The Full Catastrophe

by Rebecca Huntley

  Yes, my friends, I’ve survived the conflict of Aboriginal politics, sexism in the workplace, passive-aggressive pettiness in academia, and the ire of Andrew Bolt and his News Corp friends. But none of that compares to the story of survival I’m going to tell you now.

  I’m going to share with you how I survived my wedding night.

  By way of background you have to know I spent a year working in Canada back in the 1990s, and it wasn’t exactly a match made in heaven. Don’t get me wrong, Canadians are lovely people and I was working with the First Nations peoples of Alberta on a treaty negotiation process, so it was work that was a great privilege to do in a culture that I found full of wisdom, compassion and generosity. But for a Triple-A Type personality like myself, they gave me some very tough love.

  For example, I was told to be ready to be picked up for a meeting at 10 am at a reservation two hours north of Edmonton. It was supposed to be a day trip, so I was ready on time, neatly groomed in my suit, my killer heels and holding on to my little briefcase. The chief negotiator, who travelled in his Winnebago with his wife and three children, picked me up four hours late and with the stopping and starting, the two-hour trip took much longer than it should have. Realising that this wasn’t going to be a day trip, I quickly ducked into a Walmart (luckily, they’re all over the place) to buy a nightie, clean undies, toiletries and some flat shoes.

  When we finally arrived at the reservation, I assumed the meeting would start straight away and I was all ready to go. Instead I was told there was to be a sweat lodge ceremony. This required the purchase of a different kind of nightie. So I had to duck back to the Walmart to buy that nightie, one that was plain and without buttons (adornments aren’t allowed and the buttons are considered decorative) and some more clean undies so I could participate in the sweat lodge. Which I did, and it was wonderful and I survived, even though I thought I was going to be cooked alive.

  Then it was decided that the meeting would need to take place at a different reservation. So the next morning everyone packed up and we drove in a caravan of Winnebagos, travelling north. When we arrived, I was told that the meeting would finally take place as soon as the chief returned from hunting. And that took three days.

  The meeting did happen, and it was an eye-opener to be at the table. Such an insight into the things Indigenous people can achieve when they’re given the chance to determine their own future, and of course it was worth it for the privilege of being able to see that happen. But I returned home a week after I was picked up from what I thought was going to be a day trip, albeit with a range of Walmart nighties and underwear.

  The other thing I’ll share with you is that there was a cultural protocol in the First Nations community I was living with that required you to eat whatever was given to you at a ceremony. Now moose nose, I was assured, is a great delicacy, even though my memory of it was a mixture of gristle and snot. As a guest, I always seemed to be given this very special part of the moose as a sign of respect and acceptance. So they said, and I believed them. The advice I have to pass on to you is that your best friend at a pow-wow is salt and pepper.

  But I did love Canada and I made many friends, and I did feel the way of life there challenged that part of me that is rigid, with my passion for scheduling and timing. I think their tough love loosened me up.

  I was challenged for a year and I survived, and then I decided it was time to go home. But like a partner with whom you have a dysfunctional relationship, Canada has always kept drawing me back, and I came to spend my honeymoon in Vancouver.

  I should’ve known that the wedding and honeymoon were going to be complicated. My fiance, Michael, and I had originally booked a very small family wedding on Hayman Island in Queensland with a honeymoon on Beddara Island, but a storm brewed and both venues were blown away by Cyclone Yasi. Undeterred, and not taking this as a sign, we married in a small restaurant in Sydney. We had also decided to take up a work opportunity Michael had in Vancouver and add on a honeymoon. And let’s face it, nothing says romance like an international financial ombudsman conference. Surely it’s the next best thing to Beddara Island. Besides, we had very dear friends in Vancouver, Lea and Rick, who we wanted to see. So we felt like we were back on track after Cyclone Yasi.

  Weddings, even small ones, are stressful. Ours was joyous but there was no sleep that night and we were on a plane to Vancouver the next day, and our seats were in economy so there was no sleep between Sydney and LA. We had one of those terrible stopovers that is long but not long enough to get a hotel room and sleep, so we still hadn’t slept by the time we arrived in Vancouver. Lea and Rick were delighted to find they were with us – due to the time zones we’d travelled through – still on the very first night of our marriage.

  They lived in a converted boat house on the First Nations reservation with a view right across the harbour back to Vancouver city. Fatigue might have overtaken us now that we’d finally arrived but for the joy of seeing these great friends. It gave us a new lease on life. We sat on their top deck enjoying the breathtaking view, sipping champagne and celebrating love and friendship.

  Just as we were about to leave for dinner, Michael said, ‘Look, I don’t think I can go on. I’m starting to feel a little bit unsteady, like I think the whole floor’s moving.’

  I said, ‘Sweetie, we’re on a boat house, it’s fine.’ I encouraged him to keep going, and come to dinner with great company, great food and some great wine. Sleep could wait.

  When I first contacted Rick and Lea about staying with them, they’d said, ‘We’ve got a big place. There’s plenty of room.’ And indeed they did. They’d renovated their boat house beautifully and it was a three-storey masterpiece. But there was only one bedroom, up on the top floor, and they gave it to us while they took the couch on the middle floor, which they shared with their two enormous dogs.

  The bedroom had an ensuite, and before I went to bed, as the real honeymoon was finally about to begin, I went to brush my teeth. There was a step down into the ensuite and … that was the last thing I remember.

  I completely blacked out and I fell from the stair, hitting the edge of the bathtub with my face, right on my cheek bone. Somehow, and to this day we have no idea how I did this, I’d also broken the cistern under the toilet, causing water to gush everywhere. If there’s anyone reading this now who can figure out how I physically did this, I would be most grateful to know your theories.

  Anyway, Michael, hearing the loud thud, rushed to see what had happened and found me sprawled on the floor with water rushing all around me. What with rescuing me and stopping the water (which took a while to work out) Michael cut his hand on some broken porcelain. It was not serious but it bled profusely, so he was covered in blood and dripped it all over me while he picked me up and put me on the bed.

  He then went downstairs to tell our hosts that we’d had this disaster and wrecked their bathroom. At one point we were worried we were going to sink their boat house, the water was gushing so forcefully. Their response? ‘Yeah, we heard the noise but we knew you were on your honeymoon.’ Those crazy Australians, they must have thought.

  They came upstairs to survey the damage and there was water flooding the floor, a broken toilet and blood everywhere, and a semiconscious bride. We insisted on paying for the damage in this newly renovated bathroom and in true Canadian style they said, ‘Oh don’t even think about it, we were gonna buy a new one anyway.’

  They were ready to take me to the hospital the next morning but it turned out I have a really tough head and all that was visible was a slight bruise. By lunchtime we were up in the nearby ski town of Whistler and I was nursing a cocktail.

  I’d survived the first night of our marriage and our happy ever after could finally begin.

  Despite the fact we trashed their house, Rick and Lea remain true friends. I did note, however, that when we were planning our last trip to meet up – going to San Francisco and the Napa Valley – I suggested to Lea that we fly into Vancouver
and stay with them a while, and she said, a little too quickly, ‘No, no, we’ll meet you there.’

  Catastrophe of Angels

  Clem Bastow

  IT’S A MONDAY in April, 11 am, and I am striding up Sunset en route to my first ever date in Los Angeles since moving there a month ago. Way to go, me! I think. Locking in a date before I’ve even signed a lease! Just wait till the folks back home hear how I’ve hit the ground running in Tinseltown!

  Late in 2011, with $400 to my name, I decided to relocate to Los Angeles and work as a stringer – that’s the English slang term for ‘freelance journalists who decide to “switch things up” by relocating their life of insecure work and rental stress to sunny LA’ – covering entertainment news. The subplot was that I hoped living in LA might encourage me to take my nascent screenwriting practice seriously. The thought being that if I lived in a town where one could see movies literally being made on the corner of one’s street, one might be more inclined to get up at 5 am and Pomodoro Technique out a few pages.

  After a month or so spent settling in, I needed material: it was time to commence dating. Nothing would make me take my screenwriting more seriously than marrying an American and getting to stay there forever. And it wasn’t like Australia was doing much for me in that department; my last boyfriend was twenty-seven and lived in a shed. He used to encourage his dog onto the bed while we (he and I, not the dog and I) were having sex.

  It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when it was I realised that the common denominator between all of my terrible dating experiences was not, in fact, that all of the guys were dickheads, but rather that the chief dickhead was me. I am the dickhead. Me. Because I made these choices.

  ‘Yeah,’ I’d tell friends back home, with the world-weary affectation of a global entertainment industry nomad, ‘everyone does online dating here.’ It’s true, more people seem to rely on Match and OkCupid in that town, because unlike Melbourne, there is less of a culture of going to the pub, getting rat-arsed, then latching mollusc-like on to the first person who has more than two things in common with you. If you wake up the next day and the sight of them doesn’t make you physically ill, you commence a relationship.

  Here, though, I am determined to Date Distinctly American, so when ‘Kraig333’, who was ‘looking for a Pam to my Jim’ asked me out via a complicated series of photo likes and winks or kisses or g-spot massages, or whatever excruciating euphemism Match.com uses instead of ‘poke’, I said yes.

  The date is with a forty-two-year-old writer and comic who is 5'8" – 5'8" is my absolute limit – and seems pretty keen to meet me, if the phone conversation I had with him was any indication. He looks good in his photo, I think, a bit like a young John Travolta in a good way, before the Thetans got into his weave. How bad can it be?

  The answer dawns on me when I see a small, Hobbit-like figure striding towards me. He is definitely not 5'8". He is certainly more like 5'4", in shoes. He is wearing a jacket – blazer? – made of the sort of PVC that hasn’t existed since more than one in a thousand young men wanted to dress as Neo from The Matrix: matte and sort of spongy, like a yoga roll. I catch myself staring at it in awe when he begins to speak. His real name is Dave and he parked nearby, and why don’t we drive to Veggie Grill so we have more time to talk?

  I’m so bewildered by this tiny, PVC-wrapped person that before I know what I’m doing, I get into his car and am overwhelmed by the scent of cherry-flavoured Little Tree air-freshener. Is there a hint of chloroform in the base notes of this heady perfume, I think? The headlines start to flash before me: ‘Promising Melbourne writer dies abroad’, ‘In bitter irony, former RRR presenter Clem Bastow found stuffed in bins behind Amoeba Music’, ‘Complete moron gets into mysterious car with fun-sized John Travolta lookalike, pays terrible price’.

  Oh no, he’s reaching into the glovebox. This is it, it’s all over. Here comes the gun, or the knife, or the metal dildo. My name was Clementine, and I was going to be a screenwriter. Just as I prepare myself for the sight of the weapon, he hands me a folded piece of paper.

  ‘I printed out the menu,’ he says, and it’s clear he means for me to decide what I’m going to eat before we reach the restaurant (which, by the way, is definitely close enough to walk).

  ‘Oh!’ I say, with far too much relieved enthusiasm, as the car pulls away from the kerb and onto Sunset.

  He puts one, two, three pieces of cinnamon gum in his mouth, tells me about how he writes the taglines for video – not DVD – releases. He once did one for Melrose Place, maybe I saw it? I tell him I wasn’t allowed to watch Melrose Place when I was nine.

  Finally, we reach Crescent Heights and pull into the Trader Joe’s garage – ‘Promising young writer clubbed to death with jar of Cookie Butter’ – and begin the ascent to Veggie Grill. I smile at the waitress with a look in my eyes that I think says, ‘Please help’ but she probably just thinks it says, ‘Shitty tipper.’ David says my earrings, triangles of pointed plastic daubed with cheap black rhinestones, are ‘making his crotch hurt’.

  DaveKraig666 and I sit down at a table in the corner. He puts one, two tabs of Pepto Bismol in his mouth, leans his arms on the table like a Hill Street lawyer billboard, and says, ‘So, what do you want to ask me?’ I fumble and ask something about work, and he tells me he wrote a romantic comedy screenplay. Ten years ago. He’s still working on it. He tells me about a short film he made that someone whose name I do not recognise thought was ‘great’.

  As he asks me if he’d know any of my work, and the noise in the restaurant drains away to nothing but the tinkle of ice-cubes against the iced-tea fountain’s stainless-steel grille as I feel an acute sense of enlightenment: this isn’t a date, I have been visited by The Ghost of Screenwriting Yet to Come!

  I take his hand as he swallows some anti-anxiety medicine and we fly through space and time and smog. He shows me my ‘efficiency’ apartment in Koreatown in 2029. The vision is so real I can smell the mildew gathering under that one curled-up corner of parquetry in front of the small sink. I see thirty-seven-year-old me, hair greying, wearing my ‘Barack to the Future’ t-shirt and nothing else, working on the same fantasy adventure script I started in 2010. Behind my desk is a sole framed photograph of me at my city hall wedding to a 5'4" man in a World of Warcraft t-shirt.

  KraigDavid69 stares at me from across the table, eating another Pepto tablet. ‘Am I boring you?’ he asks. I take stock of my surroundings and realise that the vision has ended. ‘Hellooooo!’ he says in a manner that was probably hilarious in 1996 when people still remembered lines from the heartwarming western comedy adventure City Slickers.

  I fold my napkin and place it on the table. ‘I’m really sorry,’ I begin, ‘But …’

  He holds up a hand in protest. ‘I’ll be right back, I just need to visit the little boys’ room.’

  He shuffles off and I look around, calculating the distance to the nearest exit and wonder if I can create a distraction at the iced-tea fountain in order to make a quick get-away.

  Eventually, DavidKraig returns from the bathroom and announces that the date is over, but he’s going downstairs to Trader Joe’s if I want to come and get anything. Bewildered, I jump at the chance to exit this West Coast reboot of Waiting for Godot.

  For ten minutes or so, we shuffle around TJ’s – as he carries a 2-gallon jug of sweet tea and a box of laundry soap, I think about the inevitability of death and whether you can truly trust anyone. Soon after, we get back into his car – ‘Talented Australian screenwriter killed in six-car pile-up at Hollywood and Highland’ – and talk about something I literally can’t remember before I can’t last another second and yell, ‘I’ll get out here, thanks!’ We’re somewhere near the end of the Walk of Fame, the bit where the names get real obscure, and nowhere near a Metro station, but even being murdered by a hotdog stand attendee on Hollywood is better than spending another second in this cherry-scented sarcophagus of sadness.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he says, lean
ing out the passenger window.

  ‘Yes, totally fine!’ I chirp. As I stride off, I confidently tell myself this is the last time I will ever go on a date in Los Angeles.

  Six months later, it’s 3 am and I am midway through what could possibly be the most excruciatingly bad sex I have ever had. As the thirty-seven-year-old aspiring actor grinds away on top of me, my mind wanders to things like, ‘I wonder if my editor liked that last article’, ‘How many Trader Joe’s coconut macaroons is too many?’ and ‘What did I do to deserve this?’

  Hours earlier, we had agreed to meet for drinks, and so I’d performed the mating ritual of the Angeleno female: I looked at his reel on YouTube. There was a chocolate bar commercial and an excruciating improvised song about sausages, so naturally I’d put aside my better judgement and decided I would let him see me naked.

  My mind drifts to the future and I think about how much I will enjoy it when he turns up to audition for a secondary role in a film I am making. ‘Didn’t I see you in an Almond Mounds commercial once?’ I will ask from behind the camera.

  Eventually the endless pummelling of my cervix becomes too ridiculous to bear and I start laughing. He doesn’t reciprocate. ‘You take this all pretty seriously,’ I say light-heartedly.

  ‘Yeah?’ He heaves himself off me and flops down onto the bed like a fourteen-year-old throwing a tantrum. ‘And you laugh too much.’