The final chapter in the strange tale of the Dutchman, my three-day-a-week roommate in the pharmaceutical testing clinic, ends not with a whimper but a bang! He’s gone, left to stalk the streets of London town with a bulging erection and no shirt, throwing himself out of dark alleys and into the backs of limousines carting around anyone who can afford his services… Yes, he’s been removed from participation in this clinical trial as a result of a weekend appearance on a Virgin-1 television program called sex maniac and proud. 

It seems several of the nurses overseeing the study caught the episode while flipping through the channels, did the Google, and learned of his double-life. Within hours, he was dumped, and I will never see him again.

Which sounds sad, except when he came in today for his final follow-up visit, he revealed to the group that he was being released with full pay, despite skipping out on the final two weeks of the study. Which is fucked up and frustrating for me and the others, the prodigal sons of this trial, who never ran off and had sex with strangers for money and then talked about it on television, and so must continue to ingest experimental pharmaceuticals in order to receive full payment. It hardly sounds fair, when you think about it in that context.

Meanwhile, the question of why is a successful male prostitute participating in a drug trial for money has been the subject of much speculation over the past several hours. The competing theories are that either the competition is so stiff (pun intended, sure) in his field that it is difficult to get steady work, or that he participated in the study in order to receive five weeks worth of blood tests and medical monitoring, useful if you’re having sex with the sort of people who either pay for it or accept payment to do it on camera… And so either way, I suppose, it makes a bit of sense for him to be in here, though if it’s the latter, he’ll need to find some private practice in the future, as he’s been ruled no longer eligible to participate in future studies.

When you think about it, that’s a little bit fucked up. There’s nothing in the paperwork about being a prostitute or the star of pornographic films, or even a single-serving television personality related to those things, and excluding him on that basis seems a matter of taste. Maybe that’s why they paid him the full amount of money to run. It’s a question that deserves a better answer.

In the meantime, I’ve decided that I feel bad for the guy, and have thus decided that, as a conciliatory gesture, I’ll write the damn Wikipedia entry he was so desperate to see posted. Fly free, beautiful butterfly. You are but a candle in the wind now, and I wish you the best.