The Helen 100

by Helen Razer

  I saw the man with a beer and it seemed he was quite unwell and that he did not have a home. I thought of the ex with a beer and an illness and now without a home. And I knew that neither of them was responsible for their pain, or for their entirely fathomable refusal to stare it down. Drink pauses pain.

  I saw neither that she nor the man sitting opposite could just be ‘empowered’ by this straitjacket life with its rusted restraints and, fuck, I felt so bad for ever blaming her for anything at all. Including, and especially, the drink. Baby, I am sorry.

  I am reluctant to describe my ex as an alcoholic, and not because she didn’t drink like a fish. She had drunk like a school of especially thirsty mackerel. I am reluctant to call her an alcoholic because my drink-averse metabolism had come to disqualify me from such assessment, and so had my lack of pain.

  Drink would often take my ex to the past. She would talk often about how good the vibe was in 1994, the days before kids ruined raves with their inappropriate twerking and, most troubling to me, the promise she had as a writer in school.

  I have never understood nostalgia, especially for one’s past exertions as a writer, which I frequently, and often not unreasonably, see as ridiculous just minutes after they are published or complete. I like nostalgia about as much as I like drinking.

  But I might understand nostalgia, and drink, better if I had ever known real pain. It struck me that she had idealised her past because her past had not afflicted her with such physical pain. Once, before she met me, she didn’t hurt.

  Still crying at home, I called a woman I know named Kay. Kay was a recovering drunk, and I knew was in the sort of program where discretion was assured. I told her about the saddest days and nights of my ex’s drinking. I said she was an alcoholic. And not because I felt an entitlement to do so but because I am awful, and because Kay had asked ‘Was she an alcoholic?’ as recovering addicts often will.

  I could have said nothing, but instead I said, ‘I think so,’ before I could actually think so. Being sacked by a long-term spouse curses one with unthinking candour.

  In an atmosphere of uncertainty and unstable truth, we can begin to believe that the truth will set us free. I had set the truth, or my version of it, free whenever I could for two days now, and it had returned to me to that night on the No. 67 tram.

  Truth. Nostalgia. Drink. None of these things worked to pause my pain. So I just cried to the point where I thought I might need to call Gerard. Then I cried to the point where it started to be a bit funny.

  I slept for an hour or two and woke when a hangover and a cat bore down on me. A hangover was always unwelcome. But this cat was always a pleasure. At some point in the ten years we had spent together, he had deduced that if he put a paw in just the right place on my bladder, I would wake. I never minded: I adored him and attributed even his most wilful behaviour to exceptional feline intelligence.

  ‘E-le-ven!’ I mock scolded him.

  He butted my hand with his head then sniffed the place where the chicken had been. It was time to return this cat to his regular, strict and comically expensive program of eating. Although apparently it was not yet time for me to suffer any such restriction and I looked, as an undisciplined person does, at my phone for midnight notifications.

  Public Service Announcement: Newly dumped persons should try to avoid sleeping with their phones within reach. Particularly if they find that they can ever sleep at all.

  Hours before, John had texted:

  Let’s go for a walk in the park then. Are you familiar with the one I mentioned earlier? Does it meet the criterium?

  Then, he had tried to call a few minutes later.

  Then, in a fit of tender interest doubtless brought forth by my beguiling offer to function as his Jizz Bucket, he had texted again:

  I can always do tomorrow. It’s probably too late, and you may be sensibly reluctant to walk in a park in moonlight conditions with someone you’ve only just met online.

  And once more:

  Your response, or lack thereof, is completely justifiable. I suspect it might be down to the ‘criterium’ confusion of Greek with Latin in my earlier message. Which you may consider forgiving as my ambitious attempt to look more cleverer than I are.

  Look, I thought he was pretty funny. And I needed a laugh, so I texted:

  When you confused a bicycle race (criterium) for a standard that might govern a bicycle race (criterion), I would have blamed it on your phone’s autocorrect if I were not myself, after recent receipt of many teens’ mistyped messages, now internally set to autocorrect. I really didn’t notice.

  And just in case he was awake but sleepy, and so now was, as I always was, disposed to rip a phrase like ‘I really didn’t notice’ from its contextual mooring and infer from it ‘I couldn’t give less of a fuck about a fuckstain like you’, I texted, reassuringly:

  And genuine apologies for the tardiness of reply. I shan’t go into details, but let’s just say that I spent the better part of the evening occupied with the care of an eight-year-old girl, and that the future for my gender looks as ordinary as its past.

  He was awake:

  I would have loved to have owned ‘criterium’, but I’m all about the honesty. Very ardently when there are no plausible alternatives available to me.

  And:

  There is no lyric in our familiar history of hits that fills me with as much fear as that, which warns that the children are our future. Sorry about the patriarchy.

  I wrote:

  Whitney, may she rest, knew that the greatest love of all was onanistic.

  John: I know I learned to depend on me.

  Helen: I’m depending on myself right now.

  Yes, you may snigger that I told him I was ’bating. But, this was actually inevitable and therefore not my fault. Did you know that ninety-seven per cent of all associations that have their origin in an online dating service will produce conversational allusion to this act at some point between the exchange of one and fifty messages? I urge you to confirm this finding in the well-regarded work of reference, Untruths I have Pulled From My Arse by Dr* H. Razer (*Not a real Doctor).

  John: Well. Convention now obliges that I ask: What are you wearing?

  Helen: Apparently, the frock I left the house in.

  John: Please describe it.

  Helen: Honestly, it’s covered in kitty litter and bits of shit.

  John: Hot. SO hot. Well, finish yourself off, luv. I’ve blown.

  John: Srs, though, What KIND of frock?

  Helen: First, my ability to describe raiment in text has never, to my occasional professional frustration, been strong. Second, even if I were able to meaningfully evoke it as A-line or bias cut or as chartreuse or, as I have sometimes seen written in mid-range women’s fashion publications, ‘flirty’, what would you make of that? Are you, perhaps, a regular Vogue reader?

  John: Salient point, well made. Still. When can I see you in a dress that can neither be described by its owner nor understood by its aspiring remover in text?

  Helen: When it is returned from an urgently needed dry-cleaning. The putrid frock will just have to be patient before playing its part in the acclaimed comedy Helen Becomes Big Dirty John’s Internet Whore. Not now, clearly, as I imagine your plans at this late hour are set.

  John: Not necessarily. I’m available. I have a cab fare. This may seem like the message of an eager teenager, which you already have, as you once complained, in over-supply. But I said I’m accommodating and I stick by that, irregardless of the consequences. (I can’t believe my phone allowed that ‘irregardless’, but I’m kind of glad that it did.) I am accommodating, and I have been drinking.

  Helen: John. Please keep in mind that I am A Lady. As such, my body is an object of exchange in the cruel economy of sex and I will have to apply lipstick, remove body hair and conceal my vaginal fangs and such. This would take a full hour.

  John: An hour is fine, Chattel. Rehearsing one’s gender performance and retracting one’
s teeth takes at least that long.

  Helen: But I also have to feed my resentful, ageing and infirm sister a dead bird on a plate as I remember with regret my past as a glorious child star.

  John: Well, I am required to manually type ‘All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy’ in an endless range of literary formats as I plot to kill my family with an axe. We all have stuff to do, Helen.

  To say that I took pleasure in John’s messages is like saying that Kanye takes pleasure in himself. While I am conscious that their record may prompt you to ask ‘Were you off your rocker?’, I ask you to remember that I was.

  But I was not so unsteady so as to actually admit this stranger to my home, however helpful this might have been to my need, and your hope, for a good story. An irresponsible act like that one would have provided us all with an excellent plot point. If I’d let him in, not even knowing his surname, you and I could agree that I had arrived at a nadir of recklessness and that now the only way was up. Especially if his dick hadn’t worked and/or he’d tried to strangle me with this rope of non-functional dick.

  It is true that I was reckless, but not so unthinking or devoted to story, as to return to a program of penis after so many years when its owner was avowedly drunk. The drunk dick was the thing that worried me. If I was going to change the stuff of my sex diet after so long, I wanted to be damn sure it would be a nourishing move. I longed, as I have said, to be back on solids.

  The probability of liquid dick aside, I remained ambivalent about meeting John. This is not because I was still over-intellectualising the possibility and saying pseudo-psychoanalytic things to myself about writing and desire or whatever. This is not because I did not fully intend to get fully stuffed with cock—I remained, as I had for two days, unafraid of damage to either my person or my reputation.

  It was chiefly because Text Message John had provided such excellent ’bating inspiration—or ‘sinspiration’, as I am sure I have seen a women’s magazine call such stimulus—that I feared if he were to emerge from the gloom of his Dorothea Lange self-portrait, Physical John would provoke but a shadow of those excellent SMS-induced orgasms.

  In any case, it was late. And this, being a Friday morning around 2 a.m., was the saddest time of the week for many people, but particularly for a newly dumped tool like me.

  Sensibly, I stopped wanking and began to cry again. This time, I cried less forcefully than the bull-mastiff in critical condition. I cried more as a child who has just fallen does. First, I cried because of the pain, and then, less forcefully, with the memory of the pain. And then I cried just because I was crying and the tears had become their own raison d’être. I cried so much I dropped my phone and didn’t even care to pick it up.

  15

  One week, 200 calories largely sourced from own snot, incalculable cry-wanks

  In unsurprising news, the internet has a decent supply of freshly divorced middle-aged women in urgent want of cock. As such, I was not in the kind of high demand that would help me meet my goals on schedule. I had also not yet found the heart to amend my dating profile to something more appealing. So the Coldplay jokes remained.

  I had been stubborn in achieving this state of dating mediocrity. But that did not mean I was happy to be overlooked as the irrelevance I certainly am.

  I needed one hundred dates, and I wanted them now, though without immediate recourse to all the good advice about clean and plain speech I had previously received from Maddie and co. I was not yet ready to speak nicely—most especially after so much crying and children’s theatre.

  It had struck me that there was a community of people who may not only provide me with multiple dates, but who would actually appreciate dirty and elaborate dialogue. To wit, kinksters.

  I had sworn off John. Well, this is entirely untrue. I had applied a brief John Moratorium. I had rebuffed his offer of drunk sex with the explanation that I would be at a ‘work conference’ for several days where the use of mobile devices was forbidden.

  This was possibly a bit thick, as such a prohibition is unlikely applied these days in any professional environment outside the Situation Room. Possibly not even there. Those guys probably live-tweet the destruction of the Levant or text ‘LOL Afghanistan’ to their friends at Halliburton. Anyhow, I just wanted to stop nourishing my foul appetite for John and John’s drunk penis for a minute, and I had decided that I wouldn’t contact him at least until my shit-dress had returned from the cleaners.

  I would provisionally replace John with as many members of the BDSM/Kink community as might consider me suitable for use/humiliation. And, no, I promise this had nothing to do with my reading of Fifty Shades of Grey. Which is not BDSM but virgin-fetish Barbara Cartland with fewer titled ladies and some unusual furniture. And which I had only ever read so I could make fun of it by text message with Celine. I would be sure to tell them I hated this book, just to prove that I wasn’t some paperback tourist but a very earnest bottom. Hello, my name is Helen. I Am Not Anastasia Steele.

  I decided to attend a ‘munch’.

  A ‘munch’ does not refer to an afternoon of violent synchronised sex biting. Rather it is a meeting and dining opportunity for those who have joined, or seek to join, what is, regrettably, called ‘The Lifestyle’. These events generally occur at a budget-eating establishment and do not involve what ‘The Lifestylers’ refer to as ‘play’. Which is to say there is no guarantee of sex, but there is access to competitively priced tacos.

  At a munch, one does not wear fetish finery nor speak at great volume about one’s pressing urge to serve as a urinal. While some people may speak at low volume about the pleasure they take in their lavatory rank and others may be wearing an understated collar, it is agreed that in this ‘vanilla’ setting that the plain flavour of everyday behaviour will be generally observed.

  The munch serves as a friendly get-together for the faithful as well as an open introduction for aspiring spankees and jizz buckets. And, of course, for those newbies who wish to administer the spanks and the jizz. But novices were not what I craved. I wanted to find an experienced Top who would comprehensively thrash me to within an inch of my safe word.

  I had not quite decided yet if this safe word would be ‘empowering’ or ‘feminism’. Or if longer phrases were permitted. ‘It’s Barbie’s time to shine’?

  The details for such munches are usually easy to locate on fetish dating sites, and, you know, I’d tell you on which password-protected site I found the time and place for mine if only I could remember my password first and hide a profile from you that, I recall, invited a swarthy Top to jizz in my face and call me his dirty little communist. No one outside the Kink community needs to see the rubbish I wrote. You’ll just have to look up some munch details on your own.

  I have some reservations about describing this event. Of course, I am obliged to do so as it represents seven per cent of my stupid goal of one hundred dates. But a queer lady does have some scruples when it comes to the possibly unfavourable, and probably unwanted, depiction of seven fellow perverts.

  Which is to say, I don’t enjoy making fun of people for their non-normative sexuality. I think that we queers already get enough bad press—unless, of course, we are Inspiring Homosexuals with rainbow babies who promote wholesome living on YouTube. Everybody loves those family-friendly guys.

  I also do not wish to imply that these people are less discerning than others and so more inclined to bang a dickhead like myself. They certainly weren’t desperate, unlike me. But I will say that my genuine sexual history of lesbianism played very well to the male Tops I had recently met online in the lead-up to the munch, and so I had become a more valuable commodity in this small marketplace than I had been in the broader economy of Dirty Divorcées. I was no longer in oversupply.

  Of course, the Lesbian thing had proved popular on the more tedious adult dating sites as well, but none of those men had been eloquent enough to say, ‘Beg me for my cock, queer.’ A sentence, apparently, I had been longing
to read.

  Before the event, I spoke for hours by online chat, and then by telephone, with a munch-coordinating Top we’ll call Georges. Honestly, it was very hot: he was an interesting documentary filmmaker and he could spell ‘anal’ correctly. In fact, he caught onto my arousal by good punctuation and spelling early and proposed that if we met and we liked each other—or rather, ‘If I consider a dyke like you worth hurting’, which is a totally acceptable and hot thing to say in an emerging top-bottom hetero-flexible context—he would make me proofread his script treatments naked and not fuck my arse ’til I’d finished.

  So I do not wish to make fun of these people. It would be both hypocritical and unkind.

  Having said this, the whole thing (a) was mildly amusing, even to an opponent of normalised sexual codes and (b) it was not at all frightening. I figure that a description of this Bondage Beginners lunch date will serve less to malign its hosts than it will to encourage your possible future participation. I would certainly recommend this lunchtime introduction to Kink.

  But I would offer a warning to my fellow Groucho Marxists: if you do not care to join a club that would admit you as a member, The Lifestyle is a place that will receive you fairly uncritically.

  Membership doesn’t sit well with me at all (that I frequently wish it did notwithstanding). But it just effing doesn’t and the formal situations I have either left or been ejected from for non-compliance are too many to tally. A representative sample includes the Girl Guides, the Roman Catholic Church, school, the Communist Party, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and two psychotherapists, but not Cheap Gerard who needed to hold on to his clients. One lawyer and an entire chain of garden superstores. And a marriage, obviously.