The Thompson Gunner

by Nick Earls

  ‘So what would this be?’ John says, all too ready to start workshopping. ‘If it was performance art with all that rubber hanging out of Meg’s mouth? The Gimp Project?’

  I gag on my dental dam when my next breath sucks it into my mouth. I sound like a failing pool filter drawing in water and air at the same time. All three of them are laughing now. I point to the door I’ve come through, and tell them I’ve got to go. The words make no sense, but the meaning should be clear.

  Liz pulls a camera from her bag. ‘I said to John after we saw you in Melbourne that we should have taken the camera. This is just destiny, right? Imagine bumping into you here. We can’t let you go without a photo.’

  Before I can make a move, she and John are either side of me and Paul is lining up the shot. The only quick way out of this is to let it happen.

  ‘This is superb,’ John says with feeling. ‘It’s so good to meet you. Hey, you’re drooling. Can we get one more with me dabbing your chin?’

  So here I am, on the Murray Street Mall, no more privacy than a circus animal, partially anaesthetised, incoherent and drooling, having my chin dabbed for posterity. I point to the door again once Paul has captured the moment, and this time they let me go. The last thing I hear clearly as the door shuts behind me is Liz saying they’ll send the photos to the website. I sometimes wish people wouldn’t do that.

  I put my shoe on and I stand there, back in the ground floor of the fire stairs, wondering what to do next. I can’t go outside again, so the only plan I’ve got is to pound on the inner door until someone hears me.

  Before I can make my move, the door opens, and my ‘Uuh uuuuhhh’ has enough urgency to it that the woman standing there stops.

  I mime frantically and she says, ‘Oh . . . oh, you’re locked out of the dentist.’

  She laughs, as though events had the potential to turn embarrassing but she’s saved me from that, and she holds the door until I get there.

  ‘It’s left at the end of the corridor,’ she says. ‘Then left again.’

  The dentist greets me as though nothing’s happened. The crown is ready, I can’t begin to explain my adventure, I don’t even try. I lie, happily, back in the chair and pick up EDtv from where I left off.

  Hours later in my room the feeling is returning to my face, first as a hazy tingling and then as something more focused and defined.

  I came back to a flashing message light on my phone, Felicity checking to see that it had all gone as it should, and telling me to call if there’s anything she can do for me, or if I want to do something for dinner, if I feel like dinner.

  When I realised that my tongue could move normally, even though I couldn’t feel it, I tried twice to call Emma. I’ve let my mobile battery run flat and it’s recharging, so I used the room phone and dialled her number from memory. Both times I called Amcor, the packaging company, who had a message telling me business hours were over for the day.

  Outside, it gets dark. The street lights come on, and the lights of houses in the suburbs start to as well.

  I missed the end of EDtv and I didn’t even notice until I was back in the room. I hardly get to finish a thing.

  The tooth is spectacular though, the best in my mouth. The dentist fitted the crown, then drilled it down to size. It smelt like a building site while he worked on it, like a drill working on stone, not like a tooth. He showed me the map of its contours on screen, and then took a mirror and showed me the tooth itself.

  And I went out to the receptionist, put $758 on my credit card, and bought yoghurt and fruit on the way back here. They told me my new porcelain tooth is ready to go to work immediately, but I think I’ll trust it more in the morning, when I’m confidently reacquainted with that half of my mouth. The Cajun chicken filo still has me rather food-shy, maybe.

  The other part of Felicity’s message was confirmation that tomorrow starts with ‘Battle of the Sexes’ on breakfast radio, and that it’s a phoner to the room at seven-forty.

  I eat yoghurt from the tub and my face feels strange now as sensation comes back in an abnormal, disordered way. It was easier when there was less of it. It’s as if the nerves started by re-marking the old outlines and now their control has wavered while they’re filling in the whole picture. It all looks fine in the mirror though, or at least less deranged than it feels. It’s only when I smile that there’s any hint of asymmetry, and it’s getting better.

  The sky is perfect, cloudless, clean, and taking on darkness as indigo first before black. I’ve never been so tired, I’m sure of it. I’ve smashed my tooth and had it fixed and no one knows, practically no one.

  In the offices in nearby buildings, I can see unfinished work on desks, toys stuck on the tops of computers, work spaces of varying configurations. That’s what I’m looking at, the small places where people go each day, five days a week, and the ways they make them their own. I’m sure I know how the whole floor is laid out. There are corridors with flat blue–grey carpet, a reception with two potted palms and a curved desk, meeting rooms without windows, kitchens with fridges where people steal your lunch however you mark it. And the fridges have kids’ pictures on them, or those word magnets which someone always arranges into something profane and anatomically improbable, and spoils it for everyone.

  I’ve been that person, naturally.

  I’ve been the annoying temp who doesn’t care, the permanent staff member who doesn’t stay long, the account manager who, despite her habitually foul mouth and worse line in humour, is not looking to have sleazy moves made on her at the Christmas party. Not that it didn’t turn out to be a source of material.

  Every time I go ‘What is it with office Christmas parties? Mistletoe has a lot to answer for . . .’ most of the room is with me. Most of them have been there. And some of them have probably been the drunk co-worker who, late in the evening, thinks you just might put out for nothing more than a piece of parsley left over from the nibblies, if they hold it over their heads in a way that gets the mistletoe message across.

  By ten o’clock it’s all about bad music and worse groping, and those men grow a third hand. They’ve got one hand for their eighth beer, another to hover an enticing piece of parsley above their damp rubbery lips and somehow, out of nowhere, there’s a third – the Christmas party hand – that gets plonked right on your arse. Because who wouldn’t come across after a good clumsy bout of arse squeezing? And it’s only worse when they turn on the charm and tell you that, the way they look it, you’re pretty much a dead ringer for Nicole Kidman, just a bit stronger in the legs.

  That’s the routine, all but the last bit which I’ve managed to keep to myself. I don’t know why I drew the line at that.

  I was no wallflower at those Christmas parties. I often overdid it at work functions, whatever the time of year, but Christmas parties came with the most free alcohol and the added pressure of squeezing in every possible seasonal cigarette before the inevitable January one resolution, and the equally inevitable recriminations by about the eighth for having weakened and failed again.

  I resented those jobs and most things about them, except the company of a few of the people, and I was angry at the end of each year that I was still stuck there and that my luck hadn’t changed.

  But it wasn’t just about Christmas, and taking stock. I drank too much at any opportunity, and I smoked when I drank in a way that I would have called ‘social’ but that usually involved finishing my own packet quickly and then working the room for spare cigarettes the rest of the night, taking them whenever possible from the people I liked least. On one occasion, I’m pretty sure I slept with someone I didn’t know. I can’t be too shocked that someone occasionally lurched my way with the old parsley mistletoe stunt in mind.

  Murray, who has only heard about those years, refers to them as my Keith Richards phase. I don’t honestly think it was as bad as it can be made to sound – as bad as I make it sound when I tell the stories. When I finally put my mind to it, it wasn’t that hard to
decide to drink a bit less, though the nicotine took some shaking. I chewed a lot of Nicorettes before I was through it.

  Angst came out of me like steam back in my twenties, as if I was overheating with it. I’m sure it did. I’m sure I radiated trouble. And I’d get up and do my man-hating self-hating act, and get more abuse and more applause than most of the others. I loved it all – I loved the release of it, the laughter, the contest. I loved hecklers and I baited them. I’m sure I could hardly even spell subtle until I was in my thirties, so I don’t know why I think I can complain when TV people can sometimes recognise it but put ratings first.

  I started out doing stand-up at the Story Bridge Hotel on wet nights early in the week when no one would leave home to go to anything. That must have been twelve or thirteen years ago. It was eight years from then to Edinburgh, via a Raw Comedy win, Melbourne Comedy Festival, occasional TV, regular TV, touring. Increasing amounts of touring.

  My first regular TV job was as a sidekick on a talk show, which failed – though I came out of it well. The show wasn’t bad, but it’s fair to say it was patchy and it never quite found its feet. One Sydney paper called me ‘one of the few genuine bright lights in an hour of television that otherwise stumbles along at low wattage’. I couldn’t believe my luck scoring that job. It meant flights to Sydney and an overnight stay once a week, and a thousand dollars a time. It was a new league for me, a new set of numbers. I had to try not to be too much more grateful than they’d expect.

  The thousand dollars was broken up into all kinds of payments to make it a strict one-off deal, but it was a thousand dollars so they got no complaints from me. The breakdown was the same each time, always ending with $2.42 for ‘subsequent use on New Zealand cable, satellite or other’. Other? What on earth was left to be other?

  They paid all my expenses and served meals in the green room, with two choices of hot food and two salads, and they kept a well-stocked bar. I learned not to drink before the show, though the offer was always there. On air the established regulars always looked like they drank too much – backstage they were sober and calm, even attentive. They’d done their time on the road, and gone through all the bad behaviour that comes with that. On the first night I was there, the host had one glass of wine once we’d finished taping, and he told me how attached he was to home now, and that he’d started writing a novel and it wouldn’t be what people would expect. He said he was reading Carver again, and he hadn’t since his arts degree.

  I had, of course, been expecting loosely structured debauchery, spilt cocaine crunching underfoot in the toilets, worse behaviour off-screen than on. I had underestimated the element of performance, and the attention to detail. It was a better show than people gave it credit for, though international guests didn’t always know what to make of it.

  But I’d started to learn some of those lessons earlier, before I was a regular.

  The first time I did TV it was ‘Good News Week’ and I was a last-minute replacement for a politician. Emma got the call on the Thursday afternoon for a Friday evening taping and Sunday broadcast. I’d watched the show regularly, so I knew how it worked – two teams going head-to-head over a series of embarrassing games based on knowledge of the week’s events – but I had no idea of what had happened in the world that week. I’d done a night at the Story Bridge, I’d gone to a band on Tuesday, I’d temped every day in a real-estate agent’s office. I bought the paper on the way home after Emma called me, but it hardly helped in the end.

  I smoked, I drank, I worked myself up into a state, I told no one I’d be appearing on the show. I called in sick the next day and flew to Sydney in the afternoon.

  The producer said, ‘Don’t be too concerned if you do something dumb or fluff a line and crash and burn. We edit, and we do a few takes if we need to, so you don’t have to worry about it going to air. Unless you really crash and burn, of course . . .’

  And I did. We were given props for one segment, props that told a story, and we had to work out what the story was. My team had an instant camera, a coat hanger and something I can’t remember. The props were rushed on in a break, and I ended up with the camera and hardly heard the instructions. I didn’t know if I needed to. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it.

  I made such an idiot of myself on the first two takes that not only did all three make the final edit for the show, but they were part of the ad for it that was on air by midday Saturday.

  Each time, the host would work his way along the team and get to me third and announce, ‘And Meg Riddoch has . . . a camera’, and I would try to open it with a single smooth proficient move, and each time blast a photo of the underside of my chin and jump in my seat.

  A week before, I had arranged to have dinner with my parents on the Sunday after the taping, and they made me sit there watching the whole show. ‘You were very funny with that camera,’ my father said. ‘Did you have to practise?’

  It worked for me though, and there was no turning back. It’s where the problems began, things like that that were also golden opportunities. They came with a real income, but they also came with travel and an increase in profile, and you’re committed to the damage before you know it’s being done.

  ‘Your fucking, fucking job,’ was how Murray put it one indelicate day, years later, after hiding his feelings for months and months since he didn’t want to stop my fun.

  ‘Fun?’ I wanted to say to him. ‘Fun? I do this to bring my share of the money in. I want to spend more time at home, but this’ll pay off for us, just wait.’

  But I said nothing because parts of the job certainly were fun and his work isn’t like that. And anyway, he said it on a day when it was getting to both of us. I’d dragged us into something neither of us understood, and it was taking its toll.

  ‘This is part of you,’ he said. ‘And I don’t ever want to take it away.’

  He looked sad and his hair looked a mess and I loved him for saying it when we were in the middle of fighting. And I tried not to cry because it was a truce, though not a solution, and some days you settle for a truce because there’s not one good solution in sight.

  In the nearest building, about two floors up from mine, an office light goes out. Someone else goes home, probably later than they should.

  I settle in for a night of TV. A banana, a cup of chamomile tea and a night of TV. I expect other people will have arrived for the festival by now and they’ll be down in the bar getting reacquainted till all hours. Tonight, my tooth gets me out of that.

  My face is feeling better. I can feel my new tooth with my tongue, and it’s smooth and sure.

  I think it’s Wednesday, but I’ve lost track of TV so I spend too long ineptly channel surfing. Something goes wrong with TV when you tour, even if you’re touring in your own country. Entire seasons of your favourite shows seem to vanish, to happen only in a faraway and maybe better world in the lounge room you’ve left behind.

  Even when you think you’ve got everything right and you’re propped up in bed on four pillows and the wide screen is right in front of you at the perfect angle, the shows you want to watch aren’t there. You have dozens of channels and, when you find the one you’re looking for, it’s not showing the show you want to watch – the show now screening in lounge rooms across the country, including yours, including lounge rooms in the same city as your hotel.

  Instead you get a cavalcade of obscure sports and stock exchanges in which you have no interest. Darts, hurling, curling and the CAC-40. The Cac Quarante. Tubby English lads guzzle big beers and shoot for a hundred and eighty, you sit there mesmerised, quietly saying to yourself Cac Quarante . . . Cac Quarante. French is such a cool language even the name of their stock index sounds alluring. Cac Quarante . . .

  Imagine a Frenchman in a suit saying ‘Cac Quarante’, an Australian in a suit saying ‘All Ords’. The latter is made even more ordinary by the comparison, the former, if whispered in your ear in the right circumstances, sounds like it could change the
course of an evening. Today’s share price of forty big companies turned into a thing of desire. It’s a fascinating world in which, it’s easy to suspect, a lot of Frenchmen get a lot more sex than they really should. Or maybe that’s a myth, too.

  Enough. Sleep now. Sleep and don’t dream. Or dream of the Frenchman saying ‘Cac Quarante’, though he’s almost certainly trouble of the worst kind.

  Calgary — two weeks ago

  WE PILED INTO Jen’s car after the Uptown Showcase – Rob Castle, me, and a couple of others. One was a visiting comedian, one a local guy I can’t picture at all now and hardly spoke to. I think he was a student.

  I’d seen Jen at the festival office in the hotel when I’d dropped in the day before. The volunteers were in baggy matching T-shirts, and she was standing with them but looking more corporate and acting decisively while they held back in a clump. It turned out she was one of them, but she’d worn a leather skirt that wouldn’t have worked at all with the official T-shirt, and people who didn’t know better assumed she was actually on staff and kept asking her to make decisions. Which, she explained to me in the car, she was happy to do. Someone had to, and no one else seemed to be stepping forward.

  Jen was a student too, but she’d been away until the weekend so she’d had no chance to volunteer formally. She’d missed all the briefings and turned up yesterday just in case an extra pair of hands was needed. Which, in her view, it wouldn’t have been if the volunteers rostered to the meet-and-greet desk hadn’t been introverts who felt better rearranging the plates at the other end of the room and sneaking the occasional Danish.

  I sat in the front passenger seat, the three boys squished in the back. As we’d walked towards Jen’s small car, Rob Castle and I had stayed on opposite sides of the group, but even while Jen talked it was him I was listening to as he sat directly behind me and dealt with the experience of being thigh to thigh with the student, a major fan who had all his albums at home.