Shameless

by Paul Burston

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m feeling pretty tired. I think I’d rather just go home.”

  They said their good-byes outside Leicester Square tube station, and Martin watched as John and Matthew headed up Charing Cross Road. He was feeling tired, but the mere thought of going home alone at 11:00 P.M. on a Friday night was too depressing to contemplate. Besides, all the vodka and beer he had knocked back in the past two hours was making him horny. Caroline had once joked that this was the one thing the entire male species had in common, whether they were gay or straight—give them a few drinks and their bodies turn into life-support machines for their penises. Martin smiled to himself as he turned and started walking in the direction of Charing Cross.

  Heaven was the first gay club he had ever gone to. He was nineteen at the time, new to London, and only out to two people—his personal tutor at college and Caroline, who was renting a room in the same house as him. Both fugitives from towns they vowed never to return to, both eager to make a new life for themselves, they hit it off immediately and quickly became friends. It was Caroline who had encouraged Martin to “go out and paint the town pink,” although that hardly described his frame of mind at the time. He had stood outside the club for over an hour, chain-smoking his way through an entire pack of cigarettes before finally summoning up the courage to go in. Once inside, he had stood frozen to the same spot for half an hour, terrified that someone might talk to him, equally terrified that they might not, before finally leaving, alone, but feeling strangely proud of himself, as though he had achieved something small but significant. The following week he was back again, a little more relaxed and high on the sheer number of sexually available men all under one roof. That was Heaven’s main appeal. In those days, sooner or later every gay man in London ended up there. And while this no longer held true, it was a reputation the club was only too happy to trade on.

  It was almost five years since he’d last been to Heaven. Not a lot had changed. The club was still as busy and the staff were just as surly. Trying to bullshit his way into the Departure Lounge, he was turned away by a bolshie lesbian with a walkie-talkie, who took great pleasure in informing him that this area was for members only. He considered asking whether she would allow him in if he said he was a hooker, but thought better of it. Wandering back toward the main dance floor, he noticed there were a few more women than he remembered. And if he wasn’t very much mistaken, there were a few more drugs in circulation, too. Back in the days when he used to hang around Heaven every week, looking for love and picking up fashion tips, the only drugs you ever saw were poppers. Actually, you usually smelled them long before you saw them. Some of the older cloney types would soak their bandannas in the stuff and then leave them hanging around their necks so they could inhale the fumes without constantly having to fiddle about with those little bottles. Now everyone was on E, and the smell came from the toilets and all those drug-induced bowel movements. Why were the toilets always so disgusting in gay clubs? There was never enough toilet paper, the doors on the stalls never locked properly, and there was always a horrible stench coming from somewhere. How anyone could even think of having sex in a place like that was beyond him.

  Nobody seemed to mind, though. They were all running around rolling on E or dancing with their shirts off. He spotted a few faces he vaguely recognized, only they looked as if someone had surgically removed their heads and sewn them back onto different bodies. Potbellies and skinny, sunken chests had been replaced with glistening six-packs and gleaming great slabs of muscle. Martin didn’t need to be told why this sudden transformation had taken place. Ever since the arrival of AIDS, gay men had been piling into the gym in ever greater numbers, desperate to be seen as healthy, or to build up a solid mass of muscle as security in the event of being struck down by a wasting disease. In an age of sexual anxiety, a strong body was like an insurance policy. Still, he felt intimidated by the amount of muscle on display. He remembered the first time he took Caroline to Heaven. She spent the whole night commenting on how attractive the men were—and those were the days before every gay man in London started going to the gym and having his chest waxed. Suddenly Martin found himself wishing that Caroline were here with him. Gay clubs never seemed half as scary with her by his side.

  He bought a bottle of water from the sullen hunk behind the bar and wandered around for a bit, trying desperately to sober up. He hated that feeling, when you suddenly realize that you’re too drunk to do anything, and nothing you do seems to make it any better. He staggered to the toilets and stood at the urinal for a full ten minutes, silently debating whether or not he was about to throw up. Suddenly he became aware of someone hovering next to him. He turned to find an old queen with a jet black comb-over hairdo standing at the urinal with his penis in his hand, staring at Martin’s crotch and gently playing with himself. Martin gave him a dirty look. Some people had absolutely no dignity. Here he was, practically on the verge of vomiting, and all this queen could see was the opportunity for a quick fiddle. He lurched out of the toilets and along the main corridor, knocking into a few people who were either as pissed as he was or too high on drugs to notice. Finally, he found a space at the edge of the dance floor and stood there for a while, leaning against the wall, taking it all in.

  And that was when Martin spotted him—Christopher. He was right in the middle of the dance floor, waving his arms in time to the music and grinning all over his face. It was less than forty-eight hours since Martin had last seen him, but already he looked like a different person. He’d had his hair cut, which wasn’t such a surprise, and he appeared to be in the process of growing a goatee, which was. He was shirtless, which was a new development, and around his neck he wore a thick silver chain, which Martin had never seen before. And he looked happy, far happier than Martin had seen him look in ages, though of course he could recognize a chemically enhanced smile when he saw one. He didn’t recognize the man dancing next to him, though. He couldn’t see him clearly at first, but he was sure it wasn’t one of Christopher’s friends—at least no one that he had ever been introduced to. He was slightly shorter than Christopher, with black hair and a broad back. His vest was hanging from the back of his jeans, and as he turned around and moved into his line of vision, Martin saw that he had an amazing body—big arms, well-defined chest, washboard stomach, the works. Even in this room full of muscle Marys, he stood out. He must have been going to the gym every day for the past five years to get a body like that—not an easy thing to do when you had a job like Martin’s, a job that demands that you be at your desk from nine till five, five days a week, forty-seven weeks a year. . . .

  Martin didn’t need a copy of QX to know who this dreamboat was—Marco! At that precise moment, he threw those big beautiful arms of his around Christopher and the two of them began necking like it was going out of fashion. Martin turned and lurched away from the dance floor, stumbled out of the club, and fell into the nearest taxi. It wasn’t until he was halfway across London that he asked the driver to stop the cab, stuck his head out the door, and began throwing up.

  Three

  On a good day, Caroline was the first to admit that she spent more time and far more money on her personal appearance than was strictly necessary. As she often joked, she was every bit her own woman—there wasn’t one bit of her body she hadn’t refashioned in some way, shape or form, so the only person sharing any of the credit was the surgeon who performed her boob job.

  But today was not a good day, and Caroline was not in the mood for jokes. What she was in the mood for was some serious pampering. Getting an appointment at Tony’s hadn’t been easy. It was Saturday after all, and Tony wasn’t just any old hairdresser. He was Tony of Belgravia, hairstylist to the stars. He had fingered more famous follicles than Elton John had hair plugs. People didn’t just come to Tony’s for a quick trim and blow-dry, they came for a brush with celebrity. This was why he could get away with charging such exorbitant prices, and why his appointment book was always full m
onths in advance. Luckily for Caroline, there had been a late cancellation, and since she was one of Tony’s favored noncelebrity clients, he had graciously agreed to squeeze her in.

  She was sitting with her damp hair wrapped in a towel, enjoying the reassuringly expensive aroma of Tony’s own-label hair products and flicking through a copy of Vanity Fair when her cell rang. Graham, she thought. About bloody time, too. She dived into her bag, flipped open the phone, and pressed it to her ear.

  “Hello, dear, it’s your mother.”

  Caroline stifled a groan. The last thing she needed today was one of her mother’s little lectures about the vast amounts she squandered at the hairdresser’s. This was one of the reasons Caroline had always felt far closer to her grandmother than she ever had to her mother. It was her grandmother who had first encouraged her to “make the best of herself” as she put it. And she certainly knew what she was talking about. She was in her seventies now, but she never left the house without a protective layer of makeup and a good strong coat of nail varnish. Clearly the glamour gene had skipped a generation because her mother couldn’t have been more different. Caroline had long since given up trying to justify her expenditure at the hairdresser’s to her mother. Try as she might, there was no point trying to explain the high cost of contemporary styling to a woman who had absolutely no concept of the vagaries of fashion, and who had worn her hair in the same casual style for the past thirty years. Besides, Caroline didn’t really want her mother to know that it was the kind of hairdresser’s where favored customers were treated to a line or two of cocaine with their double espresso.

  “Hi, Mum. Yes, I’m fine. The thing is, I’m a bit tied up right now. Can I call you back later?”

  There was a pause, and for a moment Caroline thought that she might actually have pulled it off. Then she heard that familiar wounded tone and knew that further resistance was useless. It didn’t matter how busy she was. There was an unspoken rule that any telephone conversation between Caroline and her mother should last a minimum of five minutes, and should contain reference to at least four of the following subjects—the cost of things today, the neighbors, the weather, Europe, the National Health Service, and the latest developments regarding the house that Caroline’s brother, Kevin, and his lovely wife, Louise, had bought just outside Coventry and were in the process of doing up before they started planning a family. This last topic of conversation had been a particular favorite of late, ever since Caroline had made the mistake of mentioning Graham and her mother had made the mistake of thinking another family wedding might soon be in the cards.

  Eight minutes and one gentle reminder about the cost of living later, Caroline said good-bye to her mother and finished off her coffee, though a part of her secretly wished it could have been the other way around. Caroline was very rarely lost for words. She had spent the best part of her adolescence locked away in her bedroom poring over the collected works of Oscar Wilde, so she usually had an answer for everything. For instance, if anyone dared to suggest that she had her priorities wrong, or that her obsession with looking good indicated that she was a little shallow, she was always quick off the mark: “Only shallow people don’t judge by appearances.” But when confronted with her mother’s quiet but persistent disapproval, Caroline’s usual defenses simply weren’t enough. Words failed her. Her mother knew her too well. She knew that behind those carefully selected phrases and that polished delivery was a girl who had grown up in a terraced house on a dead-end street in Swindon, a girl who had never been considered pretty as a child, and who still had moments, hours, even days, of self-doubt. For every minute she spent on the phone to her mother, Caroline could feel the years of grooming and self-improvement slipping away. By the end of a typical conversation, she was no longer a successful account executive who, despite having left school with virtually no qualifications, had studied hard and long to learn everything she needed to know about the world of advertising. She was a shy fifteen-year-old with a weight problem and a room full of books for comfort. And the worst part of all was knowing that her mother had a sideboard full of photographs to prove it. That was why parents never threw old school photos away. It had nothing to do with sentimentality. It was just another means of ensuring that you didn’t get ideas above your station, another way of keeping you in your place.

  Just then an assistant appeared, advising her that Tony would be with her shortly. Caroline nodded as he picked up her empty coffee cup. He hovered meaningfully for a moment before asking whether madam would be requiring anything else in the way of refreshment. Recognizing this as her cue to pay a quick visit to the private room at the back, Caroline smiled and confirmed that a little of the usual wouldn’t go amiss. Damn her mother. Damn Graham. She was about to spend two hundred pounds of her hard-earned cash in a conscious effort to make herself more attractive, and nothing and nobody was going to spoil the experience. She stood up and followed the assistant to the back of the salon, reaching into her purse for her silver-plated cocaine straw as she went.

  By the time Tony was running his expert fingers through her long blond tresses, Caroline was feeling much happier.

  John was bored. He had spent the best part of the afternoon on-line, checking out the various gay chat rooms, and so far he hadn’t met anyone who took his fancy. Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. About half an hour ago, he’d had a fairly steamy conversation with someone by the name of “HotFitGuy,” who listed his hobbies as “computers, gym and sex with HOT, FIT and GOOD-LOOKING guys.” His on-screen profile contained a personal quote that suggested that, in addition to simply fancying himself, he also fancied himself as a bit of a philosopher—“If life is a waste of time, and time is a waste of life, why don’t we get together and waste ourselves? And above all, aim to be the best. Second place is the first loser.” John was quite taken by this, but unfortunately the profile omitted to mention a few important details. Only after a prolonged exchange did it finally emerge that “HotFitGuy” wasn’t quite as hot or as fit as he made out. In fact, he was pushing forty, balding and appeared to have spent the past twenty years pumping up his pectorals in order to distract attention from his expanding midriff.

  Then there was “HornyStud.” His profile said that he was twenty-seven years old, six feet tall with brown eyes and dark hair, a thirty-two-inch waist, a forty-inch chest, sixteen-inch biceps and a seven-inch uncut cock. It listed his hobbies as “sex, men and more sex” and his occupation as “something manual.” It also contained a personal quote that read, “A Hard Man Is Nice to Find.” What it neglected to mention was that he was Asian. In fact, it was only when they swapped photos that this became apparent.

  To say that John was disappointed would be an understatement. He hadn’t felt so let down since the day he discovered that the smooth, firm buttocks the new, gym-fit Robbie Williams was happy to expose on the cover of Vogue weren’t entirely his own work but had been touched up by someone in the art department. Of course John knew that on-screen profiles weren’t always entirely reliable and that people were prone to exaggerate. As he had soon discovered the first time he visited a gay chat room, there were lies, damned lies and chat-room statistics. It wasn’t a coincidence that almost everyone in the chat rooms had a thirty-two-inch waist and forty-inch chest, or that they all worked out regularly and had nice pecs and a firm arse (or “ass” as most people preferred to call it—masquerading as an American gay porn star was another popular pastime). John’s own profile was pretty close to the truth, although he did add an inch to his height and another to the length of his cock. He also claimed that he was a natural blond, rather than someone who spent a small fortune on highlights. And of course he didn’t actually tell people that he was an air steward. He’d heard enough cracks about “trolley dollies” to know better than that. Instead, he said that he worked as a security guard for an airline, which sounded far more butch without being a complete lie. There was an element of security involved in his job. He was just leaving out the bit about t
he trolley, that was all.

  But to go to the trouble of measuring your biceps and then neglect to mention that you were Asian wasn’t just a minor oversight. It was a deliberate act of deception. John fired off a message that said “Sorry, not my type” and wondered whether it was worth amending his profile, making it clear that he wasn’t interested in Asians, then decided against it. He was pretty certain you weren’t allowed to say things like that anyhow. You could say that you were “straight acting” and would “like to meet similar.” You could say that you were interested in “real men” and not “queens.” You could specify “no fats or femmes.” You could even say that you were looking for “bareback” sex, or that you were “disease free and expect similar.” But you couldn’t say anything that would be considered offensive to ethnic minorities. Who invented these stupid rules anyway? One of Shane’s lot, probably. Well, it was easy to appear politically correct when you had exotic tastes. That was no justification for making everyone else feel guilty about theirs. Before long they’d be telling you not to specify that you liked blonds, on the grounds that it made you a Nazi.

  There had been very little activity on John’s computer screen since then. Someone called “TryWaterSports” had sent him a couple of messages, accompanied by a photo of his erect cock, which left him in little doubt that “TryWaterSports” had the kind of face guaranteed to scare people off. A couple called “UsTwo4Fun” had tried to talk him into joining them for a threesome somewhere in Leytonstone, which might have been worth considering had the photo they sent been a bit clearer. As it was, John couldn’t tell if they were both as fit and beefy as they said, or simply fat and holding their stomachs in. Shortly afterward, he received several increasingly annoying messages from someone looking for a sex slave and offering a monthly salary of five hundred pounds for the successful applicant. John sent a message back to “MasterTom” informing him that he had a perfectly good job already and that he wasn’t remotely interested in playing silly games with some sad old leather queen.