Normie sexuality
About the double life of a lonely man, using nude models in his workshop empire.
Nederlandse vertaling hier
I was looking for a side job that paid well. I saw an advertisement from someone who was looking for nude models, whom he paid 200 euros for 2 hours. It concerned bachelor parties. After I had emailed him, he replied within a few minutes. He also added a photo of himself in the attachments. He presented sending that photo as a sign of willingness: ‘you send a photo of yourself, then I will also show you my own face.’ He seemed to want to come across as relaxed.
On our first appointment we went together to a company in Den Bosch, where I was allowed to keep all my clothes on. We were going to give a normal workshop there, for which he used his own, normal name: Mark. His other workshops, where nude models were involved, he sold under a pseudonym. ‘Clyde,’ he would be called then.
He picked me up behind the Central Station in Utrecht, at the kiss and ride opposite the NH hotel. He was somewhat older than in the photo he had sent, in which he still had blonde spikes on his head. Now he was almost completely bald, and the hair that he had was grey. His face was fleshy and a bit swollen.
He was actually supposed to interview me on the way to the company, by way of an application, but began to talk about himself without interruption. He was very proud of his workshop business, which in itself was a cynical invention. He said it cost him little effort, but that he earned a lot with corporate workshops, about 800 euros in an afternoon. ‘I earn more than I did as a consultant!’ he kept repeating and he kept doing calculations out loud, 800 times three, or six, times four… do the math… count your profit… it came down to about 10,000 euros per month.
It was busy on the road. I settled into the passenger seat. The car was full of food packaging and banana peels; between us there was a bag of wine gums, in the glove compartment there were marshmallows. He kept offering them to me, while he himself grabbed from the bag. Under his nails were black, dirty edges. He kept saying that he liked working with intelligent people, because he himself also had a very high IQ.
He said that he had done a PhD in ‘storage’: how you can arrange a warehouse in the most efficient way. From his research it had turned out that the smartest way to pack a suitcase was to just throw everything into it, because then you spent the least time and your things found their own way, causing them to fold into each other and fit by themselves. He had therefore also thrown the painting supplies for the workshop into two large suitcases, so that a whole pile of tubes, glitter and pencils rolled out of one of the suitcases.
It was very quiet in the company; the employees were sitting in a kind of gigantic hall with only a number of glass walls dividing the space. Many of them wore headphones while typing with hammering fingers, occasionally casting a glance to the side, as if they wanted to look suspiciously over their shoulder. At the edge of that hall a number of long white tables had been set up; that was where we had to give the workshop.
He had disposable aprons for the participants with him, and kept explaining to me that there was also size XXL, which I had to subtly pass to possible fat participants. He himself had a very fat belly, but seemed to have the illusion that he was slim, because when he talked about fat people, a meaningful, scornful expression appeared on his face, of pity for an inferior kind; the class of the ridiculous fatso. When the participants arrived, I saw a very strange, contented expression on his face, while he pressed the folded white plastic into the hands of a small, round little man, the only fatso present, with a meaningful gesture. ‘Here…’ he said, and the little man looked at him questioningly for a moment.
I shone in my role as instructor; I made the people laugh. They told me about the company. They had several factories where they bred insects, which might in the future be processed into human food, but were now only used for dog and cat food. They showed videos of the factories: people in special suits walking through all kinds of corridors and rooms of which the walls were completely filled with swarms of grasshoppers and worms and other dark brown, winged creatures. It was disgusting but fascinating.
In the parking garage Clyde asked what I wanted to have for my work that day. I turned dark red because I did not know how to compose myself. I wanted to get as much money from him as possible and would have seen it as a humiliation if I did not come away with an unreasonably large amount, but at the same time resist the game he was trying to play with me, in which I was a whore he had just had sex with, a game that visibly excited him and in which I did not want to participate, so as not to give him the wrong ideas.
I eventually asked him for three hundred euros, upon which he gave me three hundred and fifty, to also compensate the travel costs and because he liked to show his banknotes, which he slowly and clumsily, with trembling hands, counted out for me.
He had a studio in an old school building where many other workshop companies were also located. He kept his room somewhat shielded from the rest, because he did not like to advertise his nude models. Against the walls stood mediocre paintings he had made of naked women: greyish pink skin and flat shadows against a brown, meaningless background, static bodies without life. The studio was very dirty. On the table lay cheap snacks from Albert Heijn, an enormous quantity of store-brand chocolate balls, peanut clusters, cocktail nuts and cashew nuts. He had furnished the studio as he imagined the life of artists: run-down and impoverished, with stains of ink, paint, and caked dust everywhere.
In order to be able to offer me as a model on his site, he wanted to take photos of me. They could be anonymous photos; it was even actually better, to reinforce the somewhat shady character of his website. After all, he himself also lived a double life; it was all part of the experience; the website was a portal to another world, a dark mist from which the pale, somewhat cramped bodies of the models emerged.
