Getting Over It

A Night In The Life Of A Jailbreaker

Or

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Strap-on

It's over. Its finished. We are an ex-couple. I am single again. I put the letter down on the coffee table, lean back into the comfiest sofa in the whole world and look up at the ceiling.

Right now Angeline will be on her way to Waterloo station, where she will get on a fucking eorostar to fucking Paris and I’m not going to see her again. Not ever. I’m not going to see her again ever because it is over and she doesn’t want me anymore.

I was out of my depth with Angeline. Angeline was a Cleopatra. A barbarella. She was Lauren Baccall in “the big sleep”. She was Cybil Shephard in “Taxi driver”. She was Lady Brett Ashley. Yes. That was exactly what she was. That’s hit the nail right on the head. Angeline, my ex-girlfriend, was an eighteen-foot long marlin, too big to fit in the old man’s boat. I dare say you know the type. I hope the Parisian sharks enjoy Angeline.

I always knew I was sexy. My figure is fucking good. My tits are small but they point in the right direction. At the school discos I knew the boys were looking at my ass in those tight-patched jeans I used to wear. Back then I thought the reason I didn’t want to look at the boys was because they weren’t Eddie Vedder. Everyone is naïve and stupid when they are fifteen, what are you gonna to do?

I wasn’t in Angeline's league though. If a pretentious documentary filmmaker asked Heidi Fleiss to mark her out of ten, Hollywood’s favourite madam would say “Seventeen”. Angeline had sex, intelligence, sophistication, courage, money, excitement and class oozing out of every pore on her beautiful body. I wish she wasn’t gone.

I’ve got half a cigarettes worth of tobacco in a king size paper. Something tells me I’m going to be putting more weed into this one than I normally would. I just cut my nails last night and my fingertips are sore as I tear bits of the green stuff away from the bud. It’s two in the afternoon. The sun is bright today. You can never take the weather for granted in London. I should probably be out making the most of it but instead I’m sitting inside having a spliff, same as I would in January.

Being with Angeline was like a jailbreak. It was exhilarating. Time moved

obscenely fast

, but I guess deep down I knew that when I was sixty five years old, Angeline wouldn’t be the one who would be there helping me remember where I had left my teeth. Angeline wasn’t long term.

We’d be at parties full of twenty something’s who all seemed to work in the media or poets or some shit, and I knew everyone wanted her. The boys wanted her. The girls wanted her.

“Who is that young lady who looks like Amelie?”

She was spoken for. She was mine.

I knew they wondered why we were together. I was Angeline`s jailbait fuck piece to them. I was her pet.

“Is that girl even out of school?”

I probably am a young nineteen and she probably did just want a toy for the bedroom while she was in London and I was probably not supposed to fall in love with her, but like I said, time moved

obscenely fast

and shit just happened.

Bob Dylan is going to have to come off my turntable. I’m going to light my marijuana cigarette with a positive-stroke-bitchy reflection on my newly broken relationship. The sunshine will be boring the daylights out of Mick Jagger in a couple of minutes. Bill Wyman's bass is bouncing off the purple painted walls of my living room as I reach for my Zippo. Here goes then. Miss Angeline, you probably could paint the daytime black, but you would only do it if you thought “The Face” would send a journalist and a photographer to review the event.

That was bitchy but not positive. I’ll dig deep and try again.

Ok. Angeline, nobody has ever made me wetter, but you still aren’t as sexy as Jessica Rabbit. I might get her into bed one day Angeline, so don’t get too smug.

That will have to do as the smoke goes into my lungs. This one is strong. There goes the afternoon…….

I’m awake again. I’ve been sleeping on the comfiest sofa in the whole world. Angeline has still dumped me but I’ll be ok because I’m a soul survivor. Can’t believe I fell asleep with the music on. That spliff was mean.

I’m going to “Vampyros” tonight. Angeline never took me. She said it was for people who definitely weren’t in relationships. She’d been there. Yes ma petite it is just as debauched as you have heard, but I will not go with you. I will not share my Hailey.

I don’t belong to her anymore, so I’m going to “Club Vampyros”.

I was at a party with Angeline in March. It was in a flat in Peckham (the only white people who live in Peckham are so rich and so apocalyptically hip that it hurts. It actually hurts, like all the pain in all the world). I knew that I was one millionth as chic as the rest of the party crowd, but I was holding all the cards. When Angeline took me upstairs so I could lick her cunt I felt like I was on the inside looking out, and all those trendy people who had worked with Bjork or whatever, were on the outside. I made her scream. I knew they could all hear. It felt so good that we were nearly equals, Angeline and I. It felt so good licking her cunt that THE BIG PROBLEM IN OUR RELATIONSHIP didn’t matter. I’m afraid it felt so good that remembering it now compels me to shout at the picture of Lee Marvin stuck to the wall above my television,

“I LUUUURVE THE SMELL OF CUNT IN THE MORNING…. IT SMELLS LIKE…. VICTORY!” I would very much prefer it if the people downstairs hadn’t heard that.

I’m in my bedroom now. Sophie should get back in about an hour. What am I going to wear to this dyke club? Seeing as our relationship is currently on route to gay Paris, THE BIG PROBLEM IN OUR RELATIONSHIP has gone with it. So what am I now free to wear?

If a pretentious documentary film filmmaker asked Heidi Fleiss to give marks out of ten, I think Hollywood’s favourite madam would give me an eight on a good day. I’m five six, six and a half stone. If I was taller I could think about modelling. I`m good looking, I know I am. Angeline had impeccable taste. I dyed my dark brown hair deep, dark red on Wednesday and it has held out pretty well. Seeing as it’s Friday and I am single I will wear the low, low cut, skimpy silver top. Seventeen or eighteen times tonight I will look down, wonder if I’m going to pop out, and hitch it up a little. What are you gonna to do?

The navy-blue combat-trousers. Yes. Tight enough around my ass to stop traffic that time in Camden, but baggy enough in the leg to be just a bit “hobo chic.”

Angeline said I gave fantastic head. Maybe that was the secret, which her friends seemed to be trying to work out every time they saw me. A blowjob has never been a job for me. Not ever. I kiss pussies because I love them. It’s not effort, or a sacrifice. It’s an indulgence. When Angeline opened up those endless, golden brown legs, I kissed her pussy as intimately, as sensuously as I would kiss Norman Mailer if he had a sex change and swept me up in his (her?) arms. That’s why she screamed. That’s why she soaked me. That’s why it took her six months to send me the dear Joan letter and leave for Paris. It smelled like victory.

You know what? I think I’m not going to wear any shoes. The tanning salon on the Walworth road has left me feet a rather delicious olive colour. I’m going to show them off. I might very well step on stones or broken glass or something. But what are you gonna do?

Fuck. It’s six thirty. I was longer in the shower than I had planned. Sophie has just come through the door and I hear her put her bag down on the comfiest sofa in the world as I dry myself in a rush. I’m not going to bother with underwear because I want somebody to fuck me tonight, I pull on the combats and the top, splash of perfume and I’m ready. The pub that

one visits

before “Vampyros” is rather deliciously titled, “the three cocks.” I want to get there early enough to sit down and check people out. That means going now. There’s a red light beeping on the phone.

“Soph honey, I’m in a rush and I have to go out. I taped Malcolm in the middle, its still in the video.”

“You look sexy little Hailey. Is it Angeline's lucky night?”

I make a face, tell her I’ll explain tomorrow, give her a peck on the cheek and I’m out the door. I hear, “have a good time” as I leap down the stairs, take a second to mind the people downstairs` bike, now I’m outside.

Vampyros is the evil empire. Vampyros is a den of Iniquity where unheard of sins are played out. I can’t confirm any of the myriad rumours and titbits I’ve heard about the place for at least another two hours or so, but I’m a tiny bit excited. Angeline and I went to some of the other all girl places you see in “Time Out”, but they never really went close enough to ancient-Roman sexual anarchy for my taste.

Angeline was only my second ever girlfriend. The first had been my geography teacher at school. Her clubbing days were behind her. Angeline refused to take me because she wasn’t prepared to share. When she said that I felt like I was her little princess. I could even see an image of a seventy three year old Angeline holding up a set of false teeth and shouting “Voila”. My ex-girlfriend could certainly make me feel special at times, despite THE BIG PROBLEM IN OUR RELATIONSHIP. What Angeline said that time makes me even more excited about tonight.

I’ve changed from the Bakerloo line to the Northern line and the train is heading to the Angel, Islington (if the makers of Monopoly could only guess at what its worth now!). I don’t feel excited or tingly anymore. I don’t even feel good. This is because I have realised that the light on the phone was bleeping because Angeline rang when I was in the shower and left a message on the answering machine. I’m still going to Vampyros. If she’s changed her mind this night is compensation for the trauma of the letter.

I hope she has changed her mind. I hope she still wants me. I hope she is still in London. I don’t want to split up. I don’t want to split up with Angeline because I love her and I idolise her, because her eyes can make me feel like a better person than I am, because the Marlboro smoke in her throat makes her voice feel like a twenty four carat gold vibrator caressing the nether-regions of my soul, because she’s better than me, because she needs her cunt licked on a regular basis by someone who knows she is better than them, because there is no point in that bloke sat over there trying to make eye contact. I hope she still wants me.

I’m not going to be able to keep Angeline's message out of my mind tonight unless I get really fucking drunk. Really fucking stinking, filthy, fucking rat-ass piss-drunk.

I’m walking just past the street that Vampyros is on. Its away down the other end on the left. It looks like a dark shop front. I’m lighting a spliff I’ve just made walking along. I've made better spliffs than this in my life.

Vampyros is written in orange neon lights, as if it should say PORKY`S instead. The street is just like loads of others in London. Houses where the front door opens on to the pavement. The bricks are proper London style, tiny little bits of red black and brown mixed together. The cobblestones of the street make everything look quaint. I want to take this in as the rough smoke hits my throat. A lot of journeys are better than the eventual arrival. The more I notice now, the greater the anticipation will be.

It’s just after seven; the neon sign is a contrast to the smoggy London dusk, which is starting to turn darker. The street lights are little coves of bright orange as my crappy day prepares to concede to a night of God knows what. The cobblestones mean the Luftwaffe missed this little part of London. Its quiet. I love quiet sometimes. In this city you have to

find

quiet the way you have to find Lou Reed or John Coltrane.

It

won’t come to you.

The remains of the spliff are in the gutter and I'm heading for the Three Cocks. The double vodka I'm about to consume will hopefully provide me with a metaphorical stepladder with which to climb out of my stoned, Lou Reed and Coltrane loving ass. It’s a fine ass by the way. Angeline had impeccable taste.

It’s a grotty pub but that means the landlord hasn’t sold out to a chain. There’s probably thirty women in here already and I have a strong feeling that when I’m drunk enough to forget about Angeline and her message, that quite a few of the healthy wenches now in my peripheral vision will become very pleasing to my eye. The night is young.

I want a double vodka for acceleration and then a Jack Daniels with a dash of coke for more pleasurable cruise cruising speed. That’s what I want, its also what I think I deserve, but the bartender has fucked up. He has made a JD and coke instead of a JD with dash of coke like I asked for, because he is an imbecile.

“No sorry I wanted a Jack Daniels with a dash of coke, not a Jack Daniels and coke.” He looks me in the eye because he is an imbecile and I stare back. He puts the JD and coke to one side and then pours the drink I actually asked for with a reluctant but half smiling ok you pushy little stuck up bitch expression on his face. He does this because he is an imbecile. I pay him, take my drinks and sit down at a still vacant table by a grimy window.

I can see all the partygoers walking past in the road outside. All the young dudes. I should feel like a party girl too but even when the vodka has been banished to history I’m still thinking about Angeline. What the fuck did she say on the answer phone?

The imbecile bartender is collecting glasses. He is scrawny and has that haircut where they’ve paid a lot of money at a salon to look like they just got out of bed. He doesn’t look even remotely like Eddie Vedder. What did Angeline say to the answer phone, imbecile bartender?

She slept on it and realised that my delightful looks and personality package, not to mention my unparalleled skill at cunnilingus, just cannot be discarded. She’s sorry about the letter. She was drunk and emotional and had been too sensitive when I said that her poem about a tapeworm was rubbish. She knows that now. Forget about the letter little Hailey. I love you, lets just carry on as normal Its probably something like that. Vodka works fast nowadays.

I want Angeline back. She’s fucking utterly gorgeous and she made me proud. That long black dress she made herself, with the slit up to her ass. She had the figure of a supermodel but with gorgeous tits as a bonus. She had the libido of a gutter whore. I could slip my hand into that dress when we were in a crowded pub, she could carry on her conversation with her friends about Dumas and black tulips while I brought her off. She’d shudder and her eyes would crinkle at the edges but her fellow beautiful people would be none the wiser and would just keep talking more shite. I loved it. I think Angeline may well have loved too, just a little bit. Only the answering machine knows.

Make no mistake; there are some women in here that I want to fuck hard. I want them to fuck me hard. The clothes and skin on show are stark against the pub interior. The dark purple and blue triangular pattern on the carpet’s khaki background would have been hideous at first, but so much beer has found its way to the floor that the whole carpet is just now just different shades of murky grey-black apart from the odd flash of colour that has tenaciously held out against the grimy onslaught. The tables are solid oak but have been here a good while. The cigarette burns and scratches on them add to the general feel of a pub that is too old and has seen too much within its walls to be turned into a theme bar. The lighting is dim. You notice how smoky the air is. The bulbs need a clean that they probably won’t get. The dust on them makes for a seedy, subterranean,

deviant

sort of light that ricochets off the eggshell blue walls in a way that is just perfect. An immoral ambience for an immoral clientele.

Oh dear, it would seem that, through a lack of concentration that Angeline would have found sadly disappointing, I’ve inadvertently become lodged up my ass again. Never mind, the bartender’s spellbinding ability to fix the drink I asked for offers me forty per cent proof salvation, with a dash of coke to boot.

Its half past nine. The Three Cocks is packed to the rafters and I must put “Fantastic Mr. Fox” away as I’m just ever so slightly too drunk to read. Three girls are sat at my table but they haven’t disrupted my reading with their conversation about Limp Bizkit being shit because Fred Durst is a Neanderthal. Two of them have their hair cut like Fred Durst. I don’t really go for the butch thing but their companion is certainly eye catching. She’s really slim, almost flat chested, dark hair, a just small enough amount of freckles to be cute. The real feather in her cap is the raw sex you can see behind her pale blue eyes. She’s got that Friday feeling and we make fleeting eye contact. The bacardi she’s drinking hasn’t yet corroded her middle class sensibilities enough to take her from flirtatious to voracious, but the night is young.

She looks away and the conversation continues. From nu-metal to “Troilus and Cressida”, in the blink of an eye. This young filly has a soupcon of culture but there is a slut in there bursting to get out. I push my way to the bar.

The bartender must be on a roll, but imbecilic first impressions last. I’m just a tiny bit unsteady on my feet now and I can feel a good pair of tits against my arm as I negotiate a way through the melee back to my seat. I’m keeping my eyes to myself now though, until Vampyros.

I’m back at the table again now and GI Jane No1 introduces herself. She’s called GI Jane No1. She kindly introduces me to GI Jane No2, and then I find that their young companion who I am actually interested in is called Becky. Becky and I make eye contact again for a moment. I want to bury my face between Becky’s svelte legs and kiss her cunt like Greer Garson kissed Olivier in “Pride and Prejudice”. I want to slide my tongue up and down her pussy lips like they were Belgian truffles that my taste buds just could not contain the pleasure of. I want to dart my tongue into Becky’s hole until she faints. I want to love your cunt Becky, because that’s the only way to do it. I want to ambush your clitoris Becky, so that you remember the shock and awe for the rest of your days.

I’m arguing with GI Jane No2 that if MGM had balls, really had balls, like Jim Morrison or Aretha Franklin, Tom would catch Jerry, just once, the last cartoon they ever made. Tom would spit out the bones and go to find a toothpick. In the last scene Tom would be sitting around bored, then he would start crying. Fade to black.

They’re laughing and I’m skinning up. GI Jane No1 has her leg rested against mine. I don’t move my leg away even though I’m not really attracted to her. My mind creeps back to that damned, black hearted answer phone message but I push it away as I imagine Becky’s surprise as I push my middle finger up her ass. I want her. I want to wrap my legs around her and kiss her violently so she knows exactly how much I want her, but it’ll have to wait because GI Jane No2 is kissing her and Becky’s obvious pleasure disappoints me. I look away. “The Specials” are on the jukebox. Angeline and I would have pogo’d to this if we were drunk enough. But Angeline is gone.

My table buddies, presumably just like everyone else in the room, are going to Vampyros. Apparently everyone will decamp in about three quarters of an hour. There’s some excitement creeping into the atmosphere. A bit of momentum finding its way into The Three Cocks’ subversive gloom. The clientele have merged into a politely anarchic mob. The mob has a destination and the hour is nigh.