‘Mate, for us, the whole thing is just a scream,’ says organiser Dennis, of Perth. ‘I mean, people paying $32 for a steak! Bottles of wine for $25! And haircuts for blokes costing $70. The other day I saw an advert for a frypan costing $320.’ Dennis’s eyes start to water with mirth at the memory, the tears rolling down his face. ‘I know it’s rotten to laugh at minorities, but we do get some innocent pleasure from the style-setters.’
Dennis’s float features a large freezer full of budget-priced meats, and late in the parade he’s hoping to meet up with the Blokes Who Build Barbecues. The result should be just like the party at the end of the other Mardi Gras: absolutely sizzling.
Charm Offensive
Remember’, says Jocasta at the Parent-Teacher night, ‘I’m counting on you to break his spirit. That’s why we pay our taxes; for exactly this sort of professional help.’
The Space Cadet’s teacher grimaces. ‘I do try to break his spirit,’ she says. ‘But every time I crush a little bit of it, another bit pops up.’
The Space Cadet has been born with rather too much personal charm. Too much of a cheeky smile. It worries me. Out in the playground, some Year Six girls are carrying The Space Cadet around as if he’s something between a small deity and a stuffed toy. He giggles, wriggles loose from their arms, and runs in fast circles around them.
I hear Jocasta, plotting with the teacher, suggesting various methods to crush his spirit. ‘He’s so cute,’ chorus the girls outside. Whatever Jocasta and the teacher come up with, I get the feeling it won’t be much of an antidote to this.
I don’t know how to deal with The Space Cadet: I was always an ungainly and ugly child. I wonder whether it wasn’t a better start in life.
When I was a baby my ears stuck out so badly my mother decided to Sellotape them down in the hope of changing the direction of their growth. The Gloved-One did this daily, first thing in the morning, plastering them down from several angles like a difficult-to-wrap package.
She did this right up until the district nurse visited and suggested it might be the cause of the bright red rash that suddenly had broken out, right around my skull.
Anyways, between the bright red rash and the bounced-back ears there weren’t a lot of people crowding around my pram. Tough at the time perhaps. But at least I didn’t develop any early illusions about life. Now, of course, the rash has long died down, I have a balanced attitude about my attractiveness to others, and my ears are relatively flat. (‘That’s because of the Sellotaping,’ points out my mother, pretty much whenever I see her.)
I wonder if this isn’t the answer with The Space Cadet. We could make it a family tradition, and Sellotape his ears to make them stick out. At least he’d have something to worry about.
A friend says that when his two daughters are in their late adolescence, he’ll be happy for them to be escorted out by Batboy, who, he is convinced, will drive carefully and return them home on time. He’d like it to be known, right now, that calls from The Space Cadet will not be received — rather too much blond hair; too much of a glint in the eye. The need to crush his spirit becomes a yet more urgent task.
By the time of my adolescence, my mother had given up on the ears, and was focusing on the teeth. This time she sought professional help, and consulted an orthodontist. (Sellotape would have gone limp in the mouth.)
After enduring braces for two years, I removed the whole $2 000 contraption, in one my rare displays of adolescent defiance. Out in the shed one desperate afternoon, I did the deed, loosening the glue using a chisel, a hammer and a pair of pliers.
From memory I had a date that night, and had decided my hoped-for girlfriend might not like kissing me with my braces. (As opposed to the bleeding, chisel-chipped gums and glue-stained teeth with which I instead presented her.)
In a neat parallel to the Sellotape affair, it soon became obvious I’d removed the braces about a year too soon. More patience, and today I’d be Brad Pitt.
I wonder about The Space Cadet. What if the teachers can’t break his spirit? Is there anyone who could perform a bit of reverse orthodontics?
Back in the playground, The Space Cadet is standing on the library steps, dancing and waving at the Year Six girls. ‘Come and get me,’ he shouts, before running, hands outstretched, straight towards them.
A set of buck teeth, to match his dad’s? It may be our only hope.
The Milk-Crate Couch
It has come to this: standing with Jocasta looking at curtain fabrics, attempting to be proper grown-ups. Suddenly, under this sort of pressure, I have a rush of nostalgia. This fifteen-bucks-a-metre curtain fabric is all very well, but what of the decorating I used to do in my early twenties? The decorating that is still practised with such flamboyance by young blokes everywhere.
We know about the Bauhaus movement, the minimalists, and the Federation style. But has anyone thought to record that unique, indigenous style? That school of decorating we could, with pride, call ‘Australian young guy’.
Surely now is the time.
Furniture
The fans of the Australian vernacular are already buying up the nation’s Laminex tables and bright orange lamps. How much longer before the antique shops feature that other rustic creation of the 1960s and ‘70s: the upside-down milk-crate couch? First developed by two Brisbane lads in the early ‘60s, it soon swept the nation. It was the soft southerners who added the piece of foam placed atop the four milk crates; and the Adelaide guys who, with their customary sense of style, added two more milk crates, placed opposite the couch, to provide a sort of conversation pit.
Later, some say from Darwin, came the idea of adding a coffee table — typically a casual, eclectic affair. Again the emphasis on the ‘found object’ — an upturned garbage bin, a wooden fruit box, an empty wine cask.
Which brings us to the scatter cushions. Having emptied the wine cask, one often found oneself in urgent need of a pillow. Only to find that God — or Berri Estates — had miraculously provided one, right there in the box. Over months, the resulting silver, blown-up wine-bladders bestowed an edge of night-club glamour to many a lounge room.
Add a bookshelf, made of teetering planks balanced on ill-matched bricks, and you’d have achieved something pretty close to ‘The Look’.
Upholstery
In some houses the milk-crate couch was rendered unnecessary, due to the possession of an old settee, usually losing its stuffing. Would the young guys spend $2 000 having it recovered in a fine damask? Well, no. I once lived in a house in Brisbane in which one of the great innovations occurred. My memory is that it was a fellow called Marcus who first had the idea; his clarity of vision still cannot fail to impress.
Faced with a worn-out couch, Marcus visited the local auto-care centre, and invested $20 in a stretchy Holden car-seat cover. It took us a while to fit it over our old couch, pulling it down over the back, tying it around the bottom, and cutting it in around the armrest. But for months it conferred upon the flat all the sophistication of an international motor show.
Floor Coverings
On the floor? Not so much throw rugs, as thrown rugs — bits of carpet chucked away by the neighbours. But still good for soaking up the oil from the half-dismantled Kawasaki motorbike taking pride of place in the middle of the floor.
Posters
Position! Position! Position! People often used to comment on our poster positioning: it was certainly eclectic. One poster in the corner of the room, right up near the ceiling. A second right down near the floor, beside the kitchen cupboards. Was it designed to create a sense of space and freedom? No, it was designed to hide the two spots where serious mould had broken out.
Indeed, occasionally the poster of Elvis used to positively glisten with moisture, much along the lines of the weeping Madonnas of southern Italy. For what did Elvis weep? Well, probably for the general standard of food preparation and hygiene. In this house, not only did all our T-shirts say ‘support wildlife’, they actually did it.
For curtaining, we usually opted for the flannelette sheet thumb-tacked to the architrave; while a ‘lived-in’ feel was happily provided by the empty pizza boxes gaily scattered about the floor.
Back in the curtain shop, Jocasta and I are torn between plaid and the textured linen. We are aware of the problem: we have too little good taste to choose well; but just enough to realise, once the credit card leaves our hand, that we’ll have made a shocking mistake.
We’ll have to borrow some young guy’s milk-crate couch, put our feet up, and have a good hard think.
Hard Yards
My father-in-law stands at the back door, and shakes his head. Like all persons over sixty he knows about gardens, about mulch, about fertilisers. He examines the devastation before he speaks. ‘But you must have realised it would be a disaster,’ is all he says.
From the faraway look in his eyes, it seems he’s finally aware of the very murky genetic pool into which his daughter has leapt.
Together, we stare at the strange patterns on the grass: a sharply drawn circle of dead grass, cross-hatched with tall sprigs of luminous green. The whole backyard looks like a painting by Kandinsky — full of weird squiggles and semicircles of dead grass.
‘I mean, it’s not hard,’ my father-in-law adds. ‘The instructions are on the packet. Did you read the packet?’
I shift a little from foot to foot. ‘No,’ I say, ‘I didn’t read the packet.’
‘Humph’, says my father-in-law, with a small self-satisfied smile. ‘Well, I always read the packet.’
I find myself wondering if my father-in-law, if properly composted, could be turned into a useful sort of mulch.
This is one of the things about men who are over sixty. For years, they operated on the ancient male principle of reading the instructions only when all else has failed. Now, tragically, their testosterone levels have rapidly dropped. Right down to a level where they may be in danger of behaving sensibly.
I finally say: ‘What I did was to take a guess at it.’ The guess, in this case, was that you should pour half a pack of lawn fertiliser into a single watering can, before searching around the house for the rose that fits on the end of the can, then, having failed to find it, decide to do the job anyway.
‘I just figured,’ I say to my father-in-law, ‘that if I sort of danced about, letting the watering can spin around, then it would sort of splash out evenly.’
It was at this point that my father-in-law rolled his eyes. Thus turning any action I might take against him into a quite defensible crime passionnel. Four years maximum sentence. With good behaviour, I could well be out by the Christmas after next. By which time, my extra-nutritious mulch would surely have solved all my gardening problems.
As far as I can see, there are only two or three options with lawn: you can fertilise it, and watch it die; or leave it to Mother Nature, and watch it die.
Or, alternatively, you could attack your over-critical father-in-law with an axe and, two months later, ensconced in your cell with three over-friendly Tongans, find that lawn care is no longer foremost in your mind.
It’s the same story with the compost heap, which, my father-in-law says, if properly built, will not smell. And so I’ve built the whole thing to his instructions, only to discover that the reason it doesn’t smell is the army of mice who eat everything before it’s had the chance to rot.
I consider offering some tart criticisms, but by now he’s wandered off. He’s walking around the lawn, following the trail of the of the luminous, long grass growing in lines where my over-strength fertiliser slopped from the watering can.
Unluckily for me, he’s moved into his amused mode. ‘Actually, one could plot your progress,’ he says, matching his feet to the patches of green. ‘It’s like the steps of a dance. Recorded in the grass.’
At this point, my father-in-law begins performing a lunatic’s dance on the lawn, tracing my steps, flinging his hands in the air, letting his head loll from side to side. He prances about, occasionally throwing his head back to laugh at my expense. Watching him, I no longer want to mulch my father-in-law. Submerged in concrete, and then turned out to dry, he’d actually make a most striking garden gnome.
He leaps high, his feet spinning in the air, landing on either side of the green stripes.
I consider his past advice. At considerable effort I put in a garden pool (result: massive increase in mosquitoes). I put in a large tree (result: massive increase in leaves dumped on lawn). And I put in a rockery (result: massive increase in trips to the nursery after all the plants die).
Why, considering this, do I feel so inadequate next to the old boy, just because he can throw around terms such as top-dressing and aeration? Finally, I approach him.
‘I know I’m a dope,’ I offer.
‘Not at all,’ he says, throwing a paternal arm around my shoulder. ‘I don’t understand you young blokes. You don’t seem to understand that gardening is boring. In my day, we’d have just concreted the bastard over.’
OK. Sure. Now, finally, I will have to kill him.
Letterbug
When I went on holidays, I told my colleague, Tony Squires, to open all my mail. ‘Everything, mate,’ I said grandly. ‘Don’t worry if it says “private” on the envelope or anything; it might be something urgent.’ This — and I mention it in case you ever consider issuing such an invitation yourself — was a staggeringly stupid mistake.
I got back after holidays to find Squires dancing up and down the corridor, waving a handwritten letter and guffawing merrily. ‘It seemed a bit personal so I didn’t read past the first page,’ he lied.
He thrust the thing into my hand and instantly the full horror was revealed. It was a love letter. Worse. It was written by me. When I was fifteen. And it ended by quoting large slabs of Kahlil Gibran.
The woman, who’d received my letter twenty-five years before, had — with perfect timing — chosen this moment to uncover it during her house-move and post it straight into the welcoming hands of Mr Squires. That same Mr Squires who, a full two weeks later, can’t pass me in the corridor without his lips tightening into a small, suppressed smile.
Of course, in Newcastle, where Squires grew up, they don’t have love letters; it’s just a matter of a quick feel-up in the back of dad’s Commodore. But, for the rest of us, the adolescent love letter remains a uniquely embarrassing literary form.
How embarrassing? Ah, let me count the ways.
Borrowed Verse
All teenage love letters have some borrowed verse, and it’s nearly always one of the same three poems: the lofty thing from Andrew Marvell, the hippie thing from Kahlil Gibran, and the slightly sexy thing from e. e. cummings. Indeed, my letter may provide some sort of record in including all three. (Which is one up on Mr Squires, who presumably did his serenading armed with a copy of Limericks Lewd and Lusty.)
Margin Art
If it doesn’t contain a poorly executed attempt at artwork, then it’s not a real teenage love letter. Mine, for instance, contains a very colourful, and almost unrecognisable, attempt at a field of daisies — which alone may explain why the recipient of the letter has taken twenty-five years to contact me again. Would I have done better with two intertwined hearts? With a geometric? With an AC/DC logo? These questions torment me still.
Political/Philosophical Chat
It’s always important to include a few slogans in your letter, just to dignify the whole process. Mine, for instance, contains some pretty tough political comments about Malcolm Fraser. Indeed, some sort of discussion about how The Dismissal was engineered by ‘you know, real fascists’ was the precursor to nearly all my teenage snog sessions — so much so that the mere mention of Malcolm Fraser’s name still gives me a small erotic charge.
Pathetic Attempts at Grown-Up Talk
This is a must. You may be fifteen years old, and so may she — but there’s no need to admit it. What you need is a pathetic and obvious attempt to talk
like a grown-up. I can see I’m going to be forced to quote a slab of my letter, to show you what I mean. Thus: ‘Woke up this morning at the god-awful sonavabitch time of 6 o’clock, so I am at this moment sitting in the school canteen trying to resurrect myself with hot chocolate.’
It is, if I say so myself, a superb example of the form — the Clint Eastwood tough-talk of ‘sonavabitch’ rubbing up so disastrously with the truthful admission of ‘hot chockie’. Embarrassing? Oh, yes.
Actual Promises
These, I note, are completely missing in this early — and failed — attempt at winning love, but are present during my rather more successful wooing of Jocasta. Indeed, by Jocasta’s time, my love-letter techniques had improved to include the bare-faced lie — in particular, at one clearly desperate point, the claim that I’d do half the housework if she’d only let me move in. Add the constant pretentious literary references, and it seems clear that Jocasta thought she was getting some sort of fey intellectual with a cleaning fetish.
(Which must have been a shock when I finally moved in with my six weeks of dirty laundry, a Honda step-through motorcycle and the homebrew kit.)
Déjà View
Most of us watch TV, and most have a sense of déjà vu when we’re doing it. Have we seen it all before? Sure. Largely because all of TV is governed by a secret rule book.
Every office in sitcom America has a short, perky, libidinous red-head with kooky clothes and no apparent job.
Any injury whatsoever to a Jehovah’s Witness will require a blood transfusion.
Minor characters in TV drama, despite appearing weekly over a number of years, never get a change of clothes.
Supermarket shopping, carried into the kitchen, only ever consists of one bag. It never contains toilet paper.
In Bed with Jocasta Page 11