by AA Gill
And, at the time of going to press, the accepted term is “trans”, a trans-person. Now you may say, “Trans, tranny. Fuck it, what’s the difference?” Well, it makes a difference to them. It’s their name, they get to choose. So remember: it’s trans. That’s tranny with the little curly bit cut off the end.
Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,
I got my girlfriend pregnant when we were both 15. That was 17 years ago. My daughter’s just brought home her boyfriend, who’s two years older than I am. I think this is completely unacceptable. She says it’s fine because she’s nearly 18 and he’s in his thirties, and it’s not her fault that I was an underage child molester that got her mum up the duff (we’re no longer together). And I take her point. But this is all sorts of creepy wrong. And he keeps calling me dad and laughing. And the worst thing is that we were at the same school, but obviously he was two years above me, and was a fucking bully.
Stanley, Jaywick
As The Bible says, “As you sow, so shall you pay child maintenance”. The short answer is: you can’t begin to have any say in who your children get off with. Unless that’s an intrinsic part of your religion or culture, in which case obviously then that trumps love, sex and self-determination. The generally accepted algorithm for appropriate coupling is half the older partner’s age plus seven. So, she’s a bit off the reservation but not massively. You don’t mention any of this guy’s other qualities. Is he more successful than you? More socially adept? Is he better looking than you? I’m guessing that part of the problem is that he’s not someone you can patronise or intimidate, which is an important part of the father–boyfriend relationship. On the other hand, marrying someone more successful than your father is an important social evolutionary step for a girl. What is strange is that if you asked your daughter if she would go out with a 15-year-old, she’d pull a face and say that’s disgusting. Most girls see even a few years younger than them as unacceptable. But quite a lot older is perfectly agreeable. This is not an aesthetic or social choice. It’s not because older men are better companions, are more sophisticated, are politer or have better conversation, or are more accomplished fornicators. It’s a biological choice: they are more likely to be stable, established accomplished mates, and that will make them more trustworthy and adept fathers. You could look at your daughter bringing home a man of your age as being a compliment for your own record as a dad, which is more than could be said for her mother’s choice of baby-daddy, and I bet her parents weren’t at all thrilled when she came home with you.
Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,
My girlfriend’s got the right hump. About a massage. She’s packing bags, crying on the phone to her mum, swearing blue murder at me and, frankly, I can’t make head nor arsehole of it. I like a bit of a rubdown. It relaxes me. I’ve got a high-stress job (better not ask), I like to have a bit of a schvitz and a stretch in the gym, a lounge in the hot fog, and then a bit of a deep-tissue pummel. There’s a good girl at my gym and she always finishes me off in the correct and time-expected manner. And I’ve never thought anything about it. I mean, who doesn’t get a happy ending? It’s not even a thing. You bung her a tip and say, “Ta”, and you feel great and smoothed out for a high-octane evening. How relaxed are you going to be with an angry stalk on? And who doesn’t get a stiffy on the table? It’s just another bit of your bod that needs de-stressing. Anyway, the girlfriend – I say the girlfriend, but we’ve been together for a couple of years and have got a sprog, and I think that she’s it, give or take – she overheard me and a couple of mates having a bit of a natter about hand jobs, and she cornered me after and said, “Do you ever indulge?” And I said, “No, except for a polish after the massage.” And she goes inter-fucking-galactic. “You’re cheating on me and the kid, and you’ve been doing it all the time we’ve been together. I thought you loved me. I feel betrayed and humiliated. What am I going to tell little Taylor?” Bloody hell. I never saw this coming. And the thing is, I’m as good as gold. I never play away from home. My dad was a dog and I remember what it put my dear mum through. Anyway, what can I say? This doesn’t mean anything, right?
Alan, London
Well, yes and no Alan. We’ve covered cheating quite a lot here. But, apparently, your ever-alert penises have short memories. I sometimes imagine Esquire readers’ penises as a troupe of bored meerkats all up on their hind legs, sniffing the air for juicy poon; never still, always questing with evil, ravenous, little beady smirks. And then I have to think about something else, like Buddhist sandpainting. The first point to make is that the definition of what is and isn’t cheating is not down to the man in the dock. If you’ve been fouled, it isn’t for the opposing team to say whether or not they were just playing the ball. If you’ve been robbed, it isn’t for the dip to hold up his hands and say he didn’t think you’d miss it. So, cheating is not what you can get away with. It’s what she feels about what you get away with. And the truth is some partners roll their eyes at a hand job in a spa, and some partners shrug at a drunken gobble in a dressing room. But not many. And only if they’re playing away themselves or they don’t care that much about your knob one way or the other. The big question here is: would you feel as sanguine if she were doing it to you? Say, after a pedicure she got a generous fingering? Probably not. The thing with blokes and hand jobs is that they like to imagine they’re closer to a wank than fornication, whereas girls don’t even like to think about their boyfriends having one off the wrist on their own. The big deal is that it involves a third party. And now you have to ask yourself, does it matter who this third hand belongs to? I’m assuming your masseur is fit enough, but what if she were a 20-stone Bulgarian minger? What if she was a bloke? Would you be satisfied with a happy ending from a male masseur? I thought not. So, it’s not just a mechanical relief, is it? Because the mechanic matters. And there’s a telling anecdote about that. A shy cello player with a prominent symphony orchestra is on tour in the Far East. A horn player tells him that, if he fancies it, there’s a really good massage parlour next to the hotel. Never having done anything like this, the cellist nervously books in for an hour’s relaxing stroke. The masseur’s only done one leg when he’s sporting an expectant stiffy like a drumstick, and she smiles and winks and says, “Would you like a wank, soldier?” “Oh, well, actually, yes. I would rather,” says the cellist. “OK,” she replies, going to the door, “I’ll be back in five minutes when you’ve finished.”
You see, if it wasn’t a thing, as you put it, you could always have seen to yourself. But the real point is that she cares. You would mind far more if she didn’t. A lot of loving someone is protecting them from the vulnerability of their love. You had a duty not to let the mother of your child be hurt by her love for you. And if that twinges with guilt, well it’s not due to a sordid tug in the gym, it’s because you’ve failed at the first job of being in love, which is to make the person who offers their love back feel safe.
Let us pause a moment and remember the humble hand job, the Cinderella of sexual congress all too often overlooked and unconsidered compared to its two noisier, messier and more demanding sisters, the gobble and the hump. The tug is always thought of as being second best, a consolation prize, a brush off, when in fact it is a thing of skill and beauty – the sex act with the most dexterous control, and prestidigitatious possibilities. A skilled, hand-crafted rub-a-dub-dub can keep the recipient on the agonising edge of a mission for minutes, and the ability to tease the moment critique is a highly sought-after skill. A hand job can either be a helter-skelter spin, a mad dash of emetic exuberance, or a slow torture of postponed pleasure. It is the drum solo of the concept album and, in the hands of a master, a thing of divine and agonising beauty. Don’t think of the assisted wank as either humble or negligible. In the right hands, it is the epilepsy of heaven.
Over the years, we at Esquire have collected a short spankography of the unlikely and inappropriate places that people – girls and boys – have been asked to offer hand relief. Laura says
she was once asked to toss off an ex-boyfriend in a graveyard at the funeral of his father because he was so sad. And then asked to make it a blow job because his dead dad would have wanted it that way. There are a lot of requests for hand jobs in churches during services, obviously a lot at weddings, and Julie says that she was asked for a crafty tug by the best man because he was so turned on by her frock; she was the bride.
Sarah says she got drunk and took numerous pills and mind-altering herbs to settle her nerves at her new posh boyfriend’s family black-tie dinner in a stately home, but got confused, and stuck her hand down the thigh of her beau’s father. When she tried to retrieve the situation, he grabbed her wrist, rearranged his napkin, and winked. James (not his real name) says he gave manual relief to an aged but still fit Lord during the Queen’s Speech in the Palace of Westminster.
Grahame’s mother says that at her Grahame’s 10th birthday party, a little lad came into the kitchen and pulled down his shorts to reveal a keen, buoyant little pee pee. The lad said that Grahame had said that his mum would give him a hand with it. She said firmly that she couldn’t, but told him that if anyone more than twice his age ever touched the boy’s willy, it would turn blue and grow curly like a pig’s tail. Which, incidentally, is true.
Dear Adrian,
I know this sounds funny, as in amusing, but that’s why I’m reduced to writing to you about it. No one will take me seriously and, consequently, I suffer from nervous flatulence. I produce a lot of wind and release it at really inconvenient moments in lifts, and I have an overwhelming need to fart whenever I have a massage. I can feel the gasses building up, and the pressure on my sphincter is unbearable. If there is a quiet moment in the theatre or at a concert, my bottom can sense it and is compelled to fill the unforgiving silence with a rumble of gastric crowing. I can fart rhythmically as I walk, each footfall producing a martial trump. I rarely get to have sex with the same person twice as each thrust is accompanied by a sphincter whistle; an orgasm is a raga of ecstatic ululation. I have tried everything to hush my cacophonous bowel: I eat a bland and blameless diet; I take Friendly Flora and gallons of Milk of Magnesia. But it makes no difference. Whenever the mood is sombre, solemn or seductive, my arse bellows like a drunken mariachi band. In desperation, I’ve even attempted to alter the pitch of my sphincter by changing its aperture using a selection of blunt objects of increasing width in the hope that it might become more of a “futt” than a “parp”, but to no avail. Please, please could you take this seriously and tell me what I should do?
Charlie, Windermere
Get a dog. Get two dogs.
Dear Uncle Dysfunctional,
You’re good at using your words. Can you recommend any surefire, killer pick-up lines?
Ahmed, Hong Kong
Yes: silence. And a fleeting smile. There are no sure-fire pick-up lines. Pick-up lines are a wholly male myth. Nothing you say – nothing slick, funny, provocative, winsome, disingenuous, pleading – is going to make any girl have sex with you. Nothing, ever. I mean it. If you say, “Have you got any Jewish in you? Would you like some?” And a girl you’ve never met before says, “mazel tov” it’s because she fancied you before you opened your mouth, and she decided to get her end away despite your arthritic bon mot. The golden rule of sex that all men should understand, indeed, most men should have tattooed, is that you get laid despite your best efforts, not because of them. And the dominant partner in any social arrangement is the one who has the power of veto and holds the goods. And that’ll be the ladies.
Dear Mr Gill,
I used to work as an escort. I come from a poor family. My father was, well, let’s just say he was a man. I was a student, I needed the money. It was all quite polite and provincial: business dinners, company awards dos, lonely travelling salesmen and, yes, I had sex with them, but lying underneath them was far less stressful than sitting opposite them in four-star hotel dining rooms. Anyway, I gave it up when I got my first job. I’m a strategy advisor for small businesses in the retail sector. I don’t feel any shame about it. What I did was a means to an end. And now I’ve fallen in love – with an amazing boy who’s a couple of years younger than me. We get on, he’s good to me, we’ve moved in together. He’s a committed political activist with a big heart, big dreams and quite a big cock. He does great things for me and will do great things for the country. He’s going to fight a winnable seat at the next election. He doesn’t have much to do with his parents, though – he and his father don’t see eye-to-eye. Anyway, his dad came to visit and guess what? He was a client. And he remembers me. He didn’t say anything, it was in his eyes. He came back the next day when my lad was out and told me that I had to break up the relationship as it would ruin his son’s political career when my past came out, as undoubtedly it would. He knew his son was in love with me and would never go of his own accord, so if I loved him I must set him free. And then he left, saying he knew that I was a good and decent woman, and that was the person he was appealing to. I was distraught. I’ve only ever been in love once, and I will only ever be in love once. What neither my darling boy nor his father know, nor anyone else, is that I have a congenital weakness – an inherited condition. It’s been dormant but now it’s not and I will die of it, sooner rather than later. And the end will be painful, slow and incapacitating. Must I face this alone, in despair? If I tell my boyfriend he will never leave me, but must I send him away? Completely cut our lives apart? Is our mutual misery the right thing to do? Is this the final act of truly selfless love?
Violetta, Royal Leamington Spa
I’ve been waiting for 40 years to answer this letter, Violetta, which is the mother of all agony. It is the ultimate agony. So, the conventional wisdom says that you have to let him go, as you intuit. It is the ultimate proof of love. It also means you pass the fragile butterfly of devotion onto him because when he discovers that you have a fatal condition (sorry, by the way – that’s a bummer), he then has to exercise his obligation to the courage of love, and give up his career to come back to you. This will naturally be too little and too late, and you will die and he’ll be bereft, and that is the tragedy of love as the two great agony aunts of the 19th century, Dumas fils and Verdi, saw it. It’s hard to argue with them. But now we don’t have to be tied to the connections and the moral rigidity of the past. We can ask, what would Richard Curtis do?
OK, obviously you have to break up with him, but you know he loves you too much to go on his own. You must make him break up with you by turning up at some public event, probably a school play, with another man. This could be the good-looking but closeted gay older man next door. The boyfriend will see you, be mortified, break up, and prepare to leave the country to go and work for a charity in the Far East. In the meantime, you will weep on the shoulder of the old man neighbour, who will turn out to be a retired/struck-off consultant who notices the telltale symptoms of your hereditary fatal condition, but, by further chance, he will also be the world expert on said condition and he knows that it is curable if caught in time. But, apparently, you only have 12 hours left to get the miracle cure from a cottage hospital somewhere in remote Scotland. The only person who can get you there is the boyfriend’s father in his helicopter. After a tearful confrontation, he flies you to Scotland, where a strange and eccentric nurse played, I think, by Eddie Redmayne, administers the cure by enema. Then you have to rush back to London, and sprint to Heathrow to head off the boyfriend at the gate.
But, here’s the final twist: while the loudspeaker plays “Fly Me to the Moon” you miss him, just by a moment. Too late: the security guards catch you. But with the help of an enigmatic Rowan Atkinson, you give them the slip. You disguise yourself as an air hostess and smuggle yourself on-board, publicly declaring your love, and health, while giving the safety demonstration. The cabin erupts into applause and, by chance, there’s a brass brand sitting in economy to play Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s in Love with You”. It turns out that the captain of an airliner is like the captai
n of a ship, and he can marry you. The wedding reception is chicken or beef from the trolley. And Stephen Fry, who just happens to be travelling in first class, agrees to give the best man’s speech over the tannoy. It’s the best best man’s speech ever. You honeymoon on a deserted tropical island in the Indian Ocean.
You see, that’s the real, 21st century-inclusive, two fingers to misery, give us a romantic soft-centred ending. It is the endorphin of reassurance that everything will be all right. So, fuck you Alexandre Dumas fils, and up yours Giuseppe Verdi (or Joe Green as you’d have been known in Camden Town).
Of course, the addendum, if you’re thinking of rewriting this as a script for Danny Boyle: just at the end of the best man’s speech when Fry says, “Raise your glasses to the bride and groom,” a bloke at the back shouts, “Allahu Akbar!” and everything goes white. And then you hear the disembodied voice from the beginning of Love Actually, which goes on about all the people who died in the Twin Towers and their last messages not being about hate but love, but sort of ironic. Except it isn’t ironic. Love does transcend everything. Which is the original message of La Dame aux Camélias and La Traviata. But there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a happy ending as well. The damnedest saying of all your granny’s dim sayings is, “It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” No one who ever loved and lost would say that. It’s better to have loved and won than anything else. Being in love and losing it is worse than anything else – worse than bereavement, worse than cancer, worse than being beaten 4–0 by Hull.