Desperate Husbands

by Richard Glover

  A picture forms of a gaggle of people surrounding the chef, jostling to have a turn, so excited are they by the Electric Omelette Station. ‘Please let me have a turn, Mum,’ whines one teenage girl, as she elbows a transfixed grandfather out of the way. A sullen thirteen-year-old boy thumps aside his mesmerised aunt: ‘I don’t know what has come over me,’ says the boy. ‘Suddenly I have an all-consuming urge to cook.’

  No doubt the explanation lies in the further description of the product: the electric double-burner unit features non-stick die-cast construction, on/off indicator lights, and what is described as ‘a chrome finish with 24K gold-plated accents’.

  Up to now I thought ‘a gold-plated accent’ referred to a Toorak matron bunging on a posh voice, but I now see I was mistaken. You can imagine the sort of praise the inventor must have received around the office. It takes some effort to replace a single frypan with a five-piece set—and yet still achieve the same omelette sitting on the same plate.

  I make a cup of coffee and return in time for another set of ads—all of them for hair removal products. How can that be? Is Australia’s problem with unwanted hair bigger than I’d imagined? Or is it the time of day that’s to blame, with advertisements aimed at the after-midnight werewolf market?

  I recall that a good friend of mine once purchased one of these TV offers: the SoftPluck, a hair removal system in which each hair is removed so gently ‘you’ll hardly notice’. This, according to my friend, was code for ‘brutally wrench out each hair in turn until your eyes are streaming, and the air is rendered thick with the sound of wailing’. Which I guess is not quite as effective a sales pitch.

  Certainly, a picture is forming of my fellow viewers: hairy people with memory loss problems. The MassiveMemory ad has been on about five times, the phone number flashing for minutes at a time. I wonder if they ever sell anything. Either you can remember the number and thus don’t need the product. Or you need it, but haven’t the foggiest who to call.

  The weirdest thing is how so many products seem expressly designed for me. The SupaMop is ‘especially for people who want a beautifully clean house without all that scrubbing’. That’s me! I wonder how they knew. Meanwhile, the ChestFlexer is ‘specifically designed for those who want to achieve the perfect body’. That sentiment is entirely mine. Frankly, it’s spooky. All those who wish to achieve only moderately OK bodies, while they scrub away at their filthy surfaces, can step aside.

  I start thinking about my credit card. I could make the call NOW NOW NOW. But—even without the help of MassiveMemory—thoughts of past purchases come floating back. Thoughts of products such as the FireMaker—a metal box into which one pressed wet newspaper thus producing compressed-paper bricks which were guaranteed to ‘produce fuel for your fire which will save $$$ on electrical heaters’. I remember placing that order. I remember the excitement of making my first bricks. And I remember the way they stayed wet for weeks—finally forcing me to dry each brick, prior to use, in front of a blazing electrical heater, at the cost of a huge number of $$$ on my electricity bill.

  I make myself yet another cup of coffee and arrive back just in time to see a new offer from Danoz Direct. It is for an electronic letter opener which takes all the effort out of opening letters. As with the automatic prawn sheller, I suddenly realise the terrible inadequacy of my own fingers. ‘Don’t you just hate tearing important documents as you struggle to open envelopes!’ says the Danoz pitch, and straightaway I know what they mean. How often have I arrived home only to begin a half-hour tussle with the Telstra bill, a tussle which leaves the bill in shreds and me in tears, sobbing at the breakfast bar?

  ‘Now,’ continues Danoz, ‘thanks to the Electronic Letter Opener, your envelopes will virtually open themselves.’ I consider buying the product but am left wondering what I will do when the envelope arrives and I have no envelope opener with which to open the envelope containing the envelope opener. It’s a moment of existential angst that leaves me quite dissatisfied with late-night commercial TV.

  In a fit of pique, I switch to the dying moments of SBS and immediately fall into a deep slumber. When I awake I discover I am naked, forty kilos heavier, and can speak Slovenian. Now that’s what I call high-impact television.

  Hairy scary

  ‘Don’t come near me with that thing,’ says Jocasta, from her side of the bed. ‘You look like a sleazy creep. It’s like a dead slug, just sitting there on your face. It makes you look disgusting.’

  It’s true the moustache doesn’t suit me. For a start, it has somehow made my nose grow bigger. ‘How is that possible?’ I ask Jocasta, but she refuses to look, preferring to engage with a magazine photo essay on the actor Viggo Mortensen.

  On a beach holiday, the normal order must be overturned. Women who usually don’t give a damn about bikini waxing and nail polish are suddenly mad for it. Men who’ve spent the year meekly pruning and defoliating let their beards go wild.

  It’s like dress-up time for grown-ups. And so I’ve got the mo. It begins under the shower, halfway through shaving off a week’s growth. ‘I could stop right here and have a mo,’ I think to myself, and there seems no reason not to. These are the liberations of the Australian beach holiday. You can slough off your workaday self at the same time you slough off your clothes. In a pair of sluggos, you could be anybody. For instance, the sort of guy who has a mo.

  ‘What sort of guy has a mo?’ I ask Jocasta, as she hovers with her magazine, chanting the word ‘Viggo’ in the hypnotic manner of a Sufi priest. ‘A sleazy, creepy guy,’ says Jocasta distractedly, as she turns the magazine to better appreciate another shot of Viggo.

  I don’t think she’s right. As a mustachioed man, I think I’d be more decisive, more manly, stricter with myself and with the world. I’d probably drink less and be able to play sport. The question is: is it worth gaining all of the above if I also get a bigger nose?

  ‘Do you think my nose has actually grown bigger or does it just look bigger?’ I ask Jocasta, but she doesn’t seem to hear me.

  ‘What colour of nail polish do you think Viggo would like on a woman?’ is all she says, rocking her magazine from side to side to better appreciate the effect of sunlight on the actor’s skin.

  ‘Pink,’ I suggest. ‘An actor would love something theatrical.’ I’m hoping an answer from me might garner one from her; a tactic which fails to work. ‘He’s not just an actor, you know,’ says Jocasta. ‘He’s also a poet, a horseman, and he speaks ten languages.’

  The next day we’re playing beach cricket. Jocasta is bowling, wearing bright pink nail polish on her toes. She’s never worn nail polish in her life but such are the transformations of the beach. Our mate Neil whacks the ball hard, on a fast, low trajectory. I stretch to the left, wondering whether I’ll miss the ball entirely as usual or instead catch it, fumble for a while, and then drop it. I look down to check the manner of my disgrace only to find the ball nestled sweetly in my hand. In a summer of sporting firsts, here’s another. I’ve caught a cricket ball. The moustache has more power than I thought.

  During the 1970s, I spent most of my leisure time trying to summon up a single chest hair on my otherwise hairless torso. I’d brace my body, shut my eyes, hold my breath and squeeze. Under this sort of pressure the usual result was an explosive fart, together with the odd ruptured pimple. But the hoped-for hair never put in an appearance.

  Hair seemed to be some sort of code for masculinity. On TV, cricketers like Dennis Lillee mocked me with their ever-larger moustaches. Schoolmates would undo successive shirt buttons to reveal gorilla-like thatches. There was so much pure manliness knotted inside the bodies of my compatriots, it just kept bursting out—that seemed to be the unstated message. ‘Mate, every time I have a shower, more of it grows; I just can’t help myself’—that seemed to be what they were saying.

  As a teenager whose main interests were theatre and the odd book, I needed all the masculinity I could get. Desperate, I considered pasting onto my chest a poultice
of Dynamic Lifter; or, at last resort, the purchase of a chest wig. The chest wig I rejected due to the cost; the Dynamic Lifter due to the quite incredible smell.

  As the seventies wore on, the hair on every bloke’s head became progressively longer and less restrained. Some attempted sideburns, beards, even mutton chops. Chest hair, if it could be summoned up, was proudly displayed—framed in the V-for-victory of a partially unbuttoned body shirt. Women, too, threw away their blades and let hair joyfully sprout from their legs and underarms. With every year that passed, the country became hairier. By 1976, it appeared the nation would soon resemble Cousin It from The Addams Family, with severe consequences for road safety.

  Finally, through dint of effort, some time around my early twenties I achieved a small fuzz on the upper lip and just enough chest hairs to award them individual names. (‘Hi Trevor’, ‘Hi Douglas’, ‘Hi Angelique’.) And now, years on, right at the end of the summer holidays, I have finally graduated to the mo—and with it the yearned-for masculinity.

  Some strangers wander up and join our cricket game. They must think of me as a mustachioed man, and of Jocasta as a woman who habitually wears pink nail polish. I find this strangely appealing. One of the newcomers takes up the bat and hooks the ball skywards. It arcs up high, sits for a moment and then heads down towards me. There’s an eternity in which to position myself and contemplate the catch. For me, this signals disaster: the more time I have to think about a catch, the more time my mind has to catalogue all the ways in which I’ll drop it.

  As the ball falls, I remember the time when I was the assistant coach of Batboy’s baseball team. Steve, the coach, would put me on first base and try to teach the boys the rules of the game. ‘The batter,’ he’d explain, ‘runs towards first base, and at the same I throw the ball—really fast and hard—towards Richard like this…’

  There’d be a pause as they all watched the ball travel towards me.

  ‘Yeah, OK, well let’s just imagine he caught it,’ Steve would say, brightly. ‘If he’d caught it, that runner would then be out.’

  Back at the beach, I can feel everyone watching me. Never before has a ball moved so slowly; so precisely towards a waiting fielder. It must be the easiest catch in the history of beach cricket. I scrunch up my eyes, jerk my arms into the air and feel the ball drop perfectly into my hands. ‘Great catch,’ someone yells. I breathe out, and give the moustache an appreciative rub. The thicker the mo gets, the more my play resembles that of a young Dennis Lillee.

  ‘I think it’s changed your personality,’ says Jocasta that night, as she changes her nail polish colour to an electric sapphire blue. ‘What happened to the man I shacked up with—incompetent, self-pitying, hopeless at games and unable to control his drinking? Frankly, I’d got used to that guy.’

  Maybe she has a point. What sort of guy has a moustache? Not a guy like me. The mo has to go. So does her nail polish, and the magazine with Viggo. The next morning, the last day of our holidays, I shave the thing off. Almost instantly, my nose returns to its normal size. We have a final game of beach cricket with Jocasta bowling, her toes reassuringly unadorned. I take the bat, miss her first three balls, and get clean-bowled on the fourth.

  The holidays are over; and so is the new me.

  He used to be taller

  It’s my view that we should make no preparations for my mother’s arrival. None at all. ‘She’s the one with the problem,’ I tell Jocasta. ‘Why should we get uptight about it?’

  But Jocasta just shakes her head. ‘You don’t understand. The woman of the household always gets the blame. It will be on my head. Not yours.’

  My mother believes we live like pigs in our own filth. She will arrive on Wednesday wearing white gloves to ward off the germs, and will insist on washing all our glassware, plates and cooking utensils before she agrees to eat anything prepared in our kitchen. During her last visit, she located the Spray n’Wipe, and attacked our stove top—squirting in so much cleaning fluid that the thing wouldn’t work for three months. Many women of her generation have a cleaning fetish, but not many have actually cleaned one of their son’s appliances to death.

  My mother also believes that I’m obscenely overweight and possibly close to death. She will arrive wearing a solicitous look, pulling her white gloves on ever-tighter, as her eyes swivel between my belly and the stained kitchen benchtops. She will exercise self-control and decide to say nothing—the corners of her pursed lips twitching with the effort. It is an effort at self-control that will break down in a spectacular fashion sometime on the second day.

  And so I scrub and I diet.

  I say to Jocasta: ‘Why should you be responsible for the fact that I’m just the tiniest bit overweight? It’s nothing to do with you. I don’t care what she says, and neither should you.’

  Jocasta replies in a dull, beaten-down monotone, as she scrubs at a recalcitrant piece of skirting: ‘You know nothing,’ she says. ‘It’s the patriarchy. The woman always gets the blame. The mother blames the wife, and never the precious son. Oh, no. He’s perfect.’

  It’s true my mother has two photographs of me on her hall table. They are side by side—one of me at age fourteen, looking painfully thin. And another, taken a year ago, in which I’m photographed from below in a way that makes me look like Marlon Brando after a binge. Says Jocasta: ‘It’s her way of saying, “This is him when I looked after him; and here he is under the regime of that fat girlfriend of his.”’

  Jocasta squirts some Spray n’Wipe onto her cloth and starts singing a mournful slave song from the American south. She appears hopeful that some sort of chariot might swing low and take her to heaven, sometime before Wednesday.

  Says Jocasta: ‘She’ll think the shower recess is dirty, but actually it isn’t. The tiles are permanently stained, and so is the grouting, but I’ll get the blame. I think you should regrout it.’

  I reply: ‘I’m not going to regrout the whole bathroom just so my mother can have a single shower on Christmas Day. You’re insane.’

  I clean the ceiling of the kitchen with sugar soap—a job which sends rivulets of caustic chemicals straight into my eyes. After further discussion with Jocasta, I then decide to regrout the bathroom. The process takes about four hours. The house is getting cleaner and surely—by mere dint of sweaty effort—I’m getting thinner. Maybe this time we’ll reach Day Three of The Visit before my mother and I have our standard conversation:

  HER: ‘I can see you’re not doing anything about your weight problem.’

  ME: ‘It’s nothing to do with you, Mum. I’m not that fat and, besides, why don’t you mind your own business?’

  HER: ‘I would, but it’s a health issue, darling.’

  For her, it’s like trying to ignore the huge elephant in the room, the one named Richard. For me, it’s a matter of contemplating my time in Long Bay should I snap and kill her. So I exercise as I clean—wiping the cupboards, polishing the benchtops and chucking expired medicines from the bathroom cabinet.

  Jocasta says: ‘Don’t leave any medicine bottles at all. They are evidence of illness. She’ll think we got sick because we live like pigs in our own filth.’ Jocasta is on her hands and knees in the bathtub, scrubbing while she sings ‘Oh Lord, Will You Let My People Go’ in a yearning alto.

  I wash down the back of the house, vacuum some crumbs out of the kitchen drawers and wash down the kitchen windows. As I peer through the soap scum into the kitchen, I see Jocasta collecting up the cleaning products, putting them in boxes and hiding them in cupboards, so that my mother cannot once again kill our stove. After years of preparing for my father’s visits by removing all the alcohol, she now repeats the procedure. Instead of hiding the Scotch, this time she hides all the bottles of Domestos.

  Meanwhile, I tackle our bedroom—discovering five apple cores beneath my desk and a beer bottle under the bed. The thought strikes: maybe my mother is right and we do live like pigs in our own filth.

  Outside the back door, Jocasta i
s spraying the dog with air-freshener and singing ‘Death Be My Friend and Take Me to My Lord’, while I consult her list. Three days to go and all I have to do is clean the car, scrub the steps and lose six kilos.

  The day before Christmas, my mother arrives. She looks at the house but says nothing. She then gives Jocasta a hug, after which she draws me aside, saying Jocasta is ‘a natural mother’. This, I’m pretty sure, is my mother’s codeword for ‘fat’. At least she hasn’t said anything about me. We go for a walk, me slightly ahead with the dog, while Jocasta walks along with my mother. I take comfort from the fact that (a) I’m not that overweight—not after all that cleaning; and (b) to the extent that I am a little overweight, Jocasta will get all the blame.

  I can feel my mother’s eyes on me as I walk. I sense she is battling with herself about whether to say anything. As usual, it is a battle her better self rapidly loses. ‘Ah,’ sighs my mother, confiding in Jocasta. ‘It’s such a shame. He used to be taller.’

  Desperate Husbands

  For us guys, it’s great to have a new drama show to hook into—one that’s about our lives. This time around it’s the new hit series Desperate Husbands. It’s only been on for one season but already you hear of groups of guys getting together—maybe one brings the beers, another the nachos—and settling down to watch. There’s been so much TV for women recently—Sex and the City and Footballers’ Wives—we guys are hungry for the chance to get together, relax, and reserve a little time for ourselves, and for our friendship. This new show—Desperate Husbands—gives us that chance.