Roadwarrior

by Nick Molloy

  I thanked him for his contribution of information and began to get ready to go on. I tied off and donned my costume only for the manager to tell me that he now only wanted me to go down to a g string and then the second stripper could do the full monty. He clearly had no confidence in me whatsoever. Furthermore, as I was now wearing my boxing gown there was little on show to dispel the prejudice that was probably endemic in his head. I just nodded. As I saw it, I was getting paid and that was all that mattered.

  There was no drag queen on that evening and I emerged into a fairly small cellar area with no stage. A small corner had been cleared for us to perform in. The audience of women were perhaps slightly more subdued than those the week before and the show went smoothly enough. I kept control of my audience this time and had to climb some stairs into the open air to escape the arena. Still wearing my g-string I walked back to the store room past the manager and his two doorstaff. A raised eyebrow from the manager suggested that I had finally challenged his prejudices but by that stage his position was so entrenched it wasn’t going to be reversed completely.

  As I changed the manager entered, gave me an envelope with my money and said I was free to go whenever I wanted. He seemed keen to be rid of me. I had barely spoken a word to him and I will no doubt forever wonder how a person can be so judgemental about somebody when they know nothing at all about them. If he had taken offence to something I had said it would be easier to swallow. However, his own little mind had created a reason/s to dislike me. I abhor such small mindedness.

  I actually stayed and tried to watch Wyatt’s show but the view was obscured. We chatted briefly after he had finished. He had to dash off for another show, a late one in Birmingham (a 180 mile drive). We bade farewell. I was later to learn that Wyatt Earp is something of a stripping legend and strangely enough our paths have not crossed again to this day.

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  Things continued to progress slowly but steadily over the next few weeks. Sissy Bells telephoned and offered me a couple more ladies nights which I readily accepted. To my dismay however, he telephoned the day before on both instances to say that they had been cancelled. I was later to learn that this was a common problem with ladies nights. When the venue doesn’t sell enough tickets they just cancel the performer. Nowadays I make sure that everything is contractual and in the event of a cancellation a fee still has to be paid. Unfortunately, many drag queens and agents take in jobs on a wing and a prayer and there is no protection for the performer in the event that things go awry.

  This is especially the case with Sissy Bells. We were never destined to have a long and fruitful relationship and I smelled a rat both times that he called the day before. The tone of his voice, his sentence structure and semantics; they weren’t quite right. I subsequently found out that Bells got nearly all his jobs form an unscrupulous agent that was later to appear on BBC’s Watchdog programme for sending out very poor quality strippergrams for nominal fees (that said you do get what you pay for). Bells was notorious for offering low paid work and wouldn’t pay any of his strippers more than £80. I was later told that his budget for strippers was often considerably higher than what he paid them, he took a sizeable cut for himself (without any transparency). Also, if he could find a stripper who would travel to a job for less, he had a habit of cancelling the stripper already on the job so that he could accommodate the cheaper option and pocket more money for himself. I believe that is what happened on the two ladies nights he offered.

  I was still driving the Impreza and could not afford to travel too far for silly money. When Bells phoned and offered me a job in Great Yarmouth, I declined it on the basis that a 200 mile drive was fine but £80 was not. I wasn’t going to do it just for the fun of it!

  A week or so later Bells pulled a similar trick to get me to go to Barnstaple. This one I accepted for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I could do with the experience, secondly, Bells had offered £110 for this one (still not enough but I was learning) and I had also never explored Dartmoor/Exmoor and wanted to see if the rumours of Big Cats had any validity. Thus, I set off very early one Saturday afternoon.

  I drove around the moors and had something to eat beforehand in an extremely picturesque Devon village. I distinctly remember eating my sandwich on a warm summers evening admiring the small waterfall scene before finally setting off for the destination of the show.

  The drag for the evening was called Jack Russell and I was to be the only stripper. No other stripper had been offered enough to entice them to travel so far. Only rookies, lunatics or sightseers would be so stupid.

  Russell was a big fat bald bloke whose ego arrived at the venue some 20 minutes before he did. As with many drag queens he had a gimp in tow to carry most of his paraphernalia. The gimp is usually the other half and commonly the more masculine, hen pecked member of the partnership.

  I explained to the terrier that I was new to the business and would welcome any tips or wisdom that he could impart (because of course he’d been in the business for 400+ years and had seen everything there was to see). He was about as charming, enlightening and generally welcoming as Bells so I didn’t bother pushing too hard (why hurt your head on a hard wall ?). He also tried to short change me on the cash at the end of the evening, but to be fair I think Bells had neglected to tell him that the extra was owed.

  The show itself was another eye opener. I can now say without hesitation that performing as a stripper has given me a very dim view of the female species. I am privileged to get to see them at their most raw and exposed in situations where their bestial side emerges. They behave completely differently to men and this was the night that I first became aware of that.

  The show itself was still in need of a lot of polishing, but I was a man (read victim) and that is what these country women had paid to see. I was stupid enough to drive over 200 miles to be the butt of their persecution and they certainly saw no reason to appreciate that (considering that 3 strippers had already dropped out on them they might have been a little bit more welcoming). The crowd wasn’t vast, I would estimate that there was about thirty of them. Some of them were a little drunk, but definitely baying for blood.

  I pulled up a late thirty something mum of three (probably) when I was down to my g string. There were several cries of ‘get em off’ and ‘rip them off him Janice’. She was a little lary and began clawing at the non-too-tight, cheap and nasty, early days of costumier, g-string I had on. Initially, I prevented her advances, but the roars of approval from the rabble and therefore her efforts, grew greater. In the heat of the moment I bowed to the peer pressure, I let her remove my cock from my flimsy black g-string. She began to tug on it hard before promptly putting it in her mouth and performing a drunken act of fellatio on my tied off member. The baying crowd had got what they were asking for. Several eyes nearly popped out of their heads and I thought one young girl was experiencing an aneurysm.

  I retrieved my cock from her mouth replaced it in the g-string and continued the act. By the time I finished, some jaws were still on the floor.

  I emerged from the dressing room to try the Polaroid trick and was met with much the same problem I had first time. Also, there were far fewer girls at this one, compounding the problem. However, what was different about this show was the open hostility and nastiness that I was met with by an admittedly small faction of the audience. One woman openly said ‘you’re not much of a man are you’ whilst another offered the constructive criticism of ‘no I don’t want a photo, you were crap’. I smiled politely and just mumbled something about I can’t please everybody. I now understood what Wyatt Earp had meant about ladies’ nights and how no matter what you do sometimes it just doesn’t go your way.

  I was still learning and my act could and would get better. However, comments regarding the size of my cock were clearly aimed to hurt. I have very thick skin, it would take a lot more than that to pierce my armour. Furthermore, it was irrational. To label a flaccid looking 7 inch cock tiny, is lik
e calling Pamela Anderson flat chested ! However, the eye opener was in the malicious intent. I was hired to perform a show which I did. I had travelled many miles for not a lot of money. I had turned up where 3 strippers had let them down. The drag was less than welcoming and all in all I had a slight feeling of being in the Lion’s den. On the road back, I overtook the drag with an explosive burst as if to demonstrate in a childish way that I had a supercar and he did not. I glanced in the mirror wondering when I would see him next. It was late, the road was dark and I was playing a haunting Gary Numan album on the stereo (Human). I lamented on my thoughts all the way back, on whether I was cut out for this stripping lark. Was it me or was this a business that just exuded a lot of unpleasantness ? Either way, I needed to improve my game and I wasn’t quite sure how to yet.

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  Over the coming weeks I performed at a series of new gay venues. Central Station was probably the most unnerving. It is hard to believe that the audience actually wanted to watch a stripper. Going into the venue I was accosted by a prostitute intent on selling her services (we were near Kings Cross and the red light district). She wasn’t too amused when I suggested she couldn’t afford me, even though I did sell the line with a smile.

  The punters in Central Station didn’t dare look at the performer directly, only out of the corner of their eye, lest they be construed as actually being interested. It was as if the drinkers were playing the stereotyped straight : big, burly and bearded. Why on earth would they look at that sort of thing ?

  It did throw me a little. I wasn’t quite prepared for the total nonchalance of the audience. It didn’t affect my performance in any way, but it was less enjoyable. If ever there was a feeling of ‘I don’t know why I bother’ then that was it.

  On a Sunday evening I performed my first ‘double up’. I was invited back to the scene of my debut – Bromptons - for the first of the evening’s performances. From there I was kindly given a lift to the next venue by a bloke who has since become a valued friend. Andy drove me to a place called Dukes near Vauxhall. It had perhaps the most salubrious dressing room I have ever encountered. A separate room upstairs that was well away from the action, it contained a full length mirror with small light bulbs ornately dispersed around the outside rim. I wouldn’t say that I felt like a star getting changed, but it sure beat the hell out of getting changed in the broom cupboard.

  It seemed slightly odd performing again only a couple of hours after the first time. Bonny, my stalker from Bromptons had followed me across London to watch me again at Dukes. Michael told me that he had been blabbering something about wanting to wrap me up in cling film and mollycoddle me.

  The performance at Dukes was novel because it produced my first ever tip. The British are not a nation of tippers, so it should come as no surprise that my tipper was actually German. At the time I didn’t notice him slipping the tenner into my G string, but he obviously attracted my good grace after the show.

  I began to travel further and wider afield on the gay scene. The tiny stage at the Richmond Arms saw things pass uneventfully. My trip to Southampton saw me getting changed in an outbuilding. I remember getting soap in my eyes from the sponge and water routine. From then on I only used water as opposed to soapy water.

  When I visited Cambridge the landlord was particularly enamoured with me and wouldn’t leave me alone. As was to become a common enough practice, he felt the need to enter the room and ask a question at the time when I was wanking, only to offer a totally false apology. Not that I minded, I was becoming used to it. When I was leaving later in the evening he insisted on carrying my bag to the car only to tell me that there really was no need to leave as there was a spare room upstairs. His intentions were obvious and you have to give the bloke points for trying. However, I couldn’t help feel that there was a cash for favours overtone to the whole scenario. If I was to go upstairs and ‘oblige’ to his whims I would no doubt receive several more bookings. Whether they would come without expected further obligations, one could only speculate.

  My gig at Swindon was an interesting night and the first of many temptations to come my way. When I worked in recruitment I could never get anybody to go to Swindon. I began to think anyone that went there would catch the bubonic plague. People used to object on the grounds of a lack of nightlife. Maybe they don’t have much to shout about and maybe male strippers constitute a highlight in Swindon. It certainly felt like it, because the show went extremely well and I felt like a true celebrity. When I arrived the female bouncer was chastising a female customer in a very provocative way (a clip round the ear). After announcing myself I was ushered in as a man of relative importance to the broom cupboard at the back of the club. An attractive woman with short dark hair and small build forced her way into my cramped changing area. Before I could utter a word, she introduced herself as a journalist for a local paper and asked if she could profile me for an article to appear shortly. I agreed to the intrusion on the basis that she would forward me a copy of the article when it was published (in true journalistic fashion she wasn’t true to her word).

  Several questions followed, none of them particularly memorable or unusual. The most eye catching response came when I said I had a girlfriend. I sensed a little disappointment in her, which also made me feel as though I had just given the wrong answer. As I began to tie off she pretended to avert her gaze elsewhere but was sneaking a look through the corner of her eye. The temptation to ask her to ‘lend me a hand’ was enormous and would have probably been well received. My little head wanted to tear off her flimsy clothes and aggressively fuck her against the wall. My big head was raising moral objections on the basis that I had a girlfriend whom I loved, who would not be best amused by any infidelity.

  Because the journalist didn’t do anything other than pout and be subtly suggestive, the little head remained under the control of the big head. The little head was revealed for the pleasure of the punters but nothing more. The crowd were great, probably the best I had performed to at that time and when I returned to the privacy of the broom cupboard, the journalist was hot on my heels. In pursuit of journalistic endeavour she had forgotten to ask a question of immense importance and needed to complete the set. The fact that she was eyeing my nether regions like a starved dog was purely coincidental. ‘Do you like girls’ I asked. ‘Fuck off, I’m straight’ came back the reply. ‘Would you like a lift home’ I enquired. ‘OK’. Little head was making a comeback.

  We chatted rubbish as we drove in the Impreza through the dreary Swindon night. As we pulled up she mumbled something about needing a shower to get rid of the sweaty, smokey effects of the club. Kinky thoughts of what I might do with the shower head were running amok in my head, but somehow the moral argument was preventing me from enunciating them verbally. She wanted to be pinned to the wall by my cock. If I had stepped through her front door we would never have made it past the hall before we would have been naked and rutting like wild animals. Yet, we were both reticent, for whatever reasons, to table the proposal. She thanked me for the lift and got out of the car slamming the door in a kind of frustrated anger. I watched her go into her abode with a hard on that could have penetrated concrete. The big head had won the day, but for how much longer ?

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  In an effort to promote myself I had launched a website which I could direct people to. It had a brief profile of me and a few pictures. I had put it together on a basic piece of software and as my computer skills were virtually non-existent it was nothing special. However, I received a call one day from a guy called Barry Wacko. He claimed to manage a group of strippers called the Bell Ends and he expressed an interest in me joining the group. He had seen my website, had heard about me on the grapevine and was sufficiently impressed to invite me to come and meet him.

  It was a nice confidence booster and suggested that I must at least be doing something right. I agreed to the meeting and traipsed into London to meet him the following week at his flat. My in
telligence had told me that Wacko was an ex journalist who used his former contacts to spin a PR machine around his moderately well known stripping troupe.

  He cut a colourful and flamboyant figure reminding me of the media personality Laurence Llewellyn Bowen in the way he looked. With his long dark curling hair, a light grey suit and an open shirt he really only lacked a medallion. My first impression was of a man trying to defy the aging process by applying new age metrosexual principles.

  We got down to talking business and Wacko began to drone on about how he had the foresight to create the Bell Ends, how successful they had been and how successful they still were. Newspaper clippings adorned the walls of his office with various mentions of the Bell Ends, all of them several years old. He then insisted on showing me a video recording of when his mighty boys had appeared on Children in Need on the BBC.

  I steered the conversation away from his reminiscing to the present day and enquired as to how I fitted into the equation. He explained that he was constantly on the look out for fresh talent and that I fitted his profile. He went on to say that I would have to attend rehearsals (led by a Bell End called Black Rod) and see how I got on with the choreography and the other guys. Wacko had painted a picture whereby the Bell Ends were the best and busiest set of strippers on the planet. As usual I was a little sceptical.