‘Well hello and thank you to you too, you little shit. Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘Yes I’m sure.’
‘You’re wallowing. I can tell.’
‘Like a pig in shit.’
‘OK. Call me again soon.’
—
You know, I think if you’re going to disappear, either from a pool or up your own arse, the time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is the time to do it.
When Ava Gardner came to Melbourne to do that film On The Beach, she apparently said something like, ‘Melbourne’s a great place to do a film about the end of the world.’ It’s one of those moments in Melbourne’s history that everyone knows, like Jean Shrimpton wearing a miniskirt to the Melbourne cup, or Picasso’s Weeping Woman turning up in a locker in Spencer Street Station. I think Ava got it right, personally. There’s a scene in On The Beach where Ava and her co-star, whatever his name is, walk down a Melbourne street and there are empty cars in a motley arrangement all over the streets and there’s not a soul around. This is the end of the world as we know it; this is Melbourne between Christmas and New Year. There’s little traffic and hardly anyone in the streets. Everyone’s either holidaying elsewhere, or staying indoors because it’s so hot and everything’s closed anyhow.
It’s the kind of feeling that can conk you on the back of the head if you’re not careful, especially if you don’t have family and friends around you to bicker with as a distraction. It’s the kind of time when someone who’s come back to town with fresh wounds can creep into a stranger’s porny apartment to lick them (the wounds not the stranger) without telling anyone he’s even there, and who might just possibly, well might just possibly not make it.
Just before I left Barcelona I booked into a ritzy hotel I couldn’t afford and proceeded to drink my way through the entire contents of the mini-bar and a bottle of vodka, only stopping when I went to lie down on the bed for a moment, miscalculated and ended up on the floor wedged between the wall and the bedside table where I passed out, only to come to in the freakish dead-time of 3 am in the morning, horribly hung over, and with no more vodka.
I decided that I didn’t want to have escaped that Barcelona dead-time (thank God for 24-hour room service and Spanish soap operas) and come so many miles only to get conked by Melbourne’s own dead-time. No, what I needed was a night out on the tiles so that at the very least I could get drunk somewhere other than Sharon’s Place.
For a split second of madness I was going to call an old friend and long-standing companion of nights-out, Melanie. Possibly the only thing you need to know about Melanie is that she is very loyal and asks few questions, I guess mostly because she wouldn’t appreciate any questions about her own lifestyle which I know includes table-top dancing and suspect also includes Centrelink fraud. But even Melanie would require some explanation of what went down in Spain and I just couldn’t, so I decided against it.
No, what I needed I felt sure was the comfort of strangers, male strangers, gay male strangers. To make it any more specific might be pushing things.
—
Your everyday workaday gay bars aren’t all that different the world over, which I guess is not surprising in that the common denominator is that the patrons are, of course, gay.
Sitges is a little town down the coast from Barcelona. It’s a summer resort and attracts all sorts, but it’s mainly got the distinct whiff of the international gay tourist. During the summer along the main esplanade the nightlife thumps out of gay bar after gay bar until sun-up. Leo and I headed out one night to taste the delights that Sitges had to offer and found ourselves in one of those clubs. Apart from the fact that there were more Spanish men standing around (which admittedly was a major plus), I could have been at the Xchange Hotel on Commercial Road in Melbourne, just a block or two down from the Prahran pool. The same blacked-out windows to the street, the same bar, pool table, banks of televisions playing film-clips, the same watchful standoffishness of the patrons. They were even playing Let’s Get Loud by Jennifer Lopez. Or I might be making that bit up. I do know that Kylie made it into the mix.
Even so, the Xchange Hotel seemed particularly uninspiring that night when I got there. I went up to the bar and ordered a drink. I didn’t know anyone, but then again I didn’t think I would— this wasn’t somewhere me or my friends had frequented when I last lived in Melbourne, which that night was just the ticket. I moved away from the bar, found a little ledge to put my beer on and checked out the room. I wasn’t the only one doing so. Again, here were people watching people. It was kind of the same as at the pool. And the same as the club in Sitges. Probably it’s the same in gay clubs and pools the world over.
All this watching could be either comforting or stifling and that night I felt stifled. I didn’t want to stand across the room and look at people and then maybe chat to someone and maybe strike at least a deal if not a genuine connection. I didn’t want to have to bother and so in the end I decided it wasn’t too early to go to the sauna. At a sex-on-premises venue there’s just as much looking, but not as much standoffishness. And to be honest, I just wanted sex. Not because I was horny, I wasn’t particularly, but just because I felt like gorging. I wanted to be a pig and eat with my hands and stuff my cheeks full of sex. I felt lonely. I felt blue. I felt bored with my own company. I also felt, strangely, a little bit scared to stay cooped up in that fugged-up apartment for another night. I know from past experience that these feelings are not erased by piggy sex, but like a sugar pill, it fools you into thinking things are going to be different.
When I got to the sauna, I took off my clothes and put them in the locker, put a towel around my waist and headed through. First thing you see is a row of showers, with usually a couple of men underneath lazily soaping their dicks, strategically placed to see newcomers and at the same time put on a bit of a show if necessary. Then there’s a spa with no one in it, a sauna, and out the back, through a pair of saloon-like swing doors, dark passageways and little rooms with glory holes in the walls and packets of lube and condoms left like offerings. In some cubicles there is someone waiting and watching those walking past, or a couple already engaged, or more than a couple.
I kept on walking past door after door, looking in, getting a feel for the place, like some tourist. Stupidly, I was reminded of a cathedral I visited in Spain. It was on a rocky hilltop and to get there you had to walk around and around the hill towards the cathedral and along the way there were little grottos hacked out of the rock and a little white statue of some saint in each one. Every grotto had a different saint, and sometimes there were offerings left there by previous pilgrims, usually ordinary things like strings of plastic flowers or little folds of paper with poems or something. And you’d look for a second, and maybe make the sign of the cross, or leave something. And then you’d walk on until you came across the next grotto. I asked Leo what the different saints were the patrons of, and he could tell me because he’d had a Catholic upbringing and remembered a lot of them. And as he told me I found myself liking the statues based on how interesting I found their calling, but I guess you’re allowed to have your favourite saint. Saint James the Great is a patron of Spain and also of rheumatics, which I thought was kind of a weird grouping. Saint Jude is the Patron Saint of Lost Causes which appealed to the skinny-black-pants wearing art student I used to be. But my favourite was Holy Mary of Guadalupe. I can’t remember what she was the patron saint of, but it’s just such a cool name. So yeah, I was thinking about my favourite saints when I joined a solitary traveller in one of the cubicles, went straight down on my knees and found myself face to face with my first dick in weeks. Hallelujah.
Basically I went for it. And after a while of slopping this guy’s dick right into my throat and snorting
