Shameless

by Paul Burston

  The two surly black bouncers at the door greeted Caroline’s arrival with fierce stares and sharp sucking of teeth. Unfamiliar with life south of the river and completely nonplussed, she smiled sweetly and flicked her hair back over her shoulder, allowing her coat to fall open and treating the bouncers to an eyeful of her impossibly pert cleavage. This was a technique she had perfected over many years spent queuing outside exclusive West End nightclubs, and she saw no reason why it shouldn’t stand her in equally good stead in Brixton. Bouncers were the same the world over, and since very few gay clubs employed gay security staff, feminine wiles were no less effective there than anywhere else. Sure enough, the bouncers quickly ushered her in with a chorus of slapping hands and a flash of gold fillings. Unfortunately, the sour-faced queen in the ticket office wasn’t so easily impressed.

  “You do know this is a gay club?” he said, scanning his beady eyes up and down her outfit with a look of barely concealed contempt.

  “Of course,” she replied quickly.

  “Well, judging by the way you’re dressed, I assume you’re not gay yourself. And I don’t see you here with any gay friends, so . . .”

  Caroline was about to point out that she was meeting her friends inside when a voice spoke up from behind her. “Actually, she’s with me.”

  She turned to find an extremely cute guy of about thirty, dressed in a pale blue T-shirt and raw denim jeans, smiling at her with a twinkle in his eye. His hair was a dirty blond and cut into a short crop that made the most of his high cheekbones, thick neck and bright cornflower blue eyes. Caroline thought he looked just like the man from the Tommy Hilfiger ad. She didn’t care what anybody said. It was true—all the best-looking men were gay.

  “That’s right,” she said, turning back to her inquisitor and grinning triumphantly. “I’m with him.”

  The sour-faced queen stared at her doubtfully for a moment, then caved in. “That’ll be ten pounds each, please.”

  Inside the club, the man introduced himself as Phil and showed Caroline the way to the coat check before offering to buy her a drink.

  “So how come you’re here on your own?” he asked as they stood waiting at the bar.

  “I was hoping to meet up with a friend,” Caroline explained, suddenly thinking that Phil would be the ideal man to introduce to Martin. “How about you?” she asked. “Not here with your boyfriend?”

  “No, I’m single. As a matter of fact, I was supposed to be meeting some friends, too, but I’ve got a feeling I might have missed them. Mind if I tag along with you for a bit?”

  Caroline smiled. “Of course not.”

  “Great,” he said, turning to pay the barman and then handing her a vodka and tonic. “So, shall we go and have a wander?”

  Caroline nodded. “If we could wander in the direction of a dealer, I’d be eternally grateful. I’d kill for a gram of coke.”

  Phil looked doubtful. “You’ll be lucky if you find any coke in here,” he said as they headed toward the café-bar. “The police raided the place a few months ago and all the regular dealers were busted. If you do find someone selling coke, you can bet it’ll be cut with cheap speed. Trust me, it’s a complete waste of money. You’re far better off with pills. I’ve got a couple on me. You’re welcome to have one.”

  “You mean Ecstasy?”

  He grinned. “Yes, I mean Ecstasy.”

  Caroline shook her head. “I’m not sure about that. I usually just stick with coke.”

  “Are you telling me you’ve never tried Ecstasy?” Phil’s expression couldn’t have been more incredulous if she had just said that she had never tasted chocolate or had never watched a single episode of Coronation Street. “You surprise me. I had you down for a party girl!”

  Caroline blushed. “Of course I have,” she lied. “It’s been a while, that’s all.”

  “All the more reason for you to try one of these,” Phil said, digging into his pocket and producing two fat white pills. “A mate of mine gets them from Amsterdam. Trust me, they’re the best there is.”

  “Maybe when I’ve found my friend,” Caroline replied, wavering slightly.

  “It makes far more sense to take it now,” Phil said. “It’ll take an hour for you to come up anyway, and by then we’ll have found your friend. Go on, I dare you.”

  Never one to resist a dare, least of all when it involved a handsome man and the promise of a chemical high, Caroline took one of the pills and popped it into her mouth.

  “Okay,” she said, washing it down with a mouthful of vodka and tonic. “You win. Now, how about a dance?”

  At the far corner of the dance floor, John was trying to get an answer out of Fernando as to whether they should go to Crash for a couple of hours or just head straight to Trade. He had been trying for the best part of half an hour, with no success. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that Fernando on K was even less communicative than Fernando not on K. To make matters worse, Neil had just returned from the toilets, where he had shoved a combination of K and coke up his nose and seemed hell-bent on complicating matters even further.

  “But what about Martin?” Neil said, gnawing at his lower lip and staring frantically around the dance floor. “Don’t you think we should look for him? I really think we should, you know. I think we should look for him.”

  “We’ve been looking for him for over an hour,” John replied tartly. “He’s probably gone home with someone and is in bed right now, having a lot more fun than we are. I say we go to Crash. It’s a lot nearer than Trade, and with the state you’re in, I’d feel just that little bit safer driving a few miles down the road than going all the way across town.”

  Neil looked as if he were about to pop a blood vessel. “What do you mean, the state I’m in?” he screeched. “I’m not in any kind of state. I’m quite capable of driving us to Trade.”

  Fernando opened his mouth as if he were finally about to say something, but before he could get a word out, Neil was off again. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this! I didn’t hear you complaining about my driving when I came to pick you up tonight! But if you’d rather pay one of those unlicensed minicab drivers to take you to Trade and probably mug you on the way there, that’s fine with me!”

  Sensing that he wasn’t about to get his way and feeling his temper rise at the injustice of it all, John looked to Fernando to back him up, only Fernando was no longer paying attention. He had turned his back and was now staring at the stage, where this evening’s performance was about to begin. Announced by the familiar holler of the club’s drag queen hostess, which sounded remarkably like someone herding cattle, half a dozen muscle boys in various stages of undress strutted out onto the stage and began gyrating in time to the music. Next the drag queen herself appeared, tottering on in an outfit that made her look like a cross between Cyndi Lauper in her “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video and an explosion in a textile factory—long blond wig topped off with her trademark dopey tiara, metallic silver dress mismatched with a purple fake-fur wrap, black Lycra leggings holding in her thighs and pink platform boots chunky enough to support her not inconsiderable weight. Soon the scene had degenerated into one of unadulterated debauchery as the drag shuffled around the stage on her knees, servicing each of the muscle boys in strict rotation before turning to the audience with a look of smug satisfaction plastered across her face and a drop of what could either have been sweat or semen dribbling down her chin.

  Fernando, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the stage for even a second, suddenly raised his arms in the air and began applauding wildly. Knowing an appreciative fan when she saw one (which clearly wasn’t very often), and understandably grateful for any male attention she could muster, the drag queen gestured to him to join her onstage. Before John knew what was happening, Fernando had climbed up onto the stage, peeled off his T-shirt, and was unbuttoning his trousers, cheered on by the drag queen and a fair portion of the audience. They evidently found the amateurish antics of a drug-fucked nonentity infinit
ely more appealing than the slightly more polished performances they had witnessed so far from boys whose bodies may have been the best in the business, but whose overexposure in the classified pages of the gay press had gradually diminished their erotic appeal. Furious at the way they had been upstaged, and never ones to take rejection lightly, the muscle boys stomped off into the wings, leaving Fernando and the drag queen the sole focus of the audience’s attention and one man’s mounting indignation.

  “Right,” said John, turning to Neil with a face that said he wasn’t willing to be messed with. “I don’t care where we go, just so long as we go now. Crash or Trade, I don’t care. Anywhere there’s decent music. Just not here, okay?”

  “But what about Fernando?” Neil asked meekly.

  John looked up at the stage as Fernando dropped his trousers and the drag queen licked her chops in anticipation of a glimpse of a penis she hadn’t seen or sucked a dozen times before. “Fernando can take a minicab,” John said flatly.

  Mr. Big Cock Brazilian was sprawled on Martin’s sofa, stripped to the waist with a sizable erection clearly visible through his black leather trousers. Martin nuzzled his chest contentedly. Mr. Big Cock Brazilian wasn’t actually Brazilian. In the cab on the way home, he had told Martin that his name was Clive and that he actually came from Barrow-in-Furness. But so far as Martin was concerned, the fantasy of the man he had been groped by in the packed toilet at the Fridge was still very much alive and lying on his sofa, waiting to have sex with him. So what if he didn’t come from Brazil? He still looked the part, and considering the amount of drugs Martin had put away tonight, he knew it wouldn’t be long before any piece of information that threatened to spoil the fantasy was conveniently erased from his memory.

  That was the great thing about drugs. Whether you liked it or not, they forced you to live in the moment. And Martin liked it very much. He liked the way drugs made him feel. And he liked the way they made him behave, like someone who knew how to have a good time and wasn’t worried about making the right impression, or obsessed with meeting the perfect boyfriend and settling down to a life of domestic bliss and dinner parties and dogs. With drugs, he could forget about Mr. Right and make the most of Mr. Right Now. With drugs, he lost all his inhibitions. With drugs, he didn’t even know what inhibitions were anymore. With drugs, even the word sounded alien to him. “Inhibition.” What a strange word it was. “In-hib-ition.”

  “What did you say?” Mr. Big Cock Brazilian’s voice boomed in his ear.

  Martin lifted his head and looked up at him. “What?”

  “You said something, just now.”

  “Did I?” Martin thought for a moment. “Oh, right. No, I was just going to say, do you fancy a drink or something? Or maybe a line of coke?”

  Mr. Big Cock Brazilian smiled and produced a bottle from his trouser pocket. “I’d rather do K if it’s all the same to you. I find it’s better for sex. Coke just makes me want to shit. You want some?”

  Martin looked confused.

  “I meant, do you want some K?”

  Martin laughed. “Oh, right. Yes, sure.”

  They spent the next few minutes passing the little bottle back and forth between them, until finally the K kicked in and the desire to have sex as pornographic and as uninhibited as any early ’80s, pre-AIDS, hard-core gay porn movie became almost too much for Martin to bear. He slid down onto the floor until he was kneeling between Mr. Big Cock Brazilian’s legs and slowly began unbuttoning his leather trousers. There was no telling exactly how long this task took, but once it was complete and Mr. Big Cock Brazilian’s cock was unveiled in all its tumescent glory, Martin reached farther down and began unlacing his big, black and really rather hard left boot.

  “Let me do that,” Mr. Big Cock Brazilian said, grabbing Martin’s hand and pushing it away.

  Martin tried to disguise the injured tone in his voice. “Okay. I need to go to the toilet anyway.”

  He lurched into the bathroom, brushed his teeth, rummaged in the bathroom cabinet for some condoms and lube, and returned to the living room minutes later only to discover that Mr. Big Cock Brazilian had mysteriously disappeared. Typical. The best-looking man he had managed to drag home in weeks, and he had gone and done a runner.

  “I’m in here,” a voice called from up the hall.

  Silently praying that his fantasy man hadn’t climbed into Neil’s bed by mistake—or worse, climbed into Neil’s bed on purpose—Martin followed the sound of the voice up the hall, past the door to Neil’s room, and into his own bedroom. The bedside lamp was on and Mr. Big Cock Brazilian was under the covers, his clothes arranged in a neat pile on the floor. Overcome by a mixture of relief, excitement, nervous anticipation and physical disorientation, Martin placed the condoms and lube on the floor next to the bed, quickly undressed, and pulled back the covers.

  Oh shit. There was something very wrong with this picture. It had to be some weird trick of the light, but right now, from this angle, Mr. Big Cock Brazilian appeared to have a leg missing. Martin stared hard at the ten-inch stump where his left leg ought to have been and blinked several times. It must be the drugs. The K was making him see things that weren’t really there. Or rather, it was making him not see things that were really there. Whatever, it was the drugs. It had to be. He would have noticed something earlier. And besides, what amputee in his right mind would go home with someone without once mentioning the fact that he had the best part of a limb missing? It didn’t make any sense. Why spring something like that on somebody, when there was a very strong possibility that he might just freak out?

  Mr. Big Cock Brazilian’s face was giving nothing away. “Come on, then,” he said, reaching up and pulling Martin toward him. “Are we going to fuck or what?”

  Martin was lost for words. Should he say something, mention that his eyes were playing tricks on him, try to relieve the tension with a joke? But what if the joke backfired? What if his eyes weren’t deceiving him? What if this was real and rejection was something Mr. Big Cock Brazilian suffered every day? Maybe if he just ignored the missing leg, it would go away—or come back, or whatever it was that limbs did in this situation. Carefully averting his eyes and vowing never to touch K again, Martin climbed into bed and switched off the light.

  Caroline had watched Fernando’s performance with a growing, inexplicable desire to jump up on the stage with him and tear all her clothes off. Never having met Fernando, she had no idea that he was in any way linked with Martin, although it would be fair to say that by the time the performance had ended, she wasn’t really aware of her own link with Martin and had certainly given up all thought of looking for him. The Ecstasy had lifted her up to a place she had never been to before, and she threw herself onto the dance floor with a feeling of complete abandon. She loved this place. She loved the music, and the lights, and the muscle boys with their oiled bodies and even the drag queen with her dopey tiara. And she loved Phil, too. She loved him for standing up for her when the sour-faced queen was about to turn her away, and she loved him for administering the pill that had made her feel happier than she had ever felt before. But mostly she loved him for the way he felt, dancing close to her as he was now.

  “Feel my skirt,” she said, and shivered with excitement as Phil responded by placing his hands on her hips. It felt so good, being with Phil like this, knowing that he was gay and that nothing sexual was about to happen, but still enjoying the feeling of his body pressed against hers. For years she had assumed that straight girls who hung out at gay clubs every weekend were simply afraid of straight men. They went to gay clubs to escape from all that male attention, all that testosterone. Now it suddenly dawned on her that, on the contrary, the reason they went to gay clubs was to get off on the testosterone, just as she was doing now. It made so much sense. It was physically stimulating without being overtly sexual, titillating without being threatening. And of course it was flattering that a man as gorgeous as Phil had chosen her as his dancing partner for the night, even i
f he had no intention of fucking her afterward.

  “Come with me to the toilet,” Phil said suddenly.

  Caroline looked at him blankly. “What for?”

  “I’ve just remembered I’ve got a bit of coke in my wallet. We can’t do it here in full view of everybody.”

  Caroline smiled. All this and coke, too. It was turning out to be quite a night. She took Phil’s hand and allowed him to lead her across the dance floor, through the heaving mass of muscle and past the occasional girl in a glittery top, until finally they reached the men’s toilets, where, a couple of hours earlier, Martin had been given his first taste of K. Finding an empty stall, he ushered her in with him and locked the door.

  “I can see you’ve done this before,” she said as Phil tore off what remained of the toilet roll, wiped down the toilet seat, and set about chopping two fat lines.

  “There you go,” he said, standing up and handing her a rolled-up note. “Ladies first.”

  Caroline crouched over the toilet and snorted one of the lines. The sharp burning sensation took her completely by surprise. If this was coke, then it was like no coke she had ever tried before. What was it? Speed? As she struggled to her feet, she felt stranger still. Her vision blurred and suddenly she felt incredibly light-headed. “My God,” she said, reaching out to steady herself. “What the hell was that?”

  Phil took her by the arms and smiled. Then, without a word of warning, he pressed her up against the wall and forced his tongue into her mouth.

  She giggled. “What are you doing? Oh, my God! You’re not supposed to be doing that. Naughty boy. Stop it. This is silly.”