Ralph had harboured a crush on Maxi for a while, and not long after he saw the centrefold spread, he felt it was time to bite the bullet. The short, skinny, borderline-ugly boy suddenly shot up at sixteen and started filling out. Now seventeen, and unlike his short and stocky family, he stood at just over six feet. Ralph had developed broad shoulders, a nice pair of biceps and a washboard stomach. The coke-bottle glasses were gone, replaced by contact lenses so you could see his brown, puppy-dog eyes without the distortion. His pearly-whites framed by Cupid’s bow lips were now in proportion to his roundish face with its strong jaw. His hair had thickened and he wore it just above his shoulders. In short, Ralph had become very good-looking. Tweety Bird had transmogrified into a knockout (those of us in the know were careful not to liken his development to the ugly duckling story).
Looks aside, Maxi agreed to go out with Ralph based on the eyeful she copped that day in his backyard. Maxi called me early one Sunday morning three weeks into their relationship.
‘We screwed.’
‘Ooh, ooh! How was it?’ I asked eagerly.
She sighed. ‘He must have been speed-reading Masters and Johnson that day in your bedroom. He couldn’t master his johnson ... so no time even to look for my on-switch! And it hurt.’
I sighed. I was just as disappointed as Maxi. In my Kathleen Woodiwiss novels, as the hero plunges his throbbing, turgid shaft into the virginal heroine’s mossy grotto, after her initial cry of surprise and pain, she always writhes and moans in ecstasy as she arches against him. Always. Vette and Maxi might have looked like heroines of romance novels, but neither of their first sexual encounters reflected this. My faith in this genre to tell it like it is was badly shaken and it occurred to me that maybe Sylvia was right about sex. She’d told me a woman wasn’t supposed to enjoy it—‘Sex is just for the man’. Ralph kind of confirmed this when he turned up grinning from ear to ear not long after I hung up from Maxi.
‘I despoiled Maxi last night.’
Jesus! Who the hell speaks this way unless you’re Macbeth, Macduff or Hamlet?
We were used to Ralph’s turn of phrase, but Maxi found being in a relationship with him exhausting. ‘He’s weird.’
Really? You’re just noticing this?
‘He always taps things twice or repeats himself. Is there something wrong with him?’
‘Not that I know of.’ I wasn’t about to betray Ralph’s trust. No one else knew about his disorder.
‘Well, I’ve had enough.’
Ralph was desolate when Maxi ended it, but he came to accept that she only wanted friendship, nothing more. He didn’t speak to her for a few weeks, though.
After Ralph, Maxi really did become a ‘nice’ girl. ‘I’ve already got the reputation; may as well live up to it.’
At the time, the sexual revolution was gaining momentum. Maxi took advantage of these socially liberated attitudes, and she was having fun. For about six months, she bonked a different guy every week. Then, she met Marcus, MD.
Marcus was twenty-eight and didn’t seem her type (she usually went for the Cat Stevens kind, or the complete opposite—brawn). A surgical registrar, Marcus was average looking, average height, clean-cut, and clean-shaven. He was also supercilious and had such super small feet, it looked like he’d been a victim of foot binding.
A couple of months after they started dating, Maxi caught up with Vette, Ralph and me one Saturday afternoon at a little café near my place. Marcus didn’t join us. In between his long hours at the hospital and seeing Maxi, he liked to catch up on his sleep. And ‘doing coffee’ wasn’t his cup of tea. More to the point, we weren’t his cup of tea. Guess what, fancy-pants!
‘Uh, what do you see in him?’ Vette asked, tentatively.
A crooked half-smile played on Maxi’s lips. ‘Well ... when God made Marcus, He gave him a choice: big feet or big dick.’
Vette and I laughed; Ralph didn’t. Seems he still had some lingering resentment towards her for dumping him, and now he really did not get why she had.
‘The two aren’t mutually exclusive, you know,’ he said, cockily as he crossed his right leg over his left one in a figure four position, and waggled his size twelve well-shod foot.
Maxi gave him a long, hard look and winked. ‘I know that.’
Didn’t we all? The whole bloody kith and kin knew that!
Listening to these two fence was entertaining. They were alike in so many ways. One oblique, the other brazen, they were both smart arses, which was probably why they couldn’t make it work. But I questioned Maxi’s devotion to Marcus; asked her how she tolerated his snootiness even if his throbbing, turgid shaft was a sizeable one. She just shrugged. A month later, though, she dropped him.
‘A big schlong doesn’t compensate for a small mind.’
We stared at her, open-mouthed.
‘What? ... I’m not shallow!’
Ralph gazed at Maxi with a well-I-have-the-best-of-both-worlds look on his face. And maybe it had something to do with his disorder, but he generally inclined towards both worlds. After Maxi, he had yo-yoed between sexual famine and feast. Then he met someone who ritualised feast/famine/feast/famine ...
Monique was bulimic. Ralph spent most of the money he earned from his job in a men’s clothing store on her. He wined and dined her. She snarfed and barfed. Monique was also monochromic: everything was black and white in her world. This would suit someone with OCPD to a T. But Ralph’s tendency to think colourfully was at odds with his disorder. And his tendency to think outside the box was at odds with his relationship with Monique. We could only assume the attraction to her related to his overwhelming desire and tendency to think inside the box. Outside of that, we couldn’t understand the appeal (Monique was a vain, social-climbing, bleached blonde scrag). Nor did we get a chance to.
Ralph gushed about his new squeeze in the early days—Mons this and Mons that—but when Maxi asked if her last name was Veneris or Pubis (and Vette and I laughed), Ralph refused to talk to the three of us for a good month. Then he unexpectedly turned up on my doorstep early one Saturday morning.
‘It’s over. I’m done with her ... and I’ve missed you, Ruthie.’
‘I’ve missed you too! What happened?’
Mons was a catalogue model who had her sights set on the catwalk, and although she was the right height, she couldn’t make it because her legs were too short.
‘I told her vomiting would thin out her legs, not elongate them. She got so upset, she pilfered food from my plate and then, she threw that up! My food!’
Geez. Imagine.
‘Well, we had a big fight. She called me Daffy ... ’ Ralph’s voice broke and he got misty-eyed ‘… and that was it for me!’
Ralph went back to his loose ways for a while, but then he reconnected with Gwen, who found his outré behaviour adorable. A few weeks after they started going out, I asked him if he’d been harvesting caterpillars.
‘Don’t need to. She has her own home-grown army of them.’
While Ralph mounted a coup at every opportunity, I was getting cabin fever. The only viable solution was to sustain a loss: my virginity. Meantime, the beaver might be hiding in the backwoods, but it had been my ‘pet’ since before Sylvia issued her bullshit injunction. She couldn’t stop me from playing with it!
CHAPTER THREE:
DATES & LEMONS
Other than myself, there were plenty of takers, but it had to be the right one. A couple of months after the camp, I landed my first boyfriend, Zach Cohen. Before I met him, I’d chalked up a reasonable snog log and was a seasoned kisser, even though I had practised on a lot of frogs. Zach also turned out to be one of them.
At sixteen, he was a year older than me. Ironically, he was someone I did not want to lock lips with. The first time I saw Zach was at a party, where he was wheedling all the girls into pashing him. Zach came across as an overweening weasel and I told him to get out of my face when he tried it on with me. This just piqued his interest. And when he found out
I fancied Aaron, who was his cousin, it seemed to make me all the more appealing. So, Zach pursued me relentlessly. And Sylvia relentlessly pestered me to go out with him because he was Jewish. Eventually, I relented. I need to make it perfectly clear it was not because I took her advice; it was just that where Zach was addicted to the thrill of the chase, I was addicted to feeling wanted.
Zach wasn’t much to look at, but he had a certain je ne sais quoi that charmed the girls. The thing with Zach, though, was that he engaged in serial monogamy ... with a twist. Obviously, being a monogamist, he was not the kind of guy who had two relationships happening at once. Instead, he had one relationship happening twice. Zach was a sequential recycler. The best way to explain this is mathematically because his dating practices followed an algebraic formula.
Zach would date girl A for a couple of months, then he’d move on to girl B (without bothering to inform A that their relationship was kaput). After dating girl B, also for a couple of months, he’d move onto girl C. As in the case with girls A and B, girl C was not notified that her number (or letter) was up. Two months into his relationship with C, Zach moved on to girl D, then E, then F (all in much the same manner). But here is where the equation gets a tad complicated. Rather than advancing from F to G, as one would expect, Zach went back to the beginning and dated A again. He then progressed chronologically (every two months) through B, C, D, and E, stopping at F once more. This is called a repeat pattern in algebra. And because repeat patterns are key in algebraic thinking, seems Zach made sure to pick girls who weren’t too good at maths, me included.
This enterprise of his had a biennial life cycle—Zach changed the pattern every two years. In other words, after completing the second cycle with A, B, C, D, E, and F (six girls x two months per girl = twelve months + the same six girls x another lot of two months per girl = twenty-four months), Zach then started a new cycle with girls G, H, I, J, K, and L times two, and so forth. I may not have been a maths whizz, but as my second go-round with him was nearing the two-month mark, I put two and two together and told him to bugger off. No loss for him (he didn’t like it that my breasts and pawpaw were off limits). The horny toad just leapfrogged onto the next in line.
‘Why do you suppose he does that?’ Vette asked Ralph.
‘How would I know?’
‘Uh, you’re a guy, and guys are mathematically minded.’
Ralph just shrugged, and while Maxi and Vette were throwing around some possibilities, he whispered in my ear, ‘Maybe Zach’s also got OCPD.’
Then Maxi piped up, ‘I reckon he gets two bites of the cherry because he just never succeeds in popping anyone’s!’
Zach eventually did, though. He got married ten years later, presumably for love, or maybe just because he’d exhausted the whole alphabet.
Not long after I ditched him, I met Reuben. Sylvia and Joe dragged Myron and me along to a fundraiser. We were sitting at the same table as Reuben and his parents, and he and I chatted for most of the evening. Even at eighteen and a half (two years older than me), Reuben was a staid, dependable sort. Of medium build and medium height, with thick black hair, brown eyes and a dark complexion, Reuben was good-looking. He was also fun to be with, but after four months of dating, I lost interest in him. I wasn’t ready for Mr Reliability. I was looking for Mr Excitement. So I moved on, mostly through dead-end relationships, though. Like my friends, I had my share of these.
Because Maxi, Vette and I knew the best place to meet guys was at a discothèque, most Saturday nights the three of us would go to Swinger, a mid-city disco. Ralph came with us occasionally, but he preferred to save his money (probably for more underpants).
I already had my driver’s licence and I had a car. Joe owned a service station and a small used car yard, so he gave Myron and me cars to get around in. Mine was a Mini Cooper in British Racing Green, and Myron drove a Holden HK Monaro GTS with mag wheels and a Lukey Muffler. It was yellow and had two thick black stripes running vertically along the hood and the boot on the driver’s side. Myron liked to show off in it; it was the only time boy wonder let his short, back and sides down. Myron ‘Wild Thing’ Roth burned rubber! He’d rev and rev, and then floor the accelerator. This car was his window of opportunity to make noise.
I didn’t need a souped up car for that. Making noise is what a pest does best. For most of the week, I drove Sylvia up the wall and round the bend. And on Saturday nights, I drove Maxi, Vette and myself to Swinger.
Although we hadn’t yet reached the legal drinking age when we first started going to Swinger, we looked over eighteen and were never asked for ID when we bought drinks. I usually got an ouzo and Coke, not because I liked the taste; I didn’t. I just needed to look cool in the eyes of the man I’d fallen in love with.
He was tall and lean with a set of teeth so white and straight and perfectly aligned, they could have been dentures. He had shoulder length, wavy brown hair and a pair of substantial but not too bushy muttonchops flanking an angelic face with patrician features. I felt dizzy (and jealous) every time I watched him slow-dance with a woman. He was Barry Gibb (well ... he wasn’t really Barry Gibb, he just looked a lot like him). Maxi nicknamed him ‘BAG’. I so desperately wanted to bag BAG.
BAG always fronted up at Swinger with a girlfriend. A bit like Zach, seems BAG was a serial monogamist. But his cycles were shorter. He changed girlfriends every month (although he didn’t recycle like Zach), and by the looks of things, he had no specific type. There were tall ones and short ones; there were blondes and brunettes. Some had long hair, some, short hair, either straight or curly. The only constant was that they were all very attractive. Another constant was that everywhere he went, BAG dragged a pair of Hobbits along with him: two short, feral looking men with bushy beards.
Each Saturday night, it pained me to watch BAG get hot and heavy on the dance floor with the girl he was dating, while I suffered from a Saturday night fever. I found comfort in the thought that he discarded them because he was yet to meet the love of his life.
Here I am! Hello ... HELLOOO ... over here.
Or, maybe not. Would I measure up? Was I attractive enough? I wasn’t sure. I was sure, though, that I wanted to have his babies. I needed a plan.
Sylvia would often say ‘All things come to those who wait’. She didn’t much like it if you threw this cliché back at her.
‘Go and polish your furniture,’ she’d say.
‘I’ll do it later.’
‘You’ll do it now!’
‘No. Later. “All things come to those who wait”.’ This earned me a cuff on the ear and a stretch in my room with a yellow polishing cloth and a tin of Pledge.
But where BAG was concerned, Sylvia may have had a point. I needed to polish up my ability to wait. So, I waited. I waited on the dance floor, making sure to dance near him. When he suddenly faced the other way as he spun his girlfriend around, I shuffled around with whoever happened to be my dance partner so that I always remained in BAG’s line of vision. But BAG didn’t see me. When BAG sat down during breaks between dance brackets, I sat down at the table next to his. And waited. I waited until I was drinking bloody ouzo and Coke legally! Then, finally, that waiting paid off. Sort of. A plan was hatched.
Late one evening, as I was sitting with Maxi and Vette, and watching BAG bebopping with his girlfriend (who would probably be bopping him in the back of the car later), a tall skinny guy approached him, shook his hand, had a brief exchange with him, then came and sat at the table next to us. I stared at tall skinny guy, as if just by looking at him I could extract information on BAG by some strange osmosis. Tall skinny guy caught me looking, so I quickly turned away. When the band started up again, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up to see tall skinny guy’s face inches away from mine, his eyes boring into me.
‘G’day. I’m Lee. Ya wanna dance?’ he yelled over the top of the music, blasting me with hot, bad breath.
Fuck no! ‘Sure.’
Lee was fugly. Anaemic-looking, he h
ad fine, greasy, sepia hair, and crooked teeth. In his sepia suit, which was a close match to the colour of his hair, he seriously looked like a newly sharpened sepia pencil. He had a pointy head, a bit like a newborn baby whose skull is a little compressed from coming through the birth canal. It looked like Lee’s head had yet to round out, but after twenty-odd years on the planet, this was unlikely to happen.
Lee and I had one dance and then he sat at our table, uninvited. I indulged him, though, and we chit-chatted for a bit. Lee had a sepia personality to match his suit and his hair. He asked me out. I accepted.
‘Why?’ asked Ralph when we spoke the next morning.
‘Because it’s one step closer to BAG, and there comes a time when it’s just not enough to wait, when you need to do something, even if it means leaping into a snake pit.’
‘As in the kind of snake pit that contains trouser snakes?’
‘Ecch ... no! And anyhow, you wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing. Or worse!’
‘Hmm ... ’ Ralph thought about that one. ‘Maybe there are times I sell my soul to the devil, but Satan has to be damn fine looking for me to do it!’
‘I don’t see that I’m selling my soul; this is strictly reconnaissance. I’m just out to gather information.’
‘By sleeping with the enemy?’
‘No! Well ... yes, but only metaphorically. It’s just a fact-finding mission. How else am I supposed to plan my tactical moves to get this guy? Do you have a better suggestion?’
‘Why don’t you just say hello to him?’
‘Oh. Why didn’t I think of that? Jesus, Ralph! You, who weighs up everything—twice—suddenly oversimplifying the situation!’
‘Ruthie, you already have the moves.’
I blocked my ears. ‘La la la la la la la la.’
Ralph was being matter-of-fact and I didn’t want to hear it. On the odd nights he came to Swinger with us, BAG wasn’t there, so Ralph didn’t know what he looked like or the kinds of girls he was attracted to. BAG hadn’t noticed me even when I was standing right in front of him. I didn’t care what Ralph said. I intended to pull out all the stops. I was going on this date with Lee come hell or high water. As it happened, both did.
Odyssey In A Teacup Page 4