The Hunger Read online

  Tina sets up three parties for me: one in a big fucking town-house in town, another on a boat on the Thames, then it’s a fetish party out of town somewhere near High Wycombe. I check with her that the booze and the Wraps are all set up. I call the members of the Society and tell them the good news. They are all pissing themselves with excitement. A few of them have no class and ask me if they get any paperwork for being members and is it only three parties they get for their money? I threaten to give them their money back and let someone else have their place in the Society. I ask them:

  —How can you have paperwork for a Secret Society?

  They back off. With every cell in my brain stuffed full of gear, I can forget what day it is but I always remember how to sell. When I take one line too many and the fat lady sings, I know for sure she’ll hire the venue from me. I even manage to create three Principles of the Secret Society.

  PRINCIPLES OF THE SECRET SOCIETY

  1. Membership is strictly limited

  2. Breach of confidentiality will lead to immediate expulsion

  3. Given the highly secretive and sensitive nature of the Society’s parties, all payments are made at Members’ risk

  I even have a mission statement: Put the promise of pussy before a man and he’ll believe anything. Threaten to take it away and he’ll pay anything.

  The first party is organised for a Thursday evening. I could have got five Beauty Queens in for the night but I’ve had to settle for three, mainly due to the diversion of Society funds up my nasal cavity. I tell Erik I want them in on Wednesday for ‘testing’. When they arrive, they are the Crown Jewels of Wraps: two blondes, one brunette, with fake tits, shaved pussies and broken English. All I can think of when I see them is how to decide in which order to bang them.

  The money was sorted before they boarded the plane. We meet in my room at the Sanderson Hotel just after lunch and I say:

  —OK. Who’s first?

  The Wraps look at each other. I lay out nine lines on the coffee table.

  —Let’s try again. Who’s first?

  Now, of course, they are all first. I notice I am enthusiastic. I actually want to fuck them and, when I am doing it, I don’t want it to end. I solve the problem of order. I don’t ask their names. I want places not names. It turns out they are the winning Wraps from Slovakia, Romania and Kazakhstan. I fuck them in geographical order from west to east. I’m not sure where Kazakhstan is but I guess it’s the furthest east, so I make them all bend over and run a line from Slovakia through Romania to Kazakhstan. One line, hundreds of miles long. I pound with a rage I have never pounded before. To mark a Wrap is one thing. To mark the Crown Jewels of Wraps is a guarantee of immortality. When I’m finished, Slovakia can’t walk, Romania is in pieces and Kazakhstan is on her knees trying to repair the bed.

  The Next Night. The Night of the first Secret Society Party. 10 p.m.

  The house is full of Wraps. I’m checking a few things with Tina.

  —How many Asians and Eastern Europeans have you got?

  —Shit loads.

  —OK. Tell two of them they’re Beauty Queens for the night.

  —What? Real ones?

  —Of course. I told the Members we’ve got five Beauty Queens coming over and I’ve only got three and one of those has been on it since yesterday in the Sanderson. So I need two more.

  The Members start arriving at ten-thirty. When they walk in, there are thirty-two Wraps ready for action, a cocktail bar and eleven bedrooms, two beds in each. The Wraps are all wearing evening dresses. My idea. The only idea I had all day. By midnight, the house is heaving and the evening dresses have come off. Rik was first off the mark:

  —Which ones are they, Lincoln?

  I point out the Crown Jewels to him and he stares like he’s just been let out of a monastery after ten years and stumbled into a brothel. Now that I’ve banged them, the Crown Jewels look no different from the other Wraps. In fact, some of the Russian Wraps Tina managed to get hold of are fucking stunning, but the judgement of the eye is a slave to opportunity. I look again and this time I do my best to believe they are the Jewels I believed them to be when I first saw them. No change. I am looking out at a sea of Wraps and one Wrap blends seamlessly into another, as wave after wave of monotony washes over me.

  Tina brings two Asian Wraps over to meet Rik. They introduce themselves as Bangkok and Vietnam. When Rik wanders off with them, I turn to her:

  —You could at least have let him have the real ones.

  —They’re already taken and, anyway, you said they were all real. Remember?

  She’s right. There’s no difference between a real Crown Jewel and a fake one. What matters is that you believe there is a difference, and Rik, like all men, is a believer. I’ll tell him one day he got the fakes and his memory will turn sour. But for now I’ll leave him alone in his fantasy because what he believes he’s doing matters so much more than what he’s actually doing.

  As the night goes on I get my cock sucked a few times by some Eastern European Wraps who always seems to put more effort in than English Wraps. The Boss said to me once:

  —No points for effort, only results.

  I think he got that one wrong. When I have some Bulgarian Wrap eating my cock like her life depends on it, effort is priceless. We had rules at The Club. The Wraps had to work at least every other weekend. Unless there were exceptional circumstances. Here’s an exceptional circumstance:

  I was in The Club at about four in the morning when this Croatian Wrap was arguing with George. It ended with her saying:

  —Look, I’m not working again this week or next weekend. That’s the way it is. You see the people who pick me up, you don’t want to mess with them. So I am telling you I’m not working and I suggest you agree with me.

  He did, and she waved at him from the blacked-out S-Class that picked her up twenty minutes later.

  If you take your clothes off for a living, effort and hardship go hand-in-hand. You can’t expect a Wrap from Romford whose ambition in life is to graduate to a sky-blue G-string and a bigger mojito, to put in the same effort as a Wrap who arrives at the club from a war zone. Einstein called it relativity. I call it common sense.

  As the night goes on, the bankers are cashing in their investment. At ten grand a shot, including membership, this is costing them one sub-prime repossession each, and they always want value for money. I catch a glimpse of Trevor in a corner with a Wrap on each arm. He’s in his late-fifties, maybe sixty, proud of his own hair and greedy with one of those leering faces that looks up at you and saps your energy like a sponge. I wonder how the fuck he made it to the board of one of the big banks. Perhaps he drained the life out of the competition. I smile. He smiles back. Somewhere he’s got a wife waiting for him who thinks he’s meeting international clients. I wonder what it would be like if men like him were honest:

  —Hi, darling, I’m home. Just fucked two girls and I’m much more hopeful about us than I was before I had my cock sucked.

  If only, for one brief moment, married men could be honest without having to face the consequences. I never understood why women value honesty in men when, if we spit out the truth for a nano-second, we’re cast aside like the plague. Perhaps we’re better at statistics than women, which is why we have a good grasp of this issue. Here’s some Very Sad Numbers:

  • Married men get fucked 68.5 times a year by their wives

  • 20% of married men get fucked less than ten times a year (A YEAR!!!) by their wives

  • 50% of married women have little or no interest in sex

  This is the reason why Good Men have Big Secrets and those secrets are made at a party like this. All that has to happen to make it right is for men to be honest, women to get a grip on the Very Sad Numbers, and do something about it. Except women are doing something about it. Here’s some Very Happy Numbers:

  • 80% of married British women have had at least one affair

  • 64% of American women have had at least o
ne affair

  So Good Men go out, get fucked, go home and live another lie while their wives are out shagging men like me. The issue for married women is never sex. It’s husbands. Get rid of them and the sex comes rolling back like a tsunami. I know because I drown in it. And the real difference between the sexes? Women are just more subtle hypocrites.

  Someone grabs me from behind. When I turn to deck him, I see it’s Rik and manage to stop myself an inch from his face.

  —Fucking hell, Rik, I could have killed you.

  —You kill me. What about the Crown fucking Jewels girls? You told me they were real and mine are made by Gerald fucking Ratner!

  —Not exactly fakes, Rik . . .

  —Not exactly fakes?! Bangkok is a waitress from a fast food restaurant who’s here in the hope of finding a cock with a wallet big enough to pay her college fees because there’s too many chicken drumsticks to the pound, and Vietnam says she’d like to be a model one day, perhaps when she’s a bit older. What the fuck is she waiting for? Asian Grannies?

  I like the sound of that, but do my best to disguise it.

  —OK, Rik, but did you have a good time?

  —I was having a good time until I found out the truth. I know this is a Secret fucking Society but not telling me who the real Crown Jewels are is one secret too many.

  I call Tina over. She can barely walk and has white powder on her cheeks. I start explaining the situation and give up when she falls over. I grab Rik by the arm and pull him after me. We go through room after room of people fucking, drinking, snorting, and in about the fourth bedroom we go into I see Romania taking a line. She’s a monument to endurance. She’s been stuffing gear up her nose all day and still looks fresh enough to keep a bloke attached to his right hand long enough for his cock and hand to fuse together.

  —Rik, this is Romania. Romania, this is Rik.

  He puts his hand on her waist and leans into her so she can hear him above the music.

  —Are you real?

  —Excuse me?

  —Are you a real Beauty Queen?

  She pulls away from him, scrolls through her iPhone and shows him a picture. He smiles. As I walk out of the room, I feel a shooting pain in my arm. At first I think I’m going to have a heart attack. It’s long overdue, so it might as well happen here. I keep walking, expecting to drop at any moment, when the pain passes and I am left with a familiar feeling of Nothing. Fuck all. It washes over me like a tsunami.

  I used to dream of running parties with Crown Jewels and having my own name up in lights:

  Lincoln Townley: The Great Impresario.

  Lincoln Townley: The Best Gentlemen’s Parties in the World.

  Lincoln Townley: The Sexiest Shows in Town.

  But dream and reality rarely meet. Naked Wraps, champagne, cocaine, a sea of writhing, falling, shooting bodies, and I couldn’t give a fuck. I might as well be wandering through a desert.

  The next day I get a call from Nick, who takes so much coke I never understand how he manages to get to the stock market never mind trade in it.

  —That was amazing, Lincoln. When’s the next one?

  —Two weeks. On a boat.

  —Great. But don’t go taking on any more members. Secrets are best shared between as few people as possible.

  —Yeah, right.

  I think:

  —Is he really that fucking stupid?

  He’s just paid more than he ever should for a party with Wraps he could get any night of the week but, because I put ‘Secret’ in the title, he thinks it’s something special. OK, the Crown Jewels were a bit special, but there were only three of them and he probably never got near any of them.

  I go online and look at my bank account. It seems to have money in it so I assume I have accidentally hacked someone else’s account. I look at the screen and it definitely has my name on the top. I wonder where all the money has come from. After expenses, I appear to have over thirty grand. That’s what one single, grubby little word can do. Put ‘secret’ before whatever it is you’re doing and you’ve put a zero on the price. These guys can get whatever they want whenever they want it. Booze. Gear. Wraps. More than they can ever take. But there’s one thing they can never get enough of and that’s the fact that they get things other men can’t. I think it might be a good idea to close the membership book, charge more and offer less for the next party. I call it cheating. They call it status.

  The Secret Society looks like it has a future. Then it all goes to shit. Here’s what happens:

  • The second party, I call it Secrets on the Thames, is going well until some cunt lets off a flare and the skipper takes the boat back to harbour.

  • The next day I get over fifty calls giving me a hard time. I say:

  —It wasn’t me who let off the flare.

  They say:

  —But you’re the founder of the Society and we want a refund or a free party.

  I feel like telling them there is no fucking Society. It’s something I dreamed up when I took too many drugs and lost my job and it’s the only way I could pay my bills. It’s not fucking real. Then they’ll say:

  —Well, it feels real to us. The women are real. The booze is real. The gear is real. And we are Members and you can’t be a Member of Nothing. Especially if you’ve paid for it.

  • I look at my bank account and this time I know it’s mine because it’s fucking empty.

  • Somehow I manage to get it together to stage the third and what turns out to be final Secret Society Party, The Mad Masquerade. I don’t quite have the funds to hire a country house, so we make do with an empty warehouse. There are a few complaints but I tell them it’s never been used for a private party before and it’s only because the Society is so exclusive that the owner was proud to let me have it. Amazingly, the Members believe me. The truth is, it’s used for sex shows, but they’re off air for one night and I promised Tim, who owns it, a Crown Jewel if he let me have it and we split the bar. All good except I don’t have any Crown Jewels coming to this one. I decide to worry about that later.

  • The party goes well but the Members are getting restless. These are some of the questions I am asked:

  —Can we have a Membership card? I know it’s all secret but a card would be nice.

  —The parties are great, Lincoln, but when are we doing to take them to the next level. You know what it’s like; we’ve done this, three times, so what’s next?

  —Have you thought about giving Members additional ]benefits? Perhaps a concierge service or a party in Monaco?

  Of course I haven’t thought about it. I haven’t thought about anything except how I’m going to get enough cash for next bottle of Rioja, the twenty shots a day I need to survive, and the Mount Everest of Cocaine I need to get me through the day.

  I realise I’m a bit stuck. I have no money, and the chances of Members getting another party are more likely if Elvis was organising it. So I close the Society down. I email every Member and tell them the bad news while being careful to remind them of the Third Principle of the Society that ‘all payments are made at Members’ risk’. Most of the Members seem to accept it. They’ve had three great parties but, much more than that, they’ve had three great parties other men couldn’t get access to. One or two complain but they soon disappear when I suggest that perhaps they overstretched themselves when they became Members, and that if they can’t see the value in having unrestricted access to London’s most beautiful women, then in future they should stick to weddings and bar mitzvahs.

  When the last Members are off my back, Esurio asks me:

  —So what have you learned, Lincoln?

  —That I don’t want to do parties anymore.

  —And . . .

  —I’m a great salesman. The best.

  —And . . .

  —I’m lost.

  —Anything else?

  —I don’t really want to do anything. Fuck all.

  Losing My Mind

  The Week After the Last Se
cret Society Party

  Since the last Secret Society party I have been wondering if it’s possible to crack up and not know it. Or to crack up and know it only after it’s happened. Like a delayed reaction. With me it happened in four stages:

  The First Stage

  When I told Esurio I didn’t want to do anything, I didn’t think I meant it. I just said it. The truth was I still felt there must be something out there I want to do. It was a matter of finding it. Even if it was fishing or stamp collecting. There had to be something. I think it was the Geek with Glasses who said that if there is something meaningful to find, you will find it when you need it most.

  He was wrong. There was nothing. Absolutely fuck all.

  I decided to lose myself in a good book and got as far as staring blankly at the fiction shelves in Waterstones on Piccadilly before walking out empty-handed. The next day I took a trip over to the Tate Modern to see the Gauguin exhibition. After sitting before a naked woman and a South Sea island for half an hour, I moved only when one of the curators woke me up with a gentle tap on the shoulder. The single useful purpose the painting served was to remind me I was in a gallery where it is not appropriate to punch him in the face for touching me.

  Even when I’m running or working out in the gym, my mind is empty. One foot goes out before the other and I lift weights as heavy and pointless as they have ever been. Without any enthusiasm. I try banging the best-looking Wraps I can find and they muster a hard-on and a thimble of semen but, when I am at it, all I think of is tiling my Mum’s kitchen floor or standing by dark pools of water counting the ripples. My last hope is the booze and the gear. Night after night I get to the ‘red zone’ as fast as I can and wait for the euphoria, the ecstasy of drunken anticipation, to wash over me and carry me from one Technicolor adventure to the next. Nothing happens. Worse than nothing. I realise getting hammered has become a habit as dull and relentless as a grey, February sky. I begin to panic so, one night, I say to Maynard: