growl growl

I can't deal with London men at all. Someone give me a more obvious way to say 'fuck you', than disappearing for an hour and refusing to give them my number. I literally just spent an hour listening to some guy wax lyrical about his amazing historical drama commissioned by blah blah and how he can help my career no end if I don't mind being portrayed like ________ and _______, and go out with him next week for fellatio.

I can't believe in this day and age my career hinges on a couple of dry wells and a fat fuck.

Humble Pie

A couple of years back someone sent me the link to an as-yet unpublished stripper memoir, entitled Candy Girl by one Diablo Cody. I read the blurb, which sounded pretty bad, and being in my typical ranting manic type mood (I should probably really consider medication but hell, I ain't dead yet), heightened by the fact I'd just been fired from Scores for punching Dave Groehl's friend, had lost my literary agent and needed to find a new one, and was stony broke nearing Christmas alone in NYC, I ripped it a new asshole. Well, seeing as books don't have assholes, I ripped it AN asshole in a very vicious dissection on this blog.

Immediately a pile of people emailed me back, chastising me for doing this - Lily Burana, Susan from River City Kitty, people I respect and think are fucking cool, plus one strange man called Jon Hunt who I didn't know at all, but who just seemed the nicest, coolest guy over email. Have you read the book? Have you read her blog? She's really funny. She's really talented. She's actually someone you'd probably quite like. You might, erm, want to take that back.

So I read her blog and I found out she was really talented, and really cool, and really funny, and someone I would probably love to get blind drunk with in a bar, and when her book came out, I read that, and it was effing amazing too, and then I really did want to take back all that I'd said. I sent a crawling apology over email (which wasn't really that crawly as I don't brown tongue very well), and I had to say, when Diablo Cody didn't know who the hell I was and couldn't be arsed to reply with more than a one-liner, I just thought Fuck, the bitch is cool. I may come across as mean, but really, I'm a puppy, and when people email me nice shit I'm the dribbling, happy Andrex dawg. Cool is something I aspire to.

Now the author of Candy Girl, Diablo Cody, lives in Hollywood with her lovely husband Jon, and her first film just came out, Juno, directed by Jason Reitman. I went along to a preview in The Odeon in Leicester Square today and I was totally blown away. I just sat there sobbing and wishing to god I could pen something so absolutely beautiful in a starkly simple, funny way, without all the rage and the anger I seem to churn inside me 24/7 (but believe me, if you had my family, you'd be a loony too). It was just fucking good, and that bitch made me proud to be a darn stripper. I don't think I ever wrote a proper public apology, and I'm very bad at kissing ass, because I hate to think I might come across as one of those people, but boy, this girl has talent. I want to crawl into her skin and be her, just for a few days. But then I'd come back to me as I hate fake tits.

Strippers effing rule.

Thank You For Sharing

Spoiler Alert: Muslims aren't the new blacks. The Polish are the new blacks, and the best thing is, they're white, so we can say what we want about the bastards.

Aside from embracing my British colonial heritage, I went for dinner with my estranged sister, her boyfriend and her lovely best friend in Cancerwell this evening. All seemed to be going well, until I overheard my sister's boyfriend say to her:

"I'm worried I'm embarrassing you because I'm not feeling very chatty tonight."

To which my ever loyal sister replied:

"No, don't be silly. You're not embarrassing me. My sister is."

I think the implication being I selfishly brought along two bottles of white wine instead of red.

I made an excuse and left, only to find the trains from Cancerwell were cancelled. Instead I was forced to take a rail replacement service piloted by Tariq from Lahore, who detailed the intricacies of his divorce to me for the entire 43 minute journey from Denmark Hill to Victoria. At Victoria I ascended a bus to Islington, where five Polish men thought it prudent to question me intently as to whether I wanted to suck their cocks, and if not, was I a lesbian? At which point I lost it and ground public transportation to a halt by yelling obscenities at them for ten solid minutes until they were forced to leave the bus.

I got to Finsbury Park, and walked home. At home, I drank tea, listened to Morrisey, and wondered whether it was immature of me to delete my sister from my facebook friends' list, before remembering she had already deleted me from her list three weeks previously for refusing to imitate her at an important function. I toyed briefly with the idea of suicide, but realised I may need my pills for future sibling interactions and walks home from remote North London locations.

A good evening was had by all.

Q & A

We share things. Not that we are dancers, strippers, whores, sluts, Ho’s. Just that we did a job because we felt we could cope with the consequences, the sheer weight of our apostasy, the nuclear fall out, not realising that the half-life would be for all eternity, and that the job would be what we were known for whenever we entered a room, someone whispered our name, looked over and glanced into our face, closed and guarded.

Extract from 'No Man's Land'.

When I lived in midtown and had just been fired from Flash Dancers, I remember waking up every morning trying to write the book, watch my bank balance go down, swallow back panic, wait until Eton had finished work and I could run round to his apartment, away from my life. That was in September 2005. I didn't realise then I still had another year of dancing and working illegally to go, and thank god I didn't. I'm still amazed that I didn't break down. That however low I went there was something that maintained the core of me while the outside melted and flaked. New York as a whole is one of those experiences people question me about over dinner, in cocktail parties, over a pint in the pub, and I'll smile daintily like it was an amusing, flippant experience, an aberration from the norm, a jovial jaunt in Central Park, rather than what it was - a fucking holocaust.

The point is, you can never get away from the past, and I'm stuck with certain labels forever, and because of this condemned to eternity to receive emails every week asking me the same damned things. I used to reply diligently to them, but now I don't because I'm tired of repetition, so here is a tawdry Q & A for your disposal.

1. Can you help me move to NYC and work illegally and give me contacts?

No.

2. Where can I get a fake SS card like you had?

I can't give you the exact address. In my article for the Voice I said there was somewhere near Times Square. There's also a bunch of places in Chinatown, Astoria and probably Brooklyn. I know about these places and I've walked past them, but I didn't get mine from here. I got a friend who is a graphic designer to make me one with a number I checked online with one of those SS sites, and no one else had the number so it became mine. Getting the card in one of these outside places is a bit like scoring drugs from strangers. You have to hang out, ask people, be a bit cheeky and know how to convince them you're not a cop (declaring "I'm not a cop" usually helps as there is a weird NY law which means they can't lie if you ask them directly, so we always had to ask johns when they asked for drugs or sex acts. Are you a cop? No? Then of course you can pay ninety bucks for my premium quality Daz Ultra Non Bio Whitening Washing Powder with which to caress your septum....). The biggest trick to the SS card is this: most employers only require a photocopy of said document. So get a shoddy fake and photocopy the little bastard.

Getting a visa to satiate the legal side of things is a little difficult. I entered the country on a B1/B2 visa which is unusual for a Brit - I got it from working on boats for three years. But most Americans don't understand the differences between visas, so I would show them this, they would look at the date - Expires 2010 - and think all was fine and dandy.

Suckers.

Even when I got a journalist's visa, my activities were really restricted and I couldn't earn money legally aside from freelancing for British newspapers.

3. Where can I get a job that doesn't require papers?

Restaurants in the East Village, but be prepared to work 80 hour weeks to make about 500 bucks or less. Also, it's hard, near-on impossible to get these jobs. There's a lot of people looking for work in NYC, especially cash-in-hand work. I'm not going to give you the name of the restaurants no, find them out for yourself. Stripclubs - Flash, NY Dolls, Private Eyes, VIP loads of places don't require papers. Rick's Cabaret, Scores, Hustler, Penthouse - all require papers and SS numbers. Cleaning people's houses, being a nanny - although the only people who will employ you without papers are going to be dodgy.

But what on earth is the point of going to a city where you have to grind cock or work until you're dead to earn a couple of bucks? Especially when you can stay at home, work legally, and try and convince your nice kind legal employer to transfer you over to NYC? If you're stupid, careerless, harbor a death wish and are doing this kind of job anyway, then go right ahead, do it in NYC. Otherwise.... erm, why? NYC is only a good city when you have money and a good job. Believe me. Otherwise she's the devil's work.

4. Would I encourage people to move to NYC and work illegally?

No damn way. I campaigned for immigrant rights when I was there simply because I started to understand the dynamics of immigration. You live in a shit country where you can't get a job, you move to America thinking you can get legal and work for more money, you get trapped in endless bureaucracy and become a non-person. There has to be a means to remedy this situation. This doesn't mean all you white middle class assholes at home should think 'Hmm, America loves my accent, it'll be easy'. It's not. That's the mistake I made. No one gives a flying fuck about your degree, your smile, your excellent phone manner and dynamic team spirit if you don't have papers. If you want to move to NYC go to school there, or get a transfer from your current employer, or settle for a vacation in the Big A.

The moral of the story is: Don't go to NY without a visa. It's too damned hard unless you have a lot of savings, a lot of sympathetic friends, and a means to getting legal. Really, it may have sounded exciting when you read about it on the page, but it's just painful and unpleasant to go through that in person.

Over and Out.

W7

Sitting quietly on the W7 bus coming back from a yoga class, I was molested by an elderly lady who placed her hand squarely in my crotch, smiled at me beatifically, and then lurched onto me in an effort to heave herself down onto the spare seat opposite.

She managed to sit down without further harassment and gazed at me for several minutes, before leaning forward and proffering a gnarled white hand up for my perusal.

"Look," she quavered. "Look! A lump. There. And another one. There. "

She sat back down, banged her cane on the floor with a jubilant thud and looked at me as if expecting applause.

"It's probably cancer," I said, and got off at the next stop.

thanks

Thank you for your concern. Fortunately annoying lady is moving back to the States in a month so I don't have to teach her anymore, and I told hard on man my class was becoming women only.

Problems solved. Now I just need a boyfriend.

Joke.

sucks

I find myself really loathing a lot of people to whom I teach yoga. I'm admitting this because I can't stand those yoga teachers who are full of perfection, holiness, positivity, good cheer, sanskrit wisdom and raw foods. I hate them too.

Allow me to justify this irrational and violent emotion.

Firstly, I harbour a peculiar repulsion for the man who always gets a hard on in Warrior 2. I don't know why Warrior 2 as opposed to Warrior 1, or Triangle, or Parsvokanasana, but Warrior 2 does it for him, and it's all I can do to smile the benevolent and patronising smile so beloved of the yoga teacher, and tell him to get into child's pose and breathe so for a brief 3 minute respite his cock is not poking through his pants.

I also hate the lady who keeps telling me I'm really young, I have my whole life ahead of me, and when I'm not looking for it, I'll find a boyfriend. But I don't want a boyfriend, I say. So you'll find a boyfriend! she repeats inanely, offering me a peppermint tea. But what if I don't want one? Will God force me to have one just because I don't want one, because that's the way my life works with its perverse fucked-upness? Why are you giving me life truths anyway? You're middle aged, careerless, married to a cunt you hate with three small nasty little children who've sapped away your youth and vitality, your tits are by your knees and your belly's by your ankles, and all you can find to talk about is what was on TV last night. You have nothing to offer me. Go away and die.

Digging deeper into my heart I can find yet more wells of bottomless hatred for the sweaty man who has been doing ashtanga for 6 weeks, but tells me, everytime I demonstrate, that I'm doing it wrong. He knows because he read it in a book. I'm doing it wrong. Can you show me the right way to do it then? No? Then shut the fuck up and get back to adho muka svanasana...

I hate the yoga teacher who calls me every day and doesn't know his arse from a hole in the ground. He's 47, but he signs his name with a big heart to punctuate the endless waves of love ebbing from his addled, generous heart (100 quid an hour for privates, no discounts, he only works in Chelsea), a big kiss at the end. He proclaims that he told the gym I would be covering for him, it's not his fault they won't pay me, he doesn't use email so how can he have been expected to get my email? Love baby, love and peace....

I just don't like people. I don't like them when they're trying to get me to suck their dicks in the backroom of some club, I don't like them when they're breathing and sweating all over me, I don't like them when they tell me all their existential problems and ask me if yoga will make their life better, I don't like them when they're being mean, I don't even like them when they're being nice. People suck. Today, London sucks. Life sucks. I'm sure tomorrow will be better, but right now, I'm drifting on a sea of suckiness, and I fucking hate life and all who sail on her.

I feel strangely better now.

the death of intimacy

"It's important to realise that losing your virginity is a really big deal: until you lose it, after which point it becomes, of necessity, a matter of no importance. Because if you placed any importance on the who, the where or the how, you'd be broken for the rest of your life. D'you know anybody who did it the 'right' way? With their childhood sweetheart who ten years down the line they'll end up marrying? Case in point, no you bloody don't. So shut up then."

The words are brisk, but the laughter's achingly fragile, small concealed in large, a dramatic sweep of the hand, a carnivalesque gesture, the assumption of a mask, pick up the fork again, fiddle with a rubbery egg, a slice of leather bacon. "D'you know what I mean?" she says a little quieter, and in the question is the answer: the hollow ache for understanding, to be a little less alone, to make the intimacy surrounding us a little less bleak, a little more substantial than a will o' the wisp. The traces of the drug stick in the back of your throat, stale breath from too many cigarettes, stale heart from too many lovers. A mug of steaming tea, a smouldering cigarette, the tinge of someone else's intimate distractions, it's all I can do to muster the enthusiasm to recount a half-hearted litany of the ex's imperfections, and this usually excites me. We deliberately rape intimacy with its analysis every hungover, Sunday lunch, with the words rushing out of our mouths like kids at breaktime, squabbling to get out, become more visceral. I guess the unspoken belief is that if we speak before the intimacy becomes too embedded in our souls, we can exorcise through words, through gossip, through casual and devastating one liners that cut and burn and prevent its dreaded, insidious, nasty crawl into the heart. There's no hiding that intimacy just died, and all that's left nowadays is an assumption that it's the end of the night, you're alone, I'm alone, lets go home together and rub our bits together, have a bit of a kiss, take our leave in the morning like two polite friends, a kiss on the cheek, rub the make up from last night from my cheeks, walk down the road swinging a bag carelessly from one slim hand and feeling seamy, cheap, strangely untouched.

The ex (one of many) reckoned it was timing, all about timing. "The person's irrelevant. If you meet the right person and you don't want a relationship and marriage and babies then it's game over." So, if you took someone home who was just perfect you still wouldn't see them again? Oh bollocks to you, you hard hearted cunt. If the right person came along, then that's it, I'd drop everything for them. Those were the words of the other ex. I'd rather believe the timing was wrong than I was wrong. Though I wonder sometimes if I have any feelings left in here after the holocaust of too much intimacy, every night, over and over with so many strangers, so that you mingle into their pheromones, come home smelling of a thousand stinking guys and their grief and their loneliness, so what you feel is a tender, sad sense of regret, fondness, sadness, but love? How can you feel love after all this? How can you build love and castles of romance from the end of a night, standing outside a pub and a casual offer from a stranger, "Want to come home with me and suck my cock?"

The fork is poised to stab into the hash brown. "So why did you go home with that one when you were seeing that other one who you seem to quite like?"

"That one was because I didn't want to get too close to the other one." The pre-emptive safety shag to make falling in love impossible, to keep intimacy to a decent, lewd, physical level. "Ah yes, I get it. I've done that before."

"D'you think it used to be like this? A long time ago? Or along with romance did intimacy just die right out of London Town?"

The fork comes down, splits the hash brown in two. Outside it's a crisp, near burnt brown. Inside, soft and pulpy and oily.

"Who can tell?"

London 2007

Sunday morning. Mephistopheles zips around North London on a Vespa while in Finsbury Park Dora (65) clutching The Watchtower and fifteen postcards of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, approaches five burqa-clad women and asks them to repent their sins and turn their back on Allah, and proffers a Werther's Original to a soft-eyed, long lashed child in a cunning ploy to lure him into a too-early iftar. The Polish lady with three languid, dirty children rocking like Romanian orphans reaches out a greasy claw for change and a peach-bottomed black lady roars at her in indignation, Yu shul be gettin' a job, not relyin' on de state, teykin' dese chillen on de street, yu shul be ashamed o yosel. Denzel, check out dissya ooman, shul be ashamed o hersel... on the W7 red-eyed men wearing paint spattered jeans yawn and a roar of old booze lurches insolently out with a slap and a cackle, a bored girl with too-tight jeans and a muffin top of white lard-like skin crawling like a slug over a rhinestone belt slaps a dummy in the mouth of a mewling child with green sleep pouring from the corners of his eyes, slimy trails of saliva chafing red angry skin, Crouch Hill and London drops away, just happy white couples clutching Sunday papers and Starbucks, thinking of eggs and toast and Monday morning and back home again...

Paris 2004

Sunday morning,
On the bed two half-eaten croissants.
Sunday morning,
We'll soon be out on the boulevards.

Monday morning,
We have to fly back home again.
While I'm sleeping,
You paint a ring on my finger with your black marker-pen.

I'm all about you, you're all about me,
We're all about each other.
I'm all about you, you're all about me,
We're all about each other.

You don't have to tell, 'cause I know so well
What we are all after.
Likewise if uncertainty puts a spell on me,
I have to zoom in on your laughter.

Wednesday morning,
We sleep over and we're late again.
Let's skip breakfast,
We need this precious time just to comprehend

- Peter Bjorn

money money money

Anyone who insists money doesn't buy you happiness has obviously never set foot in London and had to spend £23.20 a week on a travelcard zones 1-2. Life is pretty grey when you're poor, and preparing myself for the day when the estate agent leaches all the money from my account and sucks it up into real estate is pretty darn terrifying. It's days like this the panic unfurls like a small vicious animal whose bark keeps you awake at night, and I can't help thinking, hmm, is it too late to retrain and have a real career? But then if I couldn't write every day, or have the time and space to think about writing, I'd go mad, and surely it won't be too long before I'll get another cash fix to keep me going...

I think when you're about six years into leaving uni you suddenly realise that you're not waiting for life to start, you're already in it, right in the thick of it, and however you dream about that job or promotion or girlfriend or house, this is as good as it gets. Some people get freaked out and find hollow meaning in marriage or babies or dogs or more degrees - me, I opted for writing. I honestly, without intending to sound nihilistic, just don't get life without it. Whenever something shit / good / mediocre / funny / sad happens, it gets translated into words. The dreadful realisation that life isn't fair, will never be fair, that arseholes have an easier time of it than those with consciences who like puppies and helping old ladies across the street, it all becomes so much more bearable when you explain that to someone else in a story, a book.... which is all a nice way of saying, I'm ricocheting towards the poverty line again and off to India in December and starting to worry about cash and where to dump my stuff while I rent the flat I just bought to someone who can, unlike me, afford the mortgage. But it's OK, because at least I'm a writer, albeit one with insomnia. Phew. Maybe I should get a bloody job in Stringfellow's with the rest of the slappers who are too thick to get a real job, or have illusions of artistry which prevent them from gainful employment. I'd fit right in.

Cover

This is the provisional cover for the book. They're going to replace the girl on the front with a pic of me, the shoot for which is tomorrow. There's a story there but I've already written it once tonight and if you want it, you'll have to check out the info section of my website:

http://www.ruthfowler.co.uk

Now, as the last five days have been ridiculously busy and I haven't slept properly since last week sometime, I'm going to bed happy in the knowledge that I sent the final edits off this morning and I don't have to worry about anything apart from the new book for quite a while! And now maybe I can sleep again...!