The idea was for Jess to interview me on the train as we approached London, with lots of shots in between of me gazing out of the window looking sullen, optimistic, anxious, or whatever else I may have been feeling at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I mean she wasn’t literally calling out random emotions for me to act out like we were in drama class, but I pretty much knew the score by then.
“So how do you feel that meeting with Steve went?” she asked me, camera balanced precariously over her shoulder.
“Yeah I think the meeting with Steve went well,” I responded (full sentences Joey, full sentences!)
“How do you think he feels about you coming to London?”
“I mean… obviously Steve knows about my past history in London so I do think that’s something that’s gonna be playing on his mind, but… ultimately I’m here for business, y’know? I’ve never had the chance till now to do a professional photo shoot and I’m hoping it’s gonna be a really positive experience for me.”
“So, tell me what’s changed between the last time you visited London and this time?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see some of the fellow train passengers watching and listening in as Jess filmed me, much in the same way that the customers at the Mud Dock café had done earlier that day. But ‘fuck it’, I thought. I refused to be distracted and hold myself back as a result. I felt compelled to tell my truth, and if that meant 1 or 2 people thought badly about me then so be it.
“The last time I left London I was a mess,” I said, focusing my gaze intently on Jess to avoid stumbling over my words or meeting the stony glare of anyone listening in, “I got so caught up in the drugs side of it all and was just bed hopping from guy to guy, being promiscuous and having a lot of unsafe sex. I think it’s safe to say I’d lost all respect I ever had for myself…”
“And the second part of my question?” Jess asked. “What’s changed in you this time around, and how does it feel to be going back there?”
“I’m not gonna lie, it’s scary revisiting London after all I’ve been through, but… I feel like enough time has passed now and that I’m a stronger person than I was back then. I just have to focus on the photo shoot and resist the temptation to fall back into my old ways. There are too many people rooting for me, I can’t let them down.”
“And… perfect,” Jess said, putting the camera to one side. “It really is fantastic how honest you’ve been with us throughout all this.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I just wanna tell my story,” I said. “That’s all really…”
We were edging closer and closer to London and Jess and I would be stepping off the platform in a matter of minutes.
“Don’t you ever get bored?” I asked her, off the cuff.
“Of what?” She asked, curiously.
“You go through all the effort of taking all this footage, knowing full well that a great deal of it’s not gonna end up making the final cut. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“No, I love what I do,” she said.
“Like… I see firsthand the amount of effort both you and Mobeen put in. I know if I spent that long trying to get ‘the perfect shot’ I’d be pretty pissed off if no one ever saw it.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” she reiterated, “I get to travel to all sorts of places and meet all kinds of people. It is a hard job but… it’s rewarding, y’know?”
I suddenly wondered if I’d crossed a line and was now talking to ‘TV talent scout/DV director’ Jessica Reid, as opposed to the girl who had offered me bottled water and her scarf for comfort just an hour prior.
Maybe I was prying too much. Maybe she really did love her job as much as she let on. I guess I’ll never know. There was no time to think about it any longer either way – we were pulling into Paddington Station.
When we hopped off the train the first thing I did was seek out the toilets so I could have a much needed piss (for a 30p charge of course, nothing says ‘Welcome back to London’ like being charged to use the fucking toilet!), then headed outside to the smokers area for a cigarette. It was early December – frosty and dark outside, and as such, I found it especially hard to enjoy my fag. I was freezing cold and my hands were trembling with every drag of it. In case you haven’t sussed by now, I hate the winter…
Jess took a variety of shots of me leaving the station and we waited for a cab to reunite us with Mobeen.
Together once more, the three of us went for an evening meal in a posh Soho restaurant – again, paid for by the team. I even got treated to a Mojito cocktail (my all time favourite!) whilst we killed time until 10.30pm. That was when Fifty and Dean – a gay sex shop located just around the corner on Old Compton Street, would be closing its doors to the public and opening them to us. Obviously sex shops respect the privacy and right to anonymity of their customers, so that was the primary reason we had to wait.
I’m not sure if it was the cocktail that finished me off, the fact that it had been such a long day, or a combination of both – but I was well and truly knackered by the time we made it to Fifty and Dean. What made it worse was the fact that it was so damn hot inside, and I was still lugging around the same big old blue rucksack I’d been carrying round with me the entire day. I desperately wanted to put it to one side, but Mobeen insisted I keep it over one shoulder for ‘continuity’ purposes.
I browsed through some of the rails of fetish gear and made half-assed comments to the camera like…
“Ooh now this is pretty cool.”
And…
“This could work well in one of my cam shows!”
But I didn’t buy a single thing while we were there. It wasn’t that I didn’t like anything that was on sale there – far from it in fact! I just found it all royally overpriced, and to be frank, I wasn’t really in the mood for shopping. I had a brief, slightly forced chat with the guy at the counter who, it transpired, had seen me on Cam4 broadcasting before.
“You’re much shorter in real life,” he said, in his thick Irish accent.
Thanks mate…
I was completely shattered by the time I arrived at the Travel Lodge that Jessica had pre-booked for me to stay in. I didn’t arrive there till close to midnight (Mobeen having dropped me off), but instead of going straight to bed, I pottered around in the bathroom. I wanted to look as flawless as possible for the shoot with Matt Spike the following day, so I had a quick shave, tweezed my brows and applied another layer of self tanner to my face where I could see it was beginning to go patchy and fade.
Whilst I waited for the tan to develop, I sat on the kingside bed and had a quick flick through the TV channels, eventually settling on watching a re-run of the previous week’s episode of ‘The Apprentice’.
I thought it was funny that here I was, taking part in a BBC show myself, and viewing another in my down time. I watched it with a critical eye and couldn’t help but put myself in the contestant’s shoes. ‘Webcam Boys’ was in no way as big of a budget programme as something like ‘The Apprentice’ was – but still, I wondered how many retakes simple scenes like walking in and out of the boardroom would have taken, and paid closer attention to the edit than I normally would have.
I realised how easy it was to say one thing and mean another. And I wondered how I myself would be edited to appear when the show I’d signed up for went to air. I’d not met any of the other participants, so I genuinely had no idea who else had been cast, and what their background stories were.