“So why did you and Yves never get it together?” he asks. “If you’re as wonderful as he says you are?”
Yves is passing behind me carrying drinks to some new arrivals.
“Be careful how you answer,” Yves says. “Your life may just depend on it.”
“Because he’s an arsehole,” I reply.
Pierre smiles and whisks a drink from Yves’ hand as he passes. “You see,” he tells him, “I told you we’d get on fine, we already have something in common. We both think you’re an arsehole.”
Yves laughs and boogies away with the drinks.
More people arrive, until all the rooms of his apartment are filled.
Pierre and I alternate between dancing (he dances well) and chatting (he’s funny, witty, irreverent).
He tells me about his job, he works as a Minitel host.
Minitel is an exception Française, a sort of black and white, character only terminal dished out by France telecom since the sixties. It’s a kind of pre-Internet with its main difference being that connection to services, similar to Internet sites, is billed per minute by France telecom at, depending on what your doing, more or less exorbitant rates.
Pierre explains that he works on a Minitel dating server, the prehistoric equivalent of the Internet chat room. He’s paid to look at people’s CVs, work out what they’re hoping to find, and then connect to the server pretending to be Mr (or Mrs) Right.
This explains to me why whenever I’ve tried the services, I have never managed to get a real date. It also explains why people here have such terrifying Minitel bills at the end of the month.
Pierre tells me that earlier this week he got confused while talking to a recently divorced school-teacher on one server, and a leather-clad gay masochist slave on another. The poor schoolteacher disconnected when Jennifer – the recently bereaved thirty-year-old woman he had been pretending to be – suddenly offered to tie him to the bedposts, put pegs on his nipples and stick a cucumber up his arse.
“The slave boy on the other hand didn’t seem to mind at all when I asked him if he had ever thought of remarrying,” Pierre laughs.
“I never managed to get a date on any of those,” I tell him.
“People rarely do. You were probably chatting to me,” he laughs. “You know,” he continues, leaning in towards my ear. “I would love to take you home and put pegs on your nipples.”
I raise my hand to protect myself and grin at him in amazement. “Ouch!” I say.
He grabs my arm. “Come!” he says. “We can talk better outside.”
I pull my sweatshirt down to cover my stirring interest and follow him to the door. As we push out of the apartment, Pierre snatches a joint from a German woman sitting on the stairs. She says something to us in German – something rude probably, but then German always sounds aggressive to me. We head down into the street.
I sit on a bollard. Above us, from an open window, we can hear the party thumping. Pierre hands me the joint; I take a drag.
He asks, “Do you live near here? Can we go to your place?”
I look up at him but his face seems distorted. It strikes me that it is an exceptionally hot evening. My face prickles and my mouth fills with a strange acidic taste. My teeth taste disgusting, my saliva seems electric.
Pierre crouches in front of me. “Are you OK? God! You’re soaked!” he says.
Sweat is rolling down my face, dripping from my chin. My head flops forward. For some reason I am crying, tears dribbling from my eyes.
Pierre lifts my head so that I am looking at him. The joint drops to the floor, seemingly in slow motion, turning and spinning as it falls.
“You are so white,” he says.
“I don’t feel …” I say.
And then it happens; it is instant and unexpected. The vomit squirts through my teeth. Pierre leaps back from me, but he’s too late. His eyes look down at his shirtfront in horror, then up at me.
He says, “Jesus.”
I sleep until four in the afternoon.
When I awaken, I feel shaky and vague; I don’t remember how I got home. There is a note on the table, it says, “Hope you feel better. Pierre.” It’s followed by a phone number.
I eat a bowl of cold pasta from the fridge which I immediately throw up, then climb back into my bed where I sleep, non-stop, for another fifteen hours.
The next day I’m too embarrassed to call him and the day after that I actually feel too embarrassed that I didn’t call him the day before, so I decide to try to forget the whole thing.
The following Saturday, Yves phones me, and adds me to his list of people who fell ill after smoking the joints supplied by the mysterious German woman.
“She killed the whole party,” he says. “Between those who smoked her shit and were ill, and those that carried them home, I lost half of the people who were here!”
I hang up and consider calling Pierre - consider telling him this as some kind of alibi, but as I move my hand over the phone, it rings.
“Hello,” he says. I can hear him smiling. “Are you better?”
“Yes, a bit,” I say.
“Yves tells me that you only vomit on your dates when you’ve been smoking heroin,” he says.
“Heroin?” I gasp.
“Uhuh!” he says. “Apparently so.”
Medieval Obsessions
An hour later we are in a restaurant eating pizza together. He’s as I remember him, witty and cute. “Not a very good start really,” I say.
“The I-Ching calls this kind of thing, Difficulty at the beginning leads to supreme success,” he replies.
“Umh,” I think, “he reads the I-Ching.” I always like a bit of mysticism in a man.
Our knees touch under the table and his physical proximity arouses me. He regales me again with new tales of dialogue from his strange job, tells me he has spent most of the morning talking to a nymphomaniac dominatrix whose husband doesn’t know and wouldn’t understand.
In the afternoon he chatted to a husband whose wife has lost all interest in sex and who as a result is looking for a mistress to try, “the things his wife would never understand.” We laugh wondering if maybe the two are married.
We drink a lot of wine with the meal, but I’m careful to stop before I get drunk, terrified of throwing up a second time.
I have a hard-on beneath the table; I can’t wait to get back to the apartment and see where all of this will go, how the story will unfold. I like him, I fancy him, and something intrigues me about the strange little twinkle in his eye – something to do with his eye contact lasting just a fraction longer than normal, as if asking an unspoken question, trying to spot something within me. I offer him a cup of tea at my place.
He giggles. “You English and your tea,” he laughs.
We walk the three blocks to my apartment. The streets are Monday-night empty. As we walk, the sexual tension between us strikes me as unbearable.
I consider kissing him in a doorway, but I wait.
We chase up the stairs to the apartment and burst, laughing for no reason, into my kitchen. Pierre closes the door with his arse, and stands passively leaning against it, waiting.
I throw the keys on the countertop and kiss him.
He doesn’t want my tongue in his mouth, nor his in mine, so we are reduced to a strange non-sexual pecking.
He pulls my t-shirt off; I unbutton his beige shirt. I spot a pierced nipple and pull back the shirt to examine it more closely.
He laughs. “Did you never see one before?”
I shrug. “No, not in the flesh.”
“So?” he asks.
I touch it tenderly. “Does it hurt? I mean, is it sensitive?”
He pulls on the ring. “Not at all, you see …”
I pull on it. “So that doesn’t hurt.”
Pierre stares into my eyes. “Not at all,” he says quietly, his pupils dilating. “It’s what they’re for.”
I grin. “They?”
I undo the r
emaining shirt buttons revealing two more identical rings on his other nipple and his belly button.
“Wow,” I say.
Five rings, one in each ear, one in each nipple and one through his belly button. I stand back and look at him leaning against the door.
“So you like them?” he asks.
I nod. “Yeah, very sexy,” I say.
I’m actually not sure; he looks a bit like a Christmas tree. I move back in and pull on both nipples simultaneously.
Pierre half closes his eyes – he looks drugged, he groans. I unbutton his jeans, and with a strange sense of foreboding slide them down. His dick is large, half hard, weighed down by a huge chrome ring through the head, at least three centimetres in diameter.
“Awww, Jesus!” I say, “Now that one must hurt.”
Pierre smiles placidly, slips a finger through the ring and yanks his dick from side to side. “Not at all,” he says.
I crouch down to examine it more closely. “But you can’t put a condom on.”
He shrugs. “I don’t need to, I don’t fuck.”
“Can you suck it?”
“Is this a biology class?”
I stand up again. “Sorry, I just don’t know, I mean I never …”
Pierre pushes me back down. “No, I can’t suck it,” he says. “But you can.”
I try. The heavy ring bangs against my rear teeth; it feels as though they might chip. The contact with my fillings gives me little electric shocks – like aluminium paper on chocolate, it’s horrible. I give up and stand, try to push him to his knees, but he resists.
“I don’t suck,” he says.
I pull him through to the bedroom; push him onto the bed. He folds his arms behind his head, watches me remove my trainers, shuck my jeans.
I lie on top of him, rub my body against his hairy chest, feel his piercings against my body. He remains immobile.
I slide a hand between his legs. He doesn’t move to help or hinder access.
I slide a finger against his anus; he removes a hand from behind his head to stop me.
“I’m not into anal,” he says.
I close my eyes and try not to get annoyed, but it’s too late, the moment has passed. I give up and roll off him.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Thirsty,” I say.
I stand, go through to the kitchen and fill a glass with water from the tap.
When I come back he’s standing up. He still looks great.
“So?” he asks.
“So …” I take a deep breath. I sip my water. “Look, I erm … well I don’t really get what you do do in bed, I mean, you don’t suck, you virtually can’t be sucked with that thing through your dick, you can’t fuck, you don’t like to be fucked, you barely kiss. Sorry, but what do you do?”
Pierre moves towards me. He takes my hand, kisses it, and slides it to his cheek. He stares into my eyes; his dick hardens. His pupils seem huge, black and bottomless.
“Slap me,” he says.
I frown.
“Slap my face.”
I pull my hand away from his cheek in horror. “No!”
“Just gently if you want, but slap my face.”
I shrug again. “But I don’t want to.”
He grabs my two hands. “Please, slap me,” he implores me. “I like it.”
For a moment I think, “What the hell! Why not?” I actually try to move my arm to do it, but strangely, in the end I am physically incapable. Something within me won’t let me do it – my arm blocks.
“I can’t.” I move away. “I need to piss,” I say.
He holds on tightly to my arms. “No, stay,” he says.
“But I need to piss.”
He grins. “Exactly …” He kneels before me.
I close my eyes to try to think. I laugh.
I say, “OK! Look! This is ridiculous.”
He looks at me questioningly.
“This isn’t going to work at all,” I say. I push his hands away; walk through to the bathroom.
When I return he has dressed. “I think I better go,” he says.
He walks to the front door, pecks me on the cheek. “Shame,” he says grinning.
He looks like the man I brought here half an hour ago. The well dressed funny, good-looking, normal man. “Yes,” I agree. “A real shame.”
He opens the door, steps out, and then turns back. “If you ever …” he pauses.
I smile. “Yes?”
“Well … if you ever, you know, mellow out – I mean about your sexuality.”
I take a breath. “I wasn’t aware I had a problem with my sexuality,” I say.
“Well, no,” he laughs. “Apart from the fact that that you have like this medieval oral-anal obsession.”
I lift a hand and wave at him.
I say, “Au revoir.” I say it gently, and with extreme concentration I manage to quietly close the door in his face.
It takes a few minutes for me to get really angry, to wish that I had slapped him. Medieval oral-anal obsession indeed!
Roberto di Milano
I am standing at the bar, waiting to be served. I hate the Blue Boy, hate the dingy corners, the tiny dance floor, and the steps that I am forever tripping up and down, but Le Klub is closed for their annual holiday, so I have no choice.
I wave my banknote; try to squeeze in a little closer to the bar. The guy to my right blows cigarette smoke up into the air, but the air conditioning pushes it down into my eyes.
It looks like a bar from another era, from a time when bars were illegal, and so, by definition, underground and grotty. I look to my right – a Dame Edna Everage look-alike is sitting at the bar with a poodle. I scan to the left – a few guys are lined up against the wall, leaning, waiting, watching.
The hairs on the back of my neck prickle, I run a hand across them.
The barman tugs at the banknote in my hand to get my attention.
I order a gin and tonic and look behind me and see why I have been feeling uncomfortable – he’s leaning against the wall behind me. He’s staring at me, at me alone. I glance back to the barman, hand over my banknote; pick up my drink.
As I turn, he grins at me, raises his eyebrows and raises his glass. He seems huge, a great larger than life, brick-chicken-shed of a man.
I feel very tarty, very direct, but, as Nick used to say, “I just can’t help myself.”
Once I cross the bar he’s not as big as he seemed – my height, but oh, what a body! I nod, slightly embarrassed. “Bonsoir,” I say.
He’s Italian. He introduces himself as, “Roberto. Roberto di Milano.”
I don’t know if he’s from Milan, or if that’s his surname, or maybe both. I resist the temptation to introduce myself as, Marco. Marco di Eastbourne.
He speaks a little French, but with an accent and oh what an accent! A thick, rich, deep, luxurious, velvet-pile-carpet of an accent. It’s on the edge, almost too much, slightly too greasy, like a three cheese pizza – delicious but just a bit indigestible.
I ask him what sport he does; use the occasion to touch a finger against his chest. It has been calling to me, whispering to me through the semi-transparent linen.
“Negation,” he says, apparently mixing his words. After a brief mime I understand that he’s a swimmer. That he’s a member of the Milan gay swimming team. His three-quarter length trousers reveal calves to match his torso. He grins revealing perfect white teeth.
“J’aime les inglésé,” he says.
It seems obvious that we will sleep together, it’s buzzing around in the air between us. His perfection annoys me slightly, or is it the fact that he knows it, the fact of his arrogance?
“Where do you live?” I ask. “I bet you live with your mother.” I am intentionally teasing him, trying to see what happens if we sidestep the smooth talk.
He frowns at me. “Why should I live with my mother?” he asks.
I shrug. “Every Italian man I ever met lives with his mother,” I sa
y, matching his grin.
Roberto shakes his head. “It’s just a stereotype. It’s not true.”
I nod. “So where do you live?”
“In Milan. With my mother.” Apparently he sees no irony in this reply. He smiles at me, runs the back of his hand down the front of my shirt.
“And you?” he asks.
“In Nice,” I reply. “Alone.”
Roberto winks at me. “Maybe you show me?” he says.
I go to the toilet. I calculate the pros and cons: a bit of a slime ball, very good-looking, very good body, very keen. In the end the calculation doesn’t take long – I can’t resist.
“So you show me?” he repeats when I return.
I laugh at the directness of it all.
Roberto frowns. “You don’t want maybe?”
It is the final disarming straw. He is human. I smile to reassure him. “Don’t worry,” I say. “I want!”
Roberto is hot. Roberto is in a hurry.
With his hand constantly hovering around my crotch it’s hard to drive. With his face constantly stuffing itself in front of mine it is difficult to see the road. I push him away; I try to do it jokingly.
“We’ll be home in minutes,” I tell him.
He slides a hand over my thigh. I pick it up, move it back onto his own lap. “Mamma Mia!” I say. “Will you please wait?”
Roberto giggles. He grabs my hand, places it on his own crotch – I discover that he’s terrifyingly well endowed.
“There has to be a problem,” I say to myself, glancing across at him. There’s always a problem, it just takes a moment before you find it.
“I want you to suck me,” Roberto says in a perfect American accent.
Amazing how many people around the world speak perfect porno-film English. I laugh and put the car into reverse. “We’re home,” I say. “WAIT!”
I turn off the engine. Roberto leans over, places a hand behind my head and thrusts his tongue down my throat; his hand fumbles with my zip. I pull away again; push out through the door of the car. I sigh at him, shake my head.
Roberto jumps out too. His eyes glint madly at me and I realise that he’s wearing coloured contact lenses. His eyes have taken on a zombie shine in the orange light of the street. I walk towards the house.
50 Reasons to Say Goodbye Page 5