Diseases of Venus

“Civilization and syphilization have advanced together“ - Van Helsing

In our Sixth Form year we were given a slide show on Venereal Disease as a result of a condom eruption. Several sixth form girls had acquired condoms, inflated them and distributed them around school and the boys were blamed. We were held back after assembly and when no one came forward to accept the blame the Head of Year dismissed us with a shout that we should grow up.

Two weeks later boys and girls alike sat in this special assembly noting the huge screen and the projector. One of the Religious Education teachers took the podium and smiled before she started telling us that pornography could be beautiful. She told us about a wonderful film she had seen set on a beach. It showed the magnificence of love instead of the dehumanising mechanics that made up pornography nowadays.

Every boy had multiple unfastened bra’s in their future, along with edible undergarments (which rumour had it were chocolate flavour) and a certainty that peanut butter could be involved in the bedroom. Everything was brightly possible but right now belonged to the dark side of teenage kicks. 

“Venereal disease is something you’ve likely not considered, you know about AIDS but there is much more you need to be aware of.”

What could they tell us that we didn’t already know from Clive Barker novels? One of my friends had a copy of Emmanuel IV and we had skipped school to watch it at my house.  We knew sex sounded like saxophones, that women needed oil on their chests and we discovered that watching pornography with 4 male teenage friends was uncomfortable and involved a lot of coughing.

The slide machine clicked and the screen filled with a suppurating black penis hanging from a hairless pink body.  Several slides were devoted to this man and his “extreme genital warts”. The words Genital and Warts etched into our minds.

The slide show was akin to someone who had never had a cheeseburger being taken to McDonalds and shown the bright red décor and the menu then just as they are about to order they are shown footage of unwashed abattoirs and the effects of e-coli.

Every girl in the room was a petri dish of disease.  Every boy felt warts pressing through their skin waiting to turn their genitals dark and crusty. The screen smeared with Thrush, glowed with gluey Gonorrhea, scabbed over with Scabies and sprayed syphilitic symptoms towards us. Phallus’s decayed and vaginas were riven with discharge. A single picture of crushed looking testicles made me think “well, that’s an image I’ll never forget.”

In each case we were deluged with how these diseases could be caught and the throwaway line “Scabies can be transmitted through something as simple as brushing past one another, the bug burrows into the skin and makes tunnels along the body” caused the entire room to start scratching.

After 50 minutes of destroyed groins and vivid sores the Religious Instructor took the stage and reminded us of the beautiful film she had seen, the beach, the magnificence, the purity and the cleanliness. She assured us sex could, and should, be an enriching experience while behind her a man’s stomach crisscrossed with Scabies faded away as the projector powered off. We filed out of the room nauseated as the teachers behind us laughed into their Nescafe and went for a smoke break.

We never saw the beach based film but once I moved in with other guys we amassed a great deal of pornography. A friend bought round a German film that he proclaimed brilliant and we watched it drunk. Somehow we managed to decipher the dialogue which seemed to run along the lines of “Hi, you have breasts, show them to me and my moustache” before becoming 2 hours of men peeing in plant pots and topless girls drinking the urine. Just as it got boring though they upped the game with the men taking bowel movements on white bread and….

Anyway life rolled on and 20 years later I was at a dinner. I asked a dad friend if he was thinking about a vasectomy given we were at the age where we’d been neutered by life and wife with no use left for our little astronauts. He said he was seriously considering it and I suggested we could go together, see if there was a 2 for 1 deal and “make a day of it.”

My mind flickered on the crushed testes on screen years before and I wondered, obsessed with time travel as I am, if perhaps I had been the only one to see that image. Had that picture been a warning sent by my future post operation self to the teenage trench coat pony tail version of myself?

Did time travel hinge on vasectomies? Are there wormholes in urethras? Paradoxes within prostrates? Singularities within spermatozoa?

During the midnight walk home with my wife I considered my lower parts and their relationship with the tangles of time. As life churned around us, blossoming in back packer bedrooms, tumbling drunkenly on wet beach sands as waves surged and gushed like - [I am at a loss for a simile] - I heard a voice.

“Hey,” it said with scientific certainty. I made a one handed man-justment and listened as it continued, seemingly speaking from my boxer shorts. “Hey, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour you're going to see some serious shit.

I pictured my manhood, sleek and silver and surrounded by blue lightning, uncrushed and alive. Chrome and steel and acceleration baby!

I jogged to catch up with my wife, who for tonight only would be called Jennifer.

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The Crew

The same thing happens nigh on every day. I get on the bus and sit with my book and the bus then winds its way along, slowly filling to the point where people start begrudgingly taking the aisle seats and sitting beside the person in the window seat. 

I glance up and see three or four seats left including the one beside me. I glance up again a few stops later and see every seat on the bus taken except the one beside me, there are people standing, there are people muttering, and an empty seat beside me. 

Sooner or later one lone traveller will shuffle and “excuse me” their way up and take the seat beside me and I find myself wondering what exactly it is that keeps these people at bay? I have my shirt and tie on, my hair neatly gelled , my Kindle doesn’t reveal that I am reading anything disturbing, I even have a nice lemony Armani scent, so why does no one want to sit by me?

I have come to the conclusion that, despite what my daughter tells me, I am simply not cool. I drag down the bus vibe of undercut hair, too tight trousers and iPhones. I sour their Vitamin and Nutrient Water with my grey-flecked beard and crows feet. 

This baffled me as I was cool once, I was on the edge, I was at the height of a movement before it was even a movement.

I was in a Breakdance Crew.

(Wavy lines and a tumbling sensation, oh yeah, we are going down the flash back tunnel again).

Break dance was phenomenon in the early 1980’s and during the school holidays of '82 I had visions of myself with mismatched fluoro socks, stubble on my face and the attitude in my eye of Turbo and O-Zone. 

I devoted very small amounts of time to trying to body pop, focussing on certain show stopping moves. In my 8 year old mind I was approaching event horizon of being able to break dance by simply thinking about break dancing now and then.

One of my neighbours, Karl, was a confirmed break-dancer. He had a shark tooth ear ring, muscle t shirt and a small cassette player with 3 break-dance tunes recorded five or six times. He had moves and skills and as such a “crew” naturally formed around him, especially also as he was ten and we were eight.

Being in his crew meant we followed him wherever he went and heckled anyone foolish enough to start a “beef” with him. We were fiercely territorial so the crew from the neighbouring street were our sworn enemies.

Karl would show his moves in the playing field and the crew from the next street would appear on the (ungraffiti’d) walls were they sat cat calling. As was our job we heckled back, declaring their dancer rubbish and we traded insults long enough that they demanded a “burn out.” This was a mythical concept; two dancers facing off until one broke from the inability to complete a special move. To loose a burn out could lead to tears, limbs could break from over extension and hospitalisation could very well follow. So saying, none of us had been to one though Karl had recounted a victory he had had in a burn out in a neighbouring and rougher town as the sun glinted on his sharks tooth ear ring.

Given the escalating drama of the moment nothing could happen there and then, Karl could not immediately break into a carefully choreographed routine. A time and place had to be determined. It couldn’t be in the park; parents may see and interrupt the precision dancing with shouts of dinner time. It had to be somewhere we weren’t supposed to be, and it had to be in the evening. We opted for the car park in the market square of town because it had a dumpster and that gave it an urban vibe and we chose 6pm because the street lights would be on. 

It was on, word went out about the burn out, people would come and witness this and I would be ring-side as part of Karl’s Crew.

We rushed back to Karl’s place to help him work out what to wear and spent the afternoon listening to the same tunes while Karl got dressed (tennis headband, ear ring, white trainers, baggy trousers and t shirt) and his mum bought us Lemon cordial and ginger biscuits.

We managed to convince our parents to let us out after dinner on the strict understanding we would be home for 7pm. With stomach battle ready and filled with fish fingers or frozen beef burgers we regrouped and ducked and dodged our way to town. Karl planted his cassette player down and we scowled and sneered. In my memory of this I am chewing on a matchstick though I doubt that was genuinely the case.

Karl broke into an epileptic warm up of half moves that suggested the raw talent he was just barely holding back and we all felt the electricity of the impending burn out. There was danger and music in the air, and our parents would never understand the necessity of this moment, the vital territorial tribal ritual that was about to be performed to Chaka Khan and the Rock Steady Crew. Adults just wouldn’t or couldn’t understand…and evidently neither did the other crew as they never turned up.

By 6.20pm we knew they weren’t coming. Karl was still windmilling his arms and checking his ear ring but by 6.30pm the manager of the chemist came out and told us to move on in and in a precursor to the Criminal Justice Act he told us we should turn that music off.

Not down, off.

We took the long way home, strutted through the neighbouring street looking for trouble, armed with imagined flick knives and broken bottles. No trouble came, though one of us did step in dog mess.

Back at our street with 20 minutes before curfew Karl pressed play on his cassette deck and Chaka Khan started singing at a sensibly low volume. He did a few moves and then spent a while psyching himself up to do a swan dive and lead into a caterpillar.

Having spent a good 12 minutes that summer practising I had a belief that I could do each move. Karl completed the swan dive caterpillar combo while the other kids twitched and jerked. 

Figuring this was my moment I launched into a graceful swan dive and encountered the terrible moment where ambition collides with inability. My arms buckled and my face planted firmly on the concrete and my legs went over my head as I crumpled.

I stood and wiped a small trickle of blood from my cheek as sniggers started but Karl silenced them with one clenched 10 year old fist.

“Least he tried” he said and as my heart swelled as he added an uncertain “Yo!”

One by one they launched into swan dives and crumpled until ten minutes later they were all wincing and rubbing sore points on their faces. Karl executed one more perfect dive and the front doors started opening on our street as our parents called us home.

I ran indoors and my mum asked how I had scratched my face, had I been fighting? 

“Nah Mum, dancing” I said, leaving my street persona at the door as I raced upstairs for a Sunday night Matey Bubble Bath.

Under my beard a small scar from my dance days likely remains.

And in my heart still burns the unchecked heat of the burn out.

If no one sits next to me on my next commute I am going to stand and scream out “Hey, you, the bus commute crew, show me what you do make a break make a move” and then I’ll caterpillar my way up the aisle and do the robot all the way to work.

‘Cause I could you know.

Cool is in my blood. 

Yo

How I Died

How did I die?

2011

Bear - Dad

Me - Yes mate?

Bear - If I am ever a lifeguard, and you aren't already dead, I’ll try and pull you out of the water.

*

My daughter predicts my death several times a week. She comes to our room at 1am and either taps me on the head until I wake up or opens my eyelids with her fingers and stares at me.

A small child standing by your bed in the midnight hours is always terrifying and most nights I wake with a jolt and see the dark shadow of my daughter standing breathing beside me.

What is it?

I had a nightmare.

Just try and go back to sleep darlin’

No Dad, I dreamt you died.

She then makes upset noises and I reassure her I am alive. I pull her into bed for a hug, she curls in and falls straight back to sleep.

Then without fail she kicks me in the groin.

In the morning I ask –

So how did I die last night darlin’?

She grins from the breakfast table and gives me my latest death. The list is now lengthy

• You were eaten by a crocodile
• You were shot by a gun
• You were stabbed in the face
• You were hit by a car / bus / horse
• You were eaten by an angry shark
• You were sick
• You were on the toilet
• You ate too much beans.
• You were hit by a dog
• You were old
• You just didn’t get up any more
• A snake killed you
• You exploded
• You caught fire and then exploded
• Dad, you just died, don’t you know? I am watching Tinkerbell.

With each scenario she mentions I make a mental note to be cautious just in case she is a five-year-old soothsayer. Should we go to the Reptile Park I keep a close watch on the crocodile enclosure in case it should break and the overly large child killing crocodile come rampaging towards me while my daughter giggles. I watch the ocean for sharks like Chief Brody and stay firmly on the sand while she throws sand bombs at me. I am careful crossing the road, I try not to catch fire or explode, I stay well away from snakes and exercise caution when on the toilet. Should I see a dog that looks likely to hit me I give it a wide berth. As for being shot, well there is only so much I can do to avoid that other than stay away from Nakatomi Plaza.

My sons’ death fixation does not relate to me dying, but is specifically related to the undead. He begs for details on zombies. Can zombies survive fire? Can zombies eat dogs? Do zombies ever catch the bus? Would a zombie swim or walk under water? Can Batman beat a zombie? I answer each question as best I can, prefacing it with “well, zombies don’t exist….but” and then launching into a lengthy scenario about Batman and a zombie having a tussle in Gotham City. The last zombie question I had from him was “Dad, can a zombie eat itself, what would happen when it swallowed the last bite?” I am still working on this one.

I took the kids to the local cemetery when Bear was 3 and Toes around the one-year mark. Bear had been asking to go for ages, pointing to it and telling me he wanted to see where the dead lived. We were short of anything to do that day I hiked them up the hill, Bear on my shoulders and Toes in the pram. It was a blistering Australian day and by the time we reached the gates I was dripping sweat and breathless. Bear ran gleefully towards the graves, Toes bumbled along.

Bear stopped suddenly and turned to me.

Dad?

Yes mate?

Where are the dead people?

Underground, they are buried.

He frowned.

Dad?

Yes mate?

Can we go and get a shovel?

On that same trip he asked me

Dad, why do people die?

I took a deep breath and gave it my best shot.

People get old. Once they have done everything, eaten every meal, had every beer, seen every movie and read every book they die. They fall asleep and don't wake up.

Like Da?

Yes mate, like Da.

Da was my wife’s grandfather; he died when Bear was two.

Da was old.

Yes mate, he was very old. But he was in hospital where they care for people, he was comfortable and you gave him a kiss goodbye.

Da died. He’s dead like fish.

Fish was Bears very originally named pet fish. The fish died, most likely of over feeding. He has a new fish now, when he first got it he wanted to call it Fishy. It’s a fighting fish so the name was toughened up to Demon-Fish.

Yes mate, Da is dead like Fish.

Bear gave the beach a distant look, like Heathcliffe on the moors. He seemed to weigh up mans mortality, to consider the brief shining life we lead before we wink out and leave only love and memories.

He turned back at me.

Can I have an ice cream?

*

Toes has seen her pet mouse die, she’s fascinated by deceased pigeons on the side or the road and she giggled when she saw a fish chopped into pieces by a fisherman and thrown back into the water, mouth gasping on its severed head. .

She tells me there is a ghost of an old lady in her room who hates her. This gives me chills. Sometimes she points to the corner of the room and assures me someone is standing there.

I tucked her in the other night, sung her a lullaby, kissed her and asked her to try not to dream my death tonight.

Ok Dad, I’ll just dream you get hurt.

I know I am reaping what I have sewn, having raised two happy little goth kids and I love my demon kids. So saying, it would be nice to live through the night for a change.

*

1997

An ex girlfriend, before she was an ex, asked me– If you died, would you mind if I dated your housemate?

The Dry Hump Instructor

David and I became friends through geography. The move to Upper School was daunting and on the last day of our Middle School David stopped me in the corridor and said we should walk together on the first day. He asked if I would knock for him,  I said I would, and that was the last we saw of each other all summer until the new term. I knocked, his mum answered, and we were almost late due to David fumbling with his tie, worrying at his shoelaces, and stuffing marmalade toast in his mouth.

We walked to school and back every day and by daily exposure we fell into being friends of a sort. On the walks to school we would talk about his favourite things – guns, grenades, and Rambo, or my favourite things, Stephen King novels, Stephen King movies, and Rambo.

One Friday night, half way into term, David’s parents were going out and they suggested David rent a few movies and have me over for frozen pizza. He rented Fletch and Better of Dead, we watched the latter movie (and I immediately developed a hope to one day have a French girl kiss me and compliment me on my Language Lessons – it never happened but damn I still think she's lovely).

Before we put Fletch on talk shifted to a school disco that was coming soon. I’m gonna dance with Jodi – David was confident with girls. I’d seen that at middle school, he’d follow them around the dance floor relentlessly until they let him dance beside them. As soon as a slow song came on he’d launch like a hormonal St Bernard, mouth wide and tongue flailing. There’d be confusion, saliva and sometimes a slap. Inevitably he’d walk away puffed up and on a countdown to referring to the girl as a slag but assuring anyone who was listening that he’d tongued her.

Who you going to dance with?

Girls were still an alien and hostile species to me, Stephen King was safer. I knew they were there, I knew they could be spoken to and potentially convinced to remove their tops, but at the time I had a misguided certainty that Chinese food was involved and any conversation with a girl would lead to the purchase of fried rice and sweet and sour pork. I had no money so could not afford Chinese food. David was deeper in the hormone swamp and wasn’t shy of pocket money. He was hairier, he was sweatier, and he was fixated.

Uhm, no one. There’s no one I want to dance with.

Have you ever danced with a girl? David was grinning. I admitted that I had not.

It’s easy. He leapt from his chair and ran to the kitchen, coming back with a mop with a long red handle and a white head. He turned the mop upside down and held it in front of him.

You just go up to the girl and say – Hey. He stared at the mop, smiled his Kiefer Sutherland smile, and said – Hey Jodi, d’you wanna dance? The Jodi-mop apparently wanted to dance. Soon he was circling with the mop and I was laughing. He guided me on small talk whilst humming Take my Breath Away.

Your hair looks nice – he said, flicking his fingers through the mop head before turning to me – Say something nice to them, girls love their hair.

You smell nice – he said, sniffing the mop. Girls love it if you tell them they smell nice, even though they all smell of Avon soap. I had no idea what Avon soap smelt like but made a mental note to find out. He carried on circling with the mop, guiding it around the lounge, eyes fixed firmly on it.

Ask them about school stuff, but nothing too much. Tell them that homework sucks and French is pointless, except kissing.

He cackled at his own joke and I flashed on the girl from Better Off Dead and her Language Lessons again.

You only have about 3 minutes so don’t talk much. You need to be kissing them by the last minute of the song.

He started bobbing his head back and forth, making lip-smacking sounds. His hips swayed and he seemed to peck at the mop head.

Then he said - D’you want to lick peanut butter off of my dick?

I was laughing so hard that it almost passed me by. There was a legend in school about a girl the year above us. She’d been at home with her boyfriend and had gone to get drinks from the kitchen. She’d come back into the room and he’d been nude with peanut butter spread on himself. The legend went no further than this but David was obsessed with it. Any time he saw the girl he would shout as PEANUT BUTTER as loud he could before running, red faced, in the opposite direction. The girl looked baffled each time, and I slowly realised that the legend wasn’t actually a legend but was a creation of David’s imagination.

He was still dancing with the mop but his disco chat was becoming darker. You like peanut butter don’t you? You want peanut butter? The mop didn’t respond that I could hear. How many times have you had peanut butter? The mop continued being a mop, unaware of David multiple meanings for peanut butter. It was swaying from side to side as David manoeuvred it. I was still laughing, but slightly less comfortably. David seemed to have forgotten I was there.

You and me – and peanut butter. He pulled the mop closer. Yeah. He was whispering now as he pulled the mop closer and wrapped one leg around it. And – and – you and me and –

He pushed the mop against the back of the sofa and kicked the bottom towards him. He pressed himself to it and began to grind. I sat, uncertain what the best thing to do was, as David bore down on his mothers kitchen mop and kept calling it Jodi. The air was thick with the smell of detergent and David’s sweat. He buried his face in the strands. His ears were scarlet, his body wrapped tightly around the handle. There was a practiced intent in his movements; seemingly this was not the first time he and Jodi had danced.

With a sudden shout of Bitch he stopped moving.

I slipped out of the room and ducked into the kitchen. I ran the cold tap and filled a glass with water, not wanting it but wanting to appear busy. I heard him walk out of the lounge room and into the downstairs toilet. I went back to the lounge and saw the mop, laying discarded on the floor now. I heard the toilet flush and David run upstairs. He came down a few minutes later in different trousers.

Before he came in the lounge I heard him in the kitchen, raiding the cupboard. He appeared with cigarettes and held it out to me. I declined and he lit one himself, sinking into the armchair and hitting play on the remote to start Fletch. He said nothing for the first half of the movie and I just about managed to forget about the sexually abused mop, which still lay on the floor behind me.

The following week, walking to school, David told me that he’d pulled 4 legs from a spider and put it in his underpants at the weekend. He told me he’d stolen his neighbour Sally’s bra and asked me if I wanted to come and see it, I pictured it limp on the floor, as abused as his mothers mop.

Then he became fixated on the fact that farmers had sex with their sheep and started telling me where he knew there were sheep and a few goats. He had a plan he said, he’d made a list of what they would need. I knew somewhere on the list would be peanut butter.

The last day I walked in with him I knocked on his door and his mother answered as ever. She smiled at me and invited me in. She told me David would be down in a moment and went back to the kitchen where she was mopping the floor. She swished the mop from side to side, dunking it in the bucket and back to the floor again. I watched the mop move across the kitchen and heard Take My Breath Away in the back of my mind. I started wondering, could you, should you, with a mop? Would it, could it, be good?

David hammered down the stairs and as we left I said I think we should stop walking in together. He asked why and I made something up about homework and wanting to get into school earlier. Truth was I knew if I kept hanging around with him I’d be stuffing amputated spiders down my pants and mounting my mothers vacuum cleaner within the month.

He shrugged and said So what and for the rest of the walk we didn’t say a word and I tried not to think about his mop.

Paying for it in the mail room

When I was 11 Roland gave me one pound. Unlike mine, Roland’s school shoes were shiny and were replaced during the school term. His school bag was leather, his uniform pressed and his packed lunch was not made from Sandwich Spread. He had a fist full of coins and dished them out to five of us in the playground.

I had 20 pence a day to buy a bag of sugar – Rainbow Dust (brightly coloured sherbet) or Pineapple Chunks (bright yellow cubes of fruit flavoured sweets) - from the newsagents. There was a tuck shop where Currency = Cool, since I had no money I wasn’t cool. On this day I strode into the tuck shop and handed over cash as though I did it all the time. I bought Orange Fanta and a bag of crisps and still had change. I giggled a bit.

That day I rocked the free world - until my form teacher saw me.

Where’d you get that?

Tuck shop

Where’d you get the money for that?

My poverty was known from the fact that this teacher had given me football boots and a rugby top from lost property. Given I have an inability to lie I said that Roland had given me a pound.

Why’d he do that?

I had no idea. Roland had given me the coin out of the blue. The teacher did not view this as positive an occurrence as I did.

The following morning Roland and I were called in. He asked Roland where he had gotten the money and Roland confessed to stealing it from his dad’s wallet and started to cry. He asked why he had given the money out and Roland had shrugged and cried some more. He asked me if I was bullying Roland and I looked at my spaghetti arms and I said no. He asked if Roland was buying my friendship and I said no (I had gone from bully to prostitute in 2 questions). He asked Roland to name the others he had given money to and he sobbed and named names. A few minutes later 4 others stood with us, staring at Sobbing Roland and SuperGrass Me. The teacher said we had to pay Roland back and they shelled over a pound each from their pockets. I said I would have to pay over 5 days and the teacher frowned. He itemised my Orange Fanta and Cheesy Quavers and said - You’ll pay for it.

Not being able to pay immediately made me the most guilty of “The Playground 5.” I had needed that Fanta too much!

Two years later Manesh bounded over to me during break. He gave me an iced finger bun. He had a Tupperware container full of them. I quite liked Manesh, we weren’t close but we sat next to each other in Maths and occasionally swapped jokes about the English, Irish and Scots. I took the bun, I ate the bun, I enjoyed the bun and just as I was finishing it a teacher pulled me aside.

Where’d you get the bun?

Round a mouthful of bun I said Manesh had given it to me.

Why’d he do that?

I said I didn’t know. I was confident there was no way they could make me repay a bun.

Are you bullying Manesh?

Again I looked at my spaghetti arms.

No.

Are you friends with Manesh?

I said sort of, we did Maths together and before I could tell the teacher about the racially profiled but funny English, Irish & Scots jokes he asked -

Are you not friends with him because he’s black?

I didn’t know how to answer. Manesh was darker skinned but I had never placed any importance on this. When Roland had given me the pound there had been no mention of skin colour.

I said no - I wasn’t not friends with Manesh because he was not white. The teacher frowned and told me racism was a terrible thing. I should think long and hard about racism, if I was being racist he assured me You’ll pay for it.  

I became wary of people giving me things. A redheaded girl wanted to dance with me at a school disco. A huge African kid offered to hit someone who’d said I had Hitler hair. I turned them both down. I was burned, I was bitter, I was driving in the rain staring fixedly at the white lines ahead, I was a man on the edge, fearful of generosity - and then I was no longer in school.

I was working my first job. One of my co workers was a flamboyant male. He wore bright shirts and sang a lot. He was pretty funny and one morning he gave me a chocolate biscuit. We sorted the post and talked about movies, music and alcohol. The manageress wandered in and saw me chomping chocolate digestive. She sent Stuart to the 4^th floor to collect something and once he’d gone the she turned to me.

You and Stuart getting on ok?

I nodded.

You know you need to be careful yes?

I frowned. Careful about what?

Stuart’s a Poof. Be careful about being too friendly with him. You don’t want to end up in an awkward situation. If you’re not careful (she nodded at the melting biscuit in my hand) – let’s just say you may have to pay for his friendship.

I still had spaghetti arms and was rocking a long pony tail. Being friendly with girls had never led to unexpected payments. I was unsure how having a laugh with “Gay” Stuart meant I may end up Paying in the Mail Room.

A friend’s father had been livid when a British Olympic swimmer came out as gay. The friend related his fathers concerns as What if the swimmer visited our school promoting sports and health and then tried to touch us in the changing room? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think Gay worked that way. I didn’t think Gay Stuart was hopping around the office touching every male who ate a chocolate biscuit with him.

Stuart came back and the manageress left, winking at me as though we had entered into a quiet agreement. Stuart asked what that was all about and, unable to lie, I said – You’re gay and I have to be careful about awkward situations or I may end up paying.

Stuart laughed and assured me that my pony tail and spaghetti arms were pretty ruinous. No one liked my pony tail. Then he told me the manageress was shagging the Managing Director and it became apparent that everyone I worked with was shagging someone else in the office bar me.

*

The use of race or sexual preference when denouncing people seems so ridiculous and unnecessary. I can offend folk at 50 yards without resorting to such epithets.

We once saw two men arguing in Waitrose in the UK years back. They were fighting about who had been first in the queue and their argument escalated. were almost coming to blows when one of them bellowed “you nigger bastard” and the whole shop held its breath. The lady who lives above us, arguing with her neighbour about nothing bigger than a washing line, shouted “Oh you black bitch.” These phrases seem to still come spilling out but hopefully for no longer than another decade or so as the bigots die out one by angry one. I'm sure by the time my kids are 18 such racial vitriol will have abated and we can go about disliking each other for other things.

The same with gay marriage, which seemingly every rational person in the world is for. By the time the kids are 18 it has to have been resolved. Now though, despite being legal, it is still bringing protest that seems to come from the most atavistic of thoughts  - “They already have civil ceremonies, why do they need more?” -  which I guess shows that it’s comforting to say we’re all equal as long as some of us are a little more equal than others.

In epilogue –

Roland is still rich and now married with 2.4 kids and a tractor (according to my briefly accepting a Friend Request on Facebook; I un-friended him before he could start sending tainted money).

Manesh I lost all contact with, but I am guessing he is still darker skinned then me.

Stuart, his ambition was to go on Stars in Their Eyes and win by singing a Morrissey song. I have no idea if he ever managed it but in general I don’t like people who go on television shows and I can’t stand Morrisey.

Me, I’m older than Bill Hicks was when he died. I still love his idea of a People Who Hate People Party and if I didn’t dislike people so much I’d try and start one.

Cut the nut

My wife is descended from The First Fleet - her ancestors were amongst the first convicts from the England sent to Australia. They arrived in Australia, served their time, fell in love and went about making babies. Being a First Fleeter grants you kudos over here so one day my kids will have to dress as starving convicts and sing Advance Australia Fair just as my wife did. The interesting part of her heritage is that one of her ancestors was arrested and deported for the crime of breaking and entering at the residence of [a man with the same name as me]. He stole a toolkit.

My first Christmas in Australia my mother in law gave me a toolkit. It’s full of screwdrivers, spanners, sticky things and scrapping things. I heft it down from the top of the cupboard about once a week to unscrew the battery compartments of kids’ toys or to look for the pen knife so I can use the scissors to cut my toe nails. Invariably when I put my hand in the toolkit I cut myself on some random sharp thing. Then I forget to put it away and Toes empties it and runs off with screws I don’t want or items I didn’t know I owned.

When I was 19 I got my first car. I could hardly afford to fill it up and new tyres were an impossible expense but owning it was wonderful, I could go places, I could drive into the distance playing music and gaze moodily toward the horizon in my leather jacket (from the front seat of a white mini that I bought from a middle aged lady who used it for shopping). Just after I bought it a friend and I attached a car stereo to it using duct tape, nails, string and glue. It fell off one week later whilst playing Nirvana and landed on my foot and I nearly crashed into a wall.

The only tool in the car was a jack for changing the tyres and a tyre iron. I thought I should learn how to use the jack so I practiced. I gave myself a blister and several cuts on the finger working out which was the jack was meant to go and how the handle attached but eventually I raised the car and feeling proud and prepared I lowered the car and put the jack back in the boot. As I did so, unknown to me, I knocked the cover of the car battery aside.

I drove around that afternoon feeling quite car-capable to the point that I conjured images of myself driving international rallies in my mini and winning at impossible odds whilst also defeating terrorists and saving women’s volleyball teams from distress. As I turned into my home street I could hear a bubbling sound that wasn’t related to volleyball. As I parked and the noise grew louder and I opened the boot and saw the metal handle of my jack stuck fast to the positive terminal of my battery. The other end of the handle was against my petrol tank and the side of the tank was glowing red. The bubbling sound was the petrol in the tank boiling. My battery was mostly melted. I stood wondering how long petrol can boil for before it explodes. The red glow faded and thick smoke wafted around me from the battery. As an adult I understand that my petrol tank would have been full of extremely combustible vapour but as a teenager I simply said Meep and ran away.

Shortly afterwards I needed to change a spark plug. I had a socket set that my dad had bought me and it was shiny and silver and manly. New spark plugs lay before me, and old ones in the car. The new ones would rocket charge my car. I attached the socket set, wiped oil on myself for the rugged look, wished I had a matchstick in my mouth and a southern American accent, and turned the spark plug….the wrong way. It sheared off and I had to get my dad to fix it.

I get blisters using screwdrivers. Building Ikea furniture hurts my hands. My hands are soft from a life time of keyboards and remote controls. When we bring Ikea items home Bear asks me how long it will be before I start shouting.

New Years Eve we needed a new toilet seat. For months the old one had been falling off and I’d been reattaching it. Given we were having visitors round it seemed wise to provide them somewhere to sit. We bought the seat and I had 3 hours before they arrived. The seat promised it was easily installed and I believed it.

The old seat sat askew and I hunkered down to start undoing the plastic nuts on the back of the seat. The bolt was rusted, undoubtedly due to my sons’ creative aim in the bathroom. I used pliers and a spanner and managed, over half an hour, to turn the nut roughly 6 times. The length of the screw thread was a ridiculous 2 inches. I tried the other nut and found it similarly rusted and unwilling to turn. Each time I put the pliers down they vanished and I’d spend 5 minutes looking for them only to then loose the spanner.

I had 2 hours and fifteen minutes before my guests would arrive and immediately need to defecate. I looked in my toolkit and decided it would spray the bolts with WD40 if for no other reason than it smelt nice. First spray I had the tin round the wrong way and sprayed myself in the face. The nuts still would not turn. By now I was topless and perspiring heavily so I put on gardening gloves to help me with my grip. Bright green ones with yellow flowery patterns.

I managed to turn the nut once more and then slipped and bent the bolt. At this point I contemplated asking our neighbour of our visitors could use their toilet.

Toes came in and informed me she needed the toilet. I returned to find she hadn’t bothered flushing. I got back to work and managed two more turns on one nut and then my son needed the toilet. He flushed but left a fog in the bathroom that was thick and frightening yet made me oddly proud.

I realised, in a moment of genius, that the nuts were plastic and so maybe I could melt them. I hunched around the toilet I started burning one whilst making Beavis & Butthead giggling sounds. The nut glowed green and dripped plastic and I started tearing up from the fumes. It burnt, but seemed to only shrink and tighten. I had made things worse rather than better but using fire made me feel pleased so I did it again. And again until the lighter was out of gas and I was slightly high on fumes. The nuts were now balls of black kryptonite melted to the bolt.

Thus far, aside from fire, I had used pliers, a spanner, I’d tried to chisel them off with a hammer and flat head screw driver, I’d shouted at them, and I’d used a small craft knife to try whittle through them and cut my thumb twice. I had an hour before my visitors were due and could sense their bowels expanding. I knew they would arrive experiencing gastric distress and immediately need to sit. They’d discover a bathroom full of tools and toxic smoke and me finger painting with my own blood. I was spending a disturbing amount of time considering their bowels.

I had not tried secateurs yet so I grabbed them and tried to cut the nut. Parts started breaking away from the left side bolt and I hacked and snipped and it shattered. I slid the bolt free and whooped with delight and did a little dance that I call the Lava Lamp.

The right hand nut was harder to reach. I snipped and small pieces fell away. I clipped but could not get purchase to cut the nut. I held the bolt in my hand and wondered if I could break it. How far would I be able to bend it before the porcelain seat shattered? I bent the nut a little and relied on 2 years of my sons creatively aimed wee having weakened the bolt. I bent it a little more, then a little more. I bent it back again and it immediately snapped in my hand. 2 hours and 15 minutes of pain, toxic fumes and emotional toolkit distress and the bolt snapped in under a minute.

I attached the new seat and washed for a long time. Both kids ran in and shouted that the new seat was Cool and I did my lava dance again. I wanted my wife to come, view the seat and smile. I was topless, sweaty, dancing with green gardening gloves covered in WD40, sweat, grime, and what seemed to be engine oil. I apologised to my wife for the time it had taken to do the toilet seat. She patted me and said It’s ok, after all you did manage to change the seat in the end. I took the comment as praise.

The toolkit is back on top of the cupboard now. I am hoping an English person breaks in a steals it and gets deported to Skegness.