Rent Boy

by James Anthony Ford

  I was very apprehensive to put the pill, having a picture of a dove on one side, so I just looked at it with a moment of admiration. Eddie knew it was my first one, he didn’t have to ask, he just knew by the look on my face. So he said “If you want, just take half and see how you go”. It was the exact solution to eradicate all my fears. I guess I was scared of the excitement. So I split the pill in two, put one back in the plastic bag and into my pocket and the other half went down the hatch. I actually expected it to work immediately, but I was very naive.

  We sat around in Eddie’s apartment just chatting, drinking raspberry cordial and have the odd line of speed or so. The more speed we had, the deeper and meaningless the conversation got. I got restless so I made my way into the rave party next door. The rave was made up of about three or four different room all very brightly decorated with fluoro banners, silver electric streamers and pictures of happy faces. The main room, which was the techno room, mainly DJ’s playing hard acid and hard house, was pumping. It was not until I went to check out the house room my mind started to explode. The music was the most awesome and coolest underground sexy, grinding dirty house. It was going off and I loved it with intense passion. Perhaps the ecstasy that was starting to kick in contributed to my passion of these tunes but the music was ‘real’ underground thumping house. Not the crap you hear on radio. This was true house music at its best and the people in the rave had the privilege to experience the art of the DJ at work. Faces everywhere in the room were smiling at me and looking at me with admiration. The world was at my feet, nothing mattered anymore. There were no longer any insecurities, I was the ‘IT’ guy. And I could dance. I had people surrounding me and telling me how good a dancer I was. And I was. The feeling in the room was pure love and the energy beyond control. This was life. This is how I want to be for the rest of my life. I loved life and wanted this euphoria to last forever. I loved everyone and everything. Everything was gonna be alright, and I felt cool!

  The night kept going on but time was going like a rocket. Soon it was sunrise and staggered my way out onto the chill out area where there was another DJ playing chilled out acid jazz and funky retro tunes. It felt like a lifetime since I saw Eddie that night that we didn’t say a word to each other, we just hugged. “I love you” he said. “I am so glad I met you” I replied. It was a strong feeling of friendship and we loved each other and the whole world surrounding us. The sunrise was creeping up and was the most exhilarating experience. The slow peak stage of the pill was creeping down but in a warm loving feel. I felt good, I felt cared for. Someone out there is looking after me and it was the love of the world.

  We all crowded around the ‘in’ couch area of the chill out terrace and sat around not saying anything. We all were sipping water and munching on a fruit platter but looked at each with our eyes half open but with love. We were coming down. But it was smooth. Nobody felt like talking. We were all just taking in the atmosphere, the sunshine and the thumping bass from inside the warehouse. It was such an amazing feeling that we could have had such a great night. It was just all about love. The love between the people, the love of the music, the love of the atmosphere and the love of the drugs.

  I arrive home, staggering inside at around midday. My housemates were in the lounge and said “well, you must have had a big night?” “Shut up, can’t talk, coming down” I murmured. Then I walked into my bedroom and slammed the door hoping it would keep the whole fucked up world out of my sight until I recover.

  After a few days I was back to normal but craving for a night again just like that one. I was not craving the drugs, it was just the atmosphere I adored. So the next few months it was a bit of a routine of working at the salon during the day, working at the cafe for a few hours in the evening and then going out either to a club or rave party. I kind of almost forgot that I was gay and didn’t care. All that mattered now was the rave scene and lived for it.

  Emily was keen to attend one of the raves I had talking about so I took her to one held at the Melbourne Docklands, it was called ‘Hardware’. It was a huge event and Willy was having a pre-party at his apartment so we went their first. Emily was excited about this as this was also going to be her first experience of taking an ecstasy pill. We ended up having the best time. Dancing all night non-stop, hugging each other with unconditional love, sipping raspberry water and eventually sitting outside enjoying the sunrise reflecting on the night of our lives. The come down was as smooth as silk and we all felt so good, so relaxed yet energetic but it just felt bloody good to be alive.

  After a while we got sick of the rave scene and thought there was more to life with partying all night and dealing with the tribulations of coming down all week. Emily found the come-down stage very difficult to deal with. I felt guilty about it as it was me who introduced her to the happy pill. So we started engaging on weekend trip that we dubbed as ‘family fun days’. They were trips we took on a Saturday or Sunday just doing what we called ‘normal stuff’ to get away from the party circuit. We took day trips in Emily’s car to silly places like Gumbuya Park, a kid’s mini Aussie bush version of Disneyland, and Fairy Park. Also trips to Ikea and shopping along Acland Street in St Kilda. Basically, you name it, we done it. They were so much fun and we always laughed and laughed. She was incredibly fun. She also used to send me funny letters and collages of humorous artwork which was clever and so funny and I felt flattered that she took so much effort to make me happy. I cherish it and I still have these letters to this day and sometimes look at them now to remind me of those good old days.

  But mysteriously our relationship began to fade out. Emily made excuses that she could not make it to any more day trips. She also started to speak about how much she hated the rave scene and wished she had never gone to one. I felt responsible for the way she was feeling. I thought she might be ill or just busy as she just started a new high pressure job. So I was not sure what was going on. Weeks went by and she refused to return my phone calls and then suddenly her phone was disconnected. I was baffled and began to wonder if I had upset her. I really didn’t know what happened and why she did not want to see me anymore. I felt rejected. It brought back memories of when I was a loner in my first year of high school and felt alone. To this day, I don’t know where Emily is. I wish I did as I love her a lot and I miss her. I hope she’s okay. But since then I have had to move on.

  One night at a club called ‘Filter’, which was an underground techno club, I happened to bump into a girl I used to work with at the cafe in the city that I worked for a time. We were both surprised to see each other there as the rave or techno scene in Melbourne at that time was still quite small and intimate. Her name was Simone and was quite a stunner. Long blonde hair, long legs, basically she would walk into a room and make it glow. We were chatting for hours in the club and I don’t know how it happened we ended up becoming an item. I think about it know and I really had no idea why all of a sudden I went straight or was it bisexual or was I confused? I just don’t know and don’t think I will ever know. But we also ended up moving into an apartment together and were like a married couple. I can’t even recall if I still was attracted to men at that time. It was a complete blur. However I think the reality is that I was kidding myself. I hated being stereotyped as gay that I was trying to hide it.

  Not long after I moved in with Simone, which was also in Carlton, I decided to give up the hairdressing apprenticeship. I was over it. It was a very spontaneous decision. In fact I didn’t even think about it, I just stopped turning up for work. I didn’t really want to be a hairdresser, I just saw the glamour in it. My life was all about the rave scene and wanted to live, eat and breathe it. I also knew I need more stability in my life. Just for the security side of things. I felt so guilty sometimes about my party habits that I had to find some sort of cover. Once I quit the salon, I remained at the cafe but doing a few hours here and there. But I also wanted to keep on partying. So I got the best of both worlds and I enrolled in a 2 week DJ course
and applied for a degree in tourism management studies at RMIT. The DJ course was short and part time and the degree at RMIT was also part time so I could do both simultaneously. I started the course at RMIT very quickly as it the time of last minute enrolments and got accepted. I started doing only a few subjects being Japanese, marketing and travel IT systems. That was enough to keep me busy during the day. It was also enough to keep me from guilt. I was doing something worthwhile even though I was a bit of a wild child at night.

  I really got involved in uni. It was great fun and made a lot new friends which we soon ended up partying at night as well. I now started to have a good group I can call friends. I had my uni friends and my rave scene friends. It was like my ‘day’ friends and my ‘night’ friends. After al while at home though, Simone was getting more and more attached to me. It was like I became her possession. One day she told me those three word that I dreaded, “I love you”. I just could not bring myself to say it back. I consider our relation strange as I don’t think I ever had any sexual attraction to her. It was more a superficial thing. It is also very selfish and I am ashamed to admit it. I could not live in denial anymore as I needed the sexual desire of a man. I was gay. I had to break it off with her and she was crushed. The break was messy although I was so apologetic to her but it just did not help her mental state. She claimed I used her. Perhaps she was right.

  It was not long that I found new housemates to live with, again in Carlton. I think I had some sort of attraction to Carlton, funny about that. They were a gay couple named Paul and Timothy. Paul was down to earth but Timothy was very ‘queenie’ or I should say flamboyant. He also was a very pretentious actor and that was something I despised. This was due to the fact that he did drag shows in clubs at night. I didn’t let that affect my decision to move as it was a decent place and I needed to place to live fairly quickly after the break up with Simone.

  I grew a friendship with Paul, more so than Timothy. Paul and I ended up chatting one day, like any other day and we started talking about the topic of cruising. Being still quite new to the scene, I had no idea what this meant. Cruising is a term that gay guys use for ‘areas where gay guys try and pick up other guys’. The most notorious of ‘cruising’ areas were places like ‘beats’, or public toilets where men loiter. I found that disgusting, and still do. But then Paul mentioned another place that fascinated me. They were called ‘sauna’s’. These were established gay men’s saunas. These were basically a sex on site premise, but a legitimate business. He explained that sauna’s are one of the most popular methods of meeting other men, or getting easy sex. The intention was to walk around a maze of cubicles wearing nothing but a towel around your hips and look for the talent. The idea didn’t seem too bad so I asked me to take to one to see what it was like. When we went, I was nervous. As soon as you walk in, you get instant attention and all the men lay their eyes on you, checking you out. This was a meat market to the max. You had your own locked where you undressed, whilst a few men were hiding behind lockers checking you out. Then you put a towel around your hips and wander around. Paul showed me around the place, he seemed to know the place like the back of his hand. I soon started to relax. To me the place looked like a smorgasbord of men on a platter and all you had to do is choose. There was something for everyone. I was also surprised that it looked like a little gay world within a big city. Along with the mazes of cruising cubicles was a spa, a couple of cinema’s playing gay porn and a bar. You could spend hours in there, it was a gay men’s playground. I loved it. This was a place where you had no issue with sex, as anonymous as you like, no guilt and no pressure. Just fun. But as I was new to this type of venue, it was evident that the other men knew this. I was ‘fresh meat’. All I had to do was choose and I had control. This was the type of sexual experience I was looking for. No strings.

  As time went on with my new housemates, which was in an apartment in Carlton, I discovered that Tim had an anger management issue. Paul seemed to be in control of his temper, always trying to tame him. I think it was Tim’s mental instability so I don’t think I could critical of this. I just never got involved in it and just accepted it. One night they asked me to go out to them to the infamous club called ‘The peel’. I was a bit apprehensive as I was committed to the rave scene and really hated the gay scene. But I went anyway, just for a few drinks anyway. Once we arrived there we hit the dance floor pretty much immediately and caught the eye of this handsome muscular man across the room. He was standing there with a drink in his hand and was looking around me to see if in fact he was looking at someone else. But he was looking at me. Then he put his drink down and started to approach me slowly as he was dancing. I was nervous. He looked hot. He introduced himself as Anthony. I tend to attract many people with their name starting with ‘A’, and I think there is a reason for that. Before you knew it, we ended up back at my house in one night of intense lust beyond recognition. I will leave out the explicit details as you can get the picture.

  Our one night of lust led to Tony and I dating for a few weeks. We became inseparable and we mutually agreed for Anthony to move in with me. Tim and Paul didn’t mind this, mainly because he would be paying some more rent that was a good thing. Plus the shared expenses. Anthony and I just wanted to be a couple and were really a close couple starting to fall in love. But the lust, that was climbing to love started to get a bit crowded. Anthony began to get a bit possessive. I worked at night and there was no real set time I get home as we closed the cafe when the last of the customers left. Anthony always used to quiz me on why I was so late getting home. Asking me questions like, “Who were you with?” “Did you go to a beat?”, all sorts of insecure crazy stuff. He was very paranoid and insecure and as time went on his paranoia became obsessive and then he started to physically abuse me. But he never did it in front of my housemates and was the nicest possible guy in front of my friends. I used to turn up for work with bruises and cuts on my face and I started to run out of excuses. The situation reminded me too much of the abuse of my stepfather and refused to go on like this. So when Anthony was at work I left a note on the bed stating that I wanted to end our relationship and ask him to leave the house. I went to work and an hour later he rang me crying his eyes out. I felt sorry for him but I said I cannot take this abuse anymore. So I arrived home and both my housemates came running down the hallway and barged into my room and said “How could you do this to Anthony, he is totally a mess!” “You don’t understand, he hurt me, he hurt me a lot and I can’t take this anymore” I cried. “Get out!” Paul screamed. “What?...I haven’t done anything...I haven’t done anything wrong, I am the victim here!” I cried again. “Bullshit! I want you out of here ASAP! Get it?” Paul replied. I took a deep breath and thought it was no use. Once again I had been manipulated by another monster. So I started to look for another place to live. Again.

  ………………………………………

  As time went on I was getting more and more involved with my studies at university and doing more hours at work in the cafe and built up my reputation this fashionable area of one of the best coffee makers in Melbourne. It may sound feeble, but in Melbourne it was a big statement that had to earnt. I also found new housemates pretty quickly. I ended up moving in with another gay married couple named Peter and Adam. They were an older couple but I really got along with them and that’s all I really wanted as I wanted no more catches, just a comfortable place to live. This time the house was perfect and was located in North Melbourne, so it was closer to the city and my bedroom was massive which was a bonus. It was also at around about this time that my mother had decided to move interstate with her boyfriend to the outback somewhere in the northern part of remote Western Australia. My mum’s boyfriend had a job offer there and mum wanted to look for a job whilst she was there too. As my brother was still living with mum at the time, he also went with her. I never questioned her decision to make such a big life changing decision but I always supported her. She needed that supp
ort, not to be putting her down. I respected her decision and it was not my place to question what she was doing. But the distance never became an issue, we always were in contact, well, at least once a fortnight, not daily.

  A few months later, I think it was, I can’t recall the exact timing, my mum, her boyfriend and Sam ended up moving to Queensland. For the same reason as mum’s boyfriend got transferred via his company he was working for. So I guess you could say, mum followed him, Sam really had no choice in the matter, and so he followed too. I never questioned this, although I couldn’t help but feel a little concerned that mum seemed to be chasing after the man she was seeing. Perhaps she was seeking another opportunity to settle down. Either way, it is none of my business, whatever my mother wants to do then I will support her. I had my own life here in Melbourne and I was not going anywhere. But now I had an excuse to take a trip to Queensland every now and then!

  Anyway, I was also getting to the stage where I was getting sick of going to raves all the time and my new housemates inspired me to find myself in the gay scene again. As I started to relax and feel like myself again I became a lot more focussed and started having more of a direction in life. I soon started to knock back offers of doing a DJ set at upcoming rave parties and eventually stopped going to raves altogether. I wanted to feel myself on my feet again but most of all my sexuality. It was kind of like, during my rave scene days, sex did not really exist. Sex does not really have a place in the rave scene. It’s all about the music and the recreational drugs. It’s a bit sad. I was also sick of the ‘coming down’ stages as well and thought there must be more to life than this. So for a while I enjoyed the odd dinner or two with my housemates, neglecting my ‘rave’ friends.