Welcome to Story Club

by Zoe Norton Lodge

  When I returned to the hidden delights of the wardrobe, the pornos were gone. Still, as a budding historian, I knew that sources often disappeared, and, as I’d made a mighty harvest in my preliminary sweep, I thought no more about it. For a year, these flimsy figures that had left the damning silhouettes in my brother’s porn danced in my imagination like Balinese shadow puppets, laid out on my proscenium thigh while the pounding gamelan of my heartbeat marked the tempo of secret, panting frenzy; a risky business for, in a great cruelty to a teenage boy, my bedroom had no door. Though a step closer to reality than the muddled thoughts from Gauntlet II, my porn-gleaned wisdom was still strangely distorted. For example, throughout the magazines, there were regular advertisements for penis pumps, designed to engorge that organ into vast, distended priapic grandeur. I assumed this was part of a man’s normal kit: razors, comb, penis pump, toothpaste – the usual. Not brave enough to stick my dick in the vacuum cleaner, I made do with a couple of toilet rolls masking-taped to an empty shampoo bottle as a sort of bellows. Frankly, the results were mixed at best. But then it was only what all the other boys were doing – probably? There was just no way of knowing as the only gay in the hamlet.

  Perhaps none of this mildly sordid, mostly harmless odyssey would have happened had I been online since birth like today’s questioning teens. Had I early and open access to the bottomless, bottoming filth of the internet, I might have been more worldy- wise, but something would have been lost if that outlandish misguided horny innocence, that hungry naïveté were obliterated in a handful of joyless pixels. Of course, in the end, that’s exactly what happened. When I was fifteen we bought a dial-up modem for the Pentium III, and Mum sprung me unzipped at the computer while Crotchbuffet.com was loading. These were more decorous days, when porn sites came with a title page, so all she saw was the word GAY in giant rainbow letters, but that was enough. It was final. It was out. We’ve never really talked about any of this, though given she’ll doubtless buy several copies of this book, we might now!

  Fat

  This story was originally performed at the event I Come from a Land Down Under

  My high-school nickname was Fatbear. Now, to be fair, this was not without justice, for I was quite fat. I’ve always had a problem with food, and more than straightforward gluttony: a tireless siren call in the night to seek temporary oblivion in salt and sugar, fat and fatigue, spending far more on snacks than a pack-a-day smoker. Since 2011, I have lost 29.8 kilos, gained 37.4, lost 42, gained 43.8 and lost, thus far, 8.5. I can tell you this with pinpoint precision because I daily record those fluctuations on a spreadsheet graph, sometimes accusing, sometimes triumphant. At the peaks, it’s like giving a permanent piggyback ride to an adult chimp for months at a time: sure it can be exhilarating at first, but in the end no one’s enjoying themselves. There have even been occasions at a live performance after the audience has gone home when I’ve been cut out of this plush, deep storytelling chair by sympathetic firefighters. This story is a roller-coaster ride spanning the fat years and the lean – my own personal southern oscillation index – are my binges linked to El Nino? The science is still out. Though personal in the detail, with the way our health statistics are headed, this is fast becoming a quintessentially Australian story.

  The problem started young. Family photos show that in 1987, when a two-year-old Davey apparently asked Santa Claus for a packet of salt and vinegar chips for Christmas, the Big Red Enabler delivered all the way to our family holiday on Lord Howe Island. I come from the Sutherland Shire, and grew up only five minutes from Cronulla beach; you would expect me to be a bronzed Aussie god. Alas, the pink of the Mr Whippy vans always exerted a far stronger pull than the golden sand and azure surf. My first memory of compulsive eating was at the tiny canteen of Lilli Pilli Public Primary School, where there was a strict limit of fifty cents’ worth of carob buds per child. They hadn’t reckoned on the great Little Lunch Heist. With all the cunning of Daniel Ocean and his many companions, I used to play for high stakes – a dollar’s worth of carob buds – by rejoining the queue in the hope of being served by the other tuckshop mum. More successful was to wait at the top of the steps, where the other kids who bought chips only for the promotional Pogs and Tazos and Oddbodz would donate the chips themselves to the human vacuum. On a good day, I could harvest eight or ten packets of Barbecue Ruffles. Like Helen of Troy, if she let herself go, truly had I become the face that lunched a thousand chips. The problem grew to the point that in school gymnastics, teachers would haul me over in humiliating ‘assisted forward rolls’ while the rest of the class applauded dutifully.

  Caringbah High School saw puberty and the dawn of body-consciousness in that Australian Eton of suburbia. Still the snacks flowed. Mum sedated me through an acrimonious divorce with Guylian chocolate sea-shells by the atoll, blizzards of lamingtons, hectares of caramel slice. In a bid for my favour, she wrote increasingly unconvincing notes to get me out of PE: Please excuse David, for he is tired, Please excuse David, for his shoes are wet and, eventually, as ideas ran out, simply Please excuse David. Matters came to a head in Year Twelve when my friend Mark, finding our couch strangely uncomfortable, lifted a cushion to find a tessellating mosaic of empty Guylian boxes hidden underneath. Now he had the scent, he soon found the Tupperware container where I kept hundreds and hundreds of neatly folded chip packets, crammed in so tight that they were held under great pressure, so that when he opened the lid they burst out like Olympic doves, or more accurately, confetti at a shame parade.

  It was clear I had a problem, but what to do about it? I knew that fit people did calisthenics, but all I had to go off was a single frame in a Tintin comic of the plucky Belgian doing his morning exercises. I wallowed on the floor in cruel caricatures of sit-ups. I was aware fit people lifted weights, so I hefted my father’s thickest books – The Illustrated Atlas of the Middle Ages – push for the burn! Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – no pain, no gain! Oscar Parkes’s British Battleships 1860–1950 – TWO volumes! Pumping ironclads wasn’t enough; I needed to get moving. Too embarrassed to walk outside, I paced out ten thousand steps a day back and forth along the upstairs corridor, keeping on slippered tiptoe lest Mum should hear me from downstairs and think me strange.

  Once my corridor confidence was up, I began walking the hour trip to Caringbah and back every day under the watertight alibi of getting the paper. Mum suspected I was a thigh-chafed Casanova paying court to a comely young newsagent’s daughter.

  Being a massive gay didn’t help. While I have observed that a tumsy straight man can win his way to a woman’s heart with his kindness or his personality or his sense of humour, a king-sized queen finds that all too many gays are shallow (or savvy) enough to demand at least abs as a down payment before they will extend you romantic credit. I was never going to be a twink; I’m not hairy enough to be a bear; and, sadly, my true subcategory of a ‘Babar’ is yet to achieve the recognition it deserves.

  Whatever was a rundown but fundamentally handsome man to do? Luckily, gays are endlessly inventive in their lusts, so I turned to a website called Biggercity.com, which services chubby-chasers and their prey. It had its quirks. When you sign up to most dating sites, you become a member, but on Biggercity, I was a citizen. I even considered running for mayor. Alas, while I was too stout for grindr, I found myself too slender for Biggercity. By the standards of chasers, I barely met the threshold for a chub, let alone a highly prized, two-hundred-plus-kilo superchub. While it was flattering to be told I had a fine pair of ‘moobs’, or a promising starter-belly, it was clear that Biggercity was not the answer for me, and all I was likely to meet on its very wide boulevards (the Chomps-Elysées?) was someone eager to feed me to death, with which I needed no assistance.

  This was of course all in the future. In the short term, the high-school regimen produced results, but things went awry when I moved from the leafy shores of Port Hacking to uni in the big smoke of Chippendale. I ballooned like a Montgolfie
r, and in reaction turned to far too much exercise at the university gym. Motivation on the treadmill can be difficult, but if you have a historical frame of mind, as I do, you can pretend the accumulating calories are years. Run past 1649 calories for the execution of Charles I, press on to 1789 for the French Revolution, then the industrial then the Russian, past World Wars and the Space Race. On a good day, you can push through the present into a dystopian future of your own imagining, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There was habitually an extremely athletic Indian man at the treadmill in front of me, a picture of striding, sheened virility. I would pretend he was fleeing through the jungle, and I was an ungainly elephant in pursuit of him. It may have been a little racist, but it was very effective.

  Through such methods, it’s easy enough to plunge forty or so kilos, and a pleasing downturn in the graph saved as decorpulence.xcl on my desktop can give the mental fortitude to turn away all snacks for months at a time, but keeping it off is near impossible. Any slight happiness or sadness, success or setback, celebration or commiseration is enough to break the grip of Spartan austerity and re-open the vortex of greed. With age came more sophisticated tastes. I could eat half a kilo of salami in a sitting, but was always embarrassed that the deli lady would think me a glutton. ‘That’s a lot of salami you’re buying, dear.’ ‘Oh, I am making a great many sandwiches!’ ‘Sure you are, dear. See you tomorrow.’ I can tell you from experience that smallgoods lead to great evils. Two or three times a week, I would buy several pizzas for one meal: what I call a penny farthing – family margherita for the front wheel, small meatlovers at the rear (for flavour), and a garlic bread to serve as handlebars. My housemates can testify that I have ridden this sickening vehicle far too often. I developed a sort of devious peasant cunning to hide my worst excesses, burying plastic bags jammed with wrappers and packets in the bin deep under honourable normal garbage night after night – the classic behaviour of an addict. In the pious hope of virtue I’ve thrown out uneaten tubs of Ben ’n’ Jerry’s, family slabs of chocolate, wheels of Brie, only to fish them out of the rubbish an hour later to eat them in squalid capitulation.

  A research trip from our shores back to the UK for my faltering PhD was particularly sobering. I saw Hermann Goering’s trousers, Henry VIII’s plus-size armour, George IV’s straining breeches. All of history’s greatest fattypants would have fit me snugly. Visions flashed through my mind of being flown back to Australia to be buried in the sort of square coffin in which Big Kev was interred. The attempts at virtue grew more urgent, yet more measured, examining the wellsprings of the problem. For one glorious year, a major breakthrough was made. My group of friends all went on a new year’s resolution health drive, buying those bluetoothed pedometers that record your activity in friendly competition with your peers. Like those first faltering high-school steps, I once again marked out ten thousand paces a day, but with a difference. My dear and valued friends Mark and Zoe observed from my furtive behaviour that temptation presses most heavily in the still solitude of the evening, and they undertook nightwalks with me so that I was virtuously occupied until the witching hour, for once the supermarkets are closed, I am too miserly to buy from twenty-four-hour convenience stores. There were teething problems with the system; for instance, our route led through one of Sydney’s more popular beats, where our brisk good cheer flushed out all the lusty night-gays from the bushes like pheasants at a shoot. I’ve realised that the struggle cannot be faced alone, and with luck a moderate, collegial sustained course will one day harness the power of mateship to yield lasting success. If not, thank heavens that in this heartburnt country, the plains we have to share are boundless.

  PS I got fat again! Typical.

  Sad

  This story was originally performed at the event The One That Got Away

  The first suicidal thought I remember came at the age of ten atop the Eiffel Tower. I can still feel the chill sting on my fat little face from the cold diamond of oversized chicken wire – ostrich wire, perhaps – as I gazed down, wondering how much outward momentum it would take to clear the sturdy iron legs akimbo Monsieur Eiffel spread so wide, and thus achieve a clean drop to the ground. For long years, depression has planted its dark standard in the spongy loam of my brain. Perhaps you are shocked that I might be stricken – me, so well known for my ebullience and joie de leave (the party hours early because even the company of closest friends can be exhausting). I don’t claim to be the saddest; that’s a competition I definitely wouldn’t win. The grey sludge in each head is mixed from a thousand ingredients, each case a unique dirty snowflake. I don’t speak for every experience, but in this, my magnum mopeus, I can for mine.

  It’s hard to convey what depression feels like; it’s a far more nuanced bucket of shit than just feeling ‘more than sad’. It’s a bit like an old LP record still turning when the needle has run down to the last groove, that static tick tick tick, the needle trapped in its rut, and, without a hand to help reset it, no more music. It’s an indifference to possibility, like finding a genie’s lamp but not being able to perceive any wishes you could ask of it, as well as feeling thoroughly undeserving of the lamp itself.

  What causes depression? You might as well ask why somebody’s tall – it’ll be part genes, part environment, nutrition and upbringing – but whatever the reason, their head’ll still be stuck in a chandelier full of bats. Suffice it to say that among the many gifts puberty granted me, curly hair, child-bearing hips, etc, her cornucopia included lasting depression, off and on, mostly on, for about fifteen years now.

  Maybe the divorce was causal. Just as the opposing benches in the House of Commons were separated by a space just wider than two sword-lengths, so my parents can only bear to sit at more than this prudent distance apart.

  Maybe the PhD: it’s about the worst thing a depressive can do, guaranteed to pulverise the mind. Postgrad study is all about discipline, self-motivation, above all, confidence in the assertion of your own arguments. All this is very difficult when the morale-boosting record of Sousa marches has run down and you’re stuck in that static groove. Also, no one will ever read it. There’s a reason JK Rowling didn’t write Harry Potter and the Peer-Reviewed Dissertation. By this stage of my candidature – eight years and counting – I realise there are deep structural flaws in my topic, that old chestnut ‘Eighteenth-century Naval Officers Who Were also Members of Parliament’. I’m still working through nearly sixty of these admirals’ papers, haunted by threescore ghosts of thesis past, each wiggier, goutier than the last: ‘OooOOOoooooOOOooo, I’m Admiral Sir John JEEEeeeEEennings! You haven’t studied meEEee yet . . . I will be BOOooOOoring!’ It’s often very tempting to abandon, but as Macbeth explained the sunk cost fallacy: I am in blood stepped in so far, that it’d be all gross to go back at this point. Aah, Shakespeare.

  Perhaps it’s the compulsive eating. The very sensation, particularly sugar on a plantation scale, is one of the few sure ways to bring on a reliably tangible sensation, no matter how short term or ultimately destructive. It’s the same general idea behind why some people cut themselves, although in my case it’s a safety precaution, for increasingly I have no sharp corners on which to do myself an injury. Every day’s binge-eating is always definitely the last, like a caterpillar putting off metamorphosis for just one more leaf, until it looks up and everyone else is out of their chrysalises with beautiful wings, suckin’ on flowers, entwining proboscises or whatever it is normal people do.

  Being the most confirmed of bachelors doesn’t help. You will be astonished to learn that I, a veritable Moby Dick of a catch, have always been single. Two or three dates is seemingly the most my budding relationships can sustain, before they flee the crushing weight of puns and warship trivia. I have often broken beds, but never hearts.

  This is where things can shade into suicidal territory. Don’t worry, I’ve never made an attempt – I’m very much an armchair general – and almost certainly won’t indulge the impulse now. If depression is not knowing
the use for a genie’s lamp, the suicidal urge is an unwanted vizier always whispering, ‘You could, you know,’ through an alabaster grille from the seraglio of the subconscious into the divan of rational thought (I probably shouldn’t have written this after watching Aladdin, sorry). Apart from the grim, darkly attractive little urges I think we all sometimes feel in everyday life, my mind settles by default on pernicious, impractical daydreams: is it possible to turn a bench-press into a guillotine? Could a person be hanged from a weather balloon – you’d never be found. Being well versed in history adds lurid detail to these idle fantasies: Crassus choked to death on molten gold; the last Abbasid Caliph was rolled up in a carpet and trampled by All of the Mongols; or the Empress Fausta, to Constantine inconstant, thrust for adultery into a superheated bath and steamed to death like a pork bun. This is the dismal variety available at the glum cha of the mind.

  These days, the whispers of self-oblivion are mostly the background fuzz of a radio not quite tuned right, but it was touch and go as a teenager – especially on the 2002 schoolies’ cruise with most of the shire’s Year Twelves. Leaning on the definitely not high enough rail at the very stern of the ship, I remember watching the phosphorescent wake disappearing into the tropical blackness of the night, inviting me to join it in becoming nothing as the writhing flesh of the disco around me chanted in unison the unlikely hit song of the season, in which auditors were exhorted by the rapper Khia to lick, in turn, the neck, back, pussy then crack of that anatomical seductress. I was all too aware that there was no one to lick any of these things for me. A year or two before, I had made an excruciating declaration of undying adolescent love to a school friend, now safely married beyond reach. It was Brian, he of the stoop, the thin moustache, the sallow complexion, the awkward gait and the pentagram necklace. He had it all! I must have intercepted a whiff of the pheromones he’d directed at his now wife, and was smitten for years. I tried to find the old file of the suicide note I drafted to him to share with you but I seem to have deleted it, going against every fibre of a historian’s being, which suggests it must have been pretty bad. During down patches, I’ve mentally drafted funeral plans, which mainly revolved around just what from the more maudlin end of Gilbert and Sullivan’s oeuvre would deliver the most pointed message: ‘See how the fates their gifts allot, for A is happy – B is not’. It’d really make you think. Then there are practical questions. Who would have the dubious honour of deleting my exquisite collection of pornography? Who would get the Star Wars Lego and the complete operas of Handel? Who could possibly provide as warm a home for Cuthbert the Dildo?