You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead

by Hardy, Marieke

  What led me to briefly and mysteriously channel the spirit of Ita Buttrose with that particular sentence remains unknown. I have never uttered aloud the words ‘someone like me whose beauty routines are strictly low-maintenance’ in my life. It’s as though I have just arrived in a foreign country and, unable to speak the language, parked myself in front of a television screening nothing but commercials for the Ponds Institute on high rotation. Which suggests I would later weave the terms ‘nine out of ten trial participants agree’ and ‘clinical tests prove’ effortlessly throughout the letter.

  . . . it is a pleasure to find a lipstick I can just put on and forget about . . . least to mention, not having to ‘top up’ after eating meals . . .

  Good to add the verb ‘eating’ in there lest the good people at the Sax factory had pondered exactly what it was I may have been doing with my meals. Staring mindlessly at them, perhaps? Cavorting naked around them in an ancient Wiccan ritual and/or smearing them upon my flushed and perspiring torso? Nobody likes ‘topping up’ (inverted commas model’s own) after that sort of activity.

  . . .The second time I wore colourstick, I ate oysters for dinner (how terribly decadent this all sounds) . . .

  Note wry self-deprecating comment upon one’s lavish lifestyle lest Sax HQ presume one is unaware of how dreadfully Gatsby it all is. Oysters! For dinner! Next thing she’ll be telling us she’s mainlining gin and trading eloquent barbs with Alexander Woollcott at the Algonquin.

  . . . and was amazed to find that after the meal my lipstick looked absolutely untouched.

  I am certainly not someone who writes letters like this often . . .

  Liar.

  . . . in fact, I hardly ever wear makeup at all, so I’m quite unqualified to comment on professional textures and standards . . .

  This is one of the most intensely obnoxious sentences I have ever written in my life. And I once wrote a feature film called Digital Duck about a duck who could surf the internet.

  . . . However I thought it was worth writing to let you know that you have found a very satisfied customer who will be purchasing more of your products in future.

  Cheers,

  Marieke Josephine Hardy

  I’m sure Sax appreciated the classy additional touch of my middle name in the sign-off. ‘We’re dealing with a real lady here!’ they must have whistled to themselves in awe. ‘No wonder she has no time to “top up” after her bacchanalian feasts!’

  The Sax piece was an interesting letter to find as it proved that I wasn’t simply a burning ball of indignation, firing off angry missives to whomsoever captured my disapproving eye. No, I was also a generous soul, spreading corporate love and goodwill to those deserving. This character trait continued years later when I personally crafted a card—there was glue stick and glitter involved—for the nice company (Uncle Tobys again—there’s a fair chance they had a photocopied picture of me up in reception with the words ‘UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES’ written somewhere on it by this stage) who distributed my favourite breakfast cereal, Oats Temptations. ‘It’s so exciting to put a hand into the box and retrieve the flavour that will shape my morning!!’ I wrote enthusiastically and dementedly in bright green texta.

  30.9.1998

  Dear Ms Hardy

  RE: STAY-ON COLOURSTICK

  Thank you so much for your letter received last week regarding our SAX Stay-On Colourstick. It is great to hear you love the product.

  It is very satisfying for Sax International to receive positive letters from the public. For your efforts in writing to us, please find enclosed with our compliments an ‘Earthy Me’ Colourstick and an ‘Earthy Nude’ Stay-On Lipliner.

  We are confident you will enjoy wearing them.

  Kind regards,

  A Arvan

  Sales and Marketing Coordinator

  The process of sifting through the ringbinder of my old correspondence was both horrifying and curious. Who was this person, compelled to engage in lengthy postal debate with faceless strangers about lipsticks and advertising campaigns? What drove her beyond the step of complaining loudly at dinner tables to actually sitting down and crafting meaningless long-winded written diatribes?

  September 15th, 1999

  Dear Mariek [sic]

  Thank you for contacting Ocean Spray.

  As indicated in our phone conversation, please find enclosed the information you requested. We hope you will find it helpful. We appreciate your interest and will continue to work to bring you the finest products available.

  Sincerely,

  Mary

  Consumer Representative

  Mortifyingly, this letter reveals that I had taken my love of food and drink a step further and actually called the Ocean Spray offices to have a chat with them about one of their products, presumably their range of delicious cranberry juices. Given my state of mind in 1999—I was by that stage living alone in the country and had seen a demon standing next to my bed—it was likely done at three in the morning on the consumer hotline and lasted for about seven hours, with brief intervals for bouts of noisy sobbing. I don’t doubt Mary still wakes up in the middle of the night on occasion drenched in sweat and screaming my name.

  Finding the Ocean Spray reply in my letters folder was the equivalent of waking up after a night on Stilnox to find two entire roast chicken carcasses and a dead hooker on the floor of the bedroom. It was an indication that I took my interest in products and marketing that tiny step too far.

  Politicians were a focal point of my deranged pen too. Ex-governor-general Bill Hayden clearly felt the full force of my wrath when he seized the occasion of a defamation case involving author Bob Ellis and ludicrous political duo Tony Abbott and Peter Costello to make some fairly salacious comments regarding former prime minister Paul Keating’s private life:

  26.10.1998

  Mr. Hayden,

  Are you quite mad??? . . .

  A fair enquiry to be certain, guaranteed to capture the attention of even the most uncurious reader.‘Am I mad? Well, this seems like a correspondent ready to engage in a robust intellectual dialogue with neither preconceived notions nor judgement. Please, do go on!’

  . . .Your recent behaviour re: the Bob Ellis libel case sadly leaves me certain that time has left you a very bitter man when it comes to the Keating era . . .

  Hardy Psychology 101. Please note that even Bill Hayden’s Wikipedia page clearly states, ‘He had a particular animosity towards Paul Keating.’ Why I was congratulating myself on pointing out a fact that had been freely available to the greater public for over fifteen years is anybody’s guess. I’m looking forward very much to finding the letter I wrote to the people of Berlin excitedly informing them that they are now free to roam about their city unimpeded by large concrete barriers.

  . . . In future, please confine your revolting childishness to the privacy of your home, and stick your archaic policies with it.

  People like you, sir, make me ashamed to support the ALP . . .

  So ashamed, in fact, that I will sign the letter by using a pseudonym.

  Stacie Mistysyn (Ms)

  Those with a particular love of late-1980s pop culture might note that Stacie Mistysyn is the name of the actress who played attractively passionate student Caitlin Ryan in children’s series Degrassi Junior High. Whether or not she’d approve of some rabid idiot from Melbourne sending letters to political figures under her name is yet to be ascertained. My guess is she’d probably despise Bill Hayden and congratulate me on my forthright approach.

  Interestingly, Bill Hayden responded to my letter, bringing to mind the mathematical puzzle ‘if one person with too much time on their hands meets another person with too much time on their hands, how many snippy, self-serving letters will they write before one of them suffers an aneurysm?’ He responded by photocopying a whole lot of articles with titles like BILL HAYDEN’S ‘DEVASTATING’ TRIAL BY MEDIA, LABOR MAKES HAYDEN PAY FOR ‘DEFECTING’ and WHY HAYDEN’S CRITICS GOT IT WRONG and then put them in
an envelope along with a little note that simply read ‘With Compliments: The Hon. Bill Hayden, AC’ which is a fairly decent and admirable sort of ‘go fuck yourself ’, really.

  The ringbinder of shame proved I made beginner’s mistakes, of course.When boorish shock jock Stan Zemanek was still alive and hosting daytime talk show Beauty and the Beast I—like a fool, like a fool—bought into his red-faced baiting of the pious left:

  2.2.1999

  Dear Sir or Madam,

  I am writing with regards to a channel ten program aired at one thirty pm on Tuesday, the second of February . . .

  To be precise. Jesus christ. Nobody should be that pedantic about dates and times outside of Emmett ‘Doc’ Brown and/or the entire Mayan population.

  . . . titled Beauty and the Beast. It involves a male host (Stan Zemanek) and a panel of female celebrities solving viewer dilemmas and commenting upon general media . . .

  Oh, that Beauty and the Beast from one thirty pm, Tuesday February 2nd.Way to clear it up, Cleary McClearenstein.

  . . I have been watching for fifteen minutes now and am absolutely appalled. No more than five minutes into the program the host had not only called the women ‘pooches’, but had also told a panelist she could never be mistaken for a boy ‘with those tits’. He then began lewdly referring to a necklace she was wearing as ‘balls around her neck’, and addressed each panelist as ‘darling’, pin-pointing Julia Morris as a ‘lesbian’ because she had a short haircut . . ..

  Let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that at the time of writing I was hosting a radio program on community radio station Triple R called Best of the Brat, which involved a segment named ‘Celebrity Rooter’. During this particular segment musicians would play their top five songs to fuck to, whilst talking lewdly and openly about intercourse. Yet I obviously had—and still have—my limits, at least when it came to daytime television and other such moral bastions. We all do, which is why sordid little cockstains like Alan Jones are allowed to pass judgement on the behaviour of young women in burqas whilst simultaneously being arrested for acts of indecency in public toilet blocks. No glass house left unshattered.

  Whether I simply held no faith that a letter from a twenty-three-year-old screenwriter would carry much weight with the bigwigs (or ‘big cheeses’, for the White Wings employees among you), the following paragraph proves that I was only moments away from being escorted off to the Zelda Fitzgerald Center for Slightly Hysterical Ladies.

  . . . I am complaining about this program not only as a woman . . .

  Vagina? Present!

  . . . but as a mother. I have a sick eight-year-old daughter at home with me today, and felt that at the very least I could sit her in front of some harmless daytime television . . .

  That’s right, in order to rouse what I felt were the just and proper responses from the Channel Ten authorities I invoked a fictional child. Please note that this is the exact sort of behaviour that makes the baby Jesus cry.

  . . . Harmless indeed! If I had any idea of the revolting innuendo and sexist banter that was to be aired, I would have rented a video. As it was, I just turned the television off. And it will stay off until you consider running some sensible daytime television, as opposed to this disgusting rubbish.

  Yours furiously,

  Stacie Mistysyn (Mrs)

  So my whole non-existent family was being punished for the sins of Stan Zemanek. No television until the entire network sits up and takes notice, invisible children!

  Not long after that Stan got a brain tumour (presumably unrelated to one particular letter from an angry fake housewife) and appeared in lots of women’s magazines looking sad and bald with his teary wife and headlines like NOBODY KNOWS MY STAN LIKE I DO and I felt briefly sorry for him. Which quickly passed—he was a bad egg and besides which he never replied to my heartfelt outpourings. Won’t someone think of the (fictional) children?

  That Beauty and the Beast letter began a whole cunning series written with the intention of ‘hoodwinking the respondent’. Obviously in my feverish state I was obsessed with the idea of fooling whomever may be unlucky enough to receive my latest missive and fashioned my pieces accordingly. I created dead husbands and injured pets and traumatised children. I pretended to live in bush huts and government housing and Toorak mansions. And occasionally I attempted to make a political organisation sit up and take notice by coming across like an enthused fan suffering a sustained brain injury.

  21.01.1999

  Dear Young Liberals,

  I have just heard about youre new ideas for the Young Liberals and I am thinking about joining. I heard it on channel nine news a week or so ago but it took me until today to write to you. That is not to say that I have not been thinking about it because I have been thinking about it very much. My local Pastor says I could be an excelent person in politics as I have very strong opinons on a number of topics.

  First though I have a queston for you:

  1: Is there an age requirement for people who want to join the Young Liberals? (dont worry I am sixteen and not to young)

  b: Do I have to live in Queensland to join the Queensland Young Liberals? I am asking this because while I live in Victoria from what I here the Queensland Young Liberals seem to get a lot more done than the Victorian Young Liberals who I have not read to much about.

  c: If I join the Young Liberals can I have a say in what we talk about and so on because of the topcs raised on the news I have some opinions about.

  I have been thinking about a few of the ideas. One is the ‘G’ plate for older drivers which I think is a very very good idea. My grandma is 73 and when she was driving I found it quite embarrsing. I would lie down in the back seat so that no0one I would know would see my driving with her as her driving was very bad and I didnt want people to think that maybe one day I would drive like that to. As she is now in a nursing home this is no longer a very big problem however I am sure other people would like for some law like this to be past to save them the same embarrassment from their friends when they are forced to drive with old people who everyone knows cant drive.

  Also signs that should be in english would be good to. If people are going to come to austraila they need to learn the language as well as speak it properly. If they just come here and we let them put up signs in there own language they will never learn how to join in our societry.

  Also I dont think that having the politicians in Star Trek uniforms is a very good idea to. I dont know if this was a joke idea but it is not good to put it with youre other ideas because people will think that the other ideas are jokes when really they are good ideas which should be listened to and not for people to think they are jokes. So maybe it would be good to write to the papers and tell them that the Star Trek idea was a joke so they can print it so people will know to.

  Anyway I think John Howard is a very good prime minster and I am glad he won the election even if it wasn’t by very much. He has some good ideas to and I will write more about that after I join.

  Anyway you guys are cool! Please write back soon!!!!

  Sincerely from

  Stacie Mistysyn.

  Poor Stacie Mistysyn, moniker used in vain yet again, this time with the sole purpose of making fun of the Queensland Young Liberals. There was possibly some kind of stoner logic attached to writing a fan letter in the style of Snooki from Jersey Shore. No doubt I had pictured the right-wing twits at the Young Liberal headquarters gathering around to read with worried frowns, musing aloud that if this was the sort of halfwit fan they were attracting with their policies perhaps they should probably just rethink the whole thing, or even give up altogether.

  The hobby (quest? compulsion?) of writing to companies soon ebbed, no doubt much to the combined relief of the managing directors at Uncle Tobys, Sax International and Ocean Spray, and I instead wrote to new friends. I wrote to wharfies I’d met during the MUA dispute. I wrote to distant relatives, and admired artists, and people whose stories in the press had moved me. The fr
othing mania of changing the world, one stamp at a time, receded as I grew older, replaced simply by a need to reach out to another human being via a medium more thoughtful, more palpable, than a 3 am text message or dashed-off gmail. There was love in a letter. There was a heart. At Women of Letters shows I too now bent over an aerogramme, glass of wine abandoned as I scrawled across the page. I wanted to belong.

  After a relationship broke down I gently attempted to mend bridges and build a gentler future by writing one long, self-reflective, blameless letter per week. It was my wish that when my ex-partner held my words in his hands he would forgive my many mistakes, and sense the impassioned hope between every line of my poor penmanship. That he would appreciate that I’d taken the time to sit down and write him a letter, because no electronic missive could convey the sentiment of our years together, nor possibly help us find common ground. And I didn’t use a pseudonym, and I didn’t create fictional children or complain about a broken or tasteless product.

  I just told him I loved him and put it in the post; he could read it as often or as little as he liked.

  Forevz

  This is a cancer story that has some jokes in it, so if you think perhaps that’s in poor taste it’s probably best that you put this book down and spend a long and absorbing hour listening to Don McLean’s song ‘Driedel’ and talking to your friends about how deeply meaningful it is instead of reading further. This is a cancer story that has some jokes in it mostly because the main person in the story who has cancer is the funniest person I know. I never intended to write a funny cancer story because cancer is, by nature, inherently unamusing. Michael Cera is yet to star in a feelgood buddy cancer comedy featuring dick jokes and pop culture references (‘Hey Chemo-Sabe, if I radiotherapy my balls will I become like a porno Peter Parker and shoot spiderwebs instead of semen?’). Comedian Bill Hicks had some fairly poignant stand-up shows after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer but even then he didn’t necessarily make jokes about his condition, nor were many people in his audience even aware that he was dying. If you Google the words ‘cancer jokes’—look, we all have our dark evenings at home alone trying to find distractions from the recesses of our respective souls and I’ll thank you not to judge—one of the first websites that appears is the rather timidly titled ‘Are You Ready For Cancer Jokes?’ It manages one—just one—joke (the clumsily worded ‘Q: What do you call a person who has a compulsion to get lymphoma over and over again? A: A lymphomaniac!’ Look forward to reading this one aloud from a Christmas cracker next December) before retreating rapidly, hands raised in surrender, with five lengthy paragraphs explaining that the person who runs the website has actually been diagnosed with prostate cancer so drop your burning torches, cease your poisonous emails, we’re all dealing with our healing process in different ways and laughter/medicine, so forth.