Only in it for the Money

I’m only in it for the . . .

Excitement. The fun if it. The guilty pleasure. And because I’m randy. Honest. I don’t camerawhore for money. Not that I won’t accept a little pourboire if you insist. I have a PayPal account. No cheques, no Western Union or dodgy currency from Kazakhstan or anywhere I’m never likely to go on holiday to. Pounds, Euros, Dollars, they’re OK.

Mind you, I did think if doing it for real once. Well, twice, actually, but I’m definitely not going to tell you about the second time. That really was too shaming.

The first time, I was in Paris with a friend of mine. We weren’t lovers, though. He was straight. Straight-ish. Bendable, as it turned out. We happened to go through the Bois de Boulogne late one night. We were a bit slow on the uptake, because it was a while before we realised that all those girls and boys under the trees weren’t simply out enjoying the Spring air and full of the joys of it.

It must have been the girls showing more cleavage and shorter skirts than was usual, even in Paris, even at the end of April, and that the boys mostly had one hand hovering about their flies and the other on their hips that eventually gave the game away. And the fact there seemed to be a lot more couples clambering in and out of camper vans parked along the road than you might expect from people on a caravanning holiday at 2 am in the morning .

Both of us were students, he a medic, and both of us were skint, of course. Which is why we were having to walk instead of getting a cab back to the hostel. He looked at me in a sort of speculative, assessing sort of way. I wondered for a minute if the surroundings had got to him and he was about to lapse into gaydom and drag me off into the bushes for a quickie.

He didn’t have that in mind though, at least, not precisely. We’d both noted, by then, what looked like enticing wads of cash changing hands. Pretty frequently. Either it was a particularly good night, or there was no lack of customers.

He put his arm round my shoulders and his lips brushed my ear. Bloody hell, I thought, the rampant lust in the air must have really got to him, I am going to end up hugging a tree bending forwards from the hips. I wouldn’t have minded at all; he was a year older than me, slim, narrow-hipped, dark-haired, olive-skinned, brown almond-shaped eyes, nicely shaped ears, I suddenly noticed. Lovely bum. Wholly Italian, too, as opposed to my half. I got a hard-on.

“Hey, I think we could make a go of this,” he whispered. “It looks dead easy. You cool about it?” Well, I did have one major reservation. Suppose we picked something up as well as being picked up? I didn’t fancy wincing with scalding pain every time I went into a pissoir for the rest of my holiday. I’d just been reading the Restoration poets, and Rochester’s description of it from the unexpurgated edition had suddenly come to the forefront of my mind, a bit too vividly for my liking.

“Don’t worry, trust me, I’m a doctor. I can fix us if it happens.” That sounded reassuring, until something occurred to me. “Hang on a minute, you’re not quite a doctor yet. Doesn’t that mean I can only quite trust you?” “Nah, be alright. No prob. Tru. . .Just take my word for it, right?”

The other reservation was about the competition. There were, I’d casually observed already, quite a few very attractive boys about. And one or two indistinguishable from girls. I wasn’t sure how we’d be able to stand up against our rivals.

And I had another passing concern. Suppose I didn’t fancy the punter at all? Would I be able to get it up even? Or keep it up? He just grinned at that. “You sure that might be a problem?” he said, making a grab at my crutch. I blushed. . .I really had been hoping he hadn’t noticed. I didn't know much about the ins and outs of male prostitution, then, you see. It didn't occur to me I'd be the passive partner in this whoring game most of the time. . .

Anyway, we retraced our steps, to have a better look at the competition and to size up the likely punters. That’s when we started getting nervous. There seemed to be a pretty large proportion of fat middle-aged jowly guys with huge paunches in suits. And worse, a fair number of rather hefty muscular garlicky-breathed, greasy-haired truck-driver types. With tattoos. My erection started shrinking.

“Yeah, sort of see what you mean . . .” my medical mate muttered. And then one really dishy boy casually wandered up to us suggestively swaying his hips, and even more suggestively pulling what looked like a flick knife half-way out of his bum-hugging back-pocket.

It didn’t look as though our new career was going to get a cheery fraternal welcome in that particular neck of the woods. The idea of ending up in the bushes started to look as though it might turn out to be an ending of two up to then promising young lives. Or at the very least an end to our masculine beauty. Or our masculine abilities.

So we didn’t take up prostitution to pay our expenses, and just carried on sitting in the bars trying to look as though we weren’t really sharing one half-litre of bière blonde between us for two hours at a time. I’m not cut out for real, live, whoring, I don’t think. The second time, the one I am not, no way, not ever, not even an eternity after hell’s frozen over, going to tell you about, just confirmed it.