The Sickness Of Men

It’s late on a Saturday night in Hore’s on Frith Street and it’s as if something trippy has been mixed into all the alcohol behind the bar. Everyone is wasted but decadently so. At least, that’s how it feels in the moment if you’re part of it.

Sid is shuffling around on the dance floor. He is not a good dancer, and he is not good looking, but something about his awkward posing endears him to the women around him. Not to the point where they find him attractive, but when he grinds up against them they push him away without malice.

The whole floor of the club is ankle deep in booze. Not the cheap strong lager that splashes up onto your jeans in the Camden pubs, but exotic cocktails that girls in white high heels have been unable to keep in their glasses. They slip and slide in their own liquid, paid for and sloshed onto the floor and they land on their backs, laughing, skirts riding up revealing white or pink knickers. Men rush to help them, the grips on their DMs just holding them upright as they haul the girls to their feet and hug them. The girls are not particularly pretty. All the pretty girls are at clubs you’ve heard of.

Everyone is shouting above the dreamlike trance music, and because I cannot hear their meaningless words, I am able to imagine that they are quoting poetry or philosophy and discovering new ways of analysing art. People in the booths are snorting coke off their tables but there are no bouncers to throw them out or even to turn a blind eye because they are in the manager’s office with some girls who were refused entry and then begged to get in. Someone screams in my face and I nod and smile because it seems appropriate. I cannot focus on anything because everything is rushing past me and through me, morphing and twisting like when Frodo slips the ring onto his finger.

The barman is knocking back shots and refilling my glass without asking. Occasionally he stumbles backwards and sweeps a few tumblers onto the floor. He looks confused, unsure of what has happened, and he crunches the smashed glass underfoot, oblivious. Briefly, I think about tomorrow’s hangover. Then I drain my glass. It is refilled.

A man next to me falls off his bar stool. Others join him on the floor. Then they sing Sailing and do some arm movements. Unable to let go and join in the fun, I stare at the ice as I twirl it in my glass.

Sid totters over from the dance floor looking around at the women in wide-eyed wonder. “God Damn,” he says, sitting next to me at the bar. “God Damn,” he says again.

“Dude,” I say for no reason. We are drunk and have gone American. We are celebrating the completion of what I hope will be the final draft of Clear History.

Sid leans in towards me. “Can you imagine if women knew how shallow we really are?” he asks, ogling a group of girls across the room. “I mean, they think they know. They’ve heard the statistics, men think about sex once every six seconds, or whatever. They’ve flicked through FHM and seen the cars and the tits and everything. They joke and bitch about it to their friends and in their magazines, but they could never fathom the true extent of it. Pornography, they think, is escapism, a fantasy. But the reality is far worse.

“Every woman I see gets a rating. Not a mark out of 10, but a Yes, No or Maybe. Even if it’s an old woman in a wheelchair, even if it’s subconscious, they still get that No. It still registers. And the Maybes get a second, third, fourth look. And the Yes's get thoughts. Every Yes and some of the Maybes I see I think about talking to them and whether I could get them into bed, and what I would do to them if I could. It’s a sickness, really. I can’t stop. And it’s not just something occurring in a small part of my brain. It is literally the most important thing. If I’m walking around a museum, or watching a rugby match, or sitting in a Harper Collins meeting, no matter who I’m with, everything I am experiencing is secondary to the scoping, judging and analysing of women. I swear that if I was being put to death, strapped down for a lethal injection, I’d be looking through the glass to see if there are any hot relatives of my victims. If someone cut my throat on the street and a group of girls were looking, I’d be on the ground, checking them out as my lifeblood drained away.

“They know we look at their legs and their boobs on the train if they really think about it, but they forget. We never do. If they had any concept of exactly what goes on in here,” – he taps his head – “If they even came close, they would run a mile. They would be genuinely terrified and they would exclude us from their lives. By now women would have taken over the world and would just keep us around to reproduce and open jars. And if they felt anywhere near the same as us we’d all be fucking constantly on every street corner.”

And God Damn if one of the girls here tonight doesn’t share his enthusiasm for sex, and at 1.30am he waves goodbye and stumbles off with a plain blonde on his arm, leaving me on my stool, glancing at my reflection in the chrome of the bar. I think about going home to Cheryl, but what keeps me in the bar is not the hope of meeting a strange woman. Being married has dimmed that fire a little. And what burns brighter can be bought legally in bottles.

I order another Scotch.