On the other hand, I loved the dozen girls. They were all incredibly pretty and fun to be with. They had trained since birth to be dancers, whereas I had just auditioned for a laugh and had been thrown into the deep end. I cried a lot because I couldn’t learn the difficult routines. They all had a theme and a costume to go with them. Of course the costumes were topless; it was that sort of show. We started with “The Parisienne.” In it I wore a yellow crimpolene jacket and pumpkin crimpolene trousers. The jacket was covered with sequins and it matched the girls g-strings. We had to mime to a French song called “Ce Soir a Casino (Gala Night).” I never had a clue what the song meant as I never learned the words. One of the girls told me to just sing “Mickey Mickey Mickey Mouse” over and over again onstage, because at least my lips would be moving. I did until the assistant choreographer noticed and asked me if I’d gone insane.
The second number was called “L’Africaine.” We wore—incredibly enough—monkey skins and nylon afro wigs. I refused to wear my wig after the first dress rehearsal.
The girls had a number called “Le Panthere (The Panther),” and all they wore were cat’s tails, ears, and claws. They would sit on the stage and claw the air. I would run behind the stage, and as a prank, reach through the curtain and grip their tails so they couldn’t stand up. I was reprimanded severely. We did the Can-Can, but most bizarre of all we would lip synch to “I Love Paris in the Spring Time,” while we escorted the girls around the stage. I wore a Victorian suit, top hat, and tails in powder blue; the girls had on powder blue hoop skirts and carried lace umbrellas. Topless!
Eventually, I learned all the routines and we received our first dance contract abroad in Damascus. At the time Damascus was at war, so we arrived in a war zone with every male under thirty mobilized and in uniform. I was in heaven!
The girls told me that all Arabs were bisexual and liked nothing more than to buy pretty girls (and boys) jewelry. I had no qualms about collecting some expensive baubles for myself. I liked older guys too, and Damascus seemed full of wealthy, older Arab men. The two girls who were the best at getting diamonds were Bouty and Kate. Bouty was very upper class and all big red lips, processed platinum blonde hair and cleavage. When she strutted down the staircase with the cutout of the Eiffel Tower twinkling with fairy lights behind her, grown men swooned. Kate resembled Barbra Streisand, but at show time wearing three pairs of false eyelashes, her hair in a ponytail down to her waist and 36DD breasts, she looked magnificent.
I hung out with these two and so was invited out for dinner after the show every night. The girls wouldn’t sleep with the guys on the first night . . . but I would. I was given rings, bracelets, necklaces, suits, and I had a great time eating at the best restaurants in Damascus.
One time we were out with a guy who owned a huge clothing chain, Mohammed Massid. After dinner, Bouty and Kate went to freshen up their makeup.
“Glenn, do you know what wealthy men would do after eating a good meal, hundreds of years ago?”
“No, Mohammed, what would they do?”
“They would call for a hubbly bubbly and a young boy.”
“Why the young boy?” I asked.
“The boy would crawl under the table and pleasure the gentleman with his mouth.” Mohammed was married with children and the combination of him telling me this dirty story and him having a wife made my dick rock hard. He placed my hand on his penis and I could feel through his robes how huge it was.
“Would you like to pleasure me with your mouth, Glenn?”
Did he need to even ask?
YES! YES! YES!
My little mind screamed.
“Do you have anywhere we can go?” I mumbled. He smiled a big broad grin. Later I received the most beautiful suit, shirt, tie and shoes.
The contract in Damascus was for three months. After eight weeks I was becoming restless. I was sick of cavorting around in a monkey skin loincloth. The girls were sick of the Arab men, but I wasn’t.
The laws in Damascus were strict about what you could or couldn’t show of your body in public. No arms, no legs. This was difficult for the troupe to abide by as we were all young dancers and we were used to wearing minimal clothing both on and off the stage. The poverty outside the five star hotel where we performed was horrendous. The streets smelled terrible. Parents would leave children with no arms or legs on blankets to beg. The more glaring the deformity, the more money would be given; I suppose was the logic. On our day off we would wander around the gold stalls in the market. The most desirable currency in Damascus, husbands would buy their wives all the gold their hearts’ desired because it was considered a great financial investment, a strategy to ward off the bleak poverty around them.
But more than gold was for sale. We were stared at wherever we went and men would constantly try to buy whichever girl I was with that day. We were blonde and blue-eyed in a country where that was exotic.
Meanwhile the work was stressful. The troupe’s dance captain, Sharon Wagstaff, and I didn’t like each other. She wasn’t talented so everyone was convinced she had shagged her way to the top. The first time I met her was in Barbais. She was shorter than the other girls and had carrot-red hair and a runny nose.
“’Scuse me, I’ve got a sodding cold,” she honked. “Fucking hell!” she said, eying me up and down. “You’re skinny! Are you going to be able to lift me?”
“Not in this lifetime,
”
I thought.
“And the other girls told me you’re queer. Why do we never get any straight guys?” Sharon hated me. I had no idea how to do all the dramatic lifts that were demanded for a routine called “Les Musketeres,” so she had to do the routine with Kevin. He was built like a stick insect and so she was constantly being dropped. He would spin her into scenery, banging her head on backdrops, all the while dressed in a velvet musketeer’s outfit with feathered hat. She was topless, except for a lace collar around her neck.
I thought we looked ridiculous. The costumes seen close up were shabby and threadbare from being danced and sweated in for so many shows, ranging from Katmandu to Nepal. The audience loved us nonetheless, and we were sold out every night. The show was called “Paris à Sham” and it was situated in a huge brand new theater in a hotel called the El Sham Palace, the most expensive hotel in Damascus.
I started having an affair with one of the bartenders, Karim. He was a very handsome twenty-five-year-old with jet-black hair—very hairy, almost like a monkey. I would watch him pour cocktails before the show started. He had the fattest, hairiest arse and he wore Jockey underwear in straight-man colors like moss green and maroon. All the time we were dating he treated me like a star . . . he was sadly misguided. He fell in love. I didn’t. I can still see his face and the look of shock the night I told him I’d been fired.
What happened was this. The show was divided into two acts. The second act opened with all the dancers doing a number called “Carnivalle,” in which we were all dressed in carnival attire. I wore an enormous red sombrero covered with mirrors, a yellow satin shirt tied under my nonexistent chest, red chaps and a g-string. As we waited for the curtain to go up, we noticed that Sharon, Kevin and one of the other dancers were missing.
“Sharon says they’re having a cigarette, hold the curtain,” shouted Michelle, a northern girl with thick ankles and a bad perm. I loved her. I had to throw her over my head in the Can-Can. I always thought she fancied me, and if I had been straight I would have shagged her. If I had been straight I would have shagged all of them.
“How long are we supposed to wait?” asked my roommate Karen. “I’ve got a date after with Shireef.”
“Shall I tell them to start the show?” I said.
“Glenn!!! You wouldn’t dare,” they all shot back, scandalized but hoping like hell that I would.
“Curtain up!” I shouted. The music started and from our places in the wings we saw Sharon, Kevin, and Nicky running from the dressing rooms at breakneck speed, a trail of Benson & Hedges left in their wake. Sharon was in costume but still wearing a Marks & Spencer’s bra. She couldn’t get if off in time and so had to dance the first segment in a dirty gray nylon bra. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. I spun off the stage into the wings and into the claws of Sharon.
“The girls said you ordered the show to start!” she screeched over the music.
“I’m sorry,” I laughed, “It was just a joke.” She slapped my face so hard I saw stars. I was in such shock that when I heard my cue in the music my feet carried me back onto the stage to finish the rest of the number. I cried throughout the rest of it. But they were tears of anger. I should have wrung her fat little neck. I felt humiliated. This was the first time I’d been slapped in the face. The rest of the show was a blur. I don’t even remember finishing it. Sharon left immediately and was found later drunk in the rooftop bar.
“Nobody likes me,” she cried. God, was that an understatement!
I was fired the next day. Sharon had phoned Guy Etrange and told him I was a disruptive influence in the troupe. I went to watch the show that night, if only to glare at Sharon. But I was spotted by the management and asked to leave. The day I left all the girls cried. They all hated Damascus and said they wished they could get fired too. Karim came to the airport with me and before I climbed on the plane he gave me a gold ring. He told me he would come to London. I wasn’t sure if I wanted that but just smiled and kissed him goodbye. Six of the girls had also come to see me off. They cried and kissed me and gave me little mementos. We had become so close in such a short period of time. This was something I would grow to love about performing . . . community.
I arrived back in London with no job, no prospects and 50,000 francs in my wallet. I felt like the world was my oyster.
I had been back from Damascus for a week and was frittering away my francs on bread and cheese. I needed a job. I was also looking for somewhere to live. I had been renting a room in the apartment of a guy who was a headmaster. Every Friday night he would dress in leather and prowl the sordid leather world of gay London. He would wear a dog collar and skintight leather pants that laced up the sides of his bony legs. I had never lived in such close proximity to a leather guy before. His drawers were full of dildos and butt plugs and leather paddles. I know this because when he was at school I would forage through his things, just out of curiosity—kinky underwear and porno movies, fascinating for a twenty-one-year-old with an overactive libido.
He also had piles of porno magazines. Not the good American kind, but the badly shot British ones. All brick laborers with their trousers around their ankles, showing off their uncut wet looking knobs for the camera. I couldn’t stop jerking off and looking at them. My favorite was called
Zipper
—lots of meaty guys with the occasional bodybuilder thrown in for good measure. They reminded me of the bouncers at The Palais in Nottingham.
In one of these magazines, I found an ad for strippers in a male-only club in Soho. I tore the ad out and reached for the phone.
“Hello. Is this Boys-a-Go-Go?” I asked.
“It is,” replied a voice that definitely wasn’t boyish . . . more reptilian. I explained I was looking for a job and that I was a trained dancer.
“You gotta get naked,” said Snake Lips.
“I could do that.”
“Come for an audition . . . 2 p.m. sharp. Sixty-five Dean Street. Be clean.” Be clean . . . what the hell did that mean? Did they employ strippers who weren’t clean? I rifled through the drawers in the headmaster’s bedroom and selected a leather jockstrap and biker’s cap, very Village People. I threw them into a bag and ran down to the local tube station, Highbury & Islington, and caught a train to Piccadilly Circus.
In the mid-eighties, Soho was full of sex shops and seedy bars. All the shop windows contained blow-up dolls with yellow nylon hair and gaping, painted plastic mouths. Trotting through Soho I ignored the whistles of the East End Barrow Boys selling tangerines and suddenly I stumbled upon the rat hole that was to showcase my stripping talents . . . Boys-a-Go-Go. What a bleeding dump. Surely this couldn’t be the right place. A grotty shop front with dusty string beads hanging in the window.
“Are you going to be a stripper?” I turned to face a skinny kid with shoulder-length greasy hair and a lazy eye standing in the doorway.
“Hmmm . . . I was thinking about it,” I muttered, wondering if it wasn’t too late to back out.
“Oooh, you’d be fab. I’ve been doing it for six months now . . . well, not counting the month I had to take off to get rid of my anal warts.” He grabbed me by my arm. “My name’s Gavin, but I changed it to Rock. Ya’ know, like Rock Hudson. People tell me I look like him.” I thought Gavin looked as much like Rock Hudson as the undertakers’ dog, but I kept quiet and smiled.
“Oooh, you’ve got a gorgeous smile. Wilbert’s gonna love you,” he said.
“Who’s Wilbert?” I asked, suddenly realizing that “Rock’s” fingers on my arm were sticky.
“Oh, he runs the place. Come on, I’ll introduce you, you’ll get the job if you let him eat your arse in the basement.”
Well . . . I thought perhaps Wilbert would look like one of the Barrow Boys selling tangerines, in which case I wouldn’t mind a good rimming in the basement to relax me.