by Michele Lee
I looked down at the badge fastened to my black jacket. ‘‘Smash US imperialism’,’ I reported. ‘I’m in Socialist Alternative.’
Art Pipi grinned and rolled his eyes. ‘I’m in Resistance. And so is Edge.’ He motioned to the male twin, who nodded wordlessly.
I asked Art Pipi to see a documentary about the Enron collapse. We had a drink afterwards, analysing the film, and agreed that it was informative but sensational and Hollywoodised. We drank again. We sank into fabric sofas in the Stork after listening to a ‘lecture in the pub’, held in the small function room. And again, the next night, we sat and drank with his friend on the outdoor benches of the Black Cat. Art Pipi’s friend had hung a burnt and tattered Australian flag in Footscray as an artwork entitled UnAustralian. The police had threatened him with sedition charges and predictably the Herald Sun had lambasted him. The contentious flag came down. Art Pipi and his friend talked about the work they did together as something they called the ‘Coalition Against Monuments’. They were opposed to the legitimisation of war through public monuments and institutions – the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Anzac Day, police bands. His friend’s eyes were accentuated by shadows. He’d spent the previous night working into the morning on a video-art piece, watching and editing together footage of the beheadings that Iraqi insurgents had posted on the internet as a warning to infidels.
Art Pipi drove me to Albert Street. The threat of a kiss had been hanging around all week. In the privacy of his parked car, we totally made out.
The second socialist, the Doctor, a cultural studies PhD graduate, had been in the Democratic Socialist Party for seven years in his twenties and worked with the student union at RMIT, but in a different section from where I worked. He was leaving on a redundancy package and planned to spend six months, without the burden of work, writing a screenplay. The plot of which was too complex to describe, he said at his farewell drinks. He mentioned his father’s house in France. He might go there to get some writing done.
I left. The Doctor followed. Drinks were being held for another union event – another farewell for all the people leaving on redundancies. Comforted by free drinks, surrounded by the unemployed, buoyed by the shared loss, we walked home at the end of the night and on the second storey of his share-house in Fitzroy we fucked in his room. I could hear the dulled sounds of nearby pub patrons coming through his window. In the morning the Doctor kissed me bye and lent me Edward Said’s Orientalism and a book of interviews with Aleida Guevara.
I petitioned at a party in Prahran, deep in blueblood territory. The Howard Government was still formidable at the time, the ALP disorganised, recovering from Mark Latham and doubting Kim Beazley. I wanted people to express their support against the proposed industrial relations reforms. My friends, I knew, humoured me when they proffered their names. Socialism was not so cool. Petitions were not so cool. Annoyed but brazen, I soldiered on.
At least for three months. Then I learnt something else.
I wasn’t very good at commitment.
I stopped going to Socialist Alternative meetings. I avoided walking near the stalls. I didn’t go to the Socialist Alternative parties, the ones with boxes of wine and gay porn. I didn’t see Art Pipi again. He was so quiet when we’d had sex that I’d felt like a coffin had been opened and we were both lying inside it. I returned Edward Said and Aleida Guevara to the Doctor and I told him that I was kind of busy now. He called a few times but I repeated my answer.
The legislation for Voluntary Student Unionism had been passed and the student union was shrinking its services. The government brought in the industrial reforms too. I was still working at the student union but all casuals would be finishing up in the new year. My manager would be leaving her job too. She’d gotten her doomsday letter the other week. She kept cheery though through the final days and we organised a launch in one of the TAFE buildings for an updated employment law website. She paid several hundred dollars for a comedian, a cute guy in a cowboy shirt and jeans, to help launch the website by making anti-Howard quips to a small crowd of students who’d come to the launch for the free food rather than out of outrage at the government. The comedian exchanged a few flirty text messages with my manager without compromising anyone’s professional integrity, as much as we would have liked that.
I learnt something from this. Not only was the text message a good tool for organising political action, it was a great device for flirting and for getting laid. I texted the Fuckwit From The Tea Shop. I texted the Editor. I texted Black Jack.
When I ran out of magazines to sell, and when I finished updating legal websites, and after I cleared up crumbs from the launches, the last ones we held, I didn’t know what to say to actual real-life people, face-to-face, with their weaknesses, their own generosities. When I made the political personal, I become confused about how ideas applied in reality, even though I liked the ideas.
I liked Karl, I really did.
So maybe, Karl, I just needed to be by myself, this was a delicate time. Okay? I gave Karl a friendly hug to show him there were no hard feelings and I even lingered in the embrace to show him that we’d always be that little more than ‘just friends’.
Karl texted me after a few days – I’d told him texting me every day was excessive.
Hey Michele. Been thinking of you ‘comrade’:) Would you like to hang out tonight after the march? KMxx
That sounded okay. I wasn’t doing anything tonight. But … he’d want to talk about what was going on in Bolivia with the popular uprising for the nationalisation of gas reserves and how we could apply similar tactics here. The picket out at the Ford factory, those workers needed my solidarity. He’d try to get me to visit but I didn’t want to go to Broadmeadows, it wasn’t in Zone 1. If I made a quip about my laziness, he wouldn’t get it, it was the whole German/Australian thing.
I texted him back. At first it went over a hundred and sixty characters but because I didn’t want to spend money sending him two texts, I had to rewrite it and contract words by taking out vowels. I hoped he could understand it. I knew English wasn’t his first language.
Heya. Not 2nite. Busy! 2moro? 4 coffee? Btw I hve ur manifesto n I wnt 2 give it bck. Have fun at the rally 2day. Say hi 2 evry1.
‘What do you think?’ Parker muses.
‘About what?’
‘This table.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘And the Velcro spots. Do you think I should remove the Velcro spots? See here, they’re keeping the glass top attached to the base.’
‘I’m not sure.
‘They’re so … ugly.’
Because I’ve cleared everything out of my old room, she’s able to set up her new room today. Parker wipes a wet sponge over the surface of her table.
‘And where are you off to, Michele?’
‘To see a magic show.’
‘A magic show. Cute.’
I would have liked to have asked the Cub to come along but he was working. So, I’m bringing Radar.
I didn’t plan to bring a guy named Radar but then I never seem to plan these things, they just happen. Well, they ‘happen’ in that I advertise myself on RSVP, smiling and dimpled, and then the laws of e-nature take over and men approach me. They pay RSVP for credits to send emails to women they fancy. Once I paid, very early on, when I was new to it and easily excited by the prospects of the dating cyberverse. RSVP likes to make you think it’s worth the money and for the anticipation it certainly was. The disappointment at meeting my emailee, however, made me feel sucker-punched and I never paid for emails again. Besides, it can cost over $10 per email and I don’t even like paying $10 for a taxi. I’m only in East Brunswick. I’ll walk. RSVP did give me free emails earlier this year for a Valentine’s Day promotion. I emailed Jackie Winchester for the first time.
Radar had emailed me. He’d seen my profile, my headline read This chick is totally emotionally retarded. I read his headline and then clicked through to his profile, where in his
longer description he mentioned that he liked walks on the beach and vomiting on people as they went for walks on the beach.
I grinned.
I wrote him back (it’s free to reply once someone has initiated contact) and I told him I was fucking off out of the country in a week to go to Laos. He said he loved Laos. I mentioned I’d be busy, preparing for fucking off, but I’d be going to see a magic show if he wanted to catch up. He said he’d love to come. I noted that he’d ticked ‘short-term relationship’ in his profile, which was RSVP’s coy way of letting me know that he was after a magic show and sex.
I don’t plan to have sex today with Radar.
Well, not really. Not in the sense that I’m counting on it. I too speak in coy tongues and I too tick ‘short-term relationship’ but I don’t have a bed anymore to be coy and short-term in. He has one but it’s in his parents’ house. He told me that he’s living at home because he’s just gotten back from overseas. He was gone for eighteen months. He used to work in insurance. Now, refreshed, transformed, he plans to start a new career in sustainability.
He’s a good catch. A Jewish catch too, he mentioned that in his profile in the section with the demographic details. I haven’t dated any Jewish men before, I don’t even know any Jewish people unless they’ve snuck unidentified into my life. Given Jewish people are located southside, on that side of the river that I don’t like to go to, I haven’t had much chance to meet them.
Or maybe I’ve avoided Jewish guys because I’m simply just an anti-Semitic racist. I don’t think I am a huge anti-Semitic racist, if I am a racist. I’m a socialist, so I can’t be a racist. Although if I’m anti-Israel then perhaps I am an anti-Semitic socialist. Although, I was only a socialist, for a few months. I am indisputably non-white. A Hmong. A minority of a minority, which means I’m too focussed on my own outsiderness to be avoiding Jewish men and judging them for being Jewish. And if I did judge – if you call it judgement – I don’t think I judged Radar as being less attractive because he wasn’t white. Right? More accurately I was not as attracted to the idea of him, rather than him being objectively less attractive. It’s a taste thing.
Based on skin colour.
We’re meeting at the Melbourne Town Hall where the magic show is. I’m standing outside, on the street. Radar arrives a few minutes late, and he looks like he does in his profile picture, and I register that at least he is tall and I give him a mental tick in my head for being tall. Because that’s redeeming, right? It’s redeeming that I view height as a positive indicator of masculinity and that’s less prejudiced than the skin colour issue, right?
I offer Radar, this tall Jewish man, a meek Hmong wave.
‘Sorry I’m late!’ he says and plants a kiss on my cheek.
I offer him a cookie. Yes, I made choc chip cookies before coming. I like to bear gifts.
‘Yum,’ he says. ‘Are all internet dates like this?’
It’s his first time on an internet date.
‘No,’ I say.
I did go on one RSVP date with another non-white guy, an Aussie-born Malaysian guy. This was in my first year on RSVP, me not yet hardened to RSVP and wanting to use it to explore my curiosity with Asian men, and why it was that I’d never dated one beyond my one-week hand-holding experiment with an Asian boy in year eight. My RSVP date and I had a drink at the Oxford on Swanston Street and I learnt that he was a good guy; he was easygoing, and he helped out on weekends with his parents’ business in Nunawading. He grew up with footy, and he had a build like a rugby player, and he had lots of white friends and he enjoyed barbies and he loved drinking beer. He was a banana, like me. And he liked me, and he planted a kiss on my cheek, and he wanted to see me again but I never went on a second date. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. He had a happy round face but it was a yellow face and he was Asian and I didn’t have sex with Asian guys or non-white guys and I never had and I never would and please don’t make me.
Radar and I queue up for magic at the box office. I relay the background: I had a falling out with one of the people in the magic show, whom I used to see, and that my coming here today is a gesture of contrition. Radar is intrigued, now led into past backstage gore.
‘Which one did you have sex with?’ he whispers when we’re seated. There are two men on stage performing.
‘Ah, which one do you think?’
‘That one?’
Yes, not the camp one dressed as a grandmother.
My former lover, the Magician, is playing a shoddy Houdini type of character and his co-star, the Camp Grandmother, is the only female assistant that the Magician’s cheapskate character can afford. There are eighty or so kids in the audience accompanied by parents. It doesn’t take too much to make the kids laugh, or the adults, and the men on stage do well to keep up a momentum of visual gags, cross purposes, fake bodily secretions and magic tricks that begin benignly but end up in catastrophe. Some of the gags are parents-only, wink wink, but the kids laugh all the same. The show ends with the Magician trying to turn the Camp Grandma into a nubile young woman but instead transforming her into a foot-long sub, which the Magician unwittingly takes a bite out of. The audience is gleeful as from offstage we hear the Camp Grandma yelp and then rush out with a red bite on his bum.
‘Was it bad sex?’ Radar asks me.
‘It was great sex.’
‘Why’d you have a falling out?’
‘Sometimes I’m not very good at respecting people’s feelings.’
‘Like now. You’re saying sorry by coming here on a date?’
He has a point.
Then the stage lights dim, the thrilled audience are illuminated. The Magician and the Camp Grandma bow and thank their fans for coming.
The seats start to clear and the full lights come up. I wave hello to the Magician, who waves back at me. Then he disappears backstage.
‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Missy,’ Radar says. ‘Just because I’m Jewish doesn’t mean that I’m pro-Israel.’
He laughs at a comment I’d made over email, at the idea of himself supporting the American-backed, Arab-blasting Zionist segments of Israeli society. He’s not Israeli anyway, but Polish.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘Pro-Israel! Man!’
‘Dumb, I know.’
‘Funny, really. You’re funny.’
I ask, ‘So where did Jewish people come from?’
It’s a pretty dumb question, I realise that as soon as I say it. It’s like someone asking me what country I’m from when I’ve just told them Hmong people don’t have a country and the well-meaning enquirer pausing and asking me again, no, really, what country is that?
‘Well, I can’t really answer that in terms of what country, what single country. Jewish people aren’t from any one country. Didn’t you know that? Or do you mean Israel? Basic twentieth-century history, Michele. They carved up Palestine after the Second World War. A chunk to us Jews, a chunk for the Arabs.’
I already know about that, and Husband had once sent me a bunch of links to websites exposing Israeli think-tanks that sponsored film festivals in Melbourne and all around the world. Husband was vocally anti-Israel.
I keep quiet.
Radar and I drive to South Melbourne. We get a two-hour park and then wander towards a side street. It’s empty and all the buildings that face onto it have closed industrial garage doors. It’s like a film set in a down period.
‘Nope! Wrong one,’ Radar says and we walk out of the street and into another side street. We find it this time. There aren’t too many people at St Ali on a Friday lunchtime.
‘This place gets really busy on the weekends,’ Radar says with an authority.
I haven’t been to St Ali before. Southside and all. As such, it’s all description to me, stories from write-ups in The Age and food blogs alleging that St Ali makes some of the best coffee in Melbourne. Inside, the decor borrows from the warehouse aesthetic on the nearby streets.
After the waitress walks off wit
h our lunch order, it’s just me and Radar with no magic show and no Israel between us. Do we or don’t we want to do short-term relationshipping today?
‘I was taking the piss by the way,’ he tells me. ‘I’m not bi.’
Yesterday when we’d texted to confirm details about our date, we went from details about where and when to meet to texting about blow jobs. He said he went either way, as far as sexuality goes. He’d spent some time in South-East Asia so he’s seen his share of ladyboys. I wrote back to say that I didn’t like the fact that Western men go to Asia for sex with Asian women or men. He didn’t reply.
He thinks it’s funny, the thoughts I have about him.
I say, ‘Have you ever kissed a guy?’
‘Once in La Paz. There was a big street festival on. This guy turned to me and started kissing me. I let him. He wanted to do more but I wasn’t keen.’
‘Have you ever fucked a guy?’
‘Nope.’
‘Sucked cock?’
‘Nope. But I had my cock sucked by a man. In Nairobi. But then it got, let’s say, weird and we stopped.’
Well, at least he tried. He strikes me as a guy who’d try anything once. I wonder if he did have sex with a prostitute in Asia. I used to think it was something divorced baby boomers do but I know young guys who’ve tried it because it’s there and they can. Like being offered opium in a ‘happy’ pancake or speeding on a motorcycle without a helmet.
I ask Radar if he’d had sex with a prostitute. He didn’t. No, no: prostitution in corrupt developing countries reinforces the wealth inequalities between developing and developed nations, and then there is the absence of a woman’s choice in the interaction, and it’s often just an economic exchange, and because it’s void of any intellectual or emotional stimulation, it doesn’t interest him at all. No, no.
He did, however, have an encounter with a ladyboy. Sort of.