Out of the Blue

by Blue Blake

  “I need a job . . . and somewhere to live.”

  “Well, you can stay here until you find somewhere.” I looked around the tiny room and for the second time since I’d left Godfrey, I started to cry, only this time there was no plate of curry to catch my tears.

  The next morning when we woke up I couldn’t believe what a wreck I looked. The combination of the long harsh flight and the even harsher white rum had made me look haggard and ancient but I was only twenty-one, in fact that day happened to be my birthday.

  “Come on, Paul, I’ve got $3,000, let’s go and get a spa.”

  “Ooh, there’s that new sauna that’s opened in Camden Town called the Camden Tiger. It has a fifty man Jacuzzi, the largest in Europe. I read all about it in the back of “Gay Times.”

  “Perfect . . . let’s go.”

  The Camden Tiger was situated in an old railway station on Kentish Town Road . . . five minutes from central Camden Town. It was owned by a woman called Alice and run by her two daughters and her three sons. They were Irish and crazy as loons, we would soon discover. Paul and I descended a flight of stairs, past murals of Bengal tigers peering at us through the long grass. It was very exotic in a vulgar way, and I immediately liked it. At the desk sat a good-looking red-haired guy who you could tell immediately wasn’t gay. You just felt it. He had one blue eye and one brown eye. I took this as a good omen.

  He smiled, “Hello, you two. Have you come for the job of masseurs? I’m afraid we only need one.”

  “Oh, no . . . ” said Paul, “We’re just here. . . .”

  “That’s exactly why I’m here,” I cut in.

  “Well, you’re good looking, but are you qualified?”

  “Am I qualified?” I laughed, “Ashtanga, Winky Wonky, deep fondle, I do it all.”

  “Hmm . . . ashtanga sounds familiar but I’ve never heard of winky wonky and deep fondle. Do you have massage certificates?” he asked.

  “Burned in a fire, unfortunately,” I said. “When do I start?”

  Paul, being my best friend, was by now used to my penchant for compulsive lies and remained silent.

  “Well, we pay 30 pounds an hour and you have your own private massage room next to the sauna and we provide a uniform.... Could you start now? There’s already three guys waiting. I’ll show you around the facilities.”

  Fuck the facilities . . . three guys waiting!!! That was ninety pounds and if I gave them a blowjob perhaps a HUNDRED POUNDS . . . show me the money.

  I had a blast at the Camden Tiger. I made more money than God, thanks to Victor and Jean’s great genetics. After a month I was booked constantly. Being blonde and blue-eyed in Camden Town really paid off. I would let my clients eat my arse on the massage table and soon I got Paul a job as the handyman there. That was a disaster. Paul was way too good looking to focus on scrubbing toilet floors. One of his jobs was to take all the filthy, cum-stained rags—I mean, towels—to the local launderette three doors away. This was a disgusting job and I’m sure if we still had child labor in England it would have been given to some snot nosed seven-year-old. As it was, there was no more sticking kids up chimney pots, so Paul got to play “Orphan Annie.”

  Twice a day he dragged the dirty towels down to the launderette in sacks. He begged me to help but I was too busy eating bacon sandwiches next door at the “Strangled Swan” public house. The owner’s daughter fancied me, and although she only had eight fingers due to an unfortunate birth defect, I would sometimes French kiss her, as I had an obscene craving for free pork products and beer, which eventually led to two appalling outcomes. The first was that I gained forty pounds and the second was that Paul didn’t keep a sharp eye on our towels in the launderette because soon he was too busy drinking

  Bacardi and Cokes with me at the “Swan” and the local gypsies from the encampment down the road nicked the towels out of the dryers. So the Camden Tiger ended up towel-less.

  The reason I remember this so vividly is that the same day that the gypsies were running off with our fine cotton, I was massaging a 500-pound Member of Parliament. After doing a Captain Ahab on Moby, I went to get him a towel but the cupboard was bare. I ran to the front desk, “Alice,” I said, “we have no clean towels left. I can’t find one anywhere.”

  “Love . . . I know they were all stolen from the launderette by the local gypsies,” she said. “Search around and give him whatever you can find.”

  The only thing I could find was a filthy hand towel straight off the bathroom floor that we had been using to soak up a leak in the plumbing system.

  “It smells of piss,” whined Moby.

  “Oh it does?” I replied acting shocked. “Well, that will be ten pounds extra.” He handed me the ten pounds and split, gripping the washcloth . . . dirty bastard.

  “What am I going to do, Alice will kill me!” said Paul when I discovered him five minutes later, hiding behind the sauna.

  “Come on,” I said, “I’ll sort this out.” I pulled on a pair of sweat pants over my massage outfit (a jockstrap) and Paul and I strode down the road to the gypsy encampment. Of course I thought it was going to be all girls with big tits having catfights in colorful gypsy scarves like in Dr. No. Needless to say, there wasn’t a crystal ball in sight, just scruffy gypsies with no teeth and three-legged dogs fighting over empty potato chip bags. Why the hell did they need towels? They obviously looked as though they have never heard of water. As we strode into the encampment, a fat guy wandered over. He had brass teeth and was wearing a wife beater and a pair of old suit pants with the fly wide open and no underwear. I could see his pubic hair, which for some bizarre reason I found strangely exciting, considering how repulsive he was.

  “What do you queers want?” he snarled.

  How did he know we were gay? Looking back on it, Duran Duran was still big at the time and I believed, in my mind, I bore more than a passing resemblance to Simon Le Bon. Were the blond highlights and backcombed hair a giveaway? Paul also had big hair. Dallas and Dynasty were huge hits and Paul used a can of Light & Lovely lacquer each day on his hair, which he teased up until he looked remarkably like Dominique Devereaux.

  Years later I was at a party for Liza Minnelli’s 50th birthday—she had invited fifty of her closest friends to celebrate with her, so God knows what I was doing there. I was telling John Voight how much I enjoyed his performance in Midnight Cowboy when Diahann Carroll wandered over—Dominique Devereaux herself. The days of The Camden Tiger came rushing back.

  “Miss Carroll,” I gushed, “you look stunning! I have a friend who used to style their hair exactly like yours when you starred in Dynasty.”

  “Is she quite, quite beautiful?” Diahann asked.

  “Well, actually, she’s a he . . . but yeah, he’s good looking.”

  Diahann flounced off and the rest of the evening was a blur. Red Buttons’ wife Alicia Buttons came up to me and pressed a card into my hand.

  “I breed stallions . . . if you know what I mean,” she breathed.

  I had no idea what she meant. Red Buttons glared at me from across the room.

  After wandering around for an hour or two without even a sniff of “Sally Bowles,” Burt Reynolds grabbed a microphone from off the stage and announced,

  “Ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately Liza is feeling ill and won’t be able to attend the party, but she sends her love to all her dearest friends.” I didn’t know Liza from Adam, but I nodded understandingly. As Burt walked past me, he said to Joan Collins, “I’m leaving . . . now!!” Joan Collins nodded her astonishingly young looking face and shimmied out the door with some thirty-year-old antique dealer she was shagging. I heard she later married him because although he appeared dim there was rumor that he had an enormous cock. He must have because she’s still married to him. . . .

  Back at the gypsy encampment, things were going from bad to worse.

  “We want our towels back!” I demanded.

  “We ain’t got your fucking towels!” Brass Fang yelled.

>   “Then what is your wife drying those ferrets with?” I screamed back.

  A huge woman with pigtails had appeared as if from nowhere, clutching two wet ferrets wrapped in one of our towels.

  “Don’t make me do something I won’t regret!” He threatened. I knew this was one battle I wasn’t going to win. I grabbed Paul and we flounced off in a cloud of Light & Lovely hair lacquer. The next day the gypsies fled with their ferrets wrapped in our damn towels.

  It was at the Camden Tiger that I met my next boyfriend. Patrick was a real estate agent from Scotland. I arrived for work one day and Alice said to me, “There’s a customer sitting in the sauna waiting for you.”

  Oh damn, I thought. He’ll be in a bad mood because although this was a spa, the sauna hadn’t worked properly since ten leather guys had a gangbang in there and the roof fell in on their heads. Luckily they were all OK apart from one guy with a mild concussion. But now using the sauna was like sitting in Uncle Jack’s potting shed for all the heat it gave off. And why were ten leather guys having a gangbang in the sauna, I hear you ask? Because once a month at the Camden Tiger we threw an all night party called “The Sauna Club.” Ten pounds to get in and once you checked your clothes in and got a free bottle of wine at the door it was an absolute ORGY! Paul and I handed out the wine but of course always drank so much that we constantly lost everybody’s clothing tickets so no one ever went home with the right clothing. We were always cramming guys into taxis wrapped in toilet paper and linoleum matting. We had no towels to give people as the damn gypsies had stolen them and frugal Alice refused to replace them.

  We had a Jacuzzi that seated fifty people. After the first party we drained it and found an inch of pubic hair and a turd—somebody had shit in the Jacuzzi . . . filthy swine.

  So I opened the sauna door and there sat a handsome brunette with rugged features. He shagged me on my massage table and we fell immediately in love. As Christmas was approaching we agreed to spend it together.

  Patrick told me he lived on his own in a flat in South London, having just broken up with his air steward boyfriend, a “trolley dolly” named John. I had never seen Patrick’s flat, as I was working 10 a.m.-10 p.m. at the Camden Tiger and would stagger home alone exhausted to soak my raw fingers. However, Patrick came to the Tiger at 6 p.m. each night, and we would fuck on the massage table

  “Oooh, he’s gorgeous!” cackled Alice. “I’d fuck him myself!”

  I was making a ton of money doing massages and I was booked solid. I was massaging ten guys a day in an underground sex den masquerading as a high-class sauna.

  “Why don’t you buy your own flat? Patrick suggested one night. He knew how busy I was so he figured I must have stashed the cash away.

  “I wouldn’t know how,” I said.

  “I’ll show you, it’s a piece of cake.”

  My own place!!! In London!!! Could I really do that? I started looking at suitable areas that would be fun to live in and finally decided on Earl’s Court. Patrick proposed that I rent a place there first to see if I’d like it.

  That Monday I took the day off with the excuse that I had to escort Sharon, the eight-fingered barmaid, to the local dog track as her pet whippet was running in the 12:30 and she needed moral support. She usually went with her butch lesbian sister Janice, who always wore men’s shoes and trousers, but Janice had gotten into a knife fight at the local gay bar “The Black Cap” with a 6-foot-3-inch drag queen from Ethiopia called Skinny Winnie.

  Alice grudgingly gave me the day off saying that Andrew, the assistant manager, could fill in for me. I went next door to the Strangled Swan and begged off taking Sharon to the dog track by telling Sharon I was allergic to canine fur.

  “But I saw you feeding a Spam fritter to that three-legged gypsy dog before they fucked off with your towels,” Sharon whined.

  “He was hungry,” I justified, “and desperately in need of nutrition.”

  She was right. I had felt terrible for the poor starved creature the day we had visited the gypsy encampment. So I bought a Spam fritter from the pub and fed it to the dog the same day.

  “OK . . . OK . . . look, I’m going to look at flats in Earl’s Court, I’m thinking of buying one. I can’t live in that tiny room anymore with Paul. I adore Paul but all the other squatters are vegans and practically weave their own clothes . . . and Patrick said he would drive me around.”

  “Patrick, Patrick, Patrick . . . go on then, fuck off,” she sulked.

  Earl’s Court was known in the ’80s in London as Kangaroo Valley due to the enormous number of Australians who lived there. The place was full of hard drinking, hard-partying Aussies and gay people.

  I found a flat on Kenway Road above the Khal-Al meat shop and rented it immediately. Every time I flushed the toilet, my bathroom somehow smelled of meat. The flat had one small bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom and closet; but it was all mine. To get in you had to walk down a little alley and turn left, through a black gate, which was also the back yard of the meat company. Up a rickety iron staircase there were two flats. I had the lower one 16-A Kenway Road. I painted it white and bought furniture from Ikea.

  I never did spend Christmas Eve with Patrick. He didn’t show up on Christmas day either so I went crying to Andrew’s house, clutching a bottle of sherry with Paul. Andrew spent the evening burning the turkey and telling me all men were bastards. I drank the whole bottle of sherry and passed out on the fake fur rug in front of the electric fire. I never heard from Patrick until years later when I bumped into him at the gay nightclub Heaven. “Sorry about that Christmas,” he said. “The truth is, I had a boyfriend living with me, the air steward. I was seeing both of you at the same time and it just got out of hand. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” Patrick’s looks had dimmed and he had put on weight. It was difficult to believe he had once been so handsome.

  I celebrated New Year’s Eve that year with Alice, Andrew and Paul. Drunk on Pernod and black currant, Alice leaned across the table and said to me:

  “Oooh, love, forget that bleedin’ Patrick. I’ve got a great idea for the New Year.... I’ve been looking in Gay Times for business ideas and I’ve come up with ‘Tiger Boys,’ I’m going to open up an escort agency.”

  “Do you know anything about running an escort agency?” I asked incredulously.

  “NO,” laughed mad Alice.

  “But who is going to run it?”

  “You are!” she grinned.

  In London in 1985, there were three gay escort agencies and five individual escort ads. Twenty-three years later there are three times as many agencies and about five hundred escort ads, not counting what is posted online. Back in the day the agencies and the gay escorts all advertised in Gay Times. One of the agencies was called “Number One.”

  A few days had passed and Alice and I were sitting eating cheese and onion sandwiches at the front desk of the Tiger.

  “Alice, I have no idea how to run an escort agency,” I said.

  “Well, you wank plenty of men off in that massage room . . . how difficult can it be?”

  “What does that have to do with running an escort service?”

  “Listen, I’ve got it all planned. You’ll go for an interview with one of the agencies pretending you want to be a hooker . . . I mean escort. You’ll find out how much they charge per booking, how many bookings you can expect a day, and we are up and running!”

  “Hmm . . . I would feel nervous calling them.”

  “I did that already. You’ve got an interview in Kings Cross in an hour.”

  “You called them?”

  “Yes. I said I was your crippled mother and needed cash as I was bedridden. Try to do an Irish accent like mine.”

  “But I have massages booked. . . .”

  “Ooh, love, Andrew said he would cover for you. The agency’s called Number One and you’re to meet someone called Jonathan. Here’s the address.”

  The interview went amazingly well. Jonathan was a nice guy and to
ld me bookings were 25 pounds for an in-call and sky’s the limit for an outcall. I could keep all my tips. Out of the 25 pounds, the agency got £7.50. So I would earn 17.50 pounds an hour—with tip probably 30 pounds. Jonathan told me I could do up to ten bookings a day and make a fortune. Hotel bookings could bring in as much as 100 pounds per hour.

  “Are you top, bottom or versatile?” He asked.

  “Hmm . . . versatile, I suppose, but I don’t want to get fucked or fuck anybody without seeing them first.”

  “You can’t be picky, you’ll get used to it. Most of them want to suck your dick and, because you’re young, eat your arse.”

  “Do you own the agency?” I asked.

  “No, that’s Andy. You’ll never meet him. He’s very secretive. An escort tried to stab him once after drinking methylated spirits, so now Andy doesn’t meet anybody. You’re not handy with a blade are you?” asked Jonathan almost suspiciously.

  “No . . . of course not.”

  Jonathan looked me up and down then grinned.

  “I think you’re going to do really well.”

  I went back to the Tiger and reported back to Alice. She cackled with glee about how much money could be made and set off to the Black Cap public house to recruit escorts. Skinny Winnie had already told Alice he/she wouldn’t mind turning tricks for the new agency but I severely doubted we would be retiring on the money made from an over-the-hill Ethiopian drag queen. Every time I went into the Black Cap it seemed to be full of speed freaks offering me “whiz” or drag queens. Good luck I thought, as Alice disappeared up the stairs.

  Alice returned the Black Cap that night empty handed but drunk. She and I were at the front desk when the phone rang.

  “Camden Tiger, Ben speaking,” I said. Ben was the name I used for massage work.

  “Hello, Ben . . . this is Andy,” a business-like voice said. “I’ve got a 200 pound booking for you at the Savoy Hotel in half an hour . . . can you do it? I think he’s an Arab.”

  I stood up, kissed Alice on the cheek and without a second thought walked out of the Tiger and into a whole new life.