'Oh, I don't know,' said the man. 'You'd be surprised. It's a village really.'
'Do you often play pin-ball?'
'Me? No. Got an office up the Charing Cross Road. I just like to look in most evenings on my way home. Yes, indeed.'
'Right.'
'I thought you were a girl at first with your hair and . . .everything.'
Adrian blushed. He didn't like to be reminded how long beard growth was in coming.
'No offence. I like it... it suits you.'
'Thanks'
'Yes indeed. Yes indeedy-do.'
Adrian made a note, somewhere in the back of his mind, to get a haircut the next day.
'You sound a bit public school to me. Am I right?'
Adrian nodded.
'Harrow,' he said. He thought it a safe bet.
'Harrow, you say? Harrow! Dear me, I think you're going to be a bit of a hit. Yes indeed. You got anywhere to stay?'
'Well . . .'
'You can put up with me, if you like. It's just a small flat in Brewer Street, but it's local.'
'It's terribly kind of you . . . I'm looking for a job, you see.'
That's how simple it had been. One day a lazy student, the next a busy prostitute.
'Thing is, Hugo,' said Don, 'soon as I clapped eyes on you I thought, 'That's not rent, that's the real thing.' I've been around the Dilly for fifteen years and I can spot 'em, indeedy-dumplings, I can. Now I'm sorry to say that I won't fancy you next week. Unplucked chicken is my speciality and I'll be bored stiff with you Thursday. Bored limp, more like. Hur, hur! But you cut your hair a bit - not too much - keep your Harrovian accent fit and you'll be clearing two ton a week. Yes indeed.'
'Two ton?'
'Two hundred, sunshine.'
'But what do I have to do?'
And Don told him. There were two principal amusement arcades, there was the Meat Rack, which was an iron pedestrian grille outside Play land, the more active of the arcades, and there was the Piccadilly Underground itself.
'But you want to watch that. Crawling with the law.'
Don wasn't a pimp. He worked at a perfectly respectable music publishing house in Denmark Street. Adrian paid him thirty pounds a week which covered his own accommodation and the use of the flat for tricks during the day. At night it was up to the tricks to provide the venue.
'Just don't start chewing gum, shooting horse or looking streetwise, that's all.'
At first the days passed slowly, each transaction nerve-racking and remarkable, but soon the quiet pulse of routine quickened the days. The young can become accustomed to the greatest drudgeries, like potato-harvesting or schoolwork, with surprising speed. Prostitution had at least the advantage of variety.
Adrian got on pretty well with the other rent-boys. Most of them were tougher and beefier than he was, skinheads with tattoos, braces and mean looks. They didn't regard him as direct competition and sometimes they even recommended him.
'Do you know of anyone less . . . chunky?' a punter might ask.
'You want to try Hugo, he'll be doing the
Adrian was intrigued by the fact that the most prosperous, pin-striped clients went for the rough trade, while the wilder, less respectable tricks wanted more lightly muscled boys like him. Opposite poles attracted. The Jacobs wanted hairy men and the Esaus wanted smooth. It meant that he more than most had to learn to spot the sadists and nutters who were on the lookout for a sex-slave. One of the last things Adrian wanted was to be chained up, flogged and urinated over.
He liked to think that his rates were competitive but not insulting. A blow-job was ten quid to give, fifteen to receive. After a week he made up his mind to forbid anything up the anus. Some could take it and some couldn't: Adrian decided that he belonged to the latter category. A couple of boys tried to convince him, as he hobbled down Coventry Street after a particularly heavy night complaining that his back passage felt like a windsock, that he would soon get used to it, but he resolved - financially disadvantageous as it might be - that his rear section was to be firmly labelled a no-poking compartment. This was a proviso he had to make clear to clients at the opening of negotiations: between the thighs was fine - the intercrural method was, after all, endorsed by no less an authoritative source than the Ancient Greeks themselves - but he was buggered if he was going to be buggered. As long as he could get it up he didn't mind sodomising a client, but his own bronze eye was closed to all comers.
When business was slack he and some of the others would mix with the journalists and professional Soho drinkers in the French House in Dean Street. Gaston, the implausibly named landlord, had no objection to their presence so long as they didn't tout for custom there. The Golden Lion next door was for that. The regulars however - embittered painters and poets for whom the seventies were an unwelcome vacuum to be filled with vodka and argument - could be savagely impolite.
'We don't need your kind of filth in here,' a radio producer, whose watery seed Adrian had spat out only the
