I was initially reluc- tant to tell my story, but the need to report what hap- pened to me - and the fact that The Cheese Grater will let me use the word ‘cunt’ (see?) - made the urge ir- resistible. This is an exposé of the seedy underworld of voyeurism and shit-wank- ing in and around UCL.
Defecation and mas- turbation seem at first to be uneasy bedfellows - like piz- za and ice cream, or shoot- ing heroin and playing with your baby brother. Everyone loves them on their own but combine the two and sud- denly you’re mental. Despite this, ‘defebation’ (mastica- tion already being a thing) is alive and well at UCL.
It was a crisp May evening when I waltzed into the South Junction male toilets. As I entered, exceptional character at the urinal shot me a glance and moved into the cubicle next to me. The experience got weirder when the anticipat- ed shitting noises from next door didn’t come, but were replaced by a slapping noise.
‘He can’t be masturbating in public... This doesn’t happen in real life,’ I thought. More likely he was tapping along to some irre- sistible tune on his iPod; a tune seemingly accelerating and approaching a crescen- do. His iPod must have died since this percussion ended abruptly and was followed by an apparent gasp of shock and a moan of frustration.
In view of the preced- ing paragraphs, it's quite obvious that this man turned out to be beating himself over my bodily func- tion, but at the time I was convinced that this sort of thing only happened in Lou- is Theroux documentaries (and perhaps Austria). Look- ing up, I noticed our antago- nist peering over the top of the cubicle, using me as his muse, silhouetted against the lights like an angel. A per- verted, shit-wanking angel.
At this point I believed he was only a wanker in the sense that he was a massive dickhead (although realisti- cally all wankers are almost certainly wankers in the literal sense too). Finally, this rascal spoke: ‘Tll give you a blowjob, if you like.
'If you like..’, so I could take comfort in the fact that I wasn’t about to be orally raped. I declined this admittedly polite offer. No..." I responded, unable to suppress my instinctive private school politeness, ‘thank you'. This rejec- tion didn’t seem to deter him though, and my sub- sequent enquiry, “What the fuck do you think you're doing?” was met only with the response, ‘I can see your cock.” Only when I tried to take his photo did he retreat.
Having explained the situation to UCL security, I learnt that this was not an isolated incident. Security did what they could but the culprit had vanished into the night like some kind of sexual deviant Batman.
My peers’ responses varied. ‘You turned down a free blowjob!?’ one asked. ‘If you don’t write this up in The Cheese Grater, I will. And I'll say he fucked you,’ was the response of another friend. Someone else profoundly questioned me: ‘So did you go back in and fin- ish off your shit afterwards?’
Months passed until Wanky-Toilet-Man was but a memory, an urban-legend and, for the doubters, a myth. July. Complacently re- entering the same toilets, I still took the precaution of using the end cubicle, as I habitually did after what I've come to call Round One, en- suring that I only had to de- fend against one side. Sure enough, someone entered the cubicle next to me with- in seconds. Had he taken a fraction longer it would have been too late for me to abort and get out of there. It was then I noticed a small hole beneath the toi- let roll dispenser. I looked in and saw what was either a camera lens or human eye staring straight back at me. What to do? After all, this person may have been just looking through the hole in the same way that I'was. May- be he thought I was tugging myself dry over him. Maybe he was the innocent. Had 1 become my own nemesis?
These awkward few seconds ended when my opponent zipped up a bag - suggesting he was in fact carrying a camera - and fled. The only discernable difference between this fu- gitive and the original was the fact he wore glasses: a disguise rivalled only by Clark Kent’s in its shitness.
That evening I scoured the Internet in search of photos of my genitalia. 1 fortunately had no success, but did stumble upon www. cruisinggays.com. The no- toriously indiscreet website designates the South Junc- tion toilets (in particular the end cubicles, ironically) a four-star ‘cruising’ spot for voyeurism and public inter- course. In this modern age of league tables and univer- sity rankings, UCL can take pride in the fact that the ULU toilets received only a meagre three-star rating.
I've run out of funny synonyms for masturbation and am approaching my word limit, but let me end by saying that I like to view our second encounter as a victory. Even if my withered scro- tum is now on the Internet for all to use as a masturba- tory aid, this still essentially makes me a porn star albeit one who works unknow- ingly, for free and against his will. Still though, isn’t that basically living the dream?