Making Beds in Brothels

by Adam Brock

  Before her ill-fated alliance with the House of Windsor, Lady Diana Spencer, had lived next door in the Coleherne Mansions. Moving into a large flat with some of her equally aristocratic ‘Sloan Ranger’ friends, it was rumoured that Diana visited the gay bars incognito with her coterie of high-profile gay friends. It seems unlikely that she would have popped next door for a pint and a bag of pork scratchings, unless as has been suggested by some, she donned her man drag first. The Coleherne was hostile towards women, it was a men’s bar, and the Warwick across the road was much more democratic anyway. Diana soon moved up the road to better digs at Kensington Palace, but remained a regular at the Earl’s Court gym, a place, incidentally, utilised by many of the body-focused boys of La Casa. Although she had died a couple of years before my arrival, the local shops still had yellowing pictures of the ‘People’s Princess’ taped inside their windows, and bars had framed photos of her. The hysteria of her tragic death, in 1997, hadn’t yet fully dissipated.

  The Coleherne was a busy bar, packed most nights, and drew its custom from all over London, from all strata of society, so it’s unsurprising that the criminal world passed through its doors. Drugs were easily procured and ‘business deals’ took place among those involved in the black economies: illegal work for those claiming state benefits, the purchase and sale of merchandise of debatable origin, and the large-scale sale of under-the-counter cigarettes, thereby avoiding the high duty the British government put on them. Some guy would usually sidle up to me as I went in, “Adam you wanna buy twenty Marlboro Lights, £3.50 a pack? Or I got some Gauloises, £4?”. I had stopped smoking the lethally strong French cigarettes, as they were destroying my throat, but I’d buy four packs of Marlboro, two each for Mitchell and myself.

  The lads of La Casa propped up the far-left end of the bar as you entered, at its narrowest point. The six of us would sit, looking shell-shocked. We were usually quiet for a while after finishing work. Madonna, always the first to speak at any given opportunity, would wave over the barman, “Double Vodka tonic for six… and hold the tonic!” cackling to herself at her joke as the shots were poured. We would throw back the first ‘freshener’, then order rounds for the period of the happy hour, taking advantage of the two for one deal. Within an hour or two we were well on our way to oblivion. Mitchell would be on the Jameson’s and coke, while I would drink pints of Stella with Danny, and somebody would have bought some ‘Charlie’. Usually we pitched in and bought a few grams of cocaine between us, popping into the toilets to snort the white powder through rolled-up £20 notes, with Danny, only half-jokingly, yelling, “Bring back that fucking twennie pound note Patrick, ya bleeding tea leaf!”. By ten o’clock the mood was usually festive and we’d cross the road over to the Warwick where the downstairs opened as a nightclub after eleven and we could dance until 2am. We were a wild bunch; vicious to outsiders. If someone offended us we would turn on them as a pack, our tongues being such effective weapons, honed to perfection in the cruel and competitive environment of La Casa, that there was no need to resort to physical violence.

  Our conversation probably seemed shallow and vapid to outsiders. We didn’t go in for grand existential narratives but kept to very safe subjects: fashion, men, money, gossip, the nightclubs. That’s not to say there wasn’t an understanding that much was left unsaid. Occasionally you got a hint of exactly where we had come from or, more accurately, what we were running from. “Madonna,” I asked once, “why don’t you take your money (she saved her earnings religiously) and move back to Lithuania? With all that cash you could build a house and live like a queen.” Looking momentarily glum, she responded, “Are you crazy? There is nothing for me there, just a village with pigs… no work, no hope. We are like gypsies, no money, nothing. The men just drink all day.” It was hard to imagine this deluxe, flawlessly constructed, almost genderless, god-goddess, with her perfect skin and body, being the product of a squalid upbringing among the pigs in rural Lithuania. Yet here she was draped in Gucci, with a Rolex on her wrist and diamonds on her fingers, looking every inch the metropolitan courtesan she was.

  We would get into long boozy all-day benders at the bar. Carrying on from the night before, we would sometimes be at the Coleherne for opening. Danny was a reflective drunk. “When I get enough fucking money, I’m getting out of the fucking job; it’s killing me. I have to sit all day with those twats in that fucking knocking shop, I hate the lot of them.” Implicit in that was that we Brits were excluded from his ire. It was the Brazilians, chatting all day in Portuguese, that really wound him up. I knew what he meant. Sitting in La Casa all day every day, being excluded from the conversation and unsure if you were actually the topic of conversation, added to the already high level of tension.

  I remember when the when the Queen Mother passed away, in 2001, and the news flashed on the television. Some of the Brazilian guys, unaware of the veneration in which this elderly lady was held, were less than respectful. Quizzing us about what the fuss was over the death of a woman over a hundred years of age. When some of lads started sniggering and suggested the television should be turned back onto MTV, Danny blew a gasket. With tears in his eyes he drew himself up to his full, albeit not very tall, height and roared, “Have some fucking respect!”. Picking up one squealing culprit by his neck, he started shaking him. It took a lot of soothing to calm him down. Danny held the royal family in great reverence and woe betide those who forgot it.

  Danny, like me, was poor inner-city English, from South London, and he was tough, sensitive and intelligent. “What you been up to, Princess?”, he often gently interrogated me about where I wandered on my long days off in London. It passed the time. “I walked over to Highgate Cemetery from Camden yesterday, and visited the grave of Marx… It was a long walk, but the views over London were stunning.” He was always curious and quizzed me or added snippets he knew. He’d get morose as he drank. Not angry like Mitchell, but it ate him up to think about what he was. Most of us cultivated an ability to kid ourselves about the reality of being a prostitute. Spencer dwelt on it, brooding, “How am I gonna get out of the fucking mess…? What’s going to happen to me?” Danny’s parents were drug addicts and he was raised in foster homes around the capital. I would listen with sympathy and try to soothe his nerves, although not often with success. Reading between the lines, I got a sense that he had been badly neglected and therefore his anxiety and insecurity weren’t unfounded. He had had periods of employment, “kosher jobs” he called them, in construction or working as a parcel delivery man in the city.

  The physical nature of his employment had given him a muscular build, and someone he knew from the clubs – Danny was clearly gay for all his muscles and working-class demeanour – told him how he could make fast money, no questions asked. He wasn’t interested initially but, on losing his job, he called his friend and that was his introduction into prostitution. That was two years previously. We were lovers for a while, nothing intense. Neither of us was really capable of anything physical, usually just falling asleep. The wanted human contact acted as a salve to our bruised psyches. Like all things in our lives, it was complicated by the job, and Danny had an older ‘patron’ he lived with in one of the mansion flats nearby, so nothing was ever going to develop further. Years later I heard he had got out of the business, eventually marrying his ‘patron’ and becoming the manager of a restaurant. Then, tragically, his demons overtook him, he became seriously mentally ill, and killed himself.

  I loved it at the Coleherne. There was great familiarity between us all there and rarely any of the usual tensions you get in city pubs. Me and Mitchell treated it like a second home for a long time. Birthdays, deaths, relationships – both ending and beginning – were all celebrated in that venerable old pub. About ten years after I first started drinking there, the Coleherne came under new management who swept everything away, turning it into just another expensive gastropub, and removing what was a valuable community hub for so many who had suffered so much in the area
. To my great sadness on returning one year, and in one final act of whitewashing of what had been, I found they had changed its name.

  Chapter 21

  I was now travelling back and forth between London and Amsterdam. I worked in the brothels of Germany for a time. Those were dreadful places where you were locked in, twenty-four hours a day, full of boys who were robbing each other. Those grim places were worse than the streets, at least the streets had escape routes. You were forced to sit at the bar clipping, which meant selling ‘cocktails’ and what purported to be Champagne at massively inflated prices for a small commission. I left Germany quickly, returning to safer and more familiar stomping grounds in London and Amsterdam.

  The years flew, and I would spend more and more time in Manchester. I was winding down. There is an old saying about prostitutes, two great years, two okay years and two shit years. That really sums up my experience of professional sex-work. However, I stretched it out much longer than the norm.

  Aged around twenty-five, I made my first real attempt to settle down. I had a flat in Manchester, work had slowed down and my heart wasn’t in it anymore. The money wasn’t enough to justify what I was feeling. I was beginning to feel disgusted with myself, with my world and life. I would do a couple of customers a day then refuse to stand up when the light went on. This was probably the last time I could still have reasonably extricated myself from that lifestyle and remade a life for myself. It wasn’t to be.

  The flat was a disaster. I couldn’t cope. I didn’t know how to pay bills or clean and decorate. I struggled with the simplest household management. Half of the charm of living in a hotel room was that everything was provided, I just paid the bill, and even the cleaning was done by magic.

  Years later, on returning to education, I was diagnosed as being dyslexic and dyspraxic. These conditions both have a massive impact on your organisational skills so in retrospect, alongside my psychological state, it was unsurprising that I couldn’t manage. Although I tried valiantly for years to keep on top of it, my arrears grew so bad and the place got into such a squalid state that I abandoned it in the end. Just walked out and left it. If I’m honest it had never felt as much like home as the Trebor had anyway.

  I continued to work intermittently for the next five years, but it was now largely out of need. I tried settling into civilian life, even having a job for a few years, but I struggled with the people, with the routine. I am ashamed to admit I stole from my employers. I didn’t know any better. Anyway, it was a disaster and I walked out of that too.

  I ended up returning to London for short periods to get extra cash when life on the dole became too monotonous, that is when I couldn’t scam cash out of people any other way. I could still earn enough to make it worthwhile. I looked much younger than my thirty years, had kept myself trim and was still presentable although I hated it by now, hated everything about it. I despised the people and hated myself.

  As the years passed, I lost one friend after another, people I knew from the early days and who I regarded as family. One year I came back and Patrick had vanished, the next year Danny had left. Mitchell eventually got sacked for turning up plastered and aggressive one too many times. Madonna moved into private escorting. In the end it was only me and Maxim; the sole survivors of those early days. And Maxim was mainly working on the door, his tall gaunt figure and long drawn-out vowels echoing through the house. I really missed them. They had made life bearable, even when it hadn’t been going well. Things were slowly going downhill, and I was entering the end game.

  I had been up on a visit for a few months because the work hadn’t been brilliant. I was aged thirty-one, a veteran of seventeen years, and had been doing a client a day, just enough to survive on. Out of that I paid for a bed in the hostel, and got food and a few cans of beer.

  I could no longer afford the weekly rates at the Trebor. I moved around the cheap hostels, where you could buy sleep in a shared room with three or four other men for less than fifteen pounds a night. There were some on Courtfield Square, opposite the tube station, but the cheapest were at the top of the Warwick Road, near the supermarket and based in tall dusty houses that faced straight onto the busy road. They were squalid places, swelteringly hot in summer, freezing in winter, filled with Australian backpackers, ten to fifteen per room in bunkbeds. But the less money I paid, the better, and they were cheap. I didn’t complain; it was a step up from the street, and I could get some rest and take a shower.

  Suddenly, the custom stopped altogether. It didn’t trail off, it stopped dead. I had some savings, not much but enough to cover a week or so. A few days earlier I had seen Bill who had tipped me generously, more so than usual. I used that to pay a week in advance at the hostel I was living in. I had a very small amount of money left and was eking it out on the cheapest, most filling food I could afford. Eventually it ran out.

  I ended up walking the streets at night without any place to sleep. I sometimes got a few fitful hours on a bench or in Victoria Coach station. I had no money and nowhere to go. In the morning I washed in the Earl’s Court library toilets, and sit there till La Casa opened. This was the worst time in my life. I was freezing cold, hungry and rapidly losing the will to live, thinking it might be easier to just end it all. I often sat on London Embankment weighing up whether to throw myself into the deep fast-flowing river and be done with it. I can still feel the wind that rolled in off the Thames in the early hours, so cold it burned your face, and how no matter how much you walked your feet never warmed up. I struggled to find water to drink, something we take for granted. I’m not ashamed to admit I stole food, and rifled bins.

  One morning Maxwell met me at the door. He looked me up and down, pulling his face into a caricature of sympathy, “Awww, ain’t tings being going very well for you Adam?” It hits me straight away, I don’t know why it hadn’t dawned on me before, Maxwell was starving me out. Exactly as I had seen him do to others many times before. I don’t know what I’d done to upset him. Possibly nothing. He may have just been waiting for the right time to stick the knife in, waiting to see me in a vulnerable condition.

  It would be pointless ever trying to work at La Casa again. He knew I knew, but I walked past him, showered and tried to muster up as much dignity as possible. What a difference from my first time here thirteen years ago. It wasn’t only me who had gone downhill, La Casa had. Its days of luxury were over. It was now just another rough West London knocking shop. A few years back Alberto had sold the upstairs and sliced the downstairs area into separate rooms, cutting the sizeable drawing room in half, and the furnishings now looked threadbare. The place was worn out, and so was I.

  That was it. I knew my life in prostitution was over. This was not how I had imagined my final day, but here it was. In the fantasy world I had inhabited for so long, I had pictured retirement at the behest of some wealthy client, Andrew perhaps, and being given an allowance and a small apartment to live my final days in retired luxury. The truth was I was knackered, in a mess and unlikely to be going anywhere but downhill. I waited for Alberto to come in with the wages and asked if he would lend me my coach fare home. He didn’t hesitate, taking two twenty-pound notes, twice as much as I had asked. He smiled at me sadly, “Go home, carino, go home.”

  I walked past Alberto waving goodbye. I saw Maxwell, his goldfish eyes rolling gleefully in the distance, and looking delighted. “How the mighty have fallen,” he seemed to mouth at me. I walked up the narrow staircase, up Levy Street and towards Earl’s Court station for the final time. I knew, as I walked away, that I wouldn’t be back; that I was walking out of that life for good.

  In retrospect I realise how foolish I had been. That life was never going to be sustainable. The good years were short and I couldn’t have realistically worked for much longer. It was far too psychologically taxing. Sooner or later I would have had to quit. It was a massively damaging way to earn my living, and its cost was high. While other people were learning skills to help maintain them throughout
their lives, I had been living in a fool’s paradise.

  I now realised how none of it had provided me with any real-life skills other than a highly-developed survival mode. And that was half the problem: for seventeen years I had been tuned in to a type of behaviour predicated on heightened risk. My needs were always immediate. The immediate need for accommodation, for money or food. I needed drink and drugs to suppress the inevitable anxiety. To preserve myself right now, in a manner I could cope, was paramount, my only concern. I had made no plans at all for the future, there had been no escape route.

  Chapter 22

  As I sat on the coach to Manchester, pulling out of Victoria Station, I was terrified. I didn’t have a clue what to do, I was thirty-one, homeless, with little work experience outside of prostitution and a non-existent resumé. I didn’t know how to find work. I wasn’t sure even how to start looking. Ten years earlier I could have relied on support from Streetwise, to help me with the practicalities of leaving sex-work, but now there was nothing. I was on my own.

  My immediate problem this time was finding somewhere to live. There was only one place I could think of to go. Mitchell, now living in his late Aunt Patricia’s three-bedroomed house would put me up for a while. I turned up at his door with nothing but the clothes on my back, and he welcomed me inside.

  Long gone was the cat faeces and stench. Mitchell had made a comfortable home for himself. He put me in one of the small bedrooms and I was grateful for the roof over my head. For the first few weeks it was fine. I signed on at the unemployment office, got some money coming in and rested for a while.