January Blues

The boss has it. She eyes me up over the Xerox machine and sniffs in that curiously French way of hers, fiddles with a ring the size of a saucer that she periodically removes to type apathetic one-fingered emails in French, puts back on to waft downstairs and brew treacly coffee like runny shit. Ah, mon dieu... The assistant has it, a busty, buxom Victorian creature with a private school education and withering put-downs delivered with an inaudible sigh, long dark lashes lowered demurely to her old man's cardigan, Victoria's Secrets peeking out her anti-sex clothes which suggest an interior of slut. The boss thinks I lied on my resume because I'm crap at the job. Well, I did, but not about the things she suspects, the degree and the grades. The age, the two years in a strip club gently elided, the fool-proof job stretched taut from its actual three months to its entirely fictional three years, this is the bollocks under my name. She suspects, and calls all my references and I have to pretend I don't know. So work digs me deeper into the January blues, using me as its goddamn shovel.

To kick off the dust of depression I go to meet Touching-&-Fondling, who has begun to amuse me despite, or perhaps because of, my refusal to partake in touching and fondling.

We sit in a pub in Kentish Town with my book open before me. No, it's not out yet, hold on.

"Cain't" he says slowly, as one does to an idiot.

"Cahn't"

"Cain't," he says again patiently, and sweat prickles at his brow.

"Cahn't. Did I tell you about that asshole who keeps stalking me?"

"Shut up. Cain't. Say it."

The learning-of-accents-for-audio-recordings-in-NY does not go well. We take a break.

"I'm depressed." I volunteer when it becomes clear he has no interest in my wellbeing and I must offload my mood by force. "I'm really depressed. Like, considering pills depressed. Thinking of jacking it all in, moving to LA, or Bombay, or something. I hate life and I hate people. Maybe I'll die I'm so depressed. Like Heath Ledger."

He nods noncommitally. "So nothing new?"

Silence. Just the whine of traffic and silly fat girls with muffin tops and too much eyeliner braying idiotically in Top-Shop clothes.

"I heard this noise outside my flat yesterday," T&F begins. "Like a strangled cry for help. And I looked out my window and this man was all tangled in rope, hanging from a tree, with another guy trying to hold him up. So I ran down with a bread knife and we cut him down. He was trying to kill himself."

We muse on this in silence.

"Where was this?" I ask.

"Fifty yards down the road," he points and we gaze down there, at the offending tree in question.

"Cain't," T&F provides helpfully.

I walk home through Kentish Town and feel it even more, those pressing blues, those empty fucking yawns which just swallow up your life without even the courtesy of a belch. I'm sad for that guy: sad someone stopped the poor fucker. After going to all that effort, getting yourself all psyched up for the big zero, preparing for the gates of St Peter, maybe even checking out the caskets online, surely the last thing you want is some good Samaritan coming along and screwing up your carefully planned death. What an asshole. Poor guy. I wonder what he said when he went home. Sorry luv, fucked up me suicide, is it too late to ask you to put dinner on?

I'm down down down right now, can't write, can't think, can't do anything. You ever feel like you don't really exist? I feel like that, until I write, and then I do, but the writing and the real life get so intricately entwined it's painful to separate them. Writing about yourself is not good, really not good. After the book I felt relief, like it was all over now, no more blog, no more first-person shit, no more real life episodes and offending people and blah blah fucking blah. Kick the chair away, let Mimi dangle off that fucking rope. But then they asked me to write more about my life "because it's so interesting," and I refused, for a year, until the money began to run out, and then I began to consider it, and it didn't seem so bad after all, until I crossed that line again, and realized that it was never Mimi on that rope at all, it was me and what was holding me up was only the grace of fucking god, some invisible good Samaritan holding up my legs so I didn't choke myself with words.

So I'll just have to keep it a bit more under check, I guess. I cain't keep making the same mistakes.

I'm really sorry. Yeah, that's for you. From the real world, not the fictional one.

wang

Can someone please explain to me why in New York the drugged-up bums get their wangs out, and in London, perfectly decent, well-dressed, seemingly intelligent men do it at 10pm on the Northern Line when you're just trying to read a goddamn book?

And why when you're the only person to tell that asshole to put his junk back in his pants, everyone else gives you the unholiest look, as if you just spat in Jesus' face or something?

I, don't, get, this, country.

Virginia

I didn’t realize Virginia was different to West Virginia, so I sang John Denver that week, echoing in a loop around my head during the flight from Fort Lauderdale up to Norfolk.

Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue ridge mountains…

There’s America, you must understand, and there’s America. I had known New York City, the drunks and the bums, the pimps and the ho’s, the slick, smart, tailored lefties with their nice, clean West-Village apartments, the kinds of people who vote for Hillary or Barack. I had known Portland, Oregon, with its emphasis on organic fare and white kids that say dude with a vowel that never ends, who talk about Derrida and Lacan in the same breath as enquiring whether you ride goofy or regular. I had known Fort Lauderdale, stuck in an expat bubble with other young people like me, living in five star luxury on absurd and grotesque boats owned by anonymous rich people we knew only through the check that came into our (offshore) bank accounts each month. I don’t think of these three places as sufficient to claim a knowledge of the States. It’s like sitting in Heathrow at The Oyster bar opposite the Mulberry store and saying you’ve seen Great Britain. So Virginia was a foray into blue ridge mountains, the Shenandoah river, except when I babbled this excitedly to Boy, who picked me up at the airport, he just laughed, shook his head, and drove me through country that was brittle and frosted, flat, unbearably flat, like those damned fens I’d left all those years back, flat and featureless, save for the acne scars of the stripmalls, pocked throughout with an appalling lack of imagination.

Out the window of his brown, beat-up Ford, he pointed out landmarks in his soft Virginian drawl that sounded like West Virginian to me. “That’s the military base… that’s where ah lived for seven years, until I got out just before Iraq.” Norfolk was gray, depression gray, prozac-gray, the gray of a sixty-a-day smoker on a ventilator-gray. Take me home, to the place I belong… We pulled up outside a red-brick twenties building, the basement flat. His door swung cleanly open. He didn’t use a key. “No need. I don’t own anything valuable, why would anyone come in? This is a good neighborhood. No blacks”. A formica kitchen, a refrigerator from the sixties, wallpaper peeled and blistering, faded imprints of psychedelic flowers, sad and old. The floorboards creaked and a cat with horrific misshapen lumps on its back emerged and wound itself lovingly around me. “So, you hungry? Wanna eat? Play some poker? See the sights?”. Outside you couldn’t see the sky. This is a fucking theme in my life. Five days to go in this ablution of a place. This hiccup, this phlegmy cough, this excuse, this fart.

Dark and dusty,
painted on the sky
Misty taste of moonshine
Teardrops in my eye

He took my hand and led me into the bedroom. I was apathetic, It would make the time go quicker at least. The bed squealed like a pig, springs aching and shrieking. We ended up sitting round a scarred table, scored with deep rings, sticky with old rum, playing poker and drinking Coca-Cola, and the cat with lumps on its back slept thickly on my lap, snoring softly.

We went for a drive in the afternoon, after the sun set. Drivin down the road I get a feelin' that I should have been home yesterday, yesterday…. “You know, like time goes real slow here,” I said, and wound the window down so I could stick my head out the side and smoke. The window got stuck halfway.

“That don’t work. Wait, we’ll be in the bar soon.”

People are fat in Norfolk, I saw. Fat, and there was a lot of black people, but the black people didn’t walk alongside the white people, like they did in New York City, and I’d like to say Oregon, but hell I ain’t ever seen a black person in Oregon, but here there was like this line, neat and geometrical, precise, dissecting white from black. We sat in a bar called Café Habana, ordered pink margaritas which glowed with sugary cancer agents, sat outside in the cold and felt the sky starting to press down, bulging with unwept snow. His best friend turned up, Kruger, a fat, jolly slothful person who liked me. He ordered a pink, frozen margarita too.

“How’s Mary-Anne?” Boy asked.

“She’s pissin’ me off dude. She keeps whinin’ about being fat –“

“She is fat.”

“Yeah, but hell, she had the baby like more'n eighteen months ago. It ain’t my fault she’s too fuckin’ lazy to get off her ass and down to the gym. I tolda she could go with you. You still workin’ out? Course you are. I can tell. See those muscles.”

He winked at me. I felt sorry for him with a fat wife at 25. Boy turned to me and put an explanatory arm around my shoulders.

“So Mary-Anne used to be real thin, real pretty, but she just went to shit when she got pregnant.”

Kruger grinned.

“She wanted sex all the time but I couldn’t get it up. She just didn’t look right, all puffy and fat. She let herself go. Man, she was mean.”

“So now Kruger wants to leave her ‘cause he’s not happy but they have the kid, Billy.” Boy’s gaze is distant, into the empty parking lot opposite, thinking about something he can’t quite get his head around.

“Yeah, Billy. Man, my heart breaks every time I see that kid. My boy. We taught him to say 'Vote George Bush' in the election. Dressed him up and took him out campaigning on the ole trail. 'Vote George', he says, in that little pipey voice. 'Vote Bush'. Mary-Ann was pissed.”

"She was pissed because you taught him to say 'poontang', Kruger."

"That too."

Everyone slurped pink slush through waxy paper straws. Slurp slurp. The night grew chill. People had heard there was an English girl in town and some teenagers in baggy sweats came to look at me. “Say somethin’,” one of them droned in a monotone, and they all stared. “Fuck off,” I said, and they did.

Everyone in Norfolk votes red. They say Iraq ‘Eye-raq’ and hate the French, love that ole Texan cowboy stumbling around in the White House. Florida weren't no mistake. The war ain't no mistake, fuck WMD's, fuck Guantanamo. This is 2004 and it’s a prickly subject. Kruger and Boy got out of the military just before the war. They didn’t see this as lucky. The war nearly made both of them jump right on back in there, sign up for a longer life-sentence. “We wanted action, you feel so useless being in the army and not being in combat. So you leave and then this big ole cool war starts up. And I wanted to be in it, fighting for America, you know?” I didn’t and looked bored, my cheeks sucked in trying to inhale the last of that pink slush so I felt that my face might turn inside out. Another round? Yeah.

When I got back a black dude was shuffling along down the sidewalk, past the Appleby’s with a sign that buzzed and jerked in a way that was probably highly detrimental to those who suffered from epilepsy. Garbage seeped out along the street, old, tired garbage, melded into a mush with snow, thawed out, inert. Kruger and Boy stared at him with pistol eyes.

“I’m not being racist when I say this, but black people have like no freakin’ respect. You know when you see a black person they’re gonna ask you for money, they’re a drug dealer or a single mother or something.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” sighed Kruger with the world weariness of 25 and a fat-bitch with too many hormones waiting at home .

“Uh, actually, I think that is racist.” I said, and they looked at me, depressingly dumb.

“No honey,” Kruger said gently and stupidly. “It can’t be racist if it’s true.”

Four days to go.

Take me home, country roads…

Tango

Verás que todo es mentira
Verás que nada es amor
Que al mundo nada le importa…

You see that everything’s a lie
You see that nothing is love
Nothing matters to the world…

The music of tango is the hoarse curse of the woman to her lover. It’s the insolent hand that creeps to the cusp of a man’s hipbone, retreats, silent and knowing. Tango is the woman's dance. Even if the man leads, the woman follows not in compliance, but absolute assurance of where that step will land, knowing even before her partner does where they’ll go. It’s the constraint that makes the tango, the unfulfilled offer, the delicate tracing of steps in an elliptical struggle between lover and whore, passion and passivity. Tango is the dance between the prostitute and her client, in the days when whoring was illegal and brothels assumed a semblance of respectability by claiming to be dance schools.

I stand in yet another bar in heels too high, sip souring drinks and smile pleasantly at someone who I will fuck yet never call, and it’s all I can think of, the dance. The twirls and the giros, the touch and the retreat, the moment of arrest when eyes lock and pupils dilate, a glance down and away as we continue the steps – the front ocho, barrida, gancho, media-luna - so choreographed and practiced over years of sad, sorry, sexual experience, too much experience. A dance we know so well that there are no surprises, though we may gasp at an unexpected improvisation, a slight deviation from the known.

Maybe it’s because sex and dancing were so inextricable in the lonely years I was in Manhattan - writhing in some asshole’s lap, squirming and gasping onstage, a hand tracing another woman’s curves while some jerkoff reaches into his pocket for more Benjamins – that this dance became akin to that other one, that sexual tango I keep living over and over again with devastating predictability. Life becomes one huge milonga, and entering a bar I’ll catch sight of my compatriots and our eyes will never quite meet as we feign, like those whores in Buenos Aires, that it’s just a dance, it’s nothing more than a dance.

I change partners frequently, like I did in secret dark rooms hidden in the bowels of echoing, flashy buildings when I’d make you believe it was lo- well, sex at least, the moves spontaneous and unrehearsed, the attraction unmotivated by money. The milonga’s bigger now; the expectation a little more dangerous, because back in that strip club we both knew it was a lie, a little performance, a show, a fiesta. The steps required out here are more intricate; the lies are harder to gauge because we’re not in a place which condones illusion anymore: we have to pretend we both think it’s real. So we’ll meet, have a drink or two, warm up with some preliminary stretches, some inane small-talk to ease tense muscles and jerky ligaments, let the alcohol relax us. And when it does I’ll make him feel as if he’s leading, as he holds his hand out and asks me to accompany him on this giddy trip, this tango of sex. And he steps forward, never pausing to question why it is that I can step so perfectly in time back with him, why I’m already in the same beat. ‘Dating’ they call it nowadays, this sorry ritual. It’s fun for a while, a merry-go-round, a calesita of dates and meetings, coffees and luncheons, dinner and strange beds, but the tango dancers know that the climax of the dance leads to nothing – a walk home alone, sitting at the end of the bed pulling tired nylons down pale, slim legs stinking with the juices of someone else. But I keep dancing. I keep doing it. I don’t even know why: my obsession with the performative perhaps, my need to keep practicing the steps for fear I’ll forget them. I’ve become brutal in choreographing my routines: one night, four drinks, back to his. “I didn’t expect it to come to this,” he’ll say, and I keep going with the swing, “Oh neither did I. I just thought we’d have a late night coffee.” Oh yes really, oh really. Our lower bodies touch, entwine, become one, but the upper part of our torsos, where the heart is, remain erect and untouching, the arms held stiffly and elegantly, the gaze in opposite directions. To change it up I’ll perform a cambio-de-frente, a change of face. I never expected it to come to this, he'll say, tongue-in-ass or something, and I'll stop, stare mocking and mean. Oh come one. Don’t be so fucking stupid. Of course you did. Why else would you put your fucking card behind the damn bar and invite me home to see your freakin’ cat? And then he falters, realizes that you stepped back, but he forgot to step forward, or didn’t know how, and the dance goes on without him. I leave.

It takes practice, of course, to master the tango. The upper body is stiff and unyielding, from the waist down legs hint at the endless combinations of pleasures they can divulge. Yet the torso stands aloof, compliant to the whims of a partner, a cold embrace that reveals nothing but the restless stirring in two sets of eyes. Most people can’t master this, though nowadays across a crowded bar crammed with British slobs, I’ll notice the women are always more practiced than the men. We practice and practice, keep practicing. And as we practice the lyrics change, even if the steps stay the same. The song about a prostitute and her client becomes a song of melancholy, lost love, lost family, wasted lives, a love of your barrio, but more than this a love of tango itself. We start to love the tango more than what it means, if it means anything. They say that the tango is about love between two people, a connection, the brevity of romantic love and yet its heartfelt depth, my death defying love for you… but these people have forgotten its history perhaps, because the tango is about sex and performance, illusion, choreography. The tango has always been about the inability of two people caught in a dance to connect with anything other than the steps in their feet, hearts which never touch, glances which arrest for no more than a second, nothing more than technical precision. And you never realize until you meet one whom knows the steps better than you.

I danced with him until 7am one Friday night, kept it going and going with indefatigable combinations until eventually over roulette and staring pale Asian kids in Nike he leaned over and kissed me. We went home together, naturally, yet didn’t play out the dance. Exhausted by alcohol and hours of gambling in some shithole in SoHo, we merely slept, pickled happily in booze. Perhaps it was because the dance didn’t end that we met up again, and again, and each meeting was a hedonistic flamenco of fun; a staccato, fluent love song sang by faceless people in the wings, us the main performers. I forgot to dance tango, with him, found myself losing the rhythm and dropping beats and stumbling over steps, and finally emerging, gasping, illusions dropped, the dance played out. We sat on a beach and stared out to sea, and there was silence, no music, nothing - suddenly in the distance an explosion of pyrotechnics, back to black. Stillness and a black sea, cold, hard pebbles beneath frozen butts sitting companionably on the shore. And so I didn’t realize that he hadn't stopped dancing, and when he got up, took my hand and dragged me to my feet and we set off down a pier that led far out to sea, I couldn’t keep up. I’d forgotten how. When our legs entwined I leaned forward as if to rest my chest against his, but he wasn’t there, had danced on, and I nearly fell.

I recovered quickly, like a trouper, the star of this tacky performance, started dancing again, returned to the tango as something reliable, dependable, my dance frenzied, gnawing and unsatisfied. Went home with someone else, another, the steps promiscuous and braggart, steely and determined. Kept moving. Keep moving. Still am moving. What I had with him was just a paraditas – a small stop, and I doubt I ever will make it a parada, a final curtain call, shoes unstrapped, abandoned.

There’s another definition of tango, one I prefer, one I find more appropriate to me, to the milonga of sex and dating and love in the 21st city-century. This one states that tango is the dance of the emigrant. Someone who is always leaving and never finds home. Someone whose heart is yearning for something, something that they can never have.

New Friend-Crush

I had an awesome evening last night with good friends and good food and superb dancing in Exmouth Market watching Sadler's Wells Sampled. Really breathtaking, amazing stuff. I am just in awe of dancers, and the live flamenco music made you cry.

However my favourite act, and my new uber-crush is on Salah. This guy blows your mind. I just want to be close to people who are this talented, and also this lovely, because he was exceedingly nice when I babbled to him in the bar afterwards. Go check him out, and check out Breakin Convention in May, which I will certainly be attending.

Painting

Boys in hoodies are sitting in the stairwell passing a smoke around. They hold it in the accepted position: between thumb and index finger, hand twisted so the wrist is held to where the sky should be but isn't. They inhale, hold breath, pass on, exhale, cough. Someone snickers and the echoing, empty concrete catapults their voices into the air, where they ricochet, get clawed down by the dank, damp smell of weed. They don't hear me coming up the stairs in my rubber-soled chucks, and when suddenly I'm standing there, white skin and black hair and red, red clothes, they eye me uncertainly, pupils shifting, looking down at the breezeblock floor covered in ash and coke cans and the debris of fifteen-year old fun. Attempts to get high on whatever's available hang unarticulated but obviously taken, efforts to get out of this concrete can as palpable as the dissatisfaction. It's silent as I pass, just the faint squeak of those rubber soles, and when I push past into the corridor, struggle for a key in that red, red coat I feel bloodshot, blurred eyes glare fiercely at my back.

Inside the apartment - flat - is warm. Too warm. Faint wafts of marijuana drift insidiously through the smack of paint and turpentine, new furniture swathed in clear-plastic, remnants of old wallpaper sticking damp and gloopy to a faded carpet that isn't mine. It's late and I have no curtains and looking out I can see into a different apartment, a small, dirty child crawling like a grub across creased linen and faded covers; cartoon characters washed out, out-of-fashion. The child scuttles onto the bed like a crab and a faceless person reaches for a leg, pulls her onto her back, strips her of pants and diapers, brisk, efficient, bored. The light goes out. It's raining again. It always rains in London and I can see right across Kentish Town and Highgate all the way to Alexandra Palace, illuminating a city that always feels domesticated and gray in comparison to the glitter and the grandeur of New York, its gluttonous, fantastical filth.

I go to bed in a room with no wallpaper and fresh cement in ageing holes, and somewhere deep in the belly of the building a techno-beat pulses erratically like the angina-plagued heart of this grand machine. Lying in sheets still angular and stiff from plastic packaging I can't feel relief, or contentment, or pride, or any of the things you're meant to feel when you're in your own house, paid up by you. I just feel this blankness.

I sleep, eventually, dream of hair turning gray and teeth falling out, crumbling like the plaster behind that terracotta wallpaper, plugged with polyfilla that never sets and just disintegrates in soft powder, and I wake in a panic, go to a class, go back to the DIY store. I put writing aside; put friends aside. I start to toil. It's not crafting, it's not art. Mindless repetition. Steaming, dislodge a bit of terracotta, jam my blade behind the paper, wait for it to bubble, pull. Minutes pass. Silence. Hours. It ends, I soak in the bath and watch pieces of gummed paper float up from blistered hands. Repeat. Days. The new furniture stays swaddled in plastic. I get to sugar soaping. Calking. Wait for walls to dry. Days more pass. I get tired of it, by this time. The kids in hoodies are always on the stairwell, eyeing me suspiciously. I ask them to smoke one floor up feeling my voice whine into incomprehensible transatlantic, willing it back to more palatable London, failing. They hide the smokes and just look instead, not angry, not insolent, wary and blank. In the apartment which is mine but not mine, I get headaches from the paint fumes. Angry. Sad. Doing this place up, and for what? Looking out of the window I see Alexandra Palace, not Broadway, not the Brooklyn Bridge, not the places I'm used to seeing, the places I should be seeing. Calm. Calm. By nightfall I'm calm, but I'm smoking out the window, I had given up smoking but being back here makes me want to feel something, even if it's just a chest constricting in disgust, watching gray ash fall down-down-down, and the little grub crawls into a wardrobe and her dirty feet stick out saucily at me. The lights go out.

In bed the sheets are starting to soften, but I feel harder, like the layers are toughening up. I don't feel anything and I should. Is this what happens when you get what you wish for? You just take it, disgruntled, wish for more, more experience, more life, more pain? Because maybe the pleasure, or the comfort, what you should feel, is actually just this: sheets starting to soften, a nose starting to acclimatise to the smell of marijuana and paint fumes, polyfilla crumbling and teeth greying, polyfilla greying and teeth crumbling. What next, when you have what you want? What else when the pain you have now is mere toothache compared to the yawning cancers that ate you up before? Grateful? Oh fuck you.

I move on from first coat to second. The scrabbling panic rises and I end up smoking with the hoodies on the stairwell, and when someone comes out to yell and tut-tut, we eye her blankly, note the pregnant belly, the bobbled cardigan, the slippers. I am wearing all black, and they, red. Back inside I start the third coat of paint, and start to hum. I hum. A train passes by and the apartment rattles happily, and the mood lifts as I paint over the last of that crumbling filler, turn to the next wall, see it taking shape and color, my home, and a ticket in my back pocket home to that other home, New York, New York. I guess I realize the hostility is a reaction to something unfamiliar: a modicum of something, some thing called security, a tiny anchor, or some thing, or something.

In bed the pulse starts up again, and then flicks off, just like that, so all I can hear is my heart, and out of the curtainless windows still gloriously un-calked and leeking white powder like a sigh, I see the lights of Alexandra Palace whorl into something akin to Manhattan.


** Finding it really hard to write as I'm working my ass off trying to get this apartment done up before I go to NY in February, so writing and fun is on hold for now. But I am figuring out a way to make my life properly transatlantic right now 'cause as much as I love London I need my States fix. Three years in one place and the bastard's in my blood and I miss it. Can't wait to return in 13 days! **

The Observer

This is nice - but a bit wrong. My book comes out with Viking (which is a branch of Penguin) US in June, not UK. Don't have a UK publisher yet, something my agent is going to try remedy in the next few months...

The Observer

I have a piece coming out in the UK Observer on Sunday - in The Book of the Body. Check it out.

Scores

I was digging around stripperweb.com and found some references to a prostitution bust in my old workplace, Scores westside in Manhattan, which took place a year back. I remember the manager, Gus, mentioned in the article very well. He makes an appearance in my book chomping on gyro and was actually quite a decent guy to me, although we all knew he would pimp out your Granny if it made him an extra buck.

I was also quite happy to see the lawsuit filed by Francis Vargas in the paper. I saw Francis around in Scores but didn't know her - I doubt we even spoke in the six months I worked there, eventually getting fired for punching an asshole who tried to touch me the wrong way - but I recall Sammy, again mentioned as a sleazy, mob-connected fuck here - as, yes, a sleazy, mob-connected fuck. But no one mentions Tommy, which is interesting, as the jumped up little shit had a great habit of drugging eighteen year olds and fucking them in the private rooms to make his shifts go quicker. Let's hope somebody whacked the douchebag.

Ah, Happy Days. Francis Vargas, if you need some help with your lawsuit, gimme a call.