matthew’s ugly, contorted face wanking itself into ecstasy over me – a semi-amused cardboard cutout sitting about a metre away. It was comical. He was plagued by Russell Brandian post-ejaculatory guilt. He was sheepish and angry with himself for exposing his vulnerability. He was also angry with himself for begging with such fervour that I pinch his breasts. I was like Mother fucking Mary at that moment, offering a moment of divine orgasmic succour.

He cleaned himself. I hadn’t even taken off my shoes. It would have been cheaper for him to buy a copy of Zoo magazine, and definitely less mentally strenuous.

Falsehood is fantastically worn on the sleeve of a man who sits most days in the corner of Jerk City restaurant in Soho. The seedy, idle caricature oozes the pus of bad intentions. Seek him out if you wish for a fancy car, a couple of free drinks and an awkward masturbatory show. Seek him out if you wish to humiliate a man – for he makes it spectacularly easy. Let the fun begin, ladies. BYO roofie.

* His real name is here absent. He came self-furnished with a false one.

Two Caribbean Gentlemen of the Fur Hat (16/9-18/9)

Girls are fatter in London than in Paris. They paint their faces liberally. Breasts are on display with obnoxious frequency.

The mushrooming strumpets put enormous pressure on the city; it cows under the weight of the visual assault. This is the reason it rains so much. Attempting to purge itself of milky-white cellulite and chafing mammaries, the daily bucket-down instead turns t-shirts wet. Wicked irony. I quickly eschew the bare-skinned sartorial flavour of Parisian summer in an act of sympathy. Early London days are defined by an ostentatious fur hat.

The hat is a person in its own right. It means becoming Edie Sedgwick, painting London in colours Warhol. Posh Englishmen smile and shed restraint. Unrestrained tripods ask for photographs. Young girls ogle openly. The hat guarantees a day of people collecting. Unfortunately, it is also personality-parasitic. It usurps my own ego with an alter-monster bent on sipping free coffee and scoring restaurant discounts. In it, I am wrapped around a can of Campbell’s soup. London is the Campbell’s, and I’m quite publically fucking the peas.

What follows, are the first two characters (of many) that the hat caught.

Nigel (Soho 16/9)

He began in performance mode.

“Once I dreamt abundantly.
Sleep – cousin of death –
Rouse me
Abruptly
In the permanent state, I remain.”

And the Caribbean lilt of the deep-toned, dark-skinned man in rhythmic rapture was mine outside a chain café in Soho, as I chain-smoked and witnessed word-chains populated with themes both expansive and personal.

The poetry was wild and directed only in that its mouthpiece was a single man – ideas rose and fell and disappeared in tides. It was impatient of and needy for history, and drew from every book he had read.

Innocent beginnings are surprising in my mindscape; they are so often ordered by sexual conquest. Of course, the catalyst was all visual. I was pulled into his restaurant on a warm evening and introduced liberally to the men of the establishment. He compelled me to return another day – for coffee and poetry and people collecting on the street.

Every society has a leader and a king, and Nigel was king of the miscreants. He knew them all – the sensitive and nostalgic crack addict with a ‘habit of free shopping’, the homeless man on a bicycle at Notting Hill Gate, who called Nigel ‘don’, and the owners of every thriving (and cadaverous alike) establishment we passed by. We walked to the clinking of the antique thimbles sold for 50p down Portobello Road.

I returned and will return again to Nigel, for he gave of himself and his people willingly. He became a much longer story, a lifelong friend and the link to an old man named Keith.

Keith (Soho 18/9)

Keith had paranoia and a crocodile handbag. He wore a lime green pinstriped shirt, a forest green tie, chartreuse slacks and a mossy top hat. It looked like life had grown on him. It had.

Keith had a shitload of candour and a shitload of bitterness as he began his tale,

“I took one of my top hats and a shirt – no bag or anything. My mother told me to find friends, and avenge her death.”

It was Keith’s sister who killed his mother. For the money. Now, they were trying desperately to kill him. They sprayed his clothes with chemicals, they filled his cleaning products with bleach-resistant bacteria, they were eliminating his memory. ‘They’ began as his sister and her husband – faces which variously morphed into counsellors, legal professionals, ex-friends and the government at large.

The line where reality met fiction was coloured by the 5kg of photocopied title deeds, psychoanalytical transcripts and warrants that he carried in that horned and toothy croc-satchel.

I listened for some minutes that stretched into hours of polite tedium at the hands of age and opiates and loud green pinstripe-induced senility. I recorded his monologue. At times it glimmered with insight, but it was often dead words. I lost myself in the fragrance of jerk chicken arriving at tables around us. He was happy for my company. We rollercoastered slowly together towards 7pm.

A lucid moment arrived at quarter to the hour:

“I’d rather die a pauper. I’d enjoy it better”

Deep bitterness came at five to:

“I don’t know whether God finally touched my mother, because before she died, she looked into my face and asked me if I was God. In that moment, I was.”

“We Africans are more wicked that any white man, because no white man would pay somebody to kill his mother.”

The documents were perhaps the most intriguing part of this character, and I transcribe them below for your pleasure, dear reader. When I get access to a scanner, you will see the copies that I have managed to pilfer. Perhaps, like the shrink said, this guy is on the square. Perhaps that fucking shrink was on mushrooms.

I finish with a quote from a strange and wonderfully attired old man that you will find most evenings in the bowels of Jerk City restaurant on Wardour St in Soho:

“They’ll put me in Madame Tussauds in the end”

Yes Keith, you fantastical motherfucking dinosaur. They probably will.

-

Transcript of Medical Report, No. L32829. Small, Keith Calvin (37 years)

‘I have examined Mr Small as requested. He invited me to read a copy of a letter dated 20 December 1985 written by Mr J Swain to the Registrar, Criminal Appeal Office Royal Courts of Justice. He also invited me to read a copy of Advice dated 20 December 1985 given by his former Counsel Mr David Farington. In both of these documents it was indicated that Mr Small was mentally deranged and dangerous.

‘Indeed in Mr Farrington’s document he stated “Mr Small is in my view a clear Mental Health Act 1983 Section 41 case”. Having read those documents I was prepared for aggressiveness and rudeness from Mr Small but this did not materialise. Instead I found him to be a fairly friendly but rather verbose individual who was very anxious to persuade me of his innocence in regard to his conviction on a charge of causing grievous bodily harm. He gave the following details about himself.

‘Personal and Family History
He was born in Jamaica and came to this country at the age of 14, his parents having preceded him here. He finished his schooling in a secondary modern school at the age of 15. He feels that he was of average scholastic ability but he took no school leaving exams. He was not in any serious trouble with the School Authority. After leaving school he was employed as a capstan operator for 2 years nd then joined the British Army which he soon found was not to his liking so he bought himself out after 3 months. Since then he has been variously employed as a capstan operator, builder’s labourer, factory worker, minicab driver and since 1981 he has been self employed importing and exporting clothes and foodstuffs to and from the West Indies.
He has 3 brothers and 3 sisters. He maintains close relationships with them and with his parents. He knows of no evidence of mental illness in any members of his family. He is a single man, heterosexual and has had girlfriends, on of whom has been visiting him whilst he has been in prison.

‘Psychiatric and other Medical History
He said that he had never been treated for any psychiatric or serious physiological illness and that he does not abuse alcohol or drugs.

‘Examination
His general physical health was found to be good. At interviews, although as mentioned above he was somewhat verbose, he proved to be articulate and realistic in conversation. At times he proved to be a bit exitable [sic] in his efforts to give proof of his innocence and he tended to use emotive and accusatory expression such as “fabricated evidence” and “conspiracy” about the police and other authorities who, in his eyes, have dealt unfairly with him. I did not, however, find him to be deluded or hallucinated nor did he show any other signs of mental illness. I estimated his intelligence to be within normal range.

‘Opinion
Mr Small is not suffering from mental illness nor does his mental state warrant action under the provisions of the Mental Health Act 1983. He is fit to be brought before the Court and to instruct Counsel.

‘GR Grant
Medical Officer
(Approved under Section 12, Mental Health Act 1983)’

Transcript of Home Office Communication to Mr K C Small regarding Immigration Status
Reference 01101916
15/08/2006

‘Dear Mr K. C. Small

I am writing to you regarding your immigration status following your conviction for common assault at West London Magistrates Court on 03 April 2006.
This is to inform you that the Immigration and Nationality Directorate has carefully considered your case and as your record shows that you were ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom for a period of five years prior to 1 January 1973, you have been considered as exempt from deportation action under section 7 of the Immigration Act 1971.

Yours sincerely

United Kingdom Immigration Service Enforcement and Removals Criminal Casework Team

Building a safe and tolerant society’

Watford and the Old (London 1/9-13/9)

There is something utterly depressing about leaving Paris for London on the Eurostar. Everything operates like clockwork.

On any other day, Gare du Nord represents all that is wrong with Parisian bureaucracy. It promises interminable lines, proliferating pickpockets and an engorged tripod army. In homage to their destination to the bowels of French hell, the elevators stop and start and taunt you in the heat. The signage is surely Mephistopheles’ design.

But Paris facilitates your departure with a smirk. It forces upon you the reality of the ephemeral, at once sad and magical – the two greatest trademarks of the city. And it’s fucking tragic when the train crosses the border, and you realise that you didn’t spend your last 3 euros on French bread.

Watford is the UK’s witless response to my crack-like Paris addiction. In a single word, it says, “Fuck you, this is rehab baby – silence and the elderly”. Three weeks of sleepless wonder and overstimulation are quelled by suburban air and lethargic residents.

There is a mall and a rose garden, which smells like wholesome picnics and safe British literature sampled on grey afternoons. There are smug little houses snoozing away at 1pm, and there’s a country club with golf and Sunday roasts and pints of beer for two pounds. At the pub on the corner, a father plays pool with his two primary-aged sons. They’ve lived in that bar for six generations.

I read erotic prose stolen from a well-travelled aunt, in the too-safe rose garden. My newbie smoker’s hack interrupts the quietude. Even the fucking squirrels stop munching. I plot my escape. Escape by Tube. It costs me GBP56 for a weekly pass out of here. The over-55 couple with the dog open up a picnic dinner.

Fuck off Watford.

I need the sweetest, most potent crack available. I want happy hour and Euros and horny tripods and cobbled streets that fuck with my shoes. I want waiters that ignore you for forty minutes and I want waiters that clear the best spot in the restaurant for a beautiful woman.

The Eurostar gifts you a dual-tongued newspaper, a time-difference enforced extra hour and bitterness. Yet that is the virtue of a one way ticket. Tomorrow, the search must begin for new crack.

Markus Maverick (London 9/8)

Think Captain Jack Sparrow ten years from now, wearing a swarthy Seus-esque top hat and Bill Sikes’ coat, and you have an imagination perfect of Markus Maverick – a man so eccentric that one nom de plume would not do – he also goes by ‘‘The Brick Lane Spy’’. If his description seems more like an untidily borrowed slew of previously conceived characters from an author too lazy to construct her own, I assure you dear reader, that Mr. Maverick feels borrowed. One gets the impression that his personality has been superimposed so many times that he knows not whether he is Jack the Ripper (who, incidentally, he played in a documentary on the History Channel in 2010) or a contemporary Mary Poppins, pulling at invisible kite strings and dusting sugar over life’s duller moments.

Sauntering down the cobbles of the vintage district, he spotted my fur hat, and we were immediately character kin.

A visit to Markus Maverick is not difficult to facilitate. Head to Liverpool St. Station and GPS your way towards Brick Lane. Avoid the Bangladeshi restaurants that pack the former half of the street, and reach Petticoat Lane markets sans the heavy masala musk. Wander without aim on a Sunday, and you are sure to find him nestled in a vintage establishment like some Dickens-merch-addicted bower cock.

Take him to coffee and he may give you the glorious key to the microcity – a place which he has claimed through charisma, and therefore a place from which he can never be evicted.

‘Rasta’ (Nice II, 16/8- 22/8)

It has been only two weeks since I met him, and already I have forgotten his name. Perhaps it is because his story was all about me. Invariably, they all are.

Nice was just another week of foetal mornings, untouched hostel sheets and too many costume changes. ‘Rasta’ was my waiter on the second day. The immediacy with which I reduced him to a generic pseudonym based on his hairstyle, was indicative of my then psychological state. I was non-committal. I was euphorically slutty.

It was his colleague who did the talking – an ungainly fairy-godmother-like intermediary in a courtship ritual that I had begun to expect nothing of and accept almost anything from. High on the only sure opiate – authentic provincial cooking – I happily conversed with him, as Rasta hosted, drawing in passing tourists with multilingual charisma. Rasta would pause to recommend me a location or to ask me a question or to insist I take dessert. Upon my leaving, he paused for the phone number exchange.

We met again on the third day, at night, and the booze had already been liberally downed on empty stomachs, and the outfit choice had been expectantly whore-like, and the graduation from one pub to another, to Fenocchio ice-cream parlour, to his apartment, was quick.

I swung from his open beach-fronted window, calling in inebriated whispers to every passer by. Sex too, came easily, and was forgotten just so. It left me happy, satisfied, but memory devoid, and I told him so later, with an honesty that visibly wounded.

He was sweet. He knew I was writing and he wanted a big story. Maybe he meant big-cocked. I can’t say if he was, either way.

This man I harvested told me to meet him in Paris in the winter, and I declined. He said the word ‘Paris’ with a stress on the ‘a’. ‘Pear-is’. This I remember.

I left Nice with my cock still erect – and arrogantly so – and the big story I never promised is in fact, far too small.

If only I could remember his fucking name.