Car Crash

by Lech Blaine

  ‘You look like you saw a ghost.’

  The black Mercedes hit the finish line. I leapt from the back seat, but forgot to open Frida’s door.

  She joined me. ‘Sorry,’ I whispered, my elbow locking clumsily with hers.

  The red carpet was lined with faux paparazzi. Bystanders rubbernecked the glamour and humiliation: who looked the best, and who didn’t. I grinned as my body froze in the afterglow of camera flashes.

  Thankfully, we made it through to the lobby of the venue, Rumours, the site of my escapades as a thirteen-year-old pool champion. It was as if all the muscles had been sucked from my stomach, leaving nothing but a clutter of fighting spiders.

  ‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ I said.

  ‘We need to make our entrance,’ said Frida.

  ‘Do it without me.’

  In the last stall of the male toilets, I suffered a gut-wrenching panic attack. Tears streamed down heated cheeks and onto the pleats of my hired shirt.

  Keep your chin up, Dad would say, so I swallowed vodka from the hip flask. Then I blew my runny nose, splashed a red face with water, and made a comeback before the start of official proceedings.

  Rumours had been a nightclub for horny speed freaks in the 1980s and 1990s. Nowhere else in town was large enough to host formals, so the owner rebranded the fading facility as a crematorium for teenage dreams.

  I high-fived the jocks and made sober bystanders embarrassed about their reserve. My father and sister sat at the table with Frida. I flirted with all the dates except mine, terrified that her brown eyes would trigger a public panic attack.

  I wasn’t the only bachelor in the room suffering from performance anxiety. Bashful Catholic schoolboys with bulging Adam’s apples had wasted money on colognes, tuxedos and ambitious stockpiles of contraception, only to learn that they were still the same tongue-tied young men.

  Before my post-dinner toast, I mixed Smirnoff into a schooner of Coke. The son-of-a-gun public speaker didn’t address his best mate’s brain injury, or the newspaper story about criminal charges against Dom.

  ‘If anyone’s wondering why I can’t stop smiling,’ I said, ‘it’s because I was extremely nervous. So I pictured everyone in the audience naked! And then instead of frightened, I became extremely excited.’

  I did one last speech for guffaws among the students, and mutterings about my drunkenness at the teacher’s table. They decided against staging an intervention.

  After dessert, the graduates descended onto the floor for a first dance. I hijacked the microphone and implored the cover singer to play ‘Eagle Rock’, again dropping my trousers during the chorus. The graduates of 2009 hooted with amusement while shooting footage on their smartphones. I concluded with a war cry.

  we are we are we are who?

  St Mary’s St Mary’s: blue-white-blue

  B-R-O-T-H-E-R-S! BROTHERS!

  Who was I? Who was I? Who was I? I was a danger to myself and a stranger to those around me.

  During the last dance, Frida failed to materialise, and I learned that she’d gone home early, blaming a headache. Now I was lumbered with a familiar loneliness, and my hipflask was bone dry.

  I decided to leave too. My father and I shook hands. Outside, I slammed the door to Hannah’s car, and cried like a dying animal from the moment we exited the parking lot until the tyres hit the driveway in Glenvale.

  Grief was a daily exercise in failing to say the right things, then feeling those emotions only when everyone else had stopped paying attention – so not having anyone to show them to, or freaking people out when you did. I pushed away Hannah’s comforting fingertips.

  ‘Is this about Frida leaving?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I lied, because where else did I start?

  ‘There are plenty of other fish in the sea,’ she said.

  My sister was missing the point: none of the other girls would save me either. I was too young to discover that the great bastard of bereavement was life’s chief emotional experience.

  You can fall out of love, but not out of grief.

  Schoolies Week nearly killed me. For seven days at the end of November, 20,000 Queensland teenagers descended on a thin strip of the Gold Coast to consecrate the privilege of being young and free and rich enough to spend a small fortune on getting obliterated.

  Surfers Paradise – the capital of the glitter strip – boasted the highest density of strip clubs in the country. Ethics were suspended, and every vice permitted for the right price. You could truly purge the disobedience from your system before the new restraints of degrees and apprenticeships.

  I stayed with six mates at The Islander, a yellow-brick building with pink trimmings. Inside, the clashing themes of Hawaii and Nevada were mashed together. Downstairs was a neon-lit bar called Vegas in Paradise that offered an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet for ten dollars. In the gaming lounge, wrinkled retirees and tattooed tradies toasted with stubbies in the afterglow of pokie payouts; through the tinted windows, half-naked teenagers sunbaked around the swimming pool, skin dappled by the shade of fake palm fronds.

  The first day was a haze of premeditated anarchy. Big Red brought eight bottles of homebrew rum, which we nicknamed moonshine and mixed with ginger ale.

  ‘Jingle bells, jingle bells,’ we sang, ‘the Mary’s boys are here.’

  The Islander was warmly regarded by former Schoolies as the most lawless establishment. In the bedrooms, deodoriser veiled the smell of mould and cigarettes. The décor was straight from the crayon-colored eighties. The decay had been airbrushed from the photos online, but the deception was easily forgiven.

  After approximately ten standard drinks in the space of two hours, I started existing in the present tense, responding only to the breathing bodies within touching distance. I let Big Red shave my curls into a mullet.

  ‘Let’s go fucking mental!’ I yelled. ‘Let’s go fucking mental!’

  We gravitated to the balconies, open cages that scraped the sky and exposed occupants to the thrilling risk of fatal injury. Each November, they became exhibition spaces for casual sexism as young men exercised the privilege of possessing penises.

  ‘Tits out for the boys,’ we chanted.

  ‘Dicks out for the chicks,’ the girls replied.

  The well-endowed or mistakenly confident bared tits and dicks. We mimicked media footage of previous Schoolies. Girls in bikinis French-kissed. Oglers levelled smartphones towards scripted outbreaks of promiscuity. Weathered cameramen aimed lenses at breasts that would get pixellated for the six o’clock news.

  Drinking games incited adrenaline and kinship and eventually oblivion. One of my roommates shotgunned five UDLs in under three minutes. ‘Scull, motherfucker!’ we chanted, so he had no choice. The congregation he left behind was delirious, gasping at thin air, convinced we’d witnessed something historically significant.

  Half-dressed girls on the opposite end of our floor invited us to join them. I decided to take the scenic route, lifting my clumsy body over the unstable balustrades and scooting across a series of fiberglass chambers labelled DANGER – DO NOT STEP. My death wish was already the worst-kept secret at Schoolies. I lingered on each of the five ledges for an extra few seconds, wringing out the public exposure for extra shrieks and applause.

  It was too much even for Big Red. ‘Take it easy,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be weak,’ I said.

  I downed endless shots of Midori. Everything went fuzzy before browning out. I embarked on a solo tour of the hotel. You didn’t need to knock on doors before entering – each unit was a different room at the same party.

  I witnessed girls pissing in the fire escapes, footprints of shit in hallways, bong hits at tables, bathtubs filled with vomit, bottles hurled off balconies. Strangers crushed pills against iPhone screens with school IDs and sniffed lines through rolled-up pocket money.

  ‘Swinging through the trees with my dick in my hands,’ I sang, ‘I’m a mean motherfucker: I’m a Mary’s man!’
>
  Twilight turned to night. We began a mass evacuation from our ravaged hotel rooms, coursing inexorably towards Cavill Avenue. Before dark, it was a prosaic shopping plaza. After, it turned into a human zoo: a precinct of beer gardens, nightclubs, titty bars and tattoo studios.

  I walked haughtily amid a pack of new best friends, staring into a kaleidoscope of bright lights and beautiful bodies.

  A checkpoint had been established between society and the enchanted sands at the end of Cavill Avenue. Schoolies were identifiable by fluorescent wristbands, sealed with metal clips so they couldn’t be slipped off. The barcodes were duplicated on the fluoro lanyards around our necks. Inside was a permit displaying our name, face and birthdate. Security guards herded us through a maze of chain-link cages emblazoned with ads for energy drinks.

  The vista featured 10,000 creatures stampeding between stages a few hundred metres apart. Limbs slick with sweat flickered in military-strength strobes. We hissed and whistled at each other, stray animals on heat, emitting the universal mating language.

  It was a ten-second recipe for disappearance. The speakers spread amnesia between attendees. All the specific dreads and regrets of a person’s life were cancelled out by the loudness of the music and the manic energy of the crowd.

  Over the next couple of hours, I thrashed around to the edge of physical collapse. Volunteers in front of the stages handed out free water bottles to the crowd. The secret scheme was to hydrate partygoers enough that they’d sober up. Suddenly, I was rubbing shoulders with Henry. The long arms of his doppelgänger were wrapped around a blonde girl in jean shorts and a bikini top.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ he yelled.

  His creeped-out Juliet giggled at me.

  ‘Nothing,’ I whispered.

  I retreated to the beach. The sky was purple with heat and electricity. On the far side of the stages was a quicksilver city conjured from thin air by real estate tycoons, and trafficked to gullible boomers as a new blueprint for immortality. A helicopter searched for someone in the late-night surf. The Pacific Ocean lapped at the blackness between the shore and horizon.

  For an uncomfortably long time, I stared glumly at my fellow graduates kissing gleefully on the sand and pissing knee-deep into the sea, wondering what the hell was wrong with me, what it’d take to be recruited into this cult of carefree breathing, to be okay, for fuck’s sake, just this one night, one week, one life.

  The time flashed from a grey skyscraper. It was quarter to ten on the first night of a seven-day bender. The only people I wanted to see were either dead or in hospital. I headed for the exit, careful not to kick sand on any teenagers getting hand jobs.

  Everything that glittered earlier on Cavill Avenue had turned to shit. Riot police patrolled opposing mobs, armed with pepper spray and tasers. Plainclothes cops slammed pill pushers into the back seats of unmarked cars. Paramedics fixed victims with stomach pumps and suture kits. News crews did laps of the plaza, waiting patiently for the violence they helped foment.

  Young men came to Schoolies primed to emulate fights they’d seen on YouTube. Those who didn’t know how to throw fists prepared to get their supple faces caved in by the rough knuckles of grown men. I saw a Schoolie get stretchered away while his attacker was shoved into a paddy wagon. Eyewitnesses shrieked like hyenas, sending footage to each other via Bluetooth. ‘Suck shit!’ one shouted. The others laughed hysterically.

  I arrived back at The Islander and showed my lanyard to the security guard. In the lobby, three Red Frogs accosted me. They were undercover religious evangelists scattered throughout the strip offering sweets and pancakes to sinners.

  ‘Hi, buddy,’ said the leader. ‘Are you all right?’

  I stared at him with a blank expression and walked to the lifts, which were stranded at the upper levels, so I climbed nine flights of stairs to a vandalised apartment.

  On the balcony, a flatscreen TV was wrapped in a bedsheet. Kid Cudi’s ‘Day ’n’ Nite’ vibrated between tall condos. The smell of pot fused with spew on the sea-salt breeze. The streets echoed with high-pitched voices promising to kill and screw each other indiscriminately. I watched the tiny outlines of the undead clusters I had just fled without a shred of lust or envy.

  You can only bluff for so long. Now, in the midst of systematic bliss, I experienced the realisation that no number of nights like these, blinded by alcohol and dopamine and false hope, could ever change what had happened on 2 May. And I didn’t want to negotiate the matter on a 24-hour suicide hotline or over free pancakes with sympathetic virgins in the hotel lobby.

  My body was a lost boat on a broken sea. I leaned against the rusted balustrades and concentrated on the bitumen nine floors down, a dead man wavering, seeing just how easy it would be to quit pissing in the wind.

  I looked away. I looked back again. I looked away. I looked back again. Then the door of the battered apartment swung open, laughter drifting down the hallway towards oblivion and beyond. I turned around and shut the shattered sliding door behind me.

  Fast Night, Dark Days

  In the opening weeks of summer, I relocated to the big smoke. My sister and her boyfriend had found a two-bedroom unit in Woolloongabba for the three of us.

  ‘This is a fresh start,’ said Hannah.

  The heat in Brisbane had a deeper intensity. On a subtropical Tuesday morning, I threw out my cigarettes and weighed myself on the scales at the chemist. The machine printed a receipt of my physical statistics. My BMI sat at 28.4. This put me deep inside the overweight category, eating steadily towards obese.

  I put two sixty-tablet packets of FatBlaster MAX into the shopping basket and added three flavours of the FatBlaster ULTIMATE MAX Diet Shake: Dutch chocolate, cappuccino and vanilla ice-cream. The boxes were covered with dieting mantras.

  DELETE CALORIES REDUCE BODY FAT CONTROL HUNGER

  I filled a trolley with forty assorted cans of John West tuna. From the freezer I grabbed five packets of Birds Eye SteamFresh. Dinner for the next three months would be 95 grams of flavoured fish with 150 grams of microwaved vegetables, topped by a handful of sunflower seeds. My meals were tallied on a website called CalorieKing.

  At Jetts Fitness, I signed the membership forms before embarking on a tour of the premises with a beefcake named Angus, whose Maori-inspired sleeve tattoo tapered off just above an Anglo forearm.

  ‘You’re gonna kill it,’ he said. ‘I can just tell. You want it bad. Some people don’t want it badly enough. How bad do you want it?’

  ‘Pretty bad,’ I said.

  Angus sized up my soft body with contagious excitement. ‘Picture your rig in three months,’ he said. ‘Don’t stop seeing it. Believe what you see. It’s yours. More you than you. Ya know?’

  I wanted more than a six-pack. Trauma has two rival desires: death and perfection. I planned to temporarily vanish and emerge a brand-new person, released from the secret burden of my lethal urges.

  Each morning, I promptly consumed two huge maroon ovals of caffeine, before walking to a local café and buying a double-shot skinny flat white, and then entering my weight into an Excel spreadsheet. In two weeks, I went from 83.2 to 78.6, a loss of nearly five kilograms.

  At the gym, I warmed up on the treadmill for ten minutes, increasing the speed and gradient every sixty seconds. This was followed by five minutes ripping my legs and shoulders to shreds on the rowing machine. Next, I spent half an hour pushing and pulling weights with my arms, shoulders and chest. I did three reps of ten, increasing the heft as the weeks multiplied.

  I finished with half an hour on the exercise bike before driving home, acutely unaware of who I was, apart from basics like where I lived. Dieting narrowed my focus to the only scenario I could control: calories in, calories out.

  On my off day from the gym, I went for a walk. The distances started short: four and five kilometres. But soon enough I was gaining speed, doing laps over the Story Bridge and back around the Gabba. Afterwards, I stirred sachets of orange Hydralyte into
soda water with a fork. The electrolytes and vitamin C mixed innovatively with the brain freezes and dehydration, delivering me, briefly, to a griefless present.

  ‘You’re going to get skin cancer,’ said Hannah.

  To pay the rent, I got a job as a delivery driver for a gourmet pizza franchise, travelling ballistically across upmarket suburbs where consumers required caviar and prosciutto to justify the consumption of junk food. Clients tipped me generously for speeding, not that I needed bribing. I chased premonitions of collisions and savoured the adrenaline rush of evading them.

  By New Year’s Day, I was 75.8 kilograms. By 1 February, I was 69.5 kilograms. I ate less, exercised more and fasted longer. Pretty soon there were no off days, just blank sequences between waking up, exercising, delivering pizzas and passing out.

  On the Saturday morning before Orientation Week, I caught a bus to Queen Street Mall and bought a new wardrobe with my life savings. I got skinny cream chinos and a canvas tote from Country Road. Two Ralph Lauren button-ups. A Ben Sherman polo. Wrangler jeans. Two Tommy Hilfiger t-shirts. R.M. Williams boots and a brown belt. Black Ray-Bans.

  On the Monday of Orientation Week, I glided onto the leafy campus, a bogan incognito, and secured an internship with Kevin Rudd in my first politics lecture.

  Frida was studying piano at the Conservatorium to satisfy her parents. In my dehydrated daydreams, Frida and I shared brilliant opinions over coffee before steamy sex in her dorm room; I surged to a safe seat by age thirty.

  I finally ran into Frida outside the library. She was with a group of strangers, and looked visibly hungover, probably from an event at her prestigious college.

  ‘Hey, Frida,’ I said.

  ‘Lech?’ she said.

  We hugged without tenderness. She seemed more concerned than aroused by my appearance.

  ‘Have you been eating?’ she asked.

  ‘I need to get to class,’ I said, even though I didn’t have any classes left that day. ‘Great to see you.’

  That night, I delivered pizzas while wired on diet pills. Thin white lines blinked down a flat black strip.