Roadwarrior

by Nick Molloy

  The change certainly seemed to pleasantly surprise a few regulars. I went out with a bit of a bang and a bit of cheek. I kept winking at Natasha and people picked up on it. An unwritten golden rule in a gay venue is that you never bring a girl on stage, unless specifically requested to. Neither do you play to the girls that much either. They are paying customers too, but the gay clientele has a tendency to complain if the stripper even so much as looks at a girl in the audience. My playfulness that night was tongue in cheek and everybody knew it was my last show. I’m glad to say everybody took it in the spirit it was intended. All the regulars muscled in on Natasha and interrogated her, asking if she was my girlfriend. There was a strange air about them that night. I don’t know whether it was my complete nonchalance and apparent disregard for the gays, or whether the presence of a woman to whom I had an affiliation intimidated them somewhat. Certainly, her presence had an effect on them and some of the dirty old men types, including Bonny, my stalker, had been consigned to the shadows.

  We left the club together and as I got outside the realization that it was over hit me. In about ten hours time I was about to return to the life of a drone. The last few weeks had been great, in fact the previous six months had been great. It had become climatic in the last few weeks. Just like sex, I was about to experience that post orgasmic come-down.

  I spent the next few hours with Natasha and her friends. We went for something to eat and I remember her showing me what she had written about the night in her diary – how she had loved the attention I had lavished on her in the club. Of all the people in the room I could have selected, it was her that the most important man in the room at that moment, the man who all eyes were fixed upon, chose to single her out as being special. It made her feel good, wanted and important. It was nice of her to let me know that I had made her feel like that. It added to my warm glow about stripping.

  I got home late and finally nodded off to sleep at about 4am, only for my alarm to sound three hours later. My torture had started.

  Chapter 9 – Reflection in an Arabian Prison

  I hurriedly eat Breakfast pulled on my uniform (a suit) and frogmarched myself to the station. Upon arrival at my station I reported to my new owners. I knew it was going to be bad, but even I hadn’t anticipated how bad. My owners hadn’t quite delivered on what they said they would. The arrangement meant that I should be in Dubai within a month, but preparations had not been made.

  The owners were quite strict about etiquette. On the first day it was mentioned that we drones were not allowed to answer mobile phones whilst in the premises of the owner. I could see this was going to be difficult. It was as clear as day that I wouldn’t last long in this set up. I had to get to Dubai, away from the owners, before I murdered some of the upper hierarchy of the owners.

  At the end of that first day, I went home and immediately phoned Chris (my ex boss from Passive).

  “I’ve just had the worst day of my life’’ I said in utter exasperation as he picked up the phone

  ‘Why, what’s happened’ came back the worried reply.

  ‘I returned to work’ I sobbed.

  He began laughing, but I couldn’t. I simply could not see the funny side of it and although his advice of ‘think of the money’ was correct it appeared much easier said than done.

  I set myself the goal of clearing a mortgage and even wrote down in my diary each day how I was approximately £225 closer (accounting for non working days and all living expenses) every day.

  The new owners were very hard work. They had not kept their part of the bargain and I anticipated problems ahead. I was meant to have complete autonomy with regard to the operation, yet when I asked questions about my budget and the facility to hire staff, it was as if I spoke Arabic. The director who had objected to my hiring was determined to make things difficult for me. He wanted to keep me in London for a few months before going to Dubai. I objected to this on a couple of grounds. Firstly it would ruin my tax free status and secondly I knew I would never manage to survive that long in the London office without killing somebody. Something had to be done.

  My solution as usual was that of a maverick. I let it be known to one of the girls in the office that I used to be a male stripper. Although I told her not to tell anyone, I knew full well she would tell everybody. I even gave her the website address. Telling her this actually filled me with a sense of pride. If the truth be known I was proud of the fact that I used to be a stripper. Only a select few can say that they have done it for any length of time and for that brief period I felt like a professional athlete. It was time that vindicated me for all those hours I had put in honing my body over the years. What I was doing now was something that just paid the bills. I chose to be a stripper. Needs demanded that I was now back in recruitment.

  Sure enough, the leaking of information had the desired effect. I was soon called into the office by the person who had recommended me for the role. As was his manner he stuttered and stammered his way through things, blabbering something about his favourite football team before bringing up the disturbing rumours he had heard about my past life as a stripper. Staring him straight in the eyes I asked :

  ‘What’s the problem ?’

  ‘I don’t have a problem Nick, but others do. The CEO of the parent group now knows about this and he’s wondering if it is a good idea to have somebody who used to work as a stripper heading the operation in Dubai’

  “What I did in the past has no bearing on the job I have now been hired for. I don’t see what all the fuss is about’.

  ‘Nick, I’m only trying to help, I suggest you pull the website’.

  In fairness to him I think he was trying to help…..himself. He had recommended me for the role and probably saw me as a potential embarrassment to himself. I did take the website down but only after the director who had the grudge against me had made the cardinal error of putting the stripping issue in writing. He sent me an e-mail stating that we had to be clear about my ‘out of work’ activities otherwise they would not be sending me to Dubai. I promptly paid him a visit showing my distaste for his written statement. If they did not want to send me to Dubai they were free to pay up the contract that had been agreed (one years money). Otherwise, I suggested they hurry up and arrange my transfer to Dubai as was agreed when I was hired. Short of these two alternatives we were going to end up in an industrial dispute.

  I had made my position pretty clear and with his statement now in writing I felt I had a clear case based on discrimination if they failed to follow through on their promised agreement. I was able to call their bluff.

  My tactic worked and it was agreed that I would be dispatched to Dubai within a few weeks. I knew that I wouldn’t survive very long in their offices with their regimentation, so I made up my excuses that I would need to prepare properly to relocate. They were paying me a daily pro rata rate whilst I was based in the UK, but I forfeited the money for a few weeks in a bid to successfully escape to Dubai where hopefully I would be left to run things the way I wanted. They had, after all, hired me because of my previous track record in setting up and winning new business from scratch.

  I spent the last few weeks before departure in a very dangerous limbo state. My relationship with Zoe was hanging by a thread. She was begging me to give it another go, but I was hurting from so much needless head banging that I was reticent to give it a try. I thought she just didn’t care for me anymore. In turn my reticence really hurt her, in a way that she had never been hurt before. In fact it was a pain from which she never truly recovered.

  My transition back into a corporate life was far from smooth. To say I hated my new job was far too mild a statement. I loathed it and everything it stood for. I was now working in central London and would regularly meet Natasha for lunch, who was just up the road in Whitehall. I must have really brought her down with my depressive state.

  There wasn’t a single maverick at the London office so I constantly met friends for lunch who could offer so
me sympathy to my plight. I once met a photographer friend of mine after work and remember arguing with him. I got quite angry and frustrated with him because he couldn’t understand my situation. He said that in the few weeks since I had stopped stripping I had ‘changed’ and that I wasn’t the same person. He reasoned that I shouldn’t go to Dubai because the job was making me unhappy.

  ‘But, can’t you see Mark ? I have to go through this pain now because in a year’s time things will be much better and I won’t have to worry about money too much ?’

  He simply couldn’t see my point. Mark isn’t materialistic and has never worried about money. He lives day to day, but his Highbury abode is heavily subsidised by the council. I had no such luck and try as I might, I just got frustrated in trying to make him see my position. I guess it’s a lot easier when the state pays the majority of your bills

  I flew out to Dubai to start a new life, not knowing if and when I would return to the UK. It didn’t take too long to establish that Dubai was not my new long term home. I was feeling disillusioned about the UK, but Dubai was not the solution. My best friend out there was a Greek guy called Dimitri. He was a professor at the local American University. He summed it up perfectly when he said shortly after I met him that he considered anyone who actually liked Dubai to be ‘weird’.

  The Dubai authorities operate a propaganda campaign of which Joseph Goebbles would have been proud. If I had a pound for every person that had told me that Dubai is great (even when they have never been) I’d be a rich man. Even when I tell them that I lived there for nearly a year and that they have been misinformed they insist I am wrong.

  Contrary to what may be believed over here, Dubai is not a middle eastern city with progressive western values. It is very much an Arabic, Islamic state. It might not be quite as culturally repressed as Saudi Arabia, but it hardly has the liberal values of a London or a New York. Decency police still wander the streets assessing whether people are wearing clothing that is too short. It is illegal to be gay, pornography is banned, magazines such as FHM have blacked out images throughout their pages, the films at the cinema are censored, as is the internet! You have to register with the state for internet access via their server, so the state actually censors what you can see online.

  The first thing I tried to do when I arrived was to join a sports club. I tried the track team, a couple of football teams, the national boxing team and a powerlifting competition. In all cases I was rejected because ‘they were only for Arab man’

  Dubai openly has a system that I liken to apartheid. People are categorized according to their nationality, colour and creed. They are then paid accordingly. Emiratis head the system, followed by Americans, followed by Brits. Then came the rest of Europe, followed by Australasians and South Africans. The ‘lesser Arabs’ (such as Palestinians and Egyptians) were actually quite low down the pecking order but then followed the true ‘slaves’ of the economy. Those from the Indian sub-continent and the Philippines were treated appallingly. These guys used to work 13 days out of 14, for 12 hours+ every day. A bus would pick them up from their ‘township’ every morning and deliver them to their place of work. For their slavery they were usually awarded about $100 per month.

  Dubai was a terribly superficial, contradictory place. I was effectively ostracised and prevented from penetrating the foreign communities. Everybody stuck to their own and I didn’t want to mix with the British. Dubai seemed to have attracted the worst of the worst of the ex-patriots. The average British ex-pat was about 20 years older than me. He seemed to have embraced the culture with no qualms and often referred to the ‘slaves’ as ‘jinglies’or’coolies’. I thought these terms had disappeared about 60 years ago with the British empire ! Ex-Pat Man thought it was great that he could have a live in slave for next to nothing. In answer to my objections that Dubai offered no women to a young red blooded male, they suggested I visit the whore houses (yes Dubai has several of these, but obviously the authorities deny it).

  Dimitri was on a two year contract at the university and he said he nearly went insane in the first year. For the second year he had arranged for his fiancé to come and live with him. He warned me I was going to have a tough year ahead and he was right.

  Incidentally, Dimitri was a professor of Marketing during his stay in Dubai. He later confided in me that he actually knew nothing about the subject at the time he applied for the job and simply read a couple of books on the subject. He is a very smart guy, blagged the interview and landed the position. He concurred with me that it was a mickey-mouse subject that didn’t belong in a university.

  Living in Dubai might not have been so torturous had it not been for the fact that I was working for a company that didn’t seem to know its arse from its elbow. I thought once I landed in Dubai I would be allowed to get on with it, but I was very wrong. I had made one cursory visit, a week in length, prior to my permanent move. During that week I wrote a report recommending that they change their planned office location. The director who had it in for me stole the credit on the recommendation, but when I arrived nothing had been put in motion. I had told them that I would sleep in the office for the first few days until I found a place to live. Except there was no office! I ended up spending the first two weeks on somebody’s floor that I met in the gym.

  During those couple of weeks I was unable to do anything. I had no phone, no office, nothing. Still, I was being paid to do nothing and it led to a lot of introspection on my part. I had never felt so alone and so in need of Zoe.

  The ensuing months were torturous. I was working for complete amateurs, nay idiots. My location was about as welcoming as a concentration camp. Even the weather was terrible. About 7-8 months of the year in Dubai the weather is oppressive. With 50 degree heat and humidity off the scale people go from their air conditioned buildings into their air conditioned cars back into an air conditioned buildings. Nobody dares venture outside. The remainder of the year is pleasant.

  I quickly figured out that I just needed to do the bare minimum and keep my mouth shut as much as I could. That is, take the money. I would work one month and post some good results and then take the next month off (I would blame it on Ramadan or some other Islamic festival). My employer had lied to me on numerous levels so I hardly felt bad lying back to them. Also, they never listened to a word I said to them. They clearly though I was living in a third world country (Dubai is actually technologically ahead of the UK) as they once sent by courier from the UK – wait for it – photocopying paper. It was as if I couldn’t have bought it from the shop in the building I worked.

  The idiots also never gave me the budget I asked for on day one, so I never hired the team that was required for growth. It didn’t help my state of mind that I arrived in an empty office in the morning and went home to an empty flat at night. I told them after only a few months that I wouldn’t be staying with them for any length of time. They had conducted no research into what was required in a candidate for the position. Instead they made some lofty crystal towers assumptions from their base in the UK. They were particularly keen that they hired an unmarried man. Yet, Dubai was a sexual desert. The position would have suited a married man, who could bring his wife with him and therefore help him settle (sorry if this sounds politically incorrect but they would have been foolish to hire a woman for the role – they are virtually second class citizens in Dubai and would never receive the sufficient credence from the locals).

  I spelt out to them in plain English why I thought they were idiots and how bad I thought they were. To my amazement, this caused them to offer me a contract extension rather than a rebuttal. Having spelt it out again for them I agreed to stay only for the initial term that I had agreed, whilst they find my replacement. In essence they didn’t replace me, they just bussed out a few people from their London office on a lot less money. They also never listened to my recommendation that they hire an Arabic speaker.

  All the time I was in this role I missed stripping terribly. It was
as if a part of me had been taken away and I was operating with only one arm and one leg. If ever I needed confirmation that I didn’t really fit in as a suit then my Dubai experience was it. I was also conscious that I wasn’t getting any younger and stripping should be a young man’s game. The more I flitted away my life as a rat playing corporate games the less time I would have to live the life of a professional athlete – the life I had always desired. I could always return to being a rat when I was older if I needed to. However, I could hardly start stripping when I was old, grey and fat. I couldn’t resist telling virtually everybody I got to know in Dubai that recruitment was just a time filler for me.

  ‘I will probably return to my former profession soon’ I used to say.

  This in turn led them to ask what I used to do and when I told them it was always a great topic of conversation. Think of it another way :

  ‘What do you do for a living ?’

  ‘I’m in recruitment.’

  This is followed by a long silence generally followed by snoring.