Dusk arrives in Rotterdam. The tangerine sky is full of sweet promises. Bite into its peachy palette, the juices of the evening running down your chin. Elfie Tromp is your guide. Re-encountering the setting of a sexual scene, backstage behind the curtain, in a tiny little bathroom or on a butcher’s table at the notorious West Kruiskade.
There are currently five entertainment companies that offer a Sex and the City tour in Rotterdam. After you and your friends have roamed these streets, the city will never be the same again, boasts one of the websites.
‘We saw the real mister BIG,’ reviews Annick and leaves four out of five stars.
There’s an actor. A Bob or a Jeremy or a Fred. Let’s call him Fred. He has dreams, high hopes. To one day be the new something. They ask Fred to wear a simple black pair of pants (not denim) and a white shirt. Please, Fred, unbutton the shirt a little to show that chest hair of yours, budding like sprouts in spring. Keep the shivers in when it’s chilly out, Fred. Male nipples aren’t useless: that’s a misunderstanding. Make them pop. Do not cut your hair Fred, we like it this way. You’re not just a body; you’re a surface, promising depth. Play with textures. Combine rough and smooth, Fred. Keep your head still and your eyes level. Make us plunge. It’s a fair-paying job.
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1
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– Backstage, behind the curtain. In the front row seats.
Fred is hired to act like another actor playing a player. It’s a babuschka style seduction and he keeps hearing that Kate Bush song in his head when he prepares for it. BABUSCHKA YA YA. If a spider had a voice, it’d be singing Kate Bush. Frantic, luring eight legs and sixteen eyes. But how many ears do spiders have? Do spiders have ears? Can they hear themselves sing?
‘The assignments were a bit too cheeky, but overall we had a good time.’ Bregje gives three stars.
‘We Flander girls set the city on fire,’ states Veerle.
As an actor, you need prompts. You make the scene come alive by highlighting details. Fred has a great instinct for that. He can cup his hands to make them look like pillows to rest your face on, or like empty lakes, ready for you to pour your heart in. Whichever you desire, Fred will move his hands for you.
Bodies are the tools of expression. Move an arm and make space. Bend yourself out of social confinement. Desire is growth, to expand yourself until bursting. All this tangled feeling cocoons your innards. Like a spider’s prey. Or a pupa; a chrysalis, transforming.
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2
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– The Euromast tower (normcore fantasy).
– The pancake restaurant at the foot of the tower, underneath a family table. Dripping bodily fluids on pancakes, feed them to each other.
Fred practises his walk around town, the poise of his back: strong, but not rigid. He wants the muscle power of the meatpacking district. Big stallion men hoisting tender slabs twice their size. Hooks and cleavers. The smell of chilled blood.
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3
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– On a butcher’s tabletop. Specifically: spread out at Schell, pounded like a little schnitzel, underneath the slogan ‘meat the world’ scrawled in a rainbow bend on the white-tiled wall.
Fred tries a sly smile – a smear of sweet spread. Sticky, Fred thinks. I’m rich and sticky. This is how sticky talks and he tries a few words, but they ask him to stay quiet. Please, we’re looking for the strong silent type. Fred’s voice is cute in its own way, something that sounds like a respectable childhood and a diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables, but not now please, Fred, less you, more BIG.
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4
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– The tiny bathroom in the Performance Bar. Tequila burns the back of your throat. Reading something scrawled on the door while bumping your head against it in a thrusting rhythm. A line forming outside while you moan.
A city is an obstacle course of pleasure. Climb the alluring textures of the buildings. This is what you owe your body. You owe it excitement. You owe it experience. You owe it pleasure. Be daring.
Fred walks the streets and pretends to be Mr BIG. He wonders if his footsteps sound right. He pounds his feet a little harder on the pavement. He is a beaver of lust, sending out his message to all things living and breathing: I am here, I’m coming. I’m coming here to come. He passes the restaurants, the cheap and the luxurious, checks his reflection in the glass, lifts his head a little more and spots the women he’s here for.
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5
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– Behind Alfredo’s Taqueria, against the brick wall, leaning on the trash bin. That ripe smell of raw onion peels and leftovers on the brink of runny rot that seeps deep down inside of you even when you take shallow breaths.
Fred has a balcony and some tomato plants growing at home. He winds them across a white wire and lets them grow into a nostalgic gardening picture. Fred is sexy in his own right. He did have sex on his balcony. A couple of times, actually. None of his neighbours ever complained or let on that they saw it, something that annoys him as much as it revs him up. Naughty
Fred.
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6
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– At home.
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7
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– In the middle of the park, preferably at night. Or during the early morning as the sun rises, dewy knees digging in the grass, warming your backs against the frosty sky.
He crosses the park between his house and the city centre and greets the spider statue by Louise Bourgeois, frozen in her walk across the backyard of the museum. He once read the spider is a metaphor for the artist’s mother, the looming danger of a parent. Fred is still single. And his mum is really nice. He wonders where its spider web is. Judging from her size, it’d be stretching the whole city. Maybe it’s spun in lines so fine we can’t see them. Lines so stretchy, we don’t even know we’re already tangled prey.
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8
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– In Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror room. Staring, glaring, fucking multi-ways, infinitely. Fucking so hard, the lights become stripes, become blinding, coming blindly.
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9
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– A playground. The swing set, of course.
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10
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– Practically everywhere in the zoo. Spread out over a day. Receiving oral at the rhinos. Fingerblasting in the bat cave. Save the climax for the toucans.
Fred arrives at the place and does his thing, which is so little really. Muscle roll, hair flick. Other people’s eyes have to do the work. Fred just has to be comfortable being looked at. But he can do that. He likes being watched. The women’s eyes grow bigger, their bodies respond by drifting closer together like ducklings. There’s safety in groups. Fred circles and submerges. Fred is deep, dark water. Fred is an actor getting paid.
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11
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING
– Going down on someone waiting to order drinks in a bar.
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12
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– In a multi-storey car park on a Friday night, when the shops are open late and you’re fucking in a damp, shadowy, concrete corner, crouched behind your car. Listening for the tired footsteps of families – oversized shopping bags that knock against their legs as they walk.
The night passes and Fred is free. He can go home, but he likes the women and they keep buying him drinks. Mr BIG is seeping out. Fred is popping up. There are no spiders here, no beavers or deep water, there’s just him in his black pants walking along the former quay, turned into high-rise apartments. They call it Manhattan on the Meuse.
A facade. High hopes Fred is a swindler in a swindling town. Tripping, tipsy falling onto a bed of stone, trailing the age-old water downstream. The night is lifting into a pale shade of grey, and two women in the group are feeling him up.
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13
POSSIBLE SEX SCENE SETTING:
– Under the bridge, waving to passing ships. The smell of freshwater and the urine of the homeless. Empty bags of crisps tremble and tumble in the wind, surrounding you.
– On the bridge, waving to honking cars. People wanting to be you. People being outraged by you.
Fred kisses the woman on the right. Then he kisses the woman on the left. It’s great being an actor. There’s so much love in being wanted.