My night at porkies.

I don’t often frequent strip clubs, I like to reserve them for those most special moments in life like birthdays, or right after failing exams. I find them dangerous places, it’s like another world in that dark, smoky space and for some reason they always put them in basements. There must be something about being underground that makes paying a woman to get naked seem more.. well above board.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m more than happy to pay for a woman to listen to my bullshit and then come home with me but doing it with cold hard cash makes it seem just a little too cold and hard, I much prefer a trade – I ply her with alcohol and she begins to understand my reasoning and eventually submits to my weak banter, the following morning we both feel bad. She looks over at me and feels she gave in too easy, I look at her and think I spent too much, it works because no ones happy, no one really gains.

I’m happy with that; I know fully where I stand. However, there’s something about beautiful girls soberly listening to my weak banter that’s just disorientating, it’s intoxicating and I think I could easily become to dependent on it, that’s why I don’t frequent strip clubs, I’d liken it to that if you got really addicted to cherry drops then it’s probably best not to give heroin a crack.

I went to my first strip club when I was maybe fourteen or fifteen, it was in Spain or Greece and the only thing that made the over priced beers that I hadn’t yet learnt to appreciate worth it was the scantily clad women drifting about. It wasn’t seedy, I wasn’t there to be pervy. It was more cultural understandings and rights of passage. I was there with a group of people I desperately wanted to impress despite meeting them only few days before and we were all trying to out do each other.

One of the girls approached me and asked if I wanted a private dance. I was being selected; it came as no surprise - after all I was wearing my best Ben Sherman shirt, my whitest trainers that seemed to glow in the darkness and on top of it all she could barely tell that my face was all screwed up from my tatse buds being all unaccustomed to hops.

Here I was being selected, sure it was her job to ask people for private dances but this time it wasn’t like that, there was a real connection here. She obviously didn’t want to ask me to pay but her boss was watching so she didn’t have a choice, it was convention and she couldn’t dodge it. I agreed to the dance, undid a button on the Ben Sherman and took a swig of the warm beer which screwed up my face like a slapped arse, she could tell I was a catch.

You could try and tell me that actually there are two grades of strippers, those that can allure the sad rich men, and the lower rung that generally get most of their work essentially intimidating minors to part with all of their holiday money, money given to me for ice creams and soft drinks by my grandparents. These are the ones who are a little uglier, maybe even a little past it. You could try and tell me that the latter was the exact scenario I was in, but I wouldn’t have believed you.

My stripper wasn’t mature, she was experienced and that’s why she chose me, I looked the experienced twenty-something with my beer and my Ben Sherman, and it was an American beer so in this country I guess that makes me cultured.. whatever it was, to her I wasn’t fourteen.

Also don’t think the rumours had escaped me that if a stripper is smiling when she’s giving you private dance it means she really wants to have sex with you, I was looking for just a flash of teeth, maybe a grimace or even a yawn – even if she was just trying to flick some food out from between her teeth I’d take that as a sign.

She was smiling throughout, I think she found it endearing that instead of just handing her over a note I counted out all thirty Euros in coins, out of my bum bag. It shows I’m security conscious and also good at counting which impresses girls. I know this because I know girls.

Once the money had been exchanged (which I’m still sure is just a formality that I insisted upon and she didn’t really want to have to do for me), she told me the dance would last two songs or three minutes, whichever came first. Part of me wondered that for two songs in three minutes the DJ must be particularly over zealous, the other part just hoped that either came before I did.

The dance began, I was expecting nipples and she took down her thong. This must mean she loves me, even the Greeks can’t be this European and surely she isn’t as loose with all her clients, it’s just that I must’ve created quite the first impression. What I did find confusing was how she was being very provocative but then kept pushing my hands away, I reasoned she must be very religious and was saving all the touching for after we wed, I couldn’t believe my luck-she was a virgin.. like me!

As it turns out the three minutes must’ve expired before the two songs because as quick as that she stopped, mid groin thrust. I couldn’t believe it, here I was trying hard to control myself and she was the picture of self control restraint, I loved her even more.

This was probably just another formality to fool her boss.. inside she was all lust and raw passion like me, like I said she just handled herself well. She was quickly becoming marriage material. I started to think about the next day, I think I could fit her in to meet my parents just after the jeep safari and just before the family football match, maybe she could play. I assumed her hours were mostly in the evenings so that freed the whole day up for us. I knew she’d get along with my mum, after all they were about the same age so would have loads in common, and I couldn’t see my dad not liking her.. I mean she was so captivating, and with barely a grasp of English too.

I imagined life after this holiday, I had a couple of weeks left of summer holidays, she could meet my friends and we could hang out in the park, then once term started she could pick me up after school at three fifteen. Who knows maybe she could start up a Greek club, or a dance class or something.

My imaginings quickly evaporated, I think I’d been sitting there all eyes glazed and thoughtful for at least a further two songs and I think she was worried she’d killed me, or blown my mind with her traditional Greek dancing, I couldn’t believe how raunchy this traditional Greek dancing was, and why it always had to be done in private.. my dad would know, I made a mental note to remember to ask him.

After my musings had stopped I could see my queen in all her beauty, true she was carrying a bit of weight but it was firm from all this dancing. Sure she had sideburns, but I could sense that I’d be growing them soon so she could teach me how to keep them so well trimmed. Ok, her scarred prostitute’s body was a little more ‘weather-worn’ than I expected my first lady’s to be, but you have to make these sacrifices for maturity.

I pushed all these misgivings from my mind and set about thinking how tell her about my parents, my home back in ‘Ing-land’. Suddenly it was like she was gesturing for me to leave, this couldn’t be right, perhaps just another formality? No, she was definitely trying to get me to go; she was sort of pushing me while trying to replace her underwear which gave me my first flash of vagina which I’m also going to describe as weatherworn. I had no choice, clearly it was so dark in here she’d forgotten about my Ben Sherman and probably couldn’t see my man-face while glugging this beer. Maybe she was suspicious that this beer hadn’t gone down despite me repeatedly swigging it throughout the dance. If only I could pretend to smoke that’d reignite her interest, but I was fresh out of candy sticks.

The curtain was still closed, we were still alone, I had one last option.

I began to dance for her, I don’t know if it was the newly liberated button, or the sporadically long, lone chest hair poking through, but for some reason she was enjoying it. She’d taken my seat and was clapping. My hips were whirring, thrusting the air, and she was mine again. I’d entranced her with my hand moves, hypnotised her with my hips I was ready to explode with desire and I knew she couldn’t be far off. I began to unbutton my jeans.

Quickly as that, with barely two buttons undone her smile disappeared, the clapping stopped and she pushed me out of the room through the curtain. I was very much caught off guard by this sudden change of reaction, it takes some double standards for her to disapprove of my dance being too raunchy from the undoing of two buttons. And being hastily pushed through the curtain I was still trying to re-button my fly in front of the assembled strip club clientele, partly because they weren’t aware it was an essential part of my routine, and mostly because they were strip club clientele it probably just looked like I was having a wank.. which I wasn’t.

She was an efficient woman though, within one song she’d successfully got me to hand over the rest of my money then kicked me out the club, my beer was still in the booth but I knew she wanted that to remember me by.

Besides, all this was probably just a formality. If I’d have waited around she probably would have met me around the back after her shift when her boss wasn’t suspicious to tell me in broken ‘Ing-lish’ that it was all a clever rouse and she couldn’t let me know just in case I gave the game away. Then I’d say that we should go back to my hotel and the next day she could meet my parents on the jeep safari.

Alas I couldn’t stay, I had promised my parents that I’d be home early because we had a jeep safari the next day, also I don’t think the bouncers were in on the rouse because they were looking at me like we weren’t friends.

True on that jeep safari when we stopped for ice cream my little brother and sister got one and I didn’t, but while they were surviving the heat with soft drinks I had memories, memories of the woman I let slip right through my fingers. I was also trying to convince my dad that a lizard had eaten all my holiday money some time during the night.

So here I am, not married to an ageing Greek stripper, just wondering if I should have waited.

The closest shave.

I’m sitting in my room comfort eating because I’ve just had another shit haircut. Granted the only thing in the house to comfort eat is around six rich tea biscuits, but I’ve vowed not to leave my room until my hair gets back to its original wholesomeness. I’m fed up of shit haircuts, I’ve had mostly shit haircuts and it’s against my best intentions.. As I sat in the chair I thought I said that I wanted something fashionable with length but I must’ve said that I wanted something prisoner of war inspired, or at least short enough to make me look terminally ill. As it goes he went further and now I can almost see my brain through it, my head looks the surface of the moon and if I touch the top of it my leg spasms.

It’s winter, I’d have to be an idiot to want hair this short, I think I’m halfway to losing one of my ears through frost bite and all because he got a little over zealous with his scissoring, I told him to stop, I’d told him he’d gone to far and I wasn’t up for more, but he kept saying he was just straightening it up, then taking off inch after inch. I had to purposely rebut his attempts to strike up conversation just in case he got distracted and lopped off an ear.

Half way through and I’d given up protesting, I’m not sure if I’d slighted this guy once before and now he was getting some sort of vengeance but for some reason he really had it in for me. It was getting shorter and I was struggling to see how he was still managing to find hair that could be cut. Things really took a turn for the worse when upon finishing my sideburns he started to shave my face!

Who the fuck shaves someone’s face, I don’t have an unusually hairy face, hair is very much restricted to the beard area and nowhere else. What am I supposed to do now that my face has been shaved, it’s obviously going to grow back thicker, and darker..this guy has just condemned me to being a wolf-man. I was thinking of sticking my head in a Gro-bag to get some length back but it’s only going to accelerate my transformation into a lycen. Actually forget that, being a werewolf might not even be that bad, Teenwolf got the hottest girl in the school - he could dunk..I’m just going to be some hairy bloke who’ll have to work in a kebaby.

“I’ve put some talcum powder on your neck to stop a rash from coming up,” he says.

What I wanted to say that he wouldn’t have to worry about it if he hadn’t just removed the first four layers of skin, what I needed now was some antiseptic and a tetanus shot.

All I actually said was thanks.

I still don’t know why that is, when I sit in that chair I become paralysed, I think after watching Sweeny Todd I’m just happy to get up out of the chair at the end, regardless of the hair.

“Do you want me to put some wax in it?”

Wax in it? Wax in what, there’s nothing there to put wax into, you could use up more wax putting it in my eye brows! Maybe you could rub some wax into the bald stump that is my head to give it some shine, yeah go on, do that with your wax.

“Yeah if you could mate,” was all I actually said.

Next time he should forget the scissors and just use sandpaper, that way I wouldn’t be under any illusion to what was going to happen. I’ve got a hair-wound not a hair-cut. At the end I contemplated collecting up the hair and PVAing it back on to my head.

Will I be seeing this guy again? I see him every six weeks when I get my haircut, he’s never busy and I can never seem to protest when he ushers me into his chair.

Guide to Pigs - of the guinea variety ("a guinea for that pig sir!")

My friend tom just went and bought three mice…all females; it’s the smart way to do it. You see mice procreate very quickly and sometimes the parents will eat the babies. I don’t really have much experience with mice, but I know a little about Guinea Pigs.

I was probably about seventeen when we got our guinea pigs, one boy and one girl. For me it was just about having a pet, and to be honest I really wanted ferrets but I wasn’t allowed ferrets. For my mother it was a valuable learning tool; these guinea pigs were pawns in my education on the facts of life. She had valid cause - I didn’t find out about sex for myself until some time later and even then I think I misunderstood because apparently I’m still doing it very wrong.

The little creatures started off marvellously; there was frolicking, there was subtle flirting, there was courting and there was sex. It was beautiful to witness, not the sex - I’m not a weird animal pervert, I mean watching nature take place in all its wonderfulness. I think it gave me a God complex.

The first litter was born on a Christmas day and being a wholesome person my mother wanted to keep the family unit intact, a two parent household. That’s when things took a turn for the worse. The lascivious male had been a father maybe fifteen minutes before trying to remount, I’m glad guinea pigs are born sightless as watching your father display such loose morality sets a very bad example. The father was put in sex rehab and the mother and new babies could be at peace, but it was too late.

What you can’t deny is the sheer tenacity of his sperm, couples try for years to have babies (admittedly probably not guinea pig couples) and this guy managed to re-impregnate his missus in one clumsy, hurried effort.

She was officially knocked up; fortunately the first litter had grown up and gone to new owners by the time the second litter arrived. The bad family planning meant that they were all a bit too deformed to be given away. They were all born with alopecia, they were mostly covered in welts and sores and they weren’t exactly gender specific. Oh and they were blind with beady red eyes and sallow skin.

Also guinea pigs are particularly unscrupulous and have no sexual morality, they will literally fuck anything. I tried to instil in them the same morals I had been brought up with – i.e don’t steal and it’s probably best not to shag family members. To be fair to them I never caught them stealing so I guess they did hold onto something.

When the skin conditioned boys started to mount their mother we knew we had to separate, the boys went with their father while the girls would stay put. Problems again arose when the boy who had been caught shagging his mother started to be mounted by his father; we had on our hands a flaky skinned hermaphrodite.

We took a gamble and left it with dad, I mean it had ball sack so what are the chances it could get knocked up – it got knocked up. Cue generation three of deformed offspring, the life span of a guinea pig is maybe three years, this dad had fucked up a family unit in maybe ten months, if I learned anything from these pets it was don’t have kids – they might try and shag their mother.

There was one more litter, the sex crazed male escaped and found his way in to the female pen, he had to be forcibly removed from a female, that means prizing and he wasn’t just hanging on with his limbs.

In the end there was only two healthy guinea pigs, a lot of the illegitimate children died of very unnatural causes. A few survived and looked not dissimilar to Watership Down’s General Wormwart – though with less of an agenda. The sad thing is that I could never really hold them; they started bleeding when you touched them and squealed in pain.

Despite this they all out lived any regular guinea pig, the hutches were moved to opposite ends of the garden to help prevent sex induced escapes and like all pets it was Mother Wells who had to look after them once the novelty wore off.

There’s not really a moral here, it isn’t a moral tale, well perhaps if you take anything away from this its that if you’re having an incestuous relationship and aren’t using contraception then don’t be surprised if the kid has a skin condition. I’ve heard prescription shampoos are expensive so maybe factor that in to maintenance bills.

The Scourge of Social Smoking

I’m writing this leaning over a laptop struggling for words and relieving my steadily mounting stresses with cigarette after cigarette. I’ve finally conceded; I am a smoker. But no one‘s listening, no one except for the bleary eyed Rastafarian who sits cross legged as part of my novelty ashtray guarding my stubbed out fag ends. He seems to be having a great time, but then he does seem to be smoking something different. I think I look smoky and romantic, but I’m actually just eroding away my body from the inside, like what reading smoky romantic novels does to your brain. I’ve only myself to blame, well myself and the rising popularity of social smoking.

Given that since the inception of the smoking ban heart fatalities has dropped by a third, the medical advantages are obvious. However, the ban also gave rise to a whole new scene, a people who’s existence was, prior to then, unprecedented. So how did social smoking develop so rapidly in popularity and popular culture?

See, back in the days of yore smokers and non smokers lived together harmoniously. They’d skip through fields of daffodils hand in hand, despite one having to stop and gasp for breath every ten meters or so and probably leave a wake of coughing flowers behind them. Yet the smoking ban drove a chasm between them.

Initially this seemed a wholly negative implementation for smokers everywhere, yet they managed to turn the situation around, forming an exclusive club for smokers only. A veritable paradise evolved, that caused sales of patio heaters to go through the roof. Here the music isn’t so loud as to obstruct normal conversation, and everyone laughs manically, looking arty and sophisticated with cigarette in hand. Gradually a sect of revolutionaries broke off from the non smokers, they weren’t pinned down by any genuine nicotine addiction; they could probably swim more than a length of a pool and their skin wasn’t ravaged and grey like a road worker from the effects of tar. Yet here they were flirting and flaunting themselves about in the smoker’s very own area.

This new scene comprised the social smokers; we wanted the best of both worlds yet were ridiculed by both smokers and non smokers alike. To smokers we didn’t love cigarettes so much that we hated them, we just loved them. We also never carried our own cigarettes and were perpetually blagging other peoples. Whereas non-smokers were confused why their friend, who’d never shown any inclination to smoke before, was now brandishing the cigarette like a poison snake – holding it close enough that everyone would appreciate what a reckless and dangerous person they were, but far enough away so it wouldn’t cause any real damage. No one liked a social smoker and no one wanted the stigma that came with it.

For those reasons and for other deep seated psychological issues, which will probably remain undiagnosed, I decided that I would take up smoking professionally. Although I’m old enough not to be ignorantly naïve it was probably because I thought there was a super slim hope it might make girls want me more due to appearing more edgy and reckless. That was the best case scenario. The worst was lung cancer, impotency and smoking when pregnant does risk the health of your baby. Yet every warning I’d temper with misplaced reason: Lung cancer you say? By being a smoker I’m filtering my chemicals, unlike those reckless passive smokers. Impotency? I could pretend I don’t know what that means. Harming my unborn child? Perhaps a secondary birth control measure?

Yet, unlike beer, I still I couldn’t fool my body into enjoying smoking. Following each packet my mouth tasted like an ash tray, I was smelling my fingers for a completely different reason and my clothes had a tobaccoey quality, like a Cuban virgin, but less sexy. So it wasn’t entirely that smoking addiction crept up on me, it was more that I had to creep up on the addiction and then force it into my body. At one point I was considering using nicotine patches just to give my body a taste for the drug in the twisted hope that it might yearn for more. Luckily I didn’t go that far which is probably why I remain un-sectioned. Yet there was a heavy price to pay: firstly professionally smoking isn’t that lucrative. If anything it costs you money, a lot of money – I think I’m up to about fifty quid a month and I don’t even smoke that much. Added to that professional smoking differs from social smoking in that it isn’t social, this seems obvious but now instead of smoking being an excuse to go and chat and socialise now I was excusing myself from conversations to stand alone, often in the cold, to get a nicotine fix.

I was now part of that exclusive social group ‘the smokers’ and could tick that extra box on application forms, yet smoking had lost the romantic view that I had held of it. I wasn’t Brando lighting up a cigarette after sex, I was some skinny kid smoking out his window so my mum wouldn’t find out and lecture me about the fire hazards of smoking on my bed sheets. Plus once you’ve been initiated as a smoker (an initiation that involves yellow finger tips, awful breath, and the realisation that even a expertly twirled moustache won’t detract from lesions bunched up all over the neck) you suddenly realise that what got you into this in he first place, social smoking, doesn’t look cool, it makes you look like you’re compromising your own enjoyment and health values to fit in with a scene, and James Dean would never do that.