A simple act of procuring groceries from the local supermarket is no longer a safe process, now that we’re living on Oxford Street – not a locale commonly associated with the championing of traditional family values.
Around here, it’s more about Glamour Homelessness melded with Nightclub Fever. Oh, and the occasional Dramatic Murder. Which naturally ensures a far more interesting walk to the local shop than normal.
One difference which has become quite obvious is how happy strangers are to talk to each other. Granted, it’s more often a request for money than not, but forwardness never hurt anyone.
Although I’m beginning to grow suspicious of some of the “homeless” folk around here. One grubby-looking vagrant recently followed me up the road, bellowing at me about how much he needed money for his ‘hard drugs’.
Which got me to thinking that a true addict wouldn’t label their skunk, smack or horse with the petite and clinical summation of ‘hard drugs’. As I spun around and glared questioningly at him, he seemed to sense my penetration of his facade and backed away worriedly. Genuine drug-addled local or well-rehearsed theatrical transformation? I’m still not completely sure.
Even more troublesome is the confusing trendy minimalist store interiors of Oxford Street, usually so dark and dim, you can’t tell a record store from a sex club.
No, really. It’s a mistake anyone could have made.
Purchasing music of my favoured heavier genres (artists utilising actual, material instruments? What ho!) has also proved an interesting exercise. Such genres which most record stores would happily devote racks to, are quietly tucked away at the back of trendy Oxford Street record stores like a dirty secret.
Even worse is when I accidentally stumble upon a dance artist of some kind or another that I actually quite like – for instance, FischerSpooner. I’m happy to donate any amount of money to a group which has managed to drag 1982 cringe-synth into the new millenniums, and scored a million dollar contract for the privilege.
Here I was thinking that asking an Oxford Street record store employee for a copy of the FischerSpooner album would be a simple exercise. But no! It turns out that I have “fuckin’ excellent taste in music, man, really fuckin’ cutting edge, this is the shit at the clubs, man, in London, man”. His eyes began glazing over as he looked at me, and as with most normal and every day exercises on Oxford Street, he managed to turn it into an abomination one step away from sexual intercourse.
But maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on my gay kindred around here. The straight couples daring to venture out this way are often far scarier, clinging desperately onto the last strands of their youth and not realising that bisexuality (or faux-bisexuality) is currently on a downward swing in terms of fads. Or maybe they’re just so drunk, they’re under the misguided belief that Oxford Street is a daggy bohemian end of Kings Cross they’ve never encountered before.
Just last week, as I was crossing the road, two obviously intoxicated forty-somethings stumbled up and put their arms around me.
‘How was ya day!’ the man yelled above the music of the sex club/music store (still not sure) blaring behind us.
‘Pretty good,’ I nodded back at him, shifting my gaze over the road. ‘I was working’.
The woman on my other side desperately grabbed on to my arm, and screeched ‘Did ya get ya cock sucked?’, She then wobbled dangerously, and pincered herself onto my left arm painfully, both to maintain balance and accentuate the immediacy of which she needed to hear a response to her query.
‘No,’ I honestly replied.
‘I should hope so,’ she bellowed. ‘Otherwise I’d be working where you were!’ She then cackled loudly.
It was at this point that the record store behind us switched to a soundtrack of hard-core minimalist trance, which the couple mistook for the pedestrian crossing signal and began boldly crossing the road in their own interpretation (or remix, if you will) of traffic law.
‘Shit!’ I cried. ‘Come back!’ All I could do was flap my arms like a madman. Even worse was the fact that I’d attracted the attention of a number of men prancing around in the record store/sex club due to my public utterance of the word ‘come’. However, the fact that I’d refrained from the conventional Oxford Street method of using of a suggestive indirect reference to a phallus seemed to confuse them somewhat, so they maintained a little distance, still unsure.
So I walked home, and nodded hello to the homeless stripper who hangs around the restaurant on the corner, and bought my milk and bread from the man with nine facial piercing who runs the local convenience store. And I think about the fact that I’m a gay bogan who still has a disturbing penchant for Metallica, and that I live with someone who thinks he’s a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Patsie from Absolutely Fabulous, and I begin to think that perhaps we do belong in this suburb after all.