I'm about to sleep for the first time since before the most random night I can remember having. It involves a lunatic bling crack dealer, two entirely different varieties of woman, cascading hotel upgrades and the wonder of a body that has a stop mechanism for when the mind cannot... like I said, random.
Since the destructively fun night of New Year's Eve, I've been ill with a chesty, phlegmy cough which degenerates into a nasty hacky cough when all the phlegm has run out. I think I've been pissing my officemates off because Sarah my boss told me quite explicitly to go home on Friday afternoon, which I did. I rested a little and then I suddenly realised that while not exactly in keeping with the spirit of being sent home to get well, I might be able to meet my Japanese friends Osamu and Tomoko at the airport, as they were flying in that afternoon. Sarah, if you're reading this, I was only trying to help some foreign friends. I didn't expect the rest of this to happen! I'd had a rest and felt well enough to sit on my arse on a tube for an hour in each direction, and maybe even well enough to sit on my arse waiting for them to appear in Arrivals as well. That was all I was expecting.
So I hastily concluded my various chat conversations and immediately undid the afternoon's rest by legging it to the station. Their flight was delayed so I had enough time to get there and find a suitably occluded spot from which to jump out and surprise them. Mission accomplished, I took them to their hotel in Earl's Court - they had a fifty quid twin room booked over the net. Unfortunately, after their 13 hour flight, 3 hour check-in, 1 hour delay, 1 hour baggage retrieval and 1 hour tube journey, the hotel couldn't actually give them a room due to the fact that they were renovating at the time. Instead, they paid for a taxi and upgraded them to a twin in a much nicer 4 star sister hotel, The Shaftesbury, in Piccadilly!
During the journey, A rang to tell me about a leaving do in Bar Soho on Old Compton Street he was going to for one of his Aussie friends, H, who was going back to Perth in a few days, so I had a plan for what to do once my friends were encsconced in their new, upgraded hotel room. The Shaftesbury was actually a pretty nice place, but on check-in we found that the room wasn't ready; it had been very recently occupied, probably by a staff member who didn't realise that it was going to be given out and thought he could get away with a bit of gross misconduct. Reception sounded suitably mortified and immediately sent up a porter with new keys. Apparently there was some trouble finding another twin room because they got two new rooms instead of one old twin room. In fact, they must have had trouble finding any two other rooms as my friends got two Executive Suites, with a rack (walk-in) rate of well over three hundred quid a night!
Naturally, they gave one to me. Result.
All set, with a party to go to and a key to a 4-star Executive Suite in my cashmere overcoat pocket, I grinned like a loon and headed off to the bar while leaving some messages and sending some texts along the way to put the word out about my Executive Suite. At the bar I met A and his friends, none of whom I had seen before, including the very cute T, the exceedingly cute P, and the exceedingly fun and lively H. Men in the audience will have already discerned that she wasn't that attractive. I told the story so far and started gaming T, who was sitting next to me and already interested. Was witty and sparkling and not too interested and soon T was game. Discerned that P was very attached to her beau in Oz so resolved to appear to move in on H in order to keep T on the boil. Turned out H was actually really funny, so I wasn't at all unhappy about chatting. I had initially wanted to get out there and work the room for quality company, but as I was drinking with friends and as the company was pleasant, I stuck to it. What was not good was that despite my illness I was drinking, my beer goggles were on and, with that room key in my pocket, set to maximum warp.
I moved back to T, but as this happened some chump sat down next to her and started touching her! Turned out that this was her boyfriend, with whom she was just getting back together. It was obviously doomed, but not because of me - I have some social skill, I've been told, and it would seem to me that stepping in and ruining a reforming relationship is the height of bad manners when you know the people involved. A would later comment gravely, "I'm very disappointed in T's boyfriend." It's true, he was about as entertaining as a laundrette, and about as attractive. The poor girl kept flashing desperate glances at the rest of us as if to say, "Save me!" but it was clear to me that even going for that rescue would make enemies a simple shag wasn't worth.
As time wore on the clientele of the bar shifted from office drinkers (suits and open shirts) to Friday night drinkers (fairly normal apparel), to pre-club drinkers (shiny disco clothes), to post-pub drinkers (some more suits) to nowehere-else-is-open drinkers (very ragbag assortment). Thanks to my illness I had felt pretty pissed on just a few bottles of beer earlier, so I'd been laying off, but still felt pretty dulled. T and her bloke had exited at around 12:30am, A at 1am or so and I'd been trying to use the remaining two girls P and H (one attached, the other really nice but no spark) to get other girls, but they weren't interested in joining the dancefloor. To be fair, it was getting pretty messy on the dancefloor by this time. Anyone who hadn't pulled was doing his best to, by fair means or foul, and everyone who had was starting off the foreplay there and then. There was an entertainingly disgusting 4-way circle snog and grind going on between some fat retired gay bikers in jeans and pressed shirts and their frankly vile old fag hags, which neither girl was enjoying as much as me... but I've always had a fascination with the grotesque.
The girls decided it was time to blow the joint, and I just went with the minimum effort option: taking H back to my suite. As I have said, she wasn't anything special to look at, but she was a lot of fun to talk to, and I was looking for fun more than anything else. She was the one going back to Australia in an couple of days, so a final fling was probably high in her thoughts, and as for me I thought it would be something of a nice going-away present for a good friend of a good friend: a shag in a flash hotel with a fairly fit guy she'll never see again. However, there is a huge difference between thinking, hey, there's no spark but what the hell when wearing industrial strength beer goggles in a darkened environment and the same assessment made feeling ill and tired and under the uncompromising fluorescence of a hotel lobby, after sobering up. She was a lovely girl, but 'dog' doesn't really cover it. She was rough like grade 3 sandpaper. Ugly as all seven cardinal sins. I had to invent a new language of ugliness to describe her, but if you're not the kind of callous fucker who can just dtich people on the spot, what do you do? Well, I took my amputee roadkill upstairs, thinking, we're both biologically normal people (I suspect) so let's have a laugh and a shag and enjoy the £325 hotel room! We got to the suite, which was awesome: big flatpanel TV, amazingly comfy Queen-size bed, nice bathroom, mini-balcony and of course minibar! We kissed, and that's when it all started to go really wrong.
Kissing is very important, and I made a tactical error by not kissing her earlier, because it was awful. Not merely awful, but spectacularly, catastrophically, incapacitatingly awful. What's more, under the brighter lights and now really close up, I could see her skin, which was typically sun-damaged, but to levels I can't remember having seen anywhere before. Ginger people should all leave Australia and go and live somewhere overcast. I would welcome them and their recessive genes all to England if it reduced the number of people in the world who had skin like H's - she was heavily lined and flaky like a 50 year old detective who can still carry a tune. Still, you can close your eyes, can't you? Not when the actual kiss is so distressingly bad you end up staring in wide-eyed horror as the road accident unfolds in front of you. I think you can sometimes say that two people's mouths just don't mesh very well, but in this case, I'm sorry to say, I think she was just a shocking kisser. Her mouth opened up to the size of a 2p piece (actual size) and her tongue had all the flexibility and subtlety of a child poking an anthill with a stick. Every time she touched me I thought I was the donkey having its tail pinned on and she had obviously shaved her 'tache off because it felt like I was back on Old Compton Street snogging a gay blacksmith. To add grievous insult to already mortal injury, her mouth smelt like the furnaces of hell. With her top off, her body consisted of layers of softening lard flowing over a mound of jelly. Her bottoms were staying on. Mr Floppy had arrived to say, "No!" where my mind was still saying, "Maybe." Thank god for Mr Floppy!
By now it was past 3am and pulling opportunities in Soho were drying up, but this was too much. If it was her or nothing, I would settle for my book, clean sheets and a newspaper at my door in the morning. I had to get rid of her, but how could I do it now without making her feel like a piece of meat I'd decided wasn't even worthy of a stew? I manufactured a huge coughing fit and went in to the bathroom to think. On the phone was a message from about 2 hours ago from J, the #1 person I wanted to be in that hotel room right now, saying, "Have you found anyone to share your room with yet?" Aaaarrrrrrgggggh! Shit! Fuck! No! No! Don't fuck! I quickly texted back and thought with a clarity and focus I wish I'd been able to achieve at university. Cough a bit more, flush the empty toilet and once more into the breach! I had been coughing on and off all night as it was, so I merely ramped it up a little more and and winced like it was inducing a crushing headache. H offered an ibuprofen, but I flowed around that obstacle like a river around a rock with a quick fictional allergy. I knew that J was likely to take her time in replying, so over the next half hour or so I made the symptoms worse and worse until it was entirely congruent that I might say, while in a posh suite in a posh hotel on Shaftesbury Avenue, "I just want to go home."
H understood entirely and sympathised with me. She could see it was nothing to do with her lying all the way over at the wrong end of the bell curve and everything to do with my illness. I'd made her feel desired and she was so happy that she'd been able to spend the evening with me up till that point and said so repeatedly. I offered to let her stay in the hotel room, knowing that she wouldn't feel comfortable checking out of a hotel she hadn't checked in to, and so everything was rosy for us both. I found her a licensed minicab and packed her off home with a thankfully final kiss, waited until the cab was round the corner and whipped out the phone to J. She needed a little persuasion but came down. We got a chocolate and breakfast at Balans Cafe, which my brother explained to me later was the pretence she had needed to come in to London at 4am. Amongst men, even an invitation as blunt as "I've got a suite at The Shaftesbury, you should come down and fuck?" would result in instant acquiescence, but apparently women need some non-sexual justification. By this stage I was actually genuinely very very tired, so after we got back to the hotel room my game wasn't on form. In the end I just said, "You're not going until you've kissed me!" and so at last I got it on with someone I wanted to. And everything that was wrong with H was right with J. Her kissing was confident and powerful, her body was firm and her touch was deft. My guess is that she's probably had more practice with better quality partners than H, despite H's extra 8 or 9 years! If only I had read that text while I was still in the bar and I had met up with her when I hadn't been physically wrecked. We kissed again at the car and that was that.
The night for me was now officially over. Time to get a couple of hours kip in the room before helping my Japanese friends get a train to Sheffield. But Soho tells you when your night is over, not the other way round. "Hey, you!" I heard. I walked on. "HEY YOU! SEE! SEE!" I stopped. Why do I always stop? This sweaty, edgy looking black guy absolutely covered in silver chains and rings walks very quickly up to me and gets right in my face. "Hey you! C! C! Charlie! Crack! You want it?" Fuck this I'm gone, so I walk on but he darts in front of me and starts jogging backwards saying over and over again at about a thousand words per minute, "You see, you smell, you taste, you touch. Then you buy." I am so gone, but then he glances down and stops dead. Why oh why do I always stop? He glances back up at me and says, "I'll give you 5 rocks for your shoes!"
This time I really am gone. If you find yourself having sold your shoes for crack at 7am in the morning, going barefooted is the least of your problems.
Posted by Oxygenik at January 9, 2005 3:07 AM