Note For Rent

Retroactive Perjury and Dancing On Platforms

I'm so full of different accents, so used to being confounded by local common sense, and being rushed over by languages I have no grounding in, that being close to home is a bit bewildering. I've been feeling a little strange, and not so at home with being home. Or at least I didn't, so I've left for a little while, to break up the return, and re-plant myself as a national. Home again, home again....

Some people are very happy to hear that I've decided to return to school this September; others almost maniacally so. I know that these are supportive responses, but really, come on, it's not like I haven't been doing anything with myself -- world travel is, far as I'm concerned, a grand endeavor, and one that few people really tackle on a significant scale. Pity that I'm unable to really publicly catalogue the skill sets that I've managed to tuck under my rather notched belt over this past year or so.

And now I get to contend with the fact that there are large portions of my life away that will never be shared with the people I love in my more regular life. The compartmentalization that many of my whoring peers have had to deal with--I had designed my immediate life to be exempt from that, while I was at it, and besides the flatmate and a few cordial acquaintances, I didn't really have to keep much secret from that many people. Besides lies of omission, I was relatively free of deliberate falsehoods. Now that I'm home, and out for drinks with old friends--folk that know me quite well indeed--I'm very conscious of the large blanks I have to insert to tell tales of my adventures, and the deliberate misdirection I sometimes have to employ.

Mind you, I'm also debt free, even after all my escapades, so I can't really complain.

In the meantime, killing time before I get back to the business of learning (and how I do love the mnemonic tricks and terrors involved with stuffing my head full of information), I'm back to go-going my bank account back into a respectable health. Shaking my money maker, as it were. I've forgotten how frightfully amusing it can be, surrounded by drunk, horny men, and the absurd things they try and get away with. Now, we're all aware that my boundaries are pretty broad, but things do come at a price, and statements like, "I'll give you sixty to come home with me right now," are frankly ludicrous. Bless them, though, and their fumble-y, slurry ways. At least they try.

In other news, I had sex with a small, pretty, bespectacled geek a few days ago, and I realized, with a bit of a shock, that it had been almost two months since I had had sex with anyone at all.

Horrifying, no?

Vacation

Did that last post even make sense in all its vaguerey? I’m not certain, but at least it got me back here.

Southeast Asia is all sun, and ocean, and heat, on top of heat, on top of heat. I have established something of a tan, and created an embarrassing profusion of empty, oversized beer bottles, which are collected on the tasteful little table in my lounge room; mostly, they are named Tiger. I’m beginning to wonder how I can smuggle them out without the knowledge of my Thai hosts.

Reflection away from the world you know has it’s boons and burdens, I think. Coming somewhere so alien all alone leaves you a little adrift, constantly taking your bearings, and gifts you with impressions of difference; but I don’t know how much personal epiphany I’m achieving – if that’s even why I’m here.

Every night the sun sets a little after six, and the sky burns a low, sherbet orange; and I think,

Yes. That’s enough.

But there are the swaths of time from the morning to the late afternoon, as I wander around, thinking very little at all, except maybe about the iced fruit drinks I consume with compulsive regularity, and about how I’m anxious to start another stage to my life, but how although I know the direction, I’m unable to beat any specifics out of that cardinal point until a reach it; so I’ve come to a tropical waiting room, wasting time until I can get onto another plane.

And I still don’t know what I feel about leaving; or if it was even the best decision.

I am really loving not having a phone, though. Not being tuned into the sounds and sensations your front pocket makes really is quite liberating.

My brain is finally out of my trousers.

Satisfaction, Part 3

Close to Home

Are you based in the UK?

My location is a secret.

Approximately how many miles you travel a year in your profession, and what was the furthest that you have ever been flown by a client?

As this is the first year that I’ve been working in the Business, I haven’t an average yet to speak of, but it has been common for me to travel up to 100km one way for a job, around once a week. This has become less frequent now that I’ve started charging half my rate for travel time, which is just fine for me. Most of my work to date has been restricted to the city limits of my situation, and most men who arrange to see me are impatient for me to arrive; ordering a hooker is a lot like any other id-driven impulse, if the fixation takes too long to materialize, reason usually kills the desire. There are not many people out there who are inclined to arrange too far in advance, or commit a sum of money and time to someone that they may not get along with. That said, as I develop my working relationships, travel becomes more and more of a possibility.

Although the number of men say they're going to take me places is high, and averred in breathless sencertiy, I put these opines into the category of pre-orgasm gibberish, as you don’t hear much about it after the stutter, and the buck, and the subsequent slackening. I’ve only been asked to go on an extended trip in earnest twice, and both times fell though: once because of a WHO advisory, and another because my companion’s work situation suddenly changed.

Conversely, I have a number of clients who have flown into a city just because I was going to be there, once quite a long distance, and that's something quite flattering. I also have a few invitations extended to spend indefinite amounts of time at various places about the globe, remuneration (not travel cost) included, but it’s an option I’m not interested in pursuing at the moment.

Mind you, out of blue, this morning, I got a phone call asking if I’d like to be flown out to Berlin for a number of days; that is something I am interested in, should it turn out to be genuine -- but it’s going to take some negotiation.

What other professions do you think you'd be good at?

My father always thought I would end up in PR, and I think my mother still sees me as a university professor. I imagine I’ll be quite good at writing books.

What's your academic background?

Successful and disastrous, in turns.*

What color are your eyes?

The short answer is hazel. They’re actually grey, gold and green. I’m not kidding.

What color is your hair?

I am not a successful blonde; as a redhead, a little shocking; currently, I’m brunette.

In your opinion, what's your best physical feature?

My smile.

Do you ever do drugs with your clients? Have you?

I don’t, but I have. Alcohol form time to time; presently, when a drink is offered, I’ll usually take one, but only have a few sips. I have been known to go through a mini-bar or a bottle of spirits with a client, pre my curb-the-drinking resolve.  Little bottles of Amyl are often about, but my relationship with the boot cleaner is a very wary one. Besides that, as someone who has tried just about everything once (twice, three times – you do have to be sure), there’s little that I have not encountered outside of work, so know where my boundaries and safe-zones reside. I had a client, a few months ago, take out a kit after I arrived, and offer me a small range of options. “I don’t suppose you do this when you’re working,” he said. I was in a particular mood, and had absolutely nothing to do the next day, so indulged with him, and we had a really great time. He gave me three good pornos as a tip. That was the only time I can really recall. Cocaine used to make a regular appearance, but I haven’t seen much of it lately, and it does very little to help my sexual performance.

What is, in your opinion, the best feeling in the world? And the worst one?

Musical ecstasy under the stars, hands flung out, eyes open, when you can feel the planet move concentrically in heaven’s spheres without one word to prove it; and, the moment you feel your heart collapse into a sucking memory of the love that used to fortify it against all the terrors of the world.

* Despite being a very good student, winning awards, pursuing a lengthy degree at an institution of higher learning, and being generally “most promising” to my academic mentors, I have never graduated from a single thing in my life. The psychoanalyst of my future will undoubtedly have a field day.

More Work

Keep in mind that the gay-male sex trade has a preponderance of dirty fuckers, on either side of the transaction barrier. Dirty fuckers who can't, or won't, hide the fact. I have no problem with this, per sai, I'm as unruly and sexually explicit as the next successful prostitute -- but I like a veneer of respectability; etiquette, we call it. I have a habit of alienating those clients who don't display any. This, I think, is to my advantage; not to my bank account's, to be sure, but definitely to my mental and emotional health.

Today I took my first client since being inconveniently interrupted on my way home, and I was curious to see how it would go. (As we all know by now -- thank you television -- disturbing experiences can lay the equivalent of emotional/repressed memory land-mines throughout your subconscious, just waiting to be triggered by the pressure of the an appropriate event.)

I was fine. A little reserved, but fine.

He was fine, too. A handsome lawyer, silvering, of indeterminate business interests, who got down to the task at hand quite quickly, and then wanted to sit for a glass of wine the remaining half hour. We covered the gambit, sitting at the window seat in the hotel room, rested against the glass, night shining night's wants, its epiphanies and its emptiness, on the other side while we sipped; and I kept the feeling of being handsomely fucked happily beneath my white robe. We talked school, and the burden of choice after leaving school, and how unexpected choices lead you to your next set before you know it.

"You should be doing this for yourself," he said to me.

"I am," I responded.

"No, I mean, you should be working for yourself, while you're doing this. You seem like you could handle you own affairs. I mean, right now how much do you get to keep of what I'm paying you?"

It's been on my mind a lot, lately; and to be honest, it's been on my back-burner, simmering, since the beginning. I'd rather, but I've wanted to get the lay of the land, first; and setting up shop for yourself in a foreign city can be a risky business before you even know what the suburbs mean: this one is respectable, that one is not. Even the national character has to come into play, what the hot-buttons are, and how men commonly react to attitudes, current events.

"I may get around to getting my own business number one day," I responded, slyly.

He wasn't fishing, I discovered; he was mentoring, just like the daddy-figure/commerce consultant that he was. Sweet really. So we outlined a sketchy business model for myself. We agreed that screening clients was the key.

Because I could use more patrons like him, the ones with decorum, and who are out for a little more companionship than simply sex.

Plus, I'd like to travel a little more on someone else's dime.

So, my new project is to set to it and start bringing in a private roster. I'm going to need another phone line, a better travelling kit, an on-line ad that's at once charming and alienating...

And some photos. Good god, I hate having my picture taken.

A New Home

I decided to give the blog a new home here at TypePad because it gives me a little more control over the system without having to learn anything more about web design.

Ah, lazy me.

Well, not so lazy after all. Importing the content from blogger was supposed to be easy... but it wasn't. There was all this changing, and republishing, and fiddling and nonsense that just about drove me up the wall. Though with it all finally done, I'm feeling a little chuffed: the posts are all there, the formatting is intact, and I even managed to get the comments -- which was looking a little dodgy there for a minute.

What rankles is that had I known even a little more coding than I do, I probably would have managed to do the switch in under half an hour. Stupid computer languages and their insufferable gobbledygook.

Otherwise, I've been working steadily and skillfully. The ideal of course would be only four days out of seven -- that's a rhythm I can manage while still staying sane and happy -- but I've been pulling five so I can have the extra funds to get myself comfortably set up in my new (still undiscovered) home. At least, that's the official reason; but I accept that it may also be because my excitement at being somewhere new and stimulating lures me out into establishments of ill-repute, where I spend stacks of cash on beverages, thus making it that much harder to amass the capital one needs to buy, say, a bed.

Still, it's grand to have the opportunity to choose.