Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (7 page)

The dirty little cunt. She
would never have said that if we had just met in
Starbucks.

“
You’re a
dirty little cunt.” I said

“
Ohhhh.
“

Over the tannoy system the
stewardess asked passengers to return to their seats.

“
You’re on a
plane? I’ve never done it on a plane.”

“
You have
now.”

As I left the toilet
cubicle I must have looked like I had just received some excellent
news. This was better than real sex. I would definitely be calling
her again. A jpg arrived in my phone of a picture she’d taken
seconds earlier; a close-up of two glistening fingers inside
herself. We were approaching New York and I had a date.

VICKY

Vicky turned up at Cafe Lost looking so gorgeous and tiny and
cute I wanted to have sex with her there and then in the street
against the wall.
In her profile, she looked like a ten-year
old boy with tits and so I was already a little ashamed of the
explicit nature of my intentions towards her before she even turned
up. But she seemed to enjoy the attention. Or was it my discomfort?
She looked so young a siren went off somewhere inside
me.

All her clothes came from
the children’s section of Old Navy and she had become quite adept
at removing cartoon characters and bunny rabbits but sometimes she
said she liked to leave them on. There was a pause here as she
waited for my reaction.
Sometimes she left them on?
Why
would she tell me that? An unspeakable sexual sea-creature caught
the light for a second a slithered silently back into the murk.
Such a sighting could never be reported. Maybe it was a
diversionary tactic designed to sway me form the fact that her
interest in me was purely professional. She couldn’t mention that
what she really wanted was a photo assignment and I couldn’t give
voice to my illegal longings.

“
I love your
emails.” was the first thing she said to me in person. This of
course was clever of her not just because it was flattering but
because my emails to her had been predominantly erotic in
nature.

Here are my
balls,

This is my
penis,

My hopes are
high,

It’ll come
between us.

Sh
e let me believe I might
have my way with her that very night if it wasn’t for the fact that
she needed time to get over her ex-boyfriend. What she didn’t
mention and what I found out later was that she was already living
with a man and would go home to him that very evening. She was very
pretty in a pointy sort of way and even though she did her best to
behave like a lost little girl in a world of wonder the prominent
nipples under the tight white cotton of her skin-tight t-shirt
seemed to suggest otherwise. That she had chosen amongst all the
clothes in her wardrobe to wear such a revealing t-shirt to our
first date gave me a thrill that must have informed my features. I
assumed it was one of the items of clothing she had referred to
earlier. And since I was the one doing most of the talking the
conversation seemed to sparkle. At the end of an excellent evening
after a faux argument about who should pay the bill (I won) she
jokingly punched the air between us and I angled my cheek mimicking
impact. But misreading my intention she leaned forward to kiss me
there instead. Suddenly in danger of rejecting a kiss I hadn’t
expected I clumsily kissed her cheek as she tried to kiss mine.
This was particularly dishonest of her since she had effortlessly
conjured up one of those awkward romantic moments that so often
occur between people still unsure of the others’ affections. This
seemed like a good time to tell her that I had been working too
hard and it would be nice to slow down a little.

“
Yes, you
should be kinder to yourself” she said, ingratiating herself with
someone that could lead to a seventy-thousand-dollar-a-day
photo-assignment.

“
My first act
of self-kindness will be to see you again on Wednesday night” I
said camouflaging my desire to rip off her child-sized knickers and
fuck what I found there.

“
I’d like
that.“ she said, blushing at her own dishonesty.

“
Excellent.”
I said, mortified by mine.

I googled her name and a
blog came up featuring the daily trials of a fixer-upper as she
renovated a brownstone in Bushwick. There was a picture of her in a
check shirt cuddling a huge wild-haired fucker in a newly delivered
claw-footed bathtub.

“
Me And My
Man.” the caption said.

The plumbing alone would
cost a fortune.

*****

Back in the agency the
following day just before lunchtime I was printing out fifty pages
of Diary Of An Oxygen Thief as requested by a potential literary
agent when suddenly standing there beside me was Andy. He was
waiting for something of his own to print and he just kept turning
over my emerging pages and smirking to himself. I couldn’t stop
him. He was entitled to look for his printout. I couldn’t stop the
printer either I would have pulled out the plug if I had known were
it was.

Click
whirr….pffht..

“
I liked
hurting girls…”

Click
whirr…pffht…

“
Your cunt is
loose.”

Click
whirr…pffht…

“
Call that a
head-butt?”

Slivers of my life being
served up like Prosciutto. Eleven pages in the tray meant
thirty-nine more to go. Sweet Jesus make it stop.

“
So this is
your big break-out novel?”

He didn’t look up from the
pages as he spoke. I shouldn’t have been printing anything that
wasn’t work-related. Before I could answer our account director
Perry walked over with some other guy in a suit I’d never seen
before. Andy looked quite handsome when he was enjoying
himself.

“
Do you want
me to call you when it’s done?”

“
No that’s
ok, I‘ll wait. So do you have a publisher?”

“
Not yet, I’m
sending this to an agent”

He raised his chin and
nodded once as if this explained everything he’d ever wondered
about. I decided to hide in the men’s room for a few minutes. When
I felt enough time had elapsed I’d come out and retrieve my
vileness from the printer and retreat to my office and call my
sponsor and beg him to let me resign. But after only a few seconds
of pretending to piss Andy seemed to spring from the floor at the
urinal beside me.

“
So, do you
have these in Europe?”

He was referring to the
flushers on the urinals which might or might not have been
particular to the US and I suspected he already knew the answer
before he asked me. I turned to look at him mostly in disbelief.
Was he going to work in some witty remark about me being flushed
down the toilet and never getting another job again?

This fucking
guy.

I pretended to
misunderstand.

“
Penises? Yes
we have them, but they’re much bigger”

The easy smile froze onto
his face.

“
Remind me
not to set you up like that again.” he said.

Had I lost my mind? This
guy had the power to fire me. Without a job, I was an illegal
immigrant.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Open on
a shot of me with my own shoe-shine stall.
A suited
executive talks on his cell phone as I finish giving him a shine.
The camera finds my sad forlorn face in the refection of his shoe.
In that same reflection somebody steps into view behind me. I look
down at the pavement and instead of another pair of men’s shoes I
see what appears to be a pair of ladies high-heeled boots. But as
the camera follows my gaze upwards we realise the
girl is wearing a one-piece leather cat-suit stretched
tantalisingly over every contour of her gorgeous body. And though
she’s flawless in every way the leather looks lacklustre and
uncared for. She needs a damn good buffing.

Keeping her eye on me she
gingerly steps up onto the shoe-shine-stand and dramatically dusts
off the seat before lowering herself into position. Passers-by stop
to look at her. She‘s that beautiful. I try to remind myself she’s
a customer but it’s impossible to hide the effect she’s having on
me. Is she naked beneath that body-hugging leather? Obviously
enjoying my discomfort she uncrosses her legs and offers me a foot.
I reach for a piece of cloth but when I try to spit on it I realise
my mouth has gone dry. Unperturbed she leans provocatively forward
and offers me her bottle of Perrier.

Perrier. Thirst for
Life.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MISS CANADA

But I wasn’t fired.
Instead I was assigned to oversee yet another shitty commercial,
this time being shot in Canada where all five cars in the Falfaux
stable demonstrate their snow-traction capabilities as they
converge at a ski-lodge for the holidays. Each member of an
unlikely family drive a Falfaux and it is only due to this that
they can be together for the Holidays. A lesser car would have
careered off the road. This it turned out was the script Andy had
been waiting for that day at the printer. And this assignment it
turned out was his way of punishing me for being so brazen as to
announce my ambitions of being a writer. All advertising creatives
have at least one book, musical, screenplay, play or children’s
book hidden under the metaphorical floorboards but it’s considered
very bad taste to talk about it. Why talk of escape when you’re in
a maximum-security prsion?

The
freelance producer found some idiot French-Canadian director to
shoot it on the cheap because he was as desperate to get into the
business as I was to get out of it. Before we even landed in
Calgary I couldn’t wait to leave. The director, Jean-Philip, asked
in his thick French accent if I needed anything shot for my reel.
He must have guessed I was so bored with this shoot that he needed
to offer something extra to keep my interest. Creatives often asked
a director to shoot personal projects on the back of a fully
paid-up production but even if I had something in mind I wouldn’t
have trusted this guy with it. But he was way ahead of me. Eager to
impress, he had already thought of an alternative.
That same
evening after the so-called shoot, (it was all over after two
hours) the client, Ken (No-Ken-Do as I called him), our freelance
producer (I forgot his name) and myself were picked up in a huge
SUV outside the hotel and taken to
Calgary Adult
Entertainment Club
.

Within seconds of being
ushered into the VIP area and offered a drink I didn’t want, I
realised I had no prior reference for a rabbit-fur bikini. Why
would I? It had never occurred to me that a bikini could be made
from such material. It wasn’t practical. It contradicted itself. It
was like a candle lit by a lamp. The contrasting textures of fawn
coloured fur and the clean white skin almost got me going. I say
almost
because the lighting was too harsh and the interior
too cavernous and let’s not forget that getting even a hint of a
hard-on in the same room as No-Ken-Do was an
imponderable.

“
She’s a
former Miss Canada” the sideways shift of his eyes was all he could
afford to confirm that I was indeed there beside him. I could
hardly believe it myself as I risked a sideways glance of my own at
the leaning tower of red chips surging upwards from his table
representing only too graphically his desire for the alarmingly
young girl on the stage in front of us. As he lobbed, flicked and
tossed these plastic discs, the artist formerly known as Miss
Canada positioned herself expertly to catch each filthy thought
above her now fur-free and hairless vagina. This, it turned out was
Canada’s real attraction. Not the strength of the dollar or the
endless available snow but the fact that the strippers were allowed
to go nude.

“
In Canada
the beaver goes free.” said Kenneth Berg, Falfaux’s recently
promoted Marketing Director who at that moment was busy scrunching
up his nose like he was making faces for a baby. But this vagina
was dry and uninterested. I knew this because I could see right
into it. Its owner made absolutely no attempt to appear aroused by
what she was doing and as a result neither did I. Until later.
After refusing the second offer of free drinks I slipped away and
hailed a cab back to the hotel where I had a Posh Wank (I used a
condom) and fell sideways asleep still clinging to my dick. In a
dream, I was reciting a customised version of the
right-to-bear-arms-motto;
You’ll have to take this dick from my
cold dead hands
, when I was awoken at three-am by a knock on
the door.

“
Your early
morning call, Sir.”

The producer had arranged
it because apparently I was due back in the office. And so it came
to pass, while boarding that half-understood fateful five-am flight
to New York, I was stopped by an immigration officer in Toronto
Airport.

“
I’m sorry
Sir, your visa has expired.”

I feigned
wakefulness.

“
My what
is…what?”