The Hunger Read Free Page B

strippers, Soho. A stage fit for us to stand on.
    Esurio has always been a clever cunt. Smarter than me. More agile. He often says:
    —You’re different from the rest, Lincoln. More extreme and more malleable. Two of the qualities I most appreciate in a man.
    Despite the good times and the praise, I often wish we had never met. These are the things I hate most about him:
    •  He is so fucking arrogant
    •  He thinks he knows me better than I do
    •  He tells me he always knows what’s good for me
    •  He thinks he’s always right
    •  He gets inside my head and fucks with my mind
    •  He takes me for granted
    •  He speaks with a posh accent and says his father was a baronet
    •  He repeats himself in the same sentence like when he says: Feed me, Lincoln, feed me
    •  He is so fucking demanding and nothing I do ever satisfies him
    •  He knows I am in awe of him
    •  I hate him because he is stronger than me and he has a temper like a fucking tornado. One night, I didn’t want to go out with him. I was sitting in the
     lounge watching Carol Vorderman on daytime TV. I wanted a day without a drink. Just a fucking day. He hated it. Started shouting at me. I said:
    —Fuck off and leave me alone.
    —Well, if that’s what you want, Lincoln, I will fuck off. I’ll go off into the hall and all the while you’re watching TV I’ll be lifting those weights of yours and
doing press-ups, getting even stronger, Lincoln, even stronger, and I’ll be so strong I’ll be able to lift you like a feather and carry you wherever I want.
    Two hours later I was in the Townhouse on Dean Street getting hammered.
    •  I hate his name. Esurio. So fucking pompous. I never understood why someone who sounds so English should have a Spanish name. I asked him:
    —Are you Spanish?
    —Latin, Lincoln, Latin.
    —That’s what I mean, Spanish.
    —No, not that Latin. I’m referring to the ancient Italic language. The language of gods and emperors.
    —What the fuck are you talking about?
    —Esurio, Lincoln, is a Latin word.
    —Oh yeah, what’s it mean, then? He stopped for a moment, raised his glass and smiled:
    —Hunger, Lincoln, it means hunger.

Wraps
    September 2009
    —This is the place for us, Lincoln. Look at this . . . and this!
    Esurio is beside himself with excitement. Soho has one language and that is the language of desire. It promises and teases. This is the land of make-believe where whatever you want you can have;
where all you have to do is reach out and take it. Most people float in and out of Soho. They come looking for a fantasy and whether they find it or not, they leave. There are others who
think
they can float in and out but the breeze that blows them in is too weak to carry them out. These are the real victims of Soho. They come in search of freedom and find themselves
trapped in a square mile of Chaos. I divide them into two groups:
    Lost Men
    These are middle-aged men. Some as young as thirty, most over fifty. Perhaps they have skirted around the edges of the film or television industry and now that they have
surrendered their youth, their homes and their ambition to their ex-wives, they come looking to reverse time. They are happily looking forward to puberty and the joys of having a cock hard enough
to use.
    Hopeful Girls
    Most of these are young models balancing their Louis Vuitton handbags on wobbly stilettos, who came to chase dreams and found a nightmare of coke and cock from which they will
never escape. Others come from as far as São Paulo or St Petersburg to work in ‘a great English city’ and support their families back home. They, too, find a nightmare of coke
and cock.
    Soho connects these Lost Men and Hopeful Girls. It bundles them together in a stuffy little bag, and every day that passes the string around the top of the bag pulls a little tighter until the
light and the air have gone and all that’s left is the slow suffocation of hope.
    Then there are