I was heading home. Tired, giggly and silly – ready for a few happy days in the country. Instead I got a phone call from Mucky Mark, quite my favourite corrupt TV executive. He was drinking in town with Darian (“one of us” Mark boomed excitedly), and decided I should joing them. Which was nice, as I looked like a sweaty heap of hell - during the recent hotspell, our central heating finally kicked in, reducing the office to a sauna. *pause* I really can’t use that phrase, can I? It conjures up pictures of happy semi-naked Latvuanians cavorting. This can not be said of my workplace.
Anyway, we trawled through town to some kind of nightclub that Darain knew of old, Mark belonged to, and which is frequented by Prince Harry and Chelsea girls/Expensive hookers.
It was nice. The bar staff were both pretty and deeply unpleasant. The hunky, dismissive doorman gave us a lecture on timekeeping rather like turning up late for a handsome PE teacher (“Members are allowed in until 10. Can you tell me what time it is? Exactly. Gone 10. So, can you tell me if I should let you in?”)
The cocktails were incomprehensible. We noticed most of the Chelsea Girls/Hookers were just ordering bottles of spirits. Meanwhile, we stumbled through cocktails with names like “Pearl”, “drZeuss”, “pHidelity”. Some of them came scattered with more exotic petals than a Sri Lankan honeymoon suite.
We were joined by David, a music PR friend of Mark’s. He’d just got off a plane from New York, and sat watching the digital wall, sipping drinks, and occasionally muttering “Of course, Boston Legal is superb…” or “Why have sex when you’ve got Sky+?”
Eventually, we were asked to leave. Simply, we weren’t important enough to stay.
So a few drinks in my club next to some hunky Kids’ TV presenters (“hmmn,” sighed Mark, “Today I was at a meeting where we decided to fire some of them. How unfortunate. Lets see if any of the male ones kiss.”) and I was happily thriving on the kind of Friday I wasn’t planning. My evening of sobriety and steamed dim-sum had turned all… exciting.
Mark insisted that I didn’t go home, but instead went with them to AM at Fire (thinks: I’m no good at club names. It could be Fire at AM. I could even check. But I shan’t). So I did. I was drunk. Darian explained that it was the kind of club where you took drugs. Not for any particular reason other than it was so horrible your main impulse was to get out of your skull.
And it was... interesting. Rather like a battery farm for mutton dressed as chicken, it featured a lot of semi naked men doing the kind of dancing that, if you think about it, resembles exactly the moves to the Birdie Song. Only heavily disguised under muscles, nice hair and tattoos.
There was one pretty man there. “Oh! Had him!” announced Darian, “Although, he’s prettier now.” Interestingly, Pretty Man appeared to be snogging a bald fat man.
We’d gone there because Mark was keen to meet his new man. Mark’s currently very happily monogamous with a muscly accountant, but he was away. The other weekend, Mark had met a man called Logan. “He’s fantastic! He texts like a 14 year-old girl. He’s a straight-acting, scally mechanic – he’s been sending me pictures of his car all week, which I think is a courting ritual.”
Logan turned out to be small, swarthy and almost completely out of focus. He'd persuaded Mark to come with a text that said "Da music is bangin!"
“um,” I said to Darian. “The music just goes biddly-biddly-biddly.”
“No it doesn’t,” pointed out Darian, completely fairly. He was hugging an air conditioning unit, despite some stiff competition.
A man wandered past, wearing speedos and a Zorro mask. I felt a mixture of lust and the hope that he’d travelled on the tube like that.
The toilets were a sweaty nightmare. Straight couples were having sex in the cubicles while gay men stood around looking cross, and the lollipop man shouted out “Ladies, this Council Flat is looking pretty full! Keep it moving, girls!”
A man came up, demanding a cigarette. “They’re menthol,” I explained. “Fuck off,” he said.
I decided to walk back to my bike. It was in SoHo, I was in Vauxhall. The walk didn’t seem so long, as I was very drunk, it was a warm evening, and a composer of operas was very slowly explaining on the World Service how Global Governments had kept him under Close Observation for years.
On the way, Lee sent me a picture message of scary shop dummies with the phrase “Lawks!” It brought me to a standstill. Apparently this new phone can receive pictures. I would appear to have finally joined the 20th Century.
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