A simply complex Page

eric page

Saturday, 9 August 2008

Yawn, scratch, where am I today? I worked terribly late last night in a notorious sex club in London, all was leather, rubber and the subtle stench of piss. The conversation - not surprisingly under those conditions - turned to house prices. If there’s one thing that bores me more than going through the symptoms of syphilis with a lisping Spanish fister from Seville, it’s the property crash. Who cares, to be quite frank, when there are one in seven men out there who don’t know they are HIV+ and the amount of drugs gushing round the scene makes me giddy. You do the maths, it’s a lot more frightening than a 4.65% drop in the price of a two bed flat.

I had one of my usual freaks last night... the paranoid fingerer. It’s the same old same old; he turns up dressed from head to toe in chain mail and waders and then wants to monopolise my evening with an ad nauseaum conversation regarding his fear of being riddled with infection from ‘some man’ having touched his bottom at one point. There are times in the sexual health outreach world when I feel like slapping folk, but as those self same folks would probably get off on a little physical violence I have to resort to withering, and barley concealed sarcasm, for my own benefit really.

I explain in my special ‘listen carefully as I’ll say this only once’ voice, that being touched on his bum is not going to kill him and watch him clank and slosh off. I realise his waders are full of piss and that’s where the smells coming from. Sigh! I hop in the cab and go home, the taxi driver thinks my job is fascinating and wants to know where all the dogging grounds are whilst telling me all about his girlfriend's problems with his sexual demands. He’s got an issue with his hygiene, is twenty stone overweight and farts constantly - so she has the skeletal remains of my sympathy. I rest my head against the window glass, tune the droning driver's voice out and imagine myself to be Uma Thurman in some exotic city in the world, watching the city blocks blur into one as the late night people and neon flash past.

I wake feeling refreshed, with an invite to a sex workers conference to look forward to. This one's in a grimy northern city but the sex workers present are a whole host of fun, politically active, on the ball, progressive and challenging whilst their anecdotes are the quality of gilt-lined velvet on the queen's bum. Everybody gets what they deserve!