bzzt. ooh!

my hair is caked with red glitter and fluorescent yellow dye. i have red glitter glued applied all around my left eye, going off to the side in a dramatic bold line. i’m wearing a bizarre pink and black cowgirl blouse with the sleeves ripped off—the same outfit i wore to sydney mardi gras. i’m way too dressed up, glammed up, primped up, leigh bowryed up for .popstarz.

i’m swimming back and forth between the floors, ditching friends, meeting friends, chatting with girls in the toilets, snogging straight boys. the usual. it’s getting hot and sweaty upstairs, and as i move towards the stairwell doors, i hear the following:

don’t i work with you?!

i freeze in my tracks, and spin around 720° trying to identify the source. i turn and see a familiar face. he smiles, and says, eric, i’d never expect to see you here!

for the next 18 seconds, my cpu tries in vain to piece together the puzzle. my brain is very segmented… and on a friday night, the segment of my brain in which i store all knowledge, memory and emotion regarding my day job is safely buried under layers upon layers of alcohol. i stand there, and stare blankly at him while the 1950s-style switchboard operators in my head try to plug and unplug the cables appropriately [one moh-ment, pleeeze. pleeeze hold.] eventually, the connection is made and a loud spark shoots through my brain, spraying lightening out of both ears.

oh.

my.

god.

i realize that it’s someone that i work with daily, but rarely get to see face-to-face. i laugh and laugh and laugh some more. he’s standing there, looking blokey, red stripe in hand. i’m standing there, wearing glitter and face makeup and wearing a pink blouse, holding a smirnoff ice. the amusement on his face grows as i explain why i’m dressed so bizarrely [i mistakenly convinced atif, .greg, scottish david to try something different—kashpoint, a funky sleazy electro night that was too cool for school... style with no substance. and the music was shite.] and also that indeed, yes, i am a gay homosexual.

the next few hours are spent dancing and drinking and gossiping endlessly about work and the office and scandals and flirting and grander generalizations about life and london and love. good stuff. every few minutes i find myself bursting out in laughter just at the preposterousness of the situation… mostly because i’ve built such a huge wall between my day job and the rest of my life—needlessly so, one would argue, as i know colleagues read my blog and i know my colleagues are pretty darn cool anyway.

i perhaps try to push things too far and try to drag him along for the next segment of the evening. after being horribly underdressed at kashpoint and horribly overdressed at .popstarz, we all stop off home for a change of clothes and some absinthe before queuing [needlessly! queuing needlessly! needlessly, i tell you, atif!] for a:m at .fire. eventually by 6am all the cute zombies leave the club, leaving me with a dancefloor of nothing but utterly unshagable zombies, so i somersault home down kennington lane as the sun comes up.

friday i boozed it up with my work colleagues for the first time ever. my romantic woes had been eating at me, and after 6 months at the day job i’d finally let my guard slip [just a bit] at work. the chaps i work with are probably the smartest chaps i’ve worked with, and it’s great to unwind at the end of the week with free pints and naughty revelry.

i get so easily pissed off beer, but i managed to not embarass myself too obviously after 8 or so rounds. stumbled home with a smile on my face, with thoughts of ben well supressed under many layers of booze. met .gregiño and atif at home, and spent the evening dancing and getting ready for .beyond the world aids day ball at club coliseum. yeah, basically .beyond.

the goal was get trolleyed and for once we met our goal. i’m normally a respectable clubber, and go out to enjoy myself, but just for one night i wanted to push my limits, hard. i spikey my hair up crazy stylee, put on my freakish electro outfit that everone hates [sleveless white and black print shirt with disconnected cuffs] and spent hours crawling around the club, gibbering nonsense with the boys: do, sure!, miiiiiiiiloooooooooo!, baby rimmer! and other nonsense non-sequiturs.

spent a few hours in a cosmic loop dirty dancing with some polish boy who spoke all of three words in english. our conversation went something like this:

so, it’s like 6am, do you wanna go home with me?

          e……… i………

i’m just up the road

          e……… i……… moost werk at….. e…….

what?!

          e…….. eight ay emmmmm

where do you work?

          e……… i……. how you say?

so, do you wanna go home with me?

etc.

this goes on for maybe 45 minutes as his friends look on, thinking who is that scary creature andrew is talking to and my friends look on, thinking who is that scary creature eric is talking to and then, as is typical [typisch, sehr typisch] with nights like that, you suddently sober up as the lazer slices through your consciousness, and you realize you’re a gurning zombie entrenched on the dancefloor, surrounded by even more zombies. you take your hands out of his pants, lurch towards the cloakroom, and smile, because as you pass her, the toilet attendant feels sorry for you and gives you a lollipop. no jiggy jiggy.

ryan had to be the shyest little boy i’d ever met. he’d been queuing at the bar and i accidentally manouvered in front of him. i turned and smiled apologetically, but he immediately averted my gays gaze. he then whispered something to me, so quietly that i asked him to repeat himself. he asked again, still avoiding eye contact by looking down at the bar.

he asks, ummm what are you drinking? i tell him that that i haven’t decided, but maybe some vodka tonics with absolut kurant. maybe. this bar is pretentious uppity expensive swank, and as the saying goes—when in rome, do a roman—so we’re sticking with the top-shelf cocktails, innit dahlink. i introduce myself while waiting for the peppy bar staff to make our drinks.

in america this boy would be preppy. like, carlton from fresh prince of bel air preppy. but tonight at bondai in pseudo-posh chelsea, he blends in easily with the crowd… a mix of big-breasted straight girls, small-breasted straight girls, loud annoying straight girls, sloppy drunken straight girls and—oh yeah—a smattering of sugardaddies/rent boys/drag queens/gay celebs thrown in for flavour.

ryan is so sweet i just want to put him in my pocket and take him home. he looks all of 14 but tells me he’s 22. black hair, bright puppydog eyes, sheepish smile, with a simple dark sweater and slacks covering his petite frame. i don’t fancy him—per se—but think he’s adorable so i drag him over to join atif and .greg at a corner table.

first impressions play out to be true, and this boy is prepalicious. he complains how some parts of chelsea are quite dodgy, actually and how it’s unfortunate that some people find london expensive. he starts drilling me [with questions!], and actually asks me if i play polo or enjoy hunting. i’m having none of this pretentiousness, so i make it clear that i come from a humble background [read: trailer in indiana], am not impressed by wealth, and that i do not acknowledge nor respect whatever british class system he’s attempting to impose on me.

we ended up in chelsea on a tuesday to support .popstarz nic’s new club night, remedy, which bills itself as a glammed-up midweek disco, which is exactly what it was. we went because we’re desparate to try new scenes and swim in new circles, and because we fancy nic and we still had clubbing mojo built up after saturday’s heaven debacle. the boys and i were the first to take to the dancefloor, the first to peek into the vip, and probably among the first to get bored and leave.

remedy has potential, but for me it wasn’t quite my scene. chelsea is a bit out-of-the-way for moi, the drinks were a bit steep and the crowd was a bit too girls gone wild for me. oh, and aside from the free shots, nic didn’t flirt nearly enough with me.

brian dowling was there, trying to quietly blend in but of course everyone kept staring. the concept of ~`celebrity’~ in this country never fails to amuse me… 15 minutes of fame lasts approximately 11 years in the uk. if nothing else, though, the crowd was very different from the soho/kings cross/souf london places i end up in, and it was nice to flirt and chat with the boys and girls even if there were a bit o.t.t. at times.

and then we went to bromptons where there was a greasy stripper and a filthy darkroom and poppers galore and i felt embarassed and ashamed to be a gay homosexualist. no, really. and i used to live on castro street in san francisco for chrissakes.