by Helen Razer
John had returned, in explosively generous form, to my phone, even if Anton was still occupied with his. If Anton was occupied with his phone. Perhaps he had absconded to the playground and was now pulling off a willing mother’s high-end compression pants. Perhaps he had alerted the authorities to the presence of a criminally tedious communist.
Whatever the case, I was tempted to remain here and mash my screen for John, whose bird-watching and bashfulness were glorious guarantees of a neurodevelopmental disorder. Hot. However, more pressing, I knew that I must make my way, backwards (insofar as such a preposition was possible in a hall full of mirrors) to the ladies’ room and divest myself of cat shit.
Naturally, the loo in a sad palace like this was empty of nearly everything but surfaces. There was no paper towel, just two of those orange dialysis-looking dryers into which one inserts the hands. So I backed into a cubicle wall to which one of those frugal portion-controlled loo-paper dispensers was affixed. I spent some minutes gathering up dozens of the mean, tiny squares of frictionless paper, no single one of which was up to the job of cleaning even half of an Eleven turd, moistened them at the hand-basin, then shot back inside the cubicle when the door swung open.
As I dabbed at the crap and the clay, using my phone camera to see where I’d positioned the shiny paper in relation to the cat waste, I heard two female voices unite in their approval of a ‘foreign hottie’ who was, apparently, on his phone outside the pub entrance to his little Princess Anastasia.
‘Ooh. I love a hot dad!’ said one.
‘It’s so sexy how they look after their little ones!’ said another.
I still didn’t get the ‘childcare is hot’ thing. But, I didn’t get quite a bit of the useful wisdom that appears to come so easily to others. E.g., basic makeup techniques, shutting the fuck up and dressing myself like a grownup in clean clothes. Or, not writing ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on’ on the lavatory wall.
I was a horrid animal. Clearly, this date failure was my failure and, in the case that Anton, who apparently had received a legitimate phone call and had not run off to report me to Joseph McCarthy/bend a yummy mummy over a seesaw to deliver Slavic cock, did return to the table, I determined to try to see the ‘sexy’ side of parenting as many other ladies plainly do.
Incredibly, Anton had returned.
‘Welcome back, Karla Marx,’ he said. ‘Do you like the theatre?’
As it happens, I do quite like the theatre. Not all of it, but, obviously, as a tedious Marxist, Brecht. And some other plays that I had seen, and I had seen many at the time of a particularly endurable contract for a now-dead listings website which paid me to write very short reviews. I was no connoisseur, but when I was given a pair of tickets to see Ian McKellen as Lear in an RSC production, I knew that this was marvellous. Or it was marvellous right up until interval when the ex said that she had seen enough. So I never got to see Regan go batshit and take out Gloucester’s eye.
I remembered how she could only ever be dragged to the theatre. Then I saw the possibility that I may be now invited to the theatre and I felt briefly but completely exhilarated.
Public Service Announcement: No matter how cruelly you have just been dumped in cat shit by your ex, you can expect a sensation of liberty to fill you with its welcome heat at some point. There is a glorious moment where you will feel free. It may come when you’re standing at the refrigerator and begin to understand that you can now fill it with anything you fancy. It may come when you see that Netflix has added The Shawshank Redemption and you know you are not obliged to watch it now, or ever again. Or you may be in an icy Coldplay pub, more or less scrubbed of poop, and a creditably handsome man seems ready to ask you to join him for a play and you know you’ll answer yes.
‘Yes, Anton. I do like the theatre.’
And he asked if I would join him there that evening.
Well, YES, Sexy Dad. Sexy Oscar Wilde but Heterosexual Aesthete Sex Dad.
Take me at once to the stage!
*
I learned that night there are certain theatrical productions from which one should feel morally obliged to flee at half-time.
The call to Anton had been from the former Mrs RedHot who found herself unable to escort little Anna Karenina RedHot, of leotard repute, to an evening performance of Barbie Live: The Musical. Or, as I now prefer to know it, Regan, Please Gouge Out Both My Eyes So That I Don’t Have To Watch This Pigfuckery.
The entertainment was, of course, a horror. Frankly, if I learn you have exposed your issue to this toxin, I am fucking calling the welfare people. And not just because you are filling your daughter’s unconscious with glitter and her future with a self-loathing so intense that by twenty-five she will be living on a diet of diets and Xanax. It is because your kid’s formative experience of camp is so low they will never grow to appreciate Sondheim or Fosse.
The photo slideshow was bad enough. But an enforced meeting with the little Pushkin Pants depicted at a kid’s musical was completely out of order.
The child was a turd. I know this is a terrible thing to say about the eight-year-old product of divorce.
I’m absolutely sure, of course, that this turdiness wasn’t Baby Bakunin’s fault. Obviously she had vile parents who deemed Barbie not only suitable entertainment, but entertainment so significant that it could not be missed. Not even in the middle of an internet date with a virtual guarantee of rough sex. Which, I hoped, was exactly the activity that the ex Mrs RedHot was now enjoying, as the chances that I would decreased with every tainted tune brought to us by the licensees of Mattel. Please, let someone in the world, aside from my ex, be getting laid.
The problem with little Chekhov RedHot could really be seen up on stage.
It seemed that in an effort to erase her past as an impossibly proportioned idiot slut given to utterances like ‘Math is hard!’ and ‘Let’s go shopping!’, Barbie’s new authors had turned her into an ‘empowering’ figure. I rarely feel great about the delusion of freedom and I worry quite a bit when I see it served up to kids.
The lie of empowerment was Anna Pavlova’s problem. Christ, it was nearly everyone’s problem, including mine, if Facebook, with all its empowered selfies, or if contemporary workplaces, with their invitations to Be The Best Helen You Can Be, were any reliable guide.
False empowerment was one of the big problems of the age. All the fucking awful songs were about fucking self-esteem. My least favourite of which was called ‘Finally My Moment to Shine’. This bore no little resemblance to the company song selected by the Daily Deals office, which was possibly by Taylor Swift. Who is, I am encouraged to believe, totally empowered as a woman.
Led by the arrant stupidity of what popularly passes as empowering feminism, Barbie’s function was now to make little girls Feel Good About Themselves by offering the advice that you should ‘be brave and be strong and just be yourself!’ Which is all well and good, but utterly gainsaid when done in a series of costumes all designed by a certifiable misogynist on the back of a plastic pink pony.
And if this glitzy loop of visual faux-affirmation were not enough, all of the characters in this pussy pageant reminded their young audience that the greatest work of girls is to be seen.
Barbie had apparently become some sort of multi-platform celebrity mentor for the ‘play’. Much of the ‘plot’ seemed to involve her showing other girls how to sparkle sparkle sparkle in front of the world’s waiting cameras.
Personally, I preferred Barbie’s early work. It was better when she just mumbled about how much she hated mathematics.
I had felt uncomfortable seeing the pictures of Bubba Baryshnikov in her physie outfit and fairy outfit and various Future Slut outfits, and not just because it seemed wrong to think about children within an hour of having rough sex on a playset near a pleasant home in Balwyn. But now I was faced with this whole rotten over-supply of illusory self-esteem Anton was clearly inculcating in his daughter.
I had worried that thi
s little girl was being raised to believe that her image was also the register of her value. How could she not, with so many images held by a father with whom she no longer lived? He didn’t have her in his home. Just her images. I worried that the poor little turd would shortly go on to star in a short film with a title like Co-ed Sluts Volume 17 and neglect all of her promise in the growing sport of aerobic dance in favour of documented face baths.
(Not that there’s anything wrong with a face bath. Or for the payment or receipt of a face bath for the purposes of pornographic film. Still, I didn’t imagine little Kropotkin would go on to be one of those truly ‘empowered’ stars of adult cinema, who do, I know, actually exist. She’d be one of those porn stars less fortunate. Another exploited labourer living in the service of the image and the lumpen-wang.)
These thoughts may be attributed to the fact that I am a pessimistic arsehole who hates joy. But I do not believe that I conspired to kill it as the RedHot family did, or those awful Barbie people with all their faux empowerment. You think I’m negative? You don’t know negative until you’ve seen Barbie Live: The Musical.
You think ‘government handouts’ are destroying the Kids of Today, Anton? You think the state honouring its contract to its citizens is going to fuck people up? When we’re sitting here with your already imprisoned daughter being led to believe that ‘feeling beautiful’ will set her fucking free? As though ‘feeling beautiful’ were some hard-won human right, up there with free assembly and democratic elections. As though being looked at were always a joy and never a yoke.
I wasn’t feeling super sexy anymore. And I certainly did not want to be looked at.
Still, I didn’t really mind that much that Anton, staring straight ahead, sitting between me and Gorky, now had a fistful of my tits. Groping is not looking.
Possibly, the near-naked eighteen-year-olds on stage—who had now begun to recite some dialogue about a ‘magic blue crystal’, which made me think of Tuco Salamanca, the sociopathically violent blue meth salesman from Breaking Bad—had aroused him and he was just grabbing my left mam simply because it was there. I didn’t care. Anything to deliver me from this pink mouth of hell.
I wasn’t getting laid tonight. My vagina had fused shut like Barbie’s. With Anton’s hand now halfway up my skirt, searching for a waxed plastic mound, I picked up my phone and tried to write my way out of that place.
MidLifeISIS: Thanks for your candour, John. In my own case, ‘activity partner’ is certainly a euphemism. Which is to say, if there were the option ‘Jizz Bucket’, I would have checked that one without pause. In short, I am seeking only one or several enthusiastic sexual encounters before such time as my tits go south. If this is of no interest to you, a seeker of the more serious long- or short-term, I understand utterly and thank you so much for your time. If, however, it *is* of interest to you, I thank you in advance for your cock.
Barbie was asking the audience of little girls what they aspired to be when they grew. ‘Jizz bucket,’ I muttered. And Vladimir RedHot screamed, with the rest of them, ‘PRINCESS’.
‘That’s not a job description. You must learn to be more realistic,’ I said. Audibly. And then Anton, who had not yet removed his hand from ‘my most familiar part’, looked at me with naked hatred.
‘What? What?’ I said.
‘You can’t shatter her dreams.’
Yeah. Well. You shattered mine about Big Slavic Cock, Comrade.
As the pleasure of judging poor parenting technique was the only one that night I was likely to find, I started on one of my bad speeches.
‘Well, the plain fact is that Australia has only ever produced one actual princess. Given the ongoing historical trend to reject the vestiges of monarchy in Europe, I can bet there will be no more. Your daughter, little Joanne Stalin, should know this. Also, you are Russian and so you must take a fairly gloomy view of what it means to be a princess. Shot or bludgeoned to death in the early twentieth century. Look, mate, I’m thinking about leaving because I’ve really had enough family-friendly entertainment.’
Now he withdrew his hand from my dead poonanny.
Anton said that he too had endured more than was sufficient to his liking and that I probably should leave before I so injured the self-esteem of his Russian nesting doll that he summoned theatre security and had me banned from children’s musicals for life.
Comrade. Dasvidaniya.
14
Fifty-five hours and one night of paralysing empowerment
I was fairly cross as I made my way home on the No. 67 tram. I’d disbursed hundreds of dollars on painful beauty therapy and several unpleasant minutes in a toilet cubicle just to make myself presentable for the good, hard knocking I’d been explicitly promised but had never received.
I was now angry-horny instead of pathetic-horny, and I briefly considered the possibility of returning to the theatre and demanding that Anton finish his hand job lest I sue.
Instead, I calmed myself and reasoned that I had racked up not one but two dates for that evening. There had, after all, been both an extreme change of venue and of mood. Five date points, therefore, had been accrued by 9 p.m.
My phone was blinking.
Anticathexis: Your candour is also appreciated. This is, naturally, of great interest to me, Jizz Bucket. Perhaps we should meet tonight to allow an assessment of our suitability for the object in question. John. Maniacally winking face, definitely with some animation.
What the fuck ever and, really, why not? I couldn’t even remember one fifth of my elaborate writer’s rationale for preferring not to meet this fairly funny, possibly handsome, and almost certainly on the autism spectrum fellow. Something or other to do with the fear that I would end up writing like E.L. James. A result, at least, which would have been more profitable, and even slightly less dull, than the interminable exchange of terrible messages on dating sites. Other, of course, than these messages with John, whose tempo and substance I continued to find analgesic, and which now held mild hope for profit. By which we mean cock.
MidLifeISIS: Let’s. I should probably stop saying ‘cock’ so much, though.
Anticathexis: Do please let me know your thoughts on meeting this evening, then. Where and when? PS, say ‘cock’ as much as you like.
MidLifeISIS: You should feel free to nominate a place and time, too. I am currently in the south-east without a vehicle or a clue, and I am always grateful when someone else can make a decision. Oh, and I take it as read that our conversation and proximate meeting is not a matter for discussion by anyone but ourselves? Cock.
Anticathexis: Fully understand. Discretion on my part is assured. Am I correct in assuming a meeting venue should therefore be somewhere out of the public eye, or is that going a bit overboard? I might suggest Pause (sp?), but I’ve got a nagging suspicion there’s some kind of zany spelling involved in the title, which may make it a difficult place for you to find. You may know a quiet nook closer to your place or we could meet in that big park on Glenferrie Road—I’ll bring the generic flying disk; you bring the golden retriever.
MidLifeISIS: These all sound like decent plans. Make one and I’ll be there. I am glad that this is an evening meeting as I am old and look much softer in crepuscular light.
I now understand that I was being a bit princessy in failing to accede to one of John’s several considered suggestions. Perhaps I was tired. Perhaps I was not yet accustomed to choosing the place I’d like to be. Or perhaps Barbie’s message of venal self-esteem had rubbed off on me. Make all my arrangements! It’s Barbie’s time to shine!
Anticathexis: Low light is similarly kind to my appearance so Pause (sp?) might be a suitable venue. As I may have mentioned earlier, there are no claims on my time tonight so whenever you like is fine by me. Perhaps a telephone call would be prudent?
I sent John my telephone number and he sent me his and I, in fairly unrelated news, began to decompose.
Both the events of the day and the possibility that the day may yet con
tain more events started to diminish my angry, horny spark. I was, being either forty-three or forty-one, averse to spending so many social hours away from home.
I recognised how far away home still was, and the prospect of enduring the nervous intimacy of public transport for another six stops drubbed me further. Then, when I recognised that home no longer really existed, I began to cry. Like a Barbie, at first: just tiny tears and a pint-size whimper, such as we might hear from a King Charles spaniel who has found an uncomfortable Kink in his luxury bed. Then, on the Glen Huntly Road, I cried much more like a bull-mastiff on a road in the last bloody moments of life. And I don’t know why, but I suspect it had something to do with the beer. The one that I had earlier, and the one wrapped in brown paper being emptied by the man with the rusted fly zipper sitting opposite me on the tram.
I have tended for at least a decade to avoid drinking. If I’m not physically ill after two standard drinks then I have been drinking so gradually time has afflicted me with a guilt-tinged hangover. Either way, when I’ve had just one, my head is in my hands and I am suffering that chemical regret more typically brought to folks by the morning after. It is through this prism of immediate emotional and/or physical pain that I had come to understand viscerally, if not logically, drinking as an act of destruction.