Out of the Blue

by Blue Blake

  “Glenn!!! You wouldn’t dare,” they all shot back, scandalized but hoping like hell that I would.

  “Curtain up!” I shouted. The music started and from our places in the wings we saw Sharon, Kevin, and Nicky running from the dressing rooms at breakneck speed, a trail of Benson & Hedges left in their wake. Sharon was in costume but still wearing a Marks & Spencer’s bra. She couldn’t get if off in time and so had to dance the first segment in a dirty gray nylon bra. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. I spun off the stage into the wings and into the claws of Sharon.

  “The girls said you ordered the show to start!” she screeched over the music.

  “I’m sorry,” I laughed, “It was just a joke.” She slapped my face so hard I saw stars. I was in such shock that when I heard my cue in the music my feet carried me back onto the stage to finish the rest of the number. I cried throughout the rest of it. But they were tears of anger. I should have wrung her fat little neck. I felt humiliated. This was the first time I’d been slapped in the face. The rest of the show was a blur. I don’t even remember finishing it. Sharon left immediately and was found later drunk in the rooftop bar.

  “Nobody likes me,” she cried. God, was that an understatement!

  I was fired the next day. Sharon had phoned Guy Etrange and told him I was a disruptive influence in the troupe. I went to watch the show that night, if only to glare at Sharon. But I was spotted by the management and asked to leave. The day I left all the girls cried. They all hated Damascus and said they wished they could get fired too. Karim came to the airport with me and before I climbed on the plane he gave me a gold ring. He told me he would come to London. I wasn’t sure if I wanted that but just smiled and kissed him goodbye. Six of the girls had also come to see me off. They cried and kissed me and gave me little mementos. We had become so close in such a short period of time. This was something I would grow to love about performing . . . community.

  I arrived back in London with no job, no prospects and 50,000 francs in my wallet. I felt like the world was my oyster.

  I had been back from Damascus for a week and was frittering away my francs on bread and cheese. I needed a job. I was also looking for somewhere to live. I had been renting a room in the apartment of a guy who was a headmaster. Every Friday night he would dress in leather and prowl the sordid leather world of gay London. He would wear a dog collar and skintight leather pants that laced up the sides of his bony legs. I had never lived in such close proximity to a leather guy before. His drawers were full of dildos and butt plugs and leather paddles. I know this because when he was at school I would forage through his things, just out of curiosity—kinky underwear and porno movies, fascinating for a twenty-one-year-old with an overactive libido.

  He also had piles of porno magazines. Not the good American kind, but the badly shot British ones. All brick laborers with their trousers around their ankles, showing off their uncut wet looking knobs for the camera. I couldn’t stop jerking off and looking at them. My favorite was called Zipper—lots of meaty guys with the occasional bodybuilder thrown in for good measure. They reminded me of the bouncers at The Palais in Nottingham.

  In one of these magazines, I found an ad for strippers in a male-only club in Soho. I tore the ad out and reached for the phone.

  “Hello. Is this Boys-a-Go-Go?” I asked.

  “It is,” replied a voice that definitely wasn’t boyish . . . more reptilian. I explained I was looking for a job and that I was a trained dancer.

  “You gotta get naked,” said Snake Lips.

  “I could do that.”

  “Come for an audition . . . 2 p.m. sharp. Sixty-five Dean Street. Be clean.” Be clean . . . what the hell did that mean? Did they employ strippers who weren’t clean? I rifled through the drawers in the headmaster’s bedroom and selected a leather jockstrap and biker’s cap, very Village People. I threw them into a bag and ran down to the local tube station, Highbury & Islington, and caught a train to Piccadilly Circus.

  In the mid-eighties, Soho was full of sex shops and seedy bars. All the shop windows contained blow-up dolls with yellow nylon hair and gaping, painted plastic mouths. Trotting through Soho I ignored the whistles of the East End Barrow Boys selling tangerines and suddenly I stumbled upon the rat hole that was to showcase my stripping talents . . . Boys-a-Go-Go. What a bleeding dump. Surely this couldn’t be the right place. A grotty shop front with dusty string beads hanging in the window.

  “Are you going to be a stripper?” I turned to face a skinny kid with shoulder-length greasy hair and a lazy eye standing in the doorway.

  “Hmmm . . . I was thinking about it,” I muttered, wondering if it wasn’t too late to back out.

  “Oooh, you’d be fab. I’ve been doing it for six months now . . . well, not counting the month I had to take off to get rid of my anal warts.” He grabbed me by my arm. “My name’s Gavin, but I changed it to Rock. Ya’ know, like Rock Hudson. People tell me I look like him.” I thought Gavin looked as much like Rock Hudson as the undertakers’ dog, but I kept quiet and smiled.

  “Oooh, you’ve got a gorgeous smile. Wilbert’s gonna love you,” he said.

  “Who’s Wilbert?” I asked, suddenly realizing that “Rock’s” fingers on my arm were sticky.

  “Oh, he runs the place. Come on, I’ll introduce you, you’ll get the job if you let him eat your arse in the basement.”

  Well . . . I thought perhaps Wilbert would look like one of the Barrow Boys selling tangerines, in which case I wouldn’t mind a good rimming in the basement to relax me.

  Rock dragged me through heavy, dusty curtains that must have given the old age pensioners asthma. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I heard a voice say, “Well, well, well, what have we got here?” I stifled the scream in my throat. Who would have thought an Orc from Lord of the Rings would be running a strip joint in Soho?

  “He’s here to be a stripper,” said Rock.

  “Yeah?” asked Wilbert the Ork. “Lucky for him Gustav phoned in sick. Syphilis again. You’re on in five minutes. Do you have a g-string or do you wanna wear one of Gustav’s old ones? It’s not clean, but you could run it under the tap in the back.”

  “I brought my own,” I stammered, holding up my borrowed leather thong.

  “Oooh, fancy! The queens love a bit of leather,” said Wilbert, licking his cracked lips.

  “Don’t you want to know if I can dance?” I asked. Rock and Wilbert looked at each other and broke into laughter.

  “Who fucking cares? You’ve got a knob, haven’t you? Now get on that fucking stage, we’ve got a full house. Show him where to go, Rock.”

  Rock grabbed me with his sticky fingers and led me through more dusty curtains to a tiny room decorated with pictures of girls ripped out of various porno magazines.

  “The other strippers use these to get hard,” he said. “’Course if you’re having a problem getting hard, I could blow you.”

  The thought of greasy-head getting his halitosis all over my pristine cock made Mr. Winky go from nine inches to three in a microsecond.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  “Well please yourself,” hissed Rock. “You’re not that special. Get your leather on and when the music starts up, go through these drapes and you’re on.”

  I quickly undressed and got into costume. I use the term costume very loosely.

  “Gentlemen, do we have a treat for you this afternoon! For the first time Boys-a-Go-Go proudly presents . . . Hunter!”

  Hunter? Who the hell was Hunter?

  Rock poked his head through the asthma drape and hissed.

  “That’s you, cuntface! You’re on!” All of a sudden, I heard the strains of Tom Jones singing, “What’s New Pussycat.” I opened the lurex backdrop and walked onto a stage that was four foot square and covered in lumpy shag pile. The audience consisted of six rows of cinema seats full of old men in raincoats with their cocks out, jerking off in anticipation. I once read someplace that the walrus has the ugliest penis on
the planet . . . they got it wrong.

  I started to gyrate and the more I gyrated, the more the ghouls beat off. Now here’s the strangest thing. I actually started to get into it and before I knew it, I was doing the splits up the side of the wall, bending over backwards and catching pound notes in my teeth as they were thrown on the stage. Wilbert had come to have a letch at me, presumably to see if I had a knob after all. I could see him through the gloom madly applying Chap-Stick with one hand and jerking off with the other. My thirty-minute set came to an end and I bowed deeply to scattered, very scattered, applause.

  I exited the stage and Rock pushed past me to do his thirty minutes, wearing underwear that I noticed had a HUGE skid mark.

  “You got the job,” said Wilbert. “Four sets a day, five pounds a set and you keep your tips.” I was thrilled. I would be making fifty pounds a day I reckoned. I whistled all the way home. I found the pervy headmaster waiting for me. He had discovered his leather thong was missing. I was caught red-handed. He told me I had a week to find somewhere else to live. I didn’t care. I was going to be the next Gypsy Rose Lee and everything was coming up roses.

  After a month however, I was totally sick of stripping. The club was a dump and strippers came and went by the day. Someone was always being fired for arriving late or too drugged up to perform. In those days I didn’t even smoke pot, but I was a Bacardi and Coke fiend. I would drink it by the gallon and must have constantly smelled of rum. I had fled the headmaster’s apartment and was now living in the East End of London, with a group of guys: “Dirty” Bob, David, and the two Chrises. We all shared a huge house with an Alsatian called Zeppelin that we hardly ever walked. When you did walk him, he was so ecstatic to be outside he would giddily bite people, willy-nilly, to show his enthusiasm. Needless to say, I started prowling around with him, scaring all the East End lads. I would eye up some rough piece of trade in Doc Martins and when he started calling me a “fucking queer” Zeppelin would growl and show off his big white gnashers. Sometimes I’d eye up an East End lad and Zeppelin would end up tied outside the local public toilet for an hour.

  The house was owned by Dirty Bob and his ex-boyfriend “Camp” David, a huge queen. Bob lived in the basement with a sling, his poppers, and a tub of Crisco. He never smiled because all of his teeth had fallen out from taking speed for decades. David would go to the local leather bar, the Market Tavern, wearing chaps and a butt plug. They hadn’t had sex with each other for years. Instead, they bought an enormous house in the East End and took in lodgers. The two Chrises and I were the latest batch of innocents.

  Blond Chris had been educated at Eton. He was twenty-one and dating Geoff Posner, who produced all the Victoria Wood specials. Victoria Wood is an extremely successful British comedienne who made a fortune by commenting on the eccentric way British people live their lives. Geoff was short, fat and hairy but I wanted him because of his position of power at the BBC. I always fancied hanging out with Victoria Wood and listening to her opine on whether crimpolene was a more durable fabric than corduroy and the pleasure of draft excluders. In fact, years later I would date Paul Cianni who directed and produced the BBC show Top of the Pops and who bore more than a passing resemblance to Geoff Posner. Then of course, I got to stick it to Chris who was hanging out with Victoria Wood while I was being wined and dined by Whitney Houston and Jelly Bean Benitez.

  Brunette Chris was a stunner and ran the weekly gay night every Sunday at Legend’s on Piccadilly Circus. He had meticulous hair and knew more about hair products than John Frieda. I still can’t apply hair wax without thinking of him. So the five of us were living in a five-bedroom house in the East End and I was boyfriendless until one night into the strip club wandered Godfrey Rayner. Godfrey was short, stocky, Jewish and Vice President of Guerlain Perfumes. The moment I noticed him standing there in his cashmere raincoat watching me dance, I fell in lust. Godfrey was forty; I was twenty. He took me to Marbella, Spain for a week and when I came back to the ratty strip hole I had been fired because Gustav the Syphilitic had returned to claim his job. I cried on Godfrey’s cashmere shoulder, and then he said the magic words: “I’m moving to New York City, come and live with me in America.” He didn’t have to ask twice.

  I said goodbye to the seedy strip club and the crappy East End. The only one who was sad to see me go was Zeppelin the dog, who I heard after I left went crazy and bit off Dirty Bob’s nose after Bob tried to make him sniff poppers.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I HAD NEVER BEEN TO AMERICA, let alone NYC, and was bursting with excitement the moment I stepped off the plane. While I had seen NYC depicted in many film and TV shows I wasn’t prepared for what a huge sexy city Manhattan was. Driving into Manhattan from JFK Airport my breath was literally taken away by the bold skyline that seemed to claw its way into the night sky. I felt deep down this was going to be the city of my dreams and I had an overwhelming sense that finally I had come home.

  Godfrey had given up his job at Guerlain and was going into partnership with an old friend of his who owned a florist business on the Lower West Side. He had rented us an amazing two-bedroom apartment on Gramercy Park. In spite of the excitement of this new beginning, things were hard for me. I had no work permit and Godfrey didn’t want me to go back to stripping, so money was tight. Every day I scoured the local newspaper for jobs that a twenty-year-old British boy could do that wouldn’t offend Godfrey. That didn’t leave me with many options. All was not lost, however, as we had great sex and played house. While Godfrey was at work I baked cherry pies, his favorite. But I needed to make my own money. I had started working at an early age and perhaps it was my lower class northern upbringing but I had a strong work ethic and I needed a bloody job.

  One morning I saw an ad in the local paper for selling your blood for medical experiments. I called up the company, which was based just outside Manhattan, and went for an interview. I was told I would be living in a facility with twenty other guys from Monday to Friday. We were allowed home every weekend. We would be given a drug daily and once a week we would have blood drawn to see how it affected us physiologically. At the end of the six-week trial we would be free to go and paid 3,000 dollars. I decided to do it. I said goodbye to Godfrey and moved into the facility. Me and nineteen black guys. They considered me a rare exotic creature: British and white. There were five rooms with four of us in a room. Every morning they would inject us with a chemical and we would then spend the rest of the day eating and watching television. We weren’t allowed outside. I watched The Facts of Life twice a day for six weeks. I became addicted. Was Joe a lesbian? Would Natalie ever get a date?

  In the medical clinic we wore regulation blue hospital pajamas, like prison inmates. Thank God blue was a good color for me; it could have been tangerine, which looks great on black flesh but not on pale, skinny me. You were allowed to use the phone for an hour a day, and I would chat with Godfrey about how bored I was and how I missed him and a bottle of cheap wine, and not necessarily in that order.

  My first weekend back, Godfrey bought me a gallon of chardonnay and all the ingredients to bake a cherry pie and tried to have sex with me. Immediately I drank the wine, threw the fruit down the garbage disposal and headed for “The Mineshaft.” I should have guessed that this was the beginning of the end for Godfrey and me. The Mineshaft was an infamous sex club in Manhattan in the early ’80s. Situated in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, it was a warren of tunnels and rooms where every deviant act known to man occurred. You could get fisted, pissed on, or just plain fucked while the music pounded. The place smelled of Crisco and poppers and assholes . . . a little like Dirty Bob’s bedroom back in the East End of London. I was a kid and curious but more interested in watching than getting involved.

  “Do you like what you see?” a rough voice said to me in the darkness.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Suck my cock,” Rough Voice said. He pushed me to my knees and I heard him unzip his leather pants. He held a bottle of popp
ers under my nose and I breathed in heavily. The world spun round as I took his enormous cock into my mouth. It dripped with pre-cum while he held the back of my head and slowly fucked my mouth. I felt his dick swell up and suddenly he was flooding my mouth with man-goo. He pulled away, zipped up his pants and was gone. I was left kneeling on the floor, choking, with a belly full of cum and an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  When I got home at 5 a.m. Godfrey was asleep on the couch. It was definitely over for us. I hated him for making me sell my blood and he hated me for being a financial burden on him. I returned to the clinic for the next five weeks, picked up my check for 3,000 dollars and caught an Air India flight back to London.

  While standing in line for my economy ticket boarding card, surrounded by turbans and the pungent scent of Indian spices, I reflected on my brief stay in Manhattan. Apart from flogging my blood and breaking up with Godfrey I knew in my heart of hearts I would return to the city that had held so much promise upon my arrival. The film on the plane was The Man with the Golden Gun dubbed into Hindi. I wept into my chicken vindaloo, missing Manhattan already.

  I arrived back in London wearing a cheap leather suit that I had bought in the garment district of Manhattan. My only other possessions were what I could fit into a suitcase and a gallon of Bacardi from duty-free. I went to see my best friend Paul Shipley who was living in a house on Muswell Hill. Well, a squat really. He shared it with a variety of sordid characters but he had his own room with no heating. I had met Paul when I had been living with Dirty Bob and Zeppelin. We had bonded one night over a Marks & Spencer’s frozen lasagna and a quarter tab of acid. Paul’s dark features were the perfect counterpart to my blonde hair and blue eyes and I sensed from the moment we met we would be lifelong friends. I was right.

  Paul loved Bacardi and Coke more than I did and that night whilst we warmed our cockles over a small candle in his cramped room he said to me, “So what are you going to do now?”