Wasting time

Just lingering in cyberspace today avoiding doing the things I should be doing. Like cleaning the house and working on my folio. And emailing the choreographer that I'd worked with in Melbourne. I haven't heard from him in a few weeks, which is a bad sign as I was expecting news of the video and photoshoot of the piece we did. The remount, specifically for the purposes of recording the work has already been put back from mid January to the first week in February. As the choreographer is a friend as well as collegue, he understands how important a visual record of this work is for me at the moment. It's only the second piece of professional work I've done, solo as a designer, so I really need this for my portfolio which hasn't had any new images added in five years. Aside from the break of almost two years to deal with my Mum's cancer, the majority of work I've done since graduating has been assisting other designers - good on the CV, not so good for the folio. I'm expecting either another delay, or worse, that the shoot isn't happening. At the time of the production, things were so rushed (tech rehearsal up to 30mins before opening) that no time was available to record the peice. I made a half arsed attempt by buying a new digital camera, but couldn't get it to pick anything under the lighting states. I'm dogged by this persistant problem of not being able to record my work. In the past when I have organised and paid for photographers, they either haven't listened to what I wanted and so provided nice arty shots that showed fuck all or as in one case, the production manager told the crew they didn't need to attend the photoshoot.

Yes this is a bit of a whinge. And yes, I'm feeling a little sorry for myself.

And procastinating isn't getting my anywhere, obviously.

I think I'm just going to have photography to the list of my accomplishments.

Aspiring to be Japanese

I read in Saturday's paper that 108 is the number of times that people, on average, have sex in a year in Australia.

That's about two bonks a week.

This year I've had sex twice.

Last year 12 times.

The year before that 8 times.

In fact even in my busiest year to date, the year I first came out at 26, it was only 79.

And in the 11 years that I've been sexually active, I've realised that the total number of bonks would just about make twice the national yearly average. So much for the cliched promiscuous homosexual.

I find it funny that because I'm gay and single, many people immediately assume that I must be spending all my spare time rooting around.

And perhaps I would be. If I could afford the time and the expense.

Like most things these days, casual sex rarely comes for free. In gay terms you might get lucky and pick up at your local gym or pool, or rarely on the street. But the most common way to precure sex is to pay for it. I'm not necessarily talking rent boys, but a night out on the town, club entry, drinks and the time to cruise and chat up guys can easily be a $100 (a cheap night out!) for 8 hours and no result. A trip to the sauna is about $23 and you can get trapped in towel clad limbo for hours with no action.

It was Valentine's Day yesterday and so I thought I'd find myself some lovin'. Being a Tuesday and not wanting a late night I chose the sure fire option and went to a sauna.

Once I'm through the door, white towel wrapped around my loins, I begin to question the wisdom of what I'm doing. I mean, I'm not a twittering virgin and actually used to work for one of these joints, but having had a lot of experience with saunas I know that it's really pot luck. And waiting.

So I quickly do the rounds and the only person I find attractive is one of the staff. I end up staying in the coffee lounge with the big screen tv. I drink too much tea and watch Ghost, M*A*S*H the movie and half of the new remake of The Amittyville Horror. Occasionally I get up to pee and take a wander to see if anyone else interesting has turned up. Finally, bored, I get dress and go home.

And that's generally the way it goes.

I think even amongst gay men, there's this big myth about the availability of casual sex. I've bragged myself to disbelieving straight girls, "Yeah, if I wanted it, I could walk out this door and get sex in five minutes." I 've heard plenty of my gay male friends say the same thing. And single straight guys seem to envious of the apparently availability.

I suppose the sex is available, if you close your eyes and think of England and don't care about who you're getting it from. But if you do care, and you want someone you're at least attracted to, or better yet actually like, then no, casual sex is actually very hard to find.

Internet services such as gaydar.com are the other most common method of getting sex. But I've never had any luck here either. Perhaps naively, when I had my profile, I used a real image, a nice face shot, attached to a sincere profile. Apparently, gentle, down to earth, spiritually oriented guy translates in gayspeak as BIG BOTTOM as all I would get were anonymous postings of pictures of male gentitalia in various states of tumescence attached to profile names like 'Anal Raider'. When I'd attempt to message guys that I was interested in, I get no response. Perhaps I simply lack the patience or persistence to get anything out of these services.

I'd been thinking about that article for a couple of days and wondering how I felt to be on the down side of the national average. I mean the Americans were a little higher at 112. The French at 146 and I think it was the Scandanavians that topped out at 158. The bottom of the list were the Japanese at 46. I feel like I'd been recruited to one of those Christian Abstinance campaigns by accident. George Bush is secretly winning the war on terror. Oh my God! At the rate I'm going, I'm heading for full immersion baptism and marriage to an ex-gay dike on a bike.

Perhaps I should move to Japan and improve my odds.

Strange Attractor

They called her Betty Pooper.

I thought it was because her head seemed too large for her skinny body. With her round face nested in a mass of extravagant curls she looked like an ageing wreck of the cartoon character. It was perhaps an unkind reference to the sour, unwashed smell that enclosed her like a protective bubble. She certainly never popped a little dance for me and exclaimed, "Boop, boop de doop!" More often she'd approach me, shyly and mumble about how 'they' only gave her fourteen dollars a week and I'm looking for something for my son, he's about your size. She'd grab anything from the rack closest to us, anything, any size, and hold it up for my inspection, "What do you think?"

She was one of my regulars. I would see her almost every week. I'd take her offering, gently removing it from her grasp and then tell her I was putting it on hold. I'd put the garment aside on my counter and when she left the store, I'd put it back. Sometimes the alarm would go off. "Annoying isn't? How these things just go off?" There'd be some small item dropped into her handbag. "Oh, how'd that get there?" She'd hand it to me, lowering her head and raising her face to me with a little apologetic smile. The submissive posture accentuating her dowagers hump.

I counted on my regulars to relieve the horrendous tedium of working in that place. Almost everyday there'd be three to four hours with nothing to do and no-one to talk to. I'd already dusted my allocated space, tidied the racks of hanging clothes, coat hangers all spaced neatly, exactly the same distance apart, all the clothes on shelves neatly refolded. Then I'd stare out the window at the mall with it's mixture of deserted shops with crumbling facades, unfinished skeletal redevelopment and the few, struggling retail outlets. A meager and generally dispirited collection of individuals would would wander by. Thick plate glass insulated me. There was always a police presence in that mall. The police were there because of the junkies. The junkies were there because of the methodone clinic around the corner.

Often they'd take a shortcut on the way to the clinic. Their voices like bending metal, sharp and horribly clear, spat out percussive rounds of arguments and expletives as they meandered through the store.'"What the fuck are you staring at?" was a common greeting. Going through the side entrance and out through the liquor department they were always tightly wound and belligerent. Coming back the other way, glassy eyed, they were often quite mellow. Either way, as if by reflex, they'd always try to lift something.

Store security was lavish with their praise for my vigilance. Store management gave me a final written warning prior to dismissal for talking too much and not making my sales target.

And one day while Betty was visiting, she stood in front of my counter, smiling, her head cocked to one side, swaying from foot to foot. It was a dance. The sort that an elderly, arthritic Oompah Loompah might do. Her smile widened and a tidal wave of fecal stench rolled over me. She giggled nervoulsly like a school girl caught smoking and shuffled away, trailing little islands of runny shit. The back of her track pants wet with it. The nickname was unkind. But accurate.

Betty was banned from the store after that, so no more visits from her.

But there were others I'd come to know.

Mad Mary, who gossip had it, murdered her husband for sleeping around. Apparently, so the story went, they found her in the kitchen sipping tea. She'd even offered the arresting officers a nice cuppa. They'd found her husband in their marital bed with his cock and balls in his mouth. No-one seemed to know if they'd got there before or after Mary had cut his throat. So the rumour went.

There were the girls at the cosmetic counter with their big hair right out of the sixties. Ageing, single and desperate with a voracious appetite for anything male. The poor guys looking for perfume for their girlfriends and/or wives had a tough time. I'd never before witnessed flirting as an olympic competitive sport. Curiously, perfume sales weren't that good.

And there were two others that were regular visitors. Frenchie and the middled aged guy.

Frenchie had been a visitor for about five months. Only on the first visit did he buy some clothes, after that he'd stop by for a chat. He'd come into the store or we'd run into each other on the street. We chat about various things and then one day while visiting me at work I asked him out for coffee. He didn't come again after that. This was about the time of the written warning for talking too much. Soon after Frenchie stopped dropping by the other man started to.

He was familiar was all I knew. Familiar and creepy. Then I remembered. This was the man who had raped me when I was seven. I couldn't be one hundred percent sure, except I was. I knew it was him.

For sixteen months I worked in that store. It seems like a parallel universe away now. Full of bewildering pain, loss and isolation. And there was hope and longing and love as well. It was a time of pure madness and utter strangeness. A time when my life was chaos any direction was seemed lost. A time and place peopled by ordinary, yet fantastic characters. Each, in a way, perhaps, a mirror for myself or a reflection of my past. Being there I had to endure, and somehow, I survived. I can see now, that I was given the opportunity to face a lot of my demons and away from that place I feel the strongest I have ever felt in my life. Strangely, as I write this, I feel a pang of nostalgia. Why? The people I met in that store, Betty Pooper, Mad Mary, the Junkies, the Big Hair Girls, Frenchie and even the Rapist, all of them stand tall and larger than life. Each is a sign post with memories and feeling attached. Each is symbolic for me of a point of transition. A part of my life I've left behind, a person I used to be. Through all of them I learnt about myself and about my life. I gained compassion and perhaps a little wisdom. It was a lost place where I found myself and now I have to do something with that. And for me, that may be harder than being in that damn store!