You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (2 page)

Gen smiled at us. She looked fairly cheery for somebody in the vice-like grip of two Samoan security guards, though this might have had something to do with the twelve tequila shots.

‘Er . . . yeah.'

A nod from Bouncer A.

‘Right. You're out too.'

Thus, en masse, we were turfed out of Spearmint Rhino (‘Don't you know who I am? I was once a guest on
The Early
Bird Show!
') and on to King Street. The shame of it.

‘Even Gene Simmons doesn't get thrown out of strip joints,' my friend Dave the Scot said ruefully, watching the bouncers head back inside with an exchange of satisfied grunts. ‘And I heard he sometimes goes to the toilet on the ladies' faces.'

Gen was grinning blurrily up at us from the gutter and could offer no explanation as to why she'd been so unceremoniously evicted, so we were forced to guess among ourselves what dreadful deed she might have committed. I mean, people jerk off in the men's room in those places. People vomit in pot plants. It's not like we were in
church
.

We eventually ended up at Wally's Bar in Collingwood, where my best friend Gabi stumbled upon a member from Jet wedged in the toilets between the cistern and the wall (‘I think I'm stuck,' he told her in bewildered tones) and I drank one too many mojitos and fell across the dancefloor like Peter Garrett having an epileptic fit, much to the amusement of onlookers. It was a degrading evening for all concerned. And as far as I know, the young man from Jet is still trapped in the toilets.

No, strip clubs were for chumps and amateurs, schoolies and sailors on shore leave. And too pedestrian-accessible to hold any sense of allure, any opium-den,
Miss Saigon
-style titillation. I temporarily made do with strip clubs like an impatient gastronome shovelling through the entrée. Strip clubs were the support band. Prostitutes were the main act.

The problem is, as a novice it's impossible to know how to go about involving oneself in the world of prostitutes. There's no training manual, no checklist of Things To Do. It's easy enough to get drunk and flip through the Yellow Pages where almost everyone looks like the sort of terrifying Russian mail-order bride who would eat all your Vita Brits before ripping your throat out with her teeth, but making the phone call without collapsing into a fit of mortified giggles is another matter altogether. I still can't explain why I was so obsessively keen to experience a real life face-to-face encounter with a hooker. I'd like to say I'll try anything once, with the exception of voting conservative, but to be honest I'd almost definitely draw an additional line at putting Sugar Ray on a mix tape and having sex with a horse. Outside of that, I'm very open-minded, which is why when in my early twenties I finally chanced upon a ragingly libidinous gentleman caller with background experience in whores I was pretty well primed to get the unedited story.

Matty was what you would call ‘wild at heart', if you were eighty years old and also prone to using expressions like ‘dagnabbit' and ‘there's a storm in these here achin' bones'. He was troubled, and he was Trouble. I had just ended a long-term cohabitation and felt endlessly reckless. I met him for the first time in the gardens next to the Exhibition Buildings in Carlton. It was dark and he said ‘hello' and we just started kissing. I wanted to be around him all the time. He provided that addictive sense of freefall you get when you read Bukowski and start drinking whisky at 9 am, and the more I disentangled myself from my sad, worn-out old relationship and my tedious job writing commercial television, the more susceptible I was to his hazardous charms.

He would tell me stories of his stepfather, a dark and shady character who entertained gangster friends and occasionally carried a gun. Coming from the leafy streets of East Hawthorn where the most exciting thing to happen in twenty years was my dad once forgetting to wear pants whilst taking the garbage out (19/11/1982—you probably saw it on the news), this seemed hugely exotic. Matty had grown up in a world of drunken rages and cigarettes and bar-room brawls and drive-by shootings. He ran away from home in a whirl of self-righteousness and marijuana smoke. His stepfather beat his mother. Matty was of course brutally and emotionally damaged as a result. I found him intoxicating.

Finally, here was somebody who could not only shed some light on the elusive topic of brothels but also elaborate upon it with street smarts far beyond my comparatively sheltered capacity. As I listened with a combination of horror and awe he told me about the time he'd accidentally stumbled across his stepfather's illegal porno dubbing operation. (‘Two VCRs linked to each other via a series of electrical leads,' he explained patiently. ‘That's how they did it in those days.') He'd also figured out—after days of painstaking practice—how to break into his stepfather's safe. There he found ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. He immediately started pilfering from the pile. A little on a taxi ride here, a little more on a bottle of Beam there. One of the first major purchases he made with his illicit newfound wealth was a half-hour visit from an escort. He had dialled the number of the agency with trembling, I've-gone-too-far-to-stop-now fingers. Within the hour a prostitute had come around to his house and obediently sucked him off. He spent the rest of the evening celebrating in his room, getting blind drunk on red wine stolen from the downstairs liquor cabinet.

He was twelve years old.

This was my sort of chap.

During the course of his relatively young life Matty had fucked strippers, teenage runaways, good girls from the suburbs, rough girls from the coast, arty Fitzroy types with tattoos and open windows, motherly hippies smothered in avocado oil and sanctimony, and lots and lots of prostitutes. Rather than allow this fact to send me screaming in the other direction (‘So you're really into whores? That's such an amazing coincidence, I love tapas bars and Spanish architecture'), I found it completely compelling. I had found my in-road.

We took on my secret obsession with gusto, tackling obstacles like a cheerily perverted street team. Once, during a fairly slow day at work, I requested that he go to a brothel and receive a blowjob while I listened on the telephone. People were swinging in and out of my office with script amendments and friendly ‘I'll come back later when you're not so busy' mimes while I sat, absolutely transfixed, listening to my boyfriend apparently thoroughly enjoying himself with another woman. It felt fucked up and intense.

As an ominous sign of things to come Matty's phone ran out of credit and cut off partway through a fairly interesting moment where the young lady in question (young? middle-aged? hunchbacked? It was so hard to tell on the phone) had asked him if he
liked it
.

‘Y—' Matty had purred, before the phone beeped angrily and he abruptly disappeared into the ether.

‘If we're going to
do weird stuff like this
,' I wailed to him later in the night as we debriefed, ‘
you need to pay your phone
bill
.'

The experience didn't deter us, miraculously. It made us bolder. We talked about trying out other, more provocative encounters and one night Matty authoritatively took what he felt to be the natural next step and called an escort over to my house.

I don't know how it happened. Yes I do. A drunkenly intimate conversation about his extensive experiences, no doubt with me once again cajoling him into revealing further details about his dalliances with winsome strip-a-grams (‘Was she pretty? Did her underpants have Velcro fasteners?') had led to a series of teasing hypotheticals which in turn led to some kind of ‘I dare you'/‘No, I dare
you
' idiocy and all of a sudden, there you have it—we were standing in our kitchen wearing pyjamas and daunted expressions, and a lady of the night was on her way over.

My first thought at the time—for some reason—involved my dog, who I assumed should be morally protected from the forthcoming experience.

‘We need to lock Bob Ellis in the laundry,' I said.

Matty seemed nonplussed.

‘Why? She's been in the room before. During.'

‘With
us
. This woman is a prostitute. I don't want her touching my dog. Or having some sort of . . . visitor relationship with her.'

The thought of some strumpet making coo-coo noises over Bob Ellis and scratching her behind the ear, being a normal dog person, was somehow just too much to bear. Put my boyfriend's dick in your mouth, fine. Tickle my dog's belly, get the hell out of my house. My dog didn't ask to be involved in any depraved sexual fantasies; she was simply a normal hound who liked chasing tennis balls. Having her sniffing about, wagging her sweet little tail, even—god forbid—barking high spiritedly to join in the orgiastic fun, somehow took the edge off the wickedness of it all. It was bad enough having my gym clothes and a library bag in the corner of my room. When did you ever see movies where a winking prostitute entertained a customer with a sports bra and a ‘Ready, Steady, READ!!' tote bag within arm's reach?

I suddenly saw my house through a prostitute's eyes—or at least my clumsy assumptions of what a prostitute was, after all of Matty's
My Fair Lady
-esque teachings. I realised I now hated my 1950s salt and pepper shakers. I realised I now hated the fact I was too much of a teenage dolt to wash and put away my clothes. Why wouldn't I wash and put away my clothes? Other people washed and put away their clothes.

Most of all I hated that a stranger was going to be there passing judgement on my stuff and I would have to pay her for her time.

I panicked.

‘What should a room look like when a prostitute comes over for a threeway?'

‘I don't know. A room.'

‘Maybe I should tidy up.'

‘She's not Mary Poppins. She's not going to run a white glove over the furniture and then fly off with her umbrella.'

The closer it all got to becoming real, the more I felt I wasn't cut out for these kinds of scenarios. I'm all talk. I embrace the giddy, monstrously creative idea of something or someone over the actuality of its existence. I loved imagining the wickedly wry double entendres I would make to the Monica Bellucci lookalike once she arrived and the no-doubt intellectually engaging discourse that would serve as precursor to any sex act. In my head it was all wild and perfect and everyone involved was very good-looking and possessed of a keen sense of comic timing. Matty would wear a top hat and a spinning bow tie. My underwear would come off seamlessly without any awkward tugging or wriggling. It would be perfect. Yet in reality I was terrified, and experiencing what they no doubt knowingly refer to in escort circles as ‘buyer's remorse'. I paced and wondered what on earth had brought us to this desperately sad and careless point. The moment the knock on the door came I disappeared to my bedroom like a coward and left Matty—the pro, the dirty, over-experienced, stripper-fucking pro—to deal with the pleasantries.

Our lady caller announced herself with all the delicacy and grace of Anna Nicole Smith on Oaks Day. ‘GROUSE PLACE! HOW LONG HAVE YAS LIVED HERE?'

Her greeting echoed around the entrance hall. I looked around my room for somewhere to hide. I couldn't possibly face this. I'd written for
Neighbours
, for christ's sake. I had a blog.
I had gone to the same school as Peter Costello
.

Matty replied, ‘Actually, I don't live here. My girlfriend does.'

‘AW. WHERE'S SHE TONYTE?'

His response was brief, but honest. ‘She's . . . hiding in the bedroom.'

I wanted him to die in a freak accident. A painful one that involved fire and a pair of pinking shears.

‘WHYNTCHA GET HER THEN?'

Matty entered the bedroom with apologetic shrugs. I hissed at him, mimed furiously that this was a bad idea and I had made a dreadful mistake and if he could please ask her to leave and take an apricot cookie for her troubles on the way out I would be forever grateful. Instead, I was dragged from my hiding place and shoved into view like the youngest child of the Von Trapp Family Singers facing a pre-dinner performance.

I waved. I still can't believe I waved. Who
waves
at a
prostitute
?

‘Hello there.'

She was roughly twenty-five years of age, she was roughly five foot four, and she was rough. Not in an obscene way, more like if you saw her at the Brownlow on the arm of Cameron Ling you'd think, ‘Gosh, isn't it nice that Lingy's found someone to chat to?' She had long red hair and a tight khaki Supre skirt and she was beaming at us like we were her children and we'd just presented her with a Paddle-Pop-stick photo frame with the phrase
WORLD'S TOPPEST MUM
painted on it.

I really had no issue with her physically—she was kind of sweet, if you had consumed seven glasses of pinot gris and smudged your vision slightly—but I definitely wished she'd stop clasping her hands and saying ‘LOOK AT YOUSE TWO!! SOOOOOO CUTE!!' every five minutes. In hindsight she was probably nervous and attempting to break the ice, but at the time I thought she was about thirty seconds away from spitting on a hanky and wiping dirt off my face with it.

I kept stealing helpless glances at Matty, who seemed happily ensconced in his role as host and instantly began leading our guest on a tour of the kitchen. Surely this was the moment a vaguely amusing idea became too real and everyone made polite noises about needing to go home and pay the sitter. It hardly seemed the time to leap into a life experience in which I was no longer certain I wanted to partake.

I'm not even sure what I wanted out of the whole deal anymore, outside of a rather ribald story to terrify my cousins with around the table on Christmas Day and a satisfied longheld curiosity about what a real-life prostitute would look like when not being depicted by the cast of Foxtel's successful Australian drama series
Satisfaction
. And now here I was, watching helplessly as a ginger floozy with small patches of eczema on her elbows admired my toaster. This had all gone horribly, horribly wrong.