Green

by Nick Earls

  ‘Seems like he’s got a lot of weekend jobs on at the moment,’ he says, moving comfortably into item three of his catalogue of complaint, the fact that his father made him work most of the weekend. ‘There’s a lot of people who really want to be home when you come over to their place and drop a tree. It’s lucky there were no heart murmurs today, since all I can hear is bloody chainsaws.’

  He goes for some more Staminade, and he’s talking again before the finger’s out of his mouth.

  I’ve known him long enough to know that this is one of those times when it’s best to sit there and let him rant, and offer those things the psych people call ‘minimal encouragers’ in reply, since that’s all he’s looking for. It does make me wonder if they’ve also got things called minimal discouragers. I could use a few of those sometimes.

  Where are we going? What are we doing? And the answers aren’t: World of Chickens and making burgers. It’s bigger answers I’m looking for. Day One of a new term—the usual first-day scare job and a few lectures. About to be followed by several hours in and out of a chicken costume, because it’ll put me a few dollars closer to a video camera.

  A few dollars closer to the video camera I didn’t get when I turned twenty-one late last year. It was always too much to expect, even for a twenty-first. My parents gave me a regular still camera without zoom and a copy of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. I know it’s ungrateful to think of that as anything less than a good result. Good photography isn’t about zoom and the novel was a hardback, and one I’d asked for. But it’s ungrateful to think of it in ‘result’ terms at all. So, call me ungrateful.

  Technically, I’m well aware it’s the thought that counts. I also realise that, if parents get it close to right on birthdays, you’re not doing badly. It’s having the list that’s the problem, but my parents encourage it so how can they feel blameless when I have it in mind when birthdays finally arrive? It’s my mother who started it, her idea that a list cuts down the likelihood of unwanted presents while, if it’s long enough, still allowing the gift-buyer choice. And so what if my father’s list always goes no further than brandy and socks? It could, if he wanted it to.

  Outside my family, choice was never a factor last year when it came to twenty-firsts. As far as the male members of the year went, it turned out by about April that it was your twenty-first that showed whether you were a pewter man or a crystal man. Frank was a pewter man. By my birthday in October, there was a new category: recycle man. I’m sure I ended up with some presents I’d seen earlier in the year, at the MarchApril twenty-firsts. Worse, I think I ended up with one or two I’d chipped in for the first time.

  So, at my party I scored three mismatched pewter tankards, a set of tumblers etched with the university crest, cufflinks, a harshly ugly decanter, a cocktail shaker, six golf balls and a fart cushion. Plus, that butt of all bath-time jokes, soap on a rope.

  And I have to admit, I don’t get it. Pewter surely had its day in the ale houses of the seventeenth century, I don’t understand cocktails, my cuffs—like absolutely everyone else’s—have at least as many buttons as you could need, I don’t play golf, and I’ve never in my life decanted. Where does that leave me? I suppose I shower, and I fart an average amount, but if that’s the only personal connection with my twenty-first haul that I can muster, it’s not good.

  I remember looking over my collection at the end of the evening and thinking, since when did I become the man who has everything? The only thing missing was a ship in a bottle.

  At least Frank’s gift was original, even if deeply pornographic. It’s the only hard-core wall clock I’ve ever seen. He said it was imported. ‘Good lord,’ my mother said, ‘I think it’s anatomically correct, Frank.’ Then she turned to me and told me she thought it’d look lovely anywhere in my room that can’t be seen from the door.

  So, no video camera. My father offered me a deal, and one I’m familiar with: dollar-for-dollar matching on video camera purchase if I was prepared to get a part-time job to earn my share. With the stipulation that my share was not to include money made from reselling any of last year’s superfluous textbooks—since that’s my parents’ already—or unreasonable attempts to manipulate routine cost-of-living adjustments to my allowance.

  My father’s an accountant. It’s not his fault.

  My allowance stretches to fund the rudimentary lifestyle I seem to have fallen into—a reflection on the sadness of the lifestyle, rather than the abundance of the allowance—and it’s given to me conditional on continuing to pass all my exams. Which was always my plan, anyway.

  If I want anything more, one of my options is negotiation. If what I want is seen as part of a long-term serious plan and doesn’t involve compromising my medical studies, I am occasionally awarded dollar-for-dollar matching.

  Frank looks on these arrangements, complex though they are, with some envy. He gets no allowance and describes himself as ‘self-funded’. Of course, it’s not that simple and Frank can actually be quite a scam machine. It’s not uncommon for jobs to come his way out of nowhere, and to pay cash. World of Chickens is now the job Frank calls his ‘steady gig’, and he always likes to have one of those. But it was me who, through my negotiating experience hard won at home, got us the meal-plus-bottomless-soft-drink part of our arrangements.

  I’d wanted to read Bright Lights, Big City since I’d read about it when it came out in America. I put it on my list thinking it’d be an easy purchase, but it wasn’t available here at the time so the book shop had to order it in.

  I read it straight away, and told Frank to read it too. He didn’t, so I eventually had to read bits to him to make the point. He told me to bring it in the car and we’d read it on the way to and from World of Chickens, which made me motion sick but I wanted him to get it.

  Bright Lights, Big City showed me—made it clearer to me than before—what a slow, safe hole this place is. ‘Don’t you get it?’ I said to him. ‘In comparison we’re living in Dim Lights, Big Town. Until about nine-thirty at night, when most of the dim lights go off. You see how far behind we are? How far off the pace? Even someone as old as Frank Sinatra gets to sing a song about New York as a city that doesn’t sleep. Imagine one old person here staying up past nine, or even starting dinner after six. Do you think Frank Sinatra ends the day with meat and three veg in front of ‘Wheel of Fortune’ at five o’clock? Don’t you get it?’

  He didn’t get it.

  Frank has no idea of the outside world at all. Frank thinks the book is cool, and he thinks it in an uncomplicated way. He really got into the second-person style because, with me reading it aloud, it made it as though the story was about him. I told him it was not choose-your-own-adventure format, and that the expression ‘insert your name here’ wouldn’t be occurring once in these pages.

  I tried to explain what I thought second-person was about and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I get it. You are obviously insufficiently acquainted with my literary masterpiece Bright Lights, Big Chicken. It’s about this chicken-selling med-student guy who’s a complete horn monger, but he’s got this dull mate who holds him back a bit.’ And he cleared his throat. ‘You are changing gear,’ he said as he changed gear. ‘You are pulling away from the lights.’

  I told him not to spoil it, but maybe he already had.

  ‘You are, in the trouser, perhaps the largest and most gifted man in this town.’ Definitely spoiled now. ‘They want you, baby, they want you. Some of them will get you. It’ll be excellent. They will call you the Love Master. Behind your back, they already do.’

  Jay McInerney turns thirty this year, and already Frank’s set him rolling in his grave.

  The first reference to Bolivian Marching Powder occurs on page one, and it took us both a second to work out that it probably meant cocaine. At a better time than this, and during a better mood, Frank renamed Staminade Sunnybank Hills Marching Powder, after the suburb where he lives. And he did it without the aid of any irony at all.

  W
e’ve talked more about New York since, enough that Frank now occasionally refers to Sunnybank as Brisbane’s SoHo, since it’s SOuth of HOlland Park. ‘Don’t you get it?’ he said. ‘Instead of SOuth of HOuston.’

  ‘We are so not Bright Lights, Big City,’ I remember telling him, to shut all this up. ‘We’re not even the fucking Breakfast Club.’ A reference that only let Frank segue effortlessly into some very sleazy arrangement he’d like to discuss with Molly Ringwald, but had previously been decent enough to keep to himself.

  Today he sits with the half-full jar of Staminade open between his thighs, loads his wet finger again and rubs more crystals on his gums. It’s the dumping by Cyndi he’s taking hardest.

  ‘Is a bit of fucking respect too much to hope for?’ he says, green crystals flirting with the gaps between his teeth in the late afternoon light.

  ‘I’m sorry. When did it ever get round to respect?’

  ‘Exactly. Exactly. I get taken for granted, you know. I’m not just sex-on-tap.’

  ‘See, this is the problem. The emphasis there is on the “just”. You are sex-on-tap, but you aren’t just sex-on-tap. You and I can make that distinction, but there’d be a lot of people out there who can’t.’

  ‘Shit. That’s too subtle. Which means you’re right. Subtlety’s never worked for me. Subtlety’s what you go for if you’re the kind of loser who doesn’t have anything better. Present company excepted, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Okay, he’s on the brink of annoying me, and I’m too subtle to tell him so he’ll never know. Frank has now been single for almost four days. I’ve been single since September last year, or the preceding May, depending on how you look at it. I could be a whole lot more supportive if he could remember that sometimes.

  I should’ve known he’d deal with Bright Lights, Big City the way he did. In first term this year we all started talking about the elective we have to do in December and January, between fifth year and sixth year. The faculty’s intention is that we travel, and experience something we mightn’t see here. I think it was in that context that I said something about really wanting to get out of Brisbane. Frank agreed. The next day he told me we could borrow his brother’s panel van, since his brother had done his licence for the moment, and that we should go to the coast. Which wasn’t exactly what I meant.

  We drove north in the week between psych and surgery, Frank with his board shorts and his bare feet and his bad-boy attitude, singing along to his brother’s Dusty Springfield tapes. ‘Chick-pulling tapes,’ he called them. ‘AJ’s too smart to have a stack of guy music in the van.’ I was never too sure what ‘guy music’ meant, but I did admit I hadn’t been expecting Dusty Springfield.

  Inspired by our chick-pulling potential, Frank made up ‘rules of the van’, most of which were needlessly ambitious and relied on the prospect of a sexual encounter before coming into play. The relationship man may, or may not, have been single at the time.

  In the hour and a half it took to reach the Sunshine Coast, I’d picked up most of the words to ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ and I thought I’d probably be having sex that night, or within the next couple of days at the outside. If Frank took up with a weird religion, or Amway, he’d be trouble.

  We agreed the van was sacrosanct. Rule One: No rooting in the van. If you score, you score on the beach.

  So how close did we get? All we scored was the meat tray at a seriously tough Caloundra pub. It wasn’t even particularly near the beach.

  We won the meat tray, and started playing pool with some locals. Which was fine while we were losing but then we hit a patch of form and, at the exact moment I was working out that winning mightn’t be a good idea, Frank addressed one of our opponent’s girlfriends as ‘babe’. Things didn’t go well from there.

  ‘Frank’s no good with names,’ I had to tell them. ‘And he’s not used to this kind of luck with pool either. I’d be very surprised if that blue went down. Very surprised.’

  And at that even Frank noticed their unnecessarily firm grip on the cues, and the way one of them had moved to cover the door. And I talked amiably about nothing much, and then about sport, and he duly fucked up the shot. Our form fell away in a rush, he left the girls alone and the door was open for us when they sunk the black.

  ‘At least we’ve got something to eat,’ Frank said in the car park, when he found the bright side. ‘And you talked them out of hitting us. That was good.’

  Then we had an argument about our meat and what to do with it, which became an argument about potato salad—and what the white ingredient might be—followed by one about who should have brought cooking utensils, and finally one about matches for the barbecue.

  ‘Why couldn’t you have been a boy scout?’ Frank said, the bright side now long gone. ‘You’re just the kind of person who should have been a boy scout. I should be able to hand you two sticks, and there should be nothing but friction between us and tea.’

  We went to a takeaway place, and we asked the guy how much fish and chips he’d give us as a swap for the meat tray. We lay in the van that night, the wind picked up, the rain came in from the sea, we rooted nothing and the last thing Frank said was ‘Do you want to go home in the morning?’ and the last thing I said was ‘Yep’.

  So that’s not what I mean by ‘away’. I’ve been looking at the possibility of doing my elective in New York. Naturally, I’ve thought about it enough that it now goes like this:

  You are on your way again to Ron Todd’s World of Chickens, but you have a plan. A plan that means you are now only months away from the real world. Give or take ten thousand miles. It’s all a question of perspective. There’s distance to travel, and the rest of the year to endure. A year of ward rounds and exams, of fried fillets of chicken breast with a choice of five sauces. A year in which female company has proven elusive and in which you know—inside, you know—that you have missed the John Bostock Medal for Psychiatry by the narrowest of margins.

  Okay, hyperbole with the last bit, since half of the people in the year haven’t even started psychiatry. But I still think I know.

  *

  There’s a line in Bright Lights, Big City about the central character meeting Amanda and coming to New York and beginning to feel that he was no longer on the outside looking in. That, perhaps, is the bit I get most.

  Sometimes it feels like I live in such a shit town. It meets all reasonable definitions of a shit town. There are still men who put on hats to drive on these roads, our only celebrities are sports stars and newsreaders, and everyone you meet already knows your mother.

  Okay, in my case some of the responsibility for the last one rests squarely with my mother, rather than Brisbane. My mother: uni lecturer, occasional political activist, rose fancier, theatre buff, person entirely unable to understand where her business ends and another person’s begins. Fluent in one language, shambolic in several but difficult to silence. Monty Python fan and, like most Monty Python fans, unable to understand people who don’t think every conversation can be improved by a quick reference to the Spanish Inquisition, and surprise. Etcetera. Nightmare. Worse when she’s excited. Otherwise far too British. Too bloody bloody British.

  But I can’t blame it all on her. If the world was a human body, Brisbane would be the last sphincter things pass through on the way out. Nothing happens here. I want to be a film maker, but every week here is another week without narrative and that can’t be a good start. I’m not even on the outside looking in. I’m somewhere further away, and the people on the outside looking in seem pretty close to the action to me.

  *

  I’m out being the chicken, and all that’s still in my mind. There’s not as much Elizabethan material tonight, since Ron’s interest in exploring the chicken’s Gene Kelly side seems to have done something to my confidence.

  Tonight, the theme is mime. Marcel Marceau chicken. Chicken walking against the wind, chicken doing things with silly (invisible) hat. Chicken doing a Michael Jackson mo
onwalk would be good, but the feet are too big. That’s the excuse. Chicken tripping up and falling to the pavement while failing to do a Michael Jackson moonwalk would be more embarrassment than I could handle.

  It’s changeover time, and Frank is moving his ‘biggest burger in one bite’ challenge up a notch. He says he’s mastered the Chicken Little junior burger, and he’s on his way to the big time.

  ‘I’ve got a cut-down adult bun and two pec minor muscles, pickles and sauce,’ he tells me. ‘It’s a PB.’

  ‘Sure it is, if it goes in.’

  ‘How is it a personal best though,’ Sophie says, ‘if it’s not even an acknowledged product?’

  ‘Good point.’ I don’t know what kind of point it is, but this’ll be more interesting if I go with it. ‘Would you call that competition standard, Frank?’

  ‘No, I never said that. It’s more like heavy training.’

  ‘You’ve got two of the thin bits of chicken . . . ’ Sophie won’t let it go.

  ‘Pec minor muscles,’ Frank says, trying to reclaim some ground using science. ‘I know. Like two Chicken Littles, rather than the fully adult-burger pec major. Give me a break. I’ll get there. And I know it’s not the total complement of salad items, but I’m working up to it. And you’ve got to admit, it’s pretty bloody big.’

  ‘Yeah, okay. It’s big,’ Sophie says. ‘It’s a feat, even if it’s not the one the crowd was hoping for.’ She looks at me, as if I’m to speak for the crowd.

  ‘I think it’s all about creating a sense of anticipation. If he could just jam a whole burger in there right now, we wouldn’t be calling this a challenge.’

  ‘So, do it Frank,’ she says.

  And he does. He takes a deep breath, opens his mouth wide and holds the modified burger up to it. His lips work their way along the bun, measuring it out and preparing to draw it in. His jaw moves forward, his eyes bulge, his hand pushes and the burger goes. There’s some very noisy nose breathing as he pauses between the engulf and the swallow, then he rolls his eyes back and tilts his head and takes it down his throat like a crocodile in a death roll.