Trophy Boyfriend for Rent: Enquire Within

Graphic design is what I do best, and for a while, around the turn of the century, the world seemed to agree. In 2000, I got five design jobs. Every time I’d get bored at one of them — and I get bored very easily — I’d extend my hand and someone would put a better-paying job in it. In 2009, I worked in Manhattan, at a rate that would’ve enriched me by over $100K for the year if I hadn’t become bored and careless and sent away. But I didn’t get the lo-paying production artist job in Kingston-on-Thames for which I interviewed last week. I suspect the woman doing the hiring thought it might be more prudent to hire someone not yet with one foot in the grave. Since I first began bemoaning my accelerating decrepitude here maybe five years ago, you see, I've become neither lovelier nor fresher-faced.

I have realised that I’m highly unlikely to get any more 9-to-5 jobs in this lifetime, and that the way forward might be not as a writer or graphic designer, but as a trophy boyfriend for women of a certain age, though I will confess to believing that not a single one of us isn’t of a certain age, be it 14, 39, 54, or what have you. 

Though less fresh-faced than when I was was full of the joy of life and collagen, I still make a very nice appearance in dimly illuminated bistros, where I will meet clients for the first time. Away from harsh lighting, I believe the multiple creases in my punim suggest great worldliness or even gravitas. And my physique is a thing of wonder for a man my age, thanks to the fact that I spend six hours per days at the gym, and then do my farm chores. Though I lack men’s-“health”-magazine abs, few women have failed to describe my biceps, triceps, pecs, lats, quads, and what have you as “to die for”, though in many cases I’d have preferred that they’d have lived for them. I am able to see my feet when I look down. 

As you have just seen, my sparkling sense of humour is very much intact. Back when I customarily squired Playboy and Penthouse models to rock galas in Hollywood, several told me it wasn’t my irresistible Semitic good looks that had made them scrawl their phone numbers on matchbook covers and slip them to me as I swaggered back to my table from the men’s room of chic eateries, but my palpable puckishness. I see the humour in almost everything — sometimes, admittedly, to the horror of those around me — and regularly come up with such delightful coinages as God never closes a door without first locking the windows from the outside or To each his onus, both of which are trademarked, so don't try to pass them off as your own. When the woman with whom I am dining gets up to use the lavatory or to flirt with the sommelier, who in most cases turns out to be as gay as charming, I reflexively stand. I know which fork to use, and chew with my mouth closed. I abhor textspeak and cigarette smoke.

I am able to converse engagingly on a broad variety of topics, ranging from Premier League football to architecture to foreign travel to current affairs. The many, many hours I have spent watching Chopped! in the USA and Master Chef in the UK have not been in vain. My cooking has been known to bring tears of joy to women’s eyes. I wear my clothes. They don't not wear me. This is an important distinction. I have a way of making anything I put on appear very stylish. It's just something I've always had, a je ne sais quoi. I am also able to drop foreign phrases into my speech without apparent effort. The trick — to make it appear easy — is one I mastered early in adolescence. I have always felt great ease around women. 

Families adore me. I can't count the numbers of times the parents, and more recently, children of the women in my life have taken me aside a week or two after my and their daughter's or mum's relationship began to confide, commonly with tears in their eyes, "I can't tell you how happy I am that [Mom, or Name of Daughter] found you!" The father of my first wife regarded me as the son he'd never had. We went on fishing and hunting trips together, and repaired small appliances in his little man-cave.

I am an enormously gifted musician and singer. One of my former lovers believed that, as Mel Tormé was called The Velvet Fog, I, with a comparably creamy baritone, might be thought of as The Velvet Mist. I have learned not to perform The Walker Bros.’ "The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore" at karaoke anymore, as it invariably makes the women present wish they weren’t married, and their husbands or boyfriends want to poke me in the eye. Few appreciate how high a high price one must pay for having a voice as gorgeous as mine. 

And now, at last, the money shot. Erotically, I have ample reason to believe that I am pretty nearly incomparable — intuitive, creative, and inexhaustible. If I had a dollar, or in my new country, a pound, for every time a Playboy or Penthouse model post-coitally informed me that they’d never imagined how wonderful lovemaking could be until they’d met me, I wouldn’t have had to interview for the demeaning, ill-paying production artist, uh, position in Kingston-on-Thames. One of my over-2000 lovers told me that I made her one huge G-spot. It's just something I've always been able to do.

Like some of the many, many psychotherapists by whom I have been treated over the years, I use a sliding scale, and never say no to one in need, though I will confess that it’s rather easier to say yes when she in need (I recognise bisexuality as natural, but haven't tried it yet) looks like the late Chrissy Amphett. My rate as of Valentines Day 2018 is £65/hour for outcall, plus the cost of an Uber both going and coming home, and £45/hour in my spacious riverside home, bring your own towels. I look forward to hearing from  you, and to relieving as much of your loneliness and erotic frustration as your budget and my busy schedule will permit.