‘That has AIDS in it too.’
‘You mean HIV.’
‘That’s what I said.’
We sit down on the blanket and study the brochure. The Apothecaress pulls a bottle of Vichy sunscreen from her bag and dabs each of her moles individually. Then she smears her birthmarks with the Vichy 60.
‘And girls: no facials!’
‘And no rubbing cocks against your face if you’ve shaved less than four hours before – micro-abrasions, you know…’
‘And don’t lube your arse with Nivea, because it causes microincisions in the condom…’
‘And no brushing your teeth before giving a blowjob! That causes micro-incisions, too…’
‘No giving blowjobs at all: you’ll come"into contact with AIDS through your teeth, and through the cuts on your chin from shaving; you’ll come into contact with all those fluids, and ruination!’ At that the Apothecaress pulls a bottle of Vichy water from her bag and mists her pale skin with it. She says:
‘I’m cooling myself. Furthermore, the micro-elements soothe the sun’s irritating effects, which can cause adverse changes in my skin.’
‘Look here girls, they say even fisting is bad.’
‘Fisting?’ We all sit up at the same time and tear the brochure out of the Apothecaress’s hands.
‘No kissing. You’ll get herpes… That’s because of the, umm… mucus membrane. You can’t touch the mucus membrane, so no contact between your lips and anything, anything good at least… Because all those places where you’d be likely to lick him, that’s all mucus.’
‘You can’t do anything. This is giving me a sore throat.’
‘That’s right, you can’t do anything!’ the Apothecaress declares triumphantly. ‘From now on, don’t touch any living thing. And for those of you who’ve already been touching penises with your tongue today, there’s Doxycycline and Difflam. Exterminate all those chlamydias once and for all, and don’t give any new ones a chance! Keep yourself clean down below with a personal hygiene gel; thoroughly disinfect yourselves; put on a pair of fresh white undies, and padlock them! And maybe then you’ll manage not to catch anything. From now on, no more touching! Nothing at all! Nothing is allowed!’
‘And here I was wanting to do everything…’ Old Dear No. 2 starts up very quietly. ‘Sticking my tongue down a bloke’s throat, right into the lymph nodes, siphoning them up…’
‘And licking arses and drinking cum!’
‘Licking everything! Licking everything imaginable! Licking ourselves crazy! Lick-lick-licking ourselves to death!’ Old Dear No. 1 pipes up, cheerful again. ‘And pulling hair and spitting and stuffing our faces with bollocks!’
‘But you’ve never seen a penis, a foreskin, under a microscope, have you? Do you have any idea how many bacteria there are on there? Not to mention in an anus? Haven’t you ever heard of liver-infecting viruses like…’ But everyone’s tuned out the Apothecaress.
They’ve already sterilised her, she’s aseptic, medicalised. All those doctors and apothecaresses have no taboos anymore, just petting; she’s been washed completely clean of taboos.
I’ve had it with these doctors!! Spending all their time in hospitals, in clinics – that’s why their sex lives are so bad. The things I’ve shown them! Whenever the doctor lady asks me if I’ve engaged in any ‘at-risk behaviours’, I say, uh-huh, then she says, when did the last behaviour occur, and I say, the last behaviour occurred sometime yesterday… Seems to me that ‘at-risk behaviours’ must be a term borrowed from English… And with all those samples, the blood, all those glass slides stuck up… Ugh! But washed entirely clean of taboos, starched and ironed, too…
So we said to her:
‘Foreskins and anuses may look one way under the microscope, but cock and arse! Cock and arse is the thing!’
‘And anyway, look what it says here: rubbing sperm all over your body is called a “Russian massage”. Did you know that?’
‘And fucking a woman’s cleavage is called doing it “Spanish style”.’
Everyone laughs. Oh those Spaniards!
‘Well, no one’s going to tell me it’s not OK to rub two cocks up against each other.’
‘But you can’t let the holes come into contact because your mucus membrane is exposed there.’
‘Well, I’ve been exposing all of myself all day!’ Another round of laughter.
‘But what if there’s not much in his trousers? Maybe it’s OK…’ the Old Dears console themselves.
‘You’re idiots. What difference does the size of his cock make?’
‘Oh, it can make a huge difference!’ They giggle.
‘You know, I don’t really understand this. If a lad is clean and good-looking, how can he possibly have AIDS?’ My Old Dears were beyond on this score. How often had I heard them say: ‘Why, the boy’s well groomed, and they’re going on about AIDS…!”
‘Well, just imagine this: AIDS is invisible!’
A moment of silence. They continue reading the brochure, giggling over the pictures.
‘And here was I hoping to finally gorge myself on that lad.’
‘You’ll never be sated by him, my dear,’ the Apothecaress replies philosophically. ‘There’s no quenching it. It’s not like you can eat him up or something.’ (We: ‘Well, it has happened before…’) ‘You’ll simply touch him with your tongue and wander along on the surface. You’ll glide along it without penetrating. As if you were licking a computer screen.’
They agree. General robustness and hermeneutics of the body. Like a landscape, you can’t penetrate it, it won’t sate you. It’s an illusion. A surface, a flat network, Deleuze and Guattari.
‘An optical illusion,’ adds Old Dear No. 2, playing dumb.
The Apothecaress pulls a copy of Forum out of her bag, along with pills that accelerate tanning, which she swallows down with Kudowa Springs mineral water.
‘Did you read this article in Forum, about how in the United States 40 per cent of new infections are intentional? And in Western Europe… How the queens there are so degenerate that they even ask to get infected? They put adverts on the internet saying things like “Help me seroconvert”, or how they’ve already got such and such a strain of HIV, but want a new one…’
We can’t believe it. She shows us. The article. It’s true.
‘But why would they do that?’
‘Well, why did that German guy eat the other German? As if it were a perfectly normal thing to do; when the police entered that house in Heidelberg, he still had remains in the freezer. What’s really interesting is that he had a video of the other bloke agreeing to it. He actually consented to be eaten!’
The Old Dears stamp their feet:
‘No! That’s completely abnormal! I refuse to accept it! I’m an old woman, I want to stay healthy and live a long life, and I eat… the jams I make for winter, not Germans!’
We stand there in silence. Tra la la la… Suddenly one of them says:
‘Listen, maybe that German was just really, really hungry?!’
‘Huh?’
‘Well, what you were saying, about how a lad can’t satisfy you because there’s no quenching it, because it’s all surface and skin… Well, maybe he just wanted to feel really connected to him?’
The others agree. But that’s not the way to do it. Killing someone, cutting him up and eating him. Like a schnitzel. Like in a restaurant.
The Apothecaress scowls:
‘You’re all monsters.’
She was, in spite of everything, a girl from a good family, sterile and pure. She even had on sunscreen under her UV-protective sunglasses, because of eye cancer. Pale, skinny, red-haired. A wet, English chicken. I adored her.
My Apothecary Amazon didn’t really have a sex life, no matter how much she tried; she’d read too many of those brochures. Instead she’d become addicted to chatting on the internet. She urged me to buy a camera, because the cyberqueens are all doing the nasty now, in full view and in colour, virtually in
fecting each other with virtual viruses. I thanked her very much for the suggestion and closed my eyes. Dozed off…
…
‘I don’t know about you, but I’m not laying my lips on a cock again for as long as I live…’
‘Right. Let’s see what happens tonight.’
…
‘She was looking all over for a flat, first this one, then that. So I said to her: what the hell do you want, as long as the roof’s not leaking…?’
…
‘Look at that seagull… big, big enough to feed a whole family…’
…
‘So I rang up that tart. And the line was busy!’
Di
had scars on her wrists and came from Bratislava:
‘Only an hour away from La Vienne!’
Her name was Milan. A drop-dead gorgeous, sixteen-year-old blonde with blue eyes, long eyelashes – like the boy next door in a comic book for well-behaved little children. But on the inside, inside that boy next door, a dirty old whore was lurking. A bit of a sloth, too. She worked in the metro, at the Karlplatz-Oper station. There was a pub in a glassed-in area, which we called the Aquarium as it had a view of the public toilets. Tons of teenage Poles, Czechs, Romanians, and Russians would make the rounds – and geriatric Austrians, too, of course. Some of them were beautiful; others, hideously ugly. There was no middle-of-the-road in there…
Di couldn’t forget the pervasive stench of citrus-scented disinfectant, which mingled with the smell of shit from the toilets. She hated standing in front of the urinals, waiting for clients, so she would usually sit drinking beer in that glassed-in, subterranean pub, and watch, glassy-eyed, as the old men circled the conveniences. I said to her:
‘Back to work, Diana! Arbeiten!* Even if it’s just for fifty schillings.’ And she said:
‘Ja sem žena leniva…’**
Whenever she finally got her arse in gear, all she’d do was sit and drink beer with the bloke. Then she’d say to me, out loud since he didn’t understand anyway:
‘Konečne som nasiel toho pravého chlapa…’***
Di wasn’t really suited for this kind of work. Once, exhausted by a client, she rang for a cab. She had a hard time finding the stairwell, and the steps were steep, and through the open entryway she could see the car waiting for her. So she hurried down, started running down the stairs, carefree and happy that she was done and had a decent wad of cash in her pocket. Then suddenly, just as she got to the last step, the world disappeared and there was a great thud! Di blacked out. Coming from Slovakia she wasn’t used to such clean, clear windows. She wasn’t used to many things. And later it pained her no end that the cab driver had seen her fall, had seen her careening head slam against the windows at full force, and she was embarrassed about that.
Things went downhill from there. She had less and less money. She’d even started living on the streets, which made her look like shit. It was a vicious circle: she had no money, so she looked awful, but in order to make any money, she would need to get some rest, a bath, and put on clean clothes.
She was on her own, in the metro, and her shoes chafed her feet so she couldn’t go roaming round Vienna. She hobbled over to Alfie’s, a bar for boys like herself (rent boys, in other words), sat down in the corner, and without drinking, without smoking, without eating, simply watched the goings-on, quietly humming Slovak rock songs to herself.
It was like a game of roulette: one day you might earn fifty schillings, but to do that you first had to invest something, because most of the time you’d sit there for hours before picking up a client. During that time you’d end up drinking five coffees, five Fantas, five beers, five whatever, because the waiters made sure that the rent boys ordered at least one drink an hour. So what you made in one day, you’d spend over the course of five just sitting and waiting. Di watched with envy as the successful ones at the bar stuffed themselves on enormous schnitzels with chips and salad, or chops and fried eggs. With beautiful halves of lemon to squeeze on the meat, on those chips, on all that wonderful grub! She swallowed her own spit and smoked a fag she’d bummed off someone, which tasted awful on an empty stomach. She wondered how long before they threw her out, since she wasn’t putting money in the till. Even if she did dig up a few schillings, she knew what would happen: she’d trick once, then have nothing five nights in a row; she could lose everything. Even the Romanians – they’ve been dry for two weeks! Oh, and what Romanians they were! My God! Through their oversized, baggy, white trousers they showed Didi their gorgeous, fat cocks. Stretching the stained fabric around them. In their broken German mixed with Russian, they asked her to see for herself, starved as they were – two weeks. They wanted schillings, cigarettes, but what could she give them? They were handsome and masculine, had none of that unfeeling look in their eyes, like the Austrians, Swiss, and Germans had; they were straight. Eighteen years old, swarthy, with bushy, black eyebrows!
An elderly trick named Dieter, a copy of Günter Grass’s The Rat wrapped in brown paper under his arm, makes the rounds of the bar like a professor. Wears a threadbare sports coat, has a little pipe. But he doesn’t know what he wants. He once called Di over to his table, bought her drinks, and said:
‘Heute bin ich müde, lass mich in Ruhe…’* Then they made a date for Wednesday, though Di wasn’t even sure he’d live that long.
Vincent is behind the bar today, a tall, likeable Austrian; Di and her ilk are good for business. Old torch songs waft out of the stereo speakers, even Edith Piaf. In the other room the rent boys play the slot machines. There’s a hideous, filthy African who smells badly; Di knows she’s homeless, that she got sucked into the vicious circle, and that she’ll end up the same way, too, if a miracle doesn’t happen tonight. Then that sweetheart Vincent gives a nod to the security man to escort the African discreetly off the premises. Suddenly a jolly band of local playboys bursts in: middle-aged, colourful scarves on their heads, chains around their necks, rings on their fingers. Noisy and jolly, straight from a land called Miami, a land of movie stars, cocktails, and red convertibles pumping music at full blast. A land of moonscape wallpaper and faded dreams that’s only as far away as the imagination of the next playboy. They order whiskies and smoke Marlboro Reds – they couldn’t care less if smoking kills. Bald and monstrously obese, in the way that only the wealthy can be, because wealth always exaggerates a person’s distinguishing features – thinks Milan, the philosopher of the Bratislava council estates. Because if someone likes to eat and he’s poor, all that will happen is he’ll get fat; but if he’s rich (and for Di all Austrians were rich), then he’ll end up looking like one of those behemoths. And if you have a really campy queen who happens to be loaded, she’ll probably be wearing an entire jewellery shop, a coat of gold, furs – enough to trump any opera diva. The playboys’ bellowing fills the bar; they’re completely out of control, but of no use to Di as long as they’re entertaining each other. She’s been around long enough to know that only the shamefaced, solitary daddies stuck in the corner are worth eyeing. The bald men unleash another volley of rowdy guffaws. Meanwhile the real ‘rowdy ones’ – the beautiful young Russians – sit quietly in the corners, fumbling in the pockets of their grubby jeans, counting out their last coins. There was yet another kind of trick who got deformed by wealth: the middle-aged queens with their faces, their grimaces, each reminiscent of a different animal species: weasel, parrot, owl… dripping with bracelets and topped with hair transplants. A moment later those poseurs are joined by beautiful, two-metre-tall lads from the land of glittering lights and cheap entertainment, who come to take their coats, move their ashtrays closer, light their cigarettes, who exchange their place at the door for a chance to be chosen. They even pull out their chairs for them, sit them down at their tables.
But even as those lads hurry to serve them, the queens bat their eyelashes and slap them clumsily, tenderly, or make indignant faces: ‘You look like a turd. I’m taking someone else home tonight! Pooh!’ Even though they
were old and ugly, they didn’t show the least sign of balding (transplants) or greying (dye), they had no wrinkles, they were tall, well fed; it was only the jaded expressions on their faces that gave away their ages. They’d already had everything replaced. But they put on airs like those Czech actresses, those old girls with frizzy perms… Old gazelles with their bracelets and rings and cigarette cases and lighters, and everything smothered in diamonds, rubies, a hoard years in the making. Right beside them: a table of strapping bears with huge bald pates – a gang of taxi drivers. They’re knocking back beers, smoking those little brown cigars, cracking up for the whole pub to hear. Tin rings with skulls on them. And if they weren’t bald, then they invariably had their hair cut in a mullet, sometimes down to their arse in back, a crew-cut up front, with highlights. Now one of them swaggers like an old sailor to the jukebox and picks out a whole variety show of bad German dance songs about love. The ones with the choruses. A woman’s warm voice oozes out of the jukebox. All they need now are beer and schnitzel, thinks Di, chewing her nails.
The macho moneymakers are playing billiards in the other room. On and on and on, for six hours already. As if they didn’t need to work at all. Oh, they’re ordering sandwiches! The expensive ones… Garnished and served right at the billiards table, service on top… The sandwiches that have sausage and pickle and tomato… Sometimes they leave the door to Alfie’s open and a breeze blows in. Some of the boys are always getting calls on their mobile phones – they’re the real call boys… They place adverts with their phone numbers and photos in the gay papers. They take their calls and walk slowly past the bar towards the door, chatting away. Hi, this is Eros; hi, this is Hyacinth… Their names are always confected. Later, from payphones, they ring their girlfriends in Prague and Moscow, their fiancées:
‘Hey baby, I’ve got a job in a restaurant. I can hardly wait till I’ve made the money for our wedding… Yeah baby, I got the socks and clean underwear you sent, thanks a million…’
Every now and then a skinny, nervous, bald queen walks in, sits at the bar, orders a beer, and spends the whole evening flicking her lighter on and off. When you ask her for a light, she looks at you for a moment with a completely vacant stare. Later a group of Polish grunt walks in. Straights. Their eyes brim with banality, hostility. They’re here to make money; they suppress their disgust. They wear tracksuits with POLSKA in enormous red letters emblazoned across the back. Right off they say:
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