In Bed with Jocasta (16 page)
Read In Bed with Jocasta Online
Authors: Richard Glover
How embarrassing? Ah, let me count the ways.
Borrowed Verse
All teenage love letters have some borrowed verse, and it’s nearly always one of the same three poems: the lofty thing from Andrew Marvell, the hippie thing from Kahlil Gibran, and the slightly sexy thing from e. e. cummings. Indeed, my letter may provide some sort of record in including all three. (Which is one up on Mr Squires, who presumably did his serenading armed with a copy of
Limericks Lewd and Lusty.)
Margin Art
If it doesn’t contain a poorly executed attempt at artwork, then it’s not a real teenage love letter. Mine, for instance, contains a very colourful, and almost unrecognisable, attempt at a field of daisies — which alone may explain why the recipient of the letter has taken twenty-five years to contact me again. Would I have done better with two intertwined hearts? With a geometric? With an AC/DC logo? These questions torment me still.
Political/Philosophical Chat
It’s always important to include a few slogans in your letter, just to dignify the whole process. Mine, for instance, contains some pretty tough political comments about Malcolm Fraser. Indeed, some sort of discussion about how The Dismissal was engineered by ‘you know, real fascists’ was the precursor to nearly all my teenage snog sessions — so much so that the mere mention of Malcolm Fraser’s name still gives me a small erotic charge.
Pathetic Attempts at Grown-Up Talk
This is a must. You may be fifteen years old, and so may she — but there’s no need to admit it. What you need is a pathetic and obvious attempt to talk like a grown-up. I can see I’m going to be forced to quote a slab of my letter, to show you what I mean. Thus: ‘Woke up this morning at the god-awful sonavabitch time of 6 o’clock, so I am at this moment sitting in the school canteen trying to resurrect myself with hot chocolate.’
It is, if I say so myself, a superb example of the form — the Clint Eastwood tough-talk of ‘sonavabitch’ rubbing up so disastrously with the truthful admission of ‘hot chockie’. Embarrassing? Oh, yes.
Actual Promises
These, I note, are completely missing in this early — and failed — attempt at winning love, but are present during my rather more successful wooing of Jocasta. Indeed, by Jocasta’s time, my love-letter techniques had improved to include the bare-faced lie — in particular, at one clearly desperate point, the claim that I’d do half the housework if she’d only let me move in. Add the constant pretentious literary references, and it seems clear that Jocasta thought she was getting some sort of fey intellectual with a cleaning fetish.
(Which must have been a shock when I finally moved in with my six weeks of dirty laundry, a Honda step-through motorcycle and the homebrew kit.)
M
ost of us watch TV, and most have a sense of
déjà vu
when we’re doing it. Have we seen it all before? Sure. Largely because all of TV is governed by a secret rule book.
Every office in sitcom America has a short, perky, libidinous red-head with kooky clothes and no apparent job.
Any injury whatsoever to a Jehovah’s Witness will require a blood transfusion.
Minor characters in TV drama, despite appearing weekly over a number of years, never get a change of clothes.
Supermarket shopping, carried into the kitchen, only ever consists of one bag. It never contains toilet paper.
Every square metre of Sydney Harbour has at least a couple of floating bodies. Watching
Water Rats,
it’s a miracle they still manage to get the ferries through to Manly.The judges who preside over cases in the United States are always African-American.
Being the sibling of a police officer or a doctor is pretty much asking for it: I’d give it three episodes before you’re revealed as a heroin addict.
The main guy’s an Anglo; the sidekick is from a minority group.
The main guy is handsome; the sidekick is both fatter and shorter.
The circled classified ad left by the murderer is always in the middle of the page of classifieds, never on the top or side.
Only on game shows does the carry-over champ win $61 000 of prizes — which works out as one pin-ball machine and three nights on Hamilton Island. Remind me to never shop where they shop.
Radio announcers, heard for three seconds through the car radio, just happen to be conveniently announcing both the time and place of the scene: ‘And it’s a beautiful morning in Adelaide.’
Criminals never shop at Target. That fibre fragment discovered at the crime scene comes from a jacket that could only be bought at a single shop in southern Glasgow, during the years 1951 to 1953.
Heroin use leads to an inability to shave.
Everyone in New York can see the Manhattan skyline out their window, just as every single citizen of Sydney has a view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
As people glide through the airport, no suitcase ever looks as heavy as a real one.
The only compatible organ donor is the no-good, long-lost father.
The policeman at the crime scene is always starting a fresh notebook.
The crucial phone message left by the kidnapper is always the first on the message tape … the audience conveniently spared the four messages from the video shop.
Everyone pulls up right outside their venue, and finds a parking spot, even in the middle of New York.
Murderers have long tired of simply shooting people. Not when they could have fun with mirrored walls, electrical spikes, and trampolines buried in lawns.
The big boss is always a humourless, thin-lipped stickler for the rules, handling pressure from above.
The more brilliant and intuitive the cop, the worse his bad breath/rumpled clothes/psycho-sexual problems.
And, most curious of all, beautiful young women always, and inexplicably, fall for craggy older guys.
My favourite was the cover headline: ‘Small
Breasts are Back in Fashion’. And you were
left wondering: what does the editor imagine?
That women like Jocasta have sets of these
things? That they get up every morning,
umming and ahhing about whether they’ll
slide on the 38 double-Ds or the 32 As?
J
ocasta is trying to get me out of bed, employing the customary method of throwing the kids in there with me, using them like small incendiaries. It’s certainly a terrifying scene, and one that normally brings a rapid end to the Reading of the Newspaper. But not this morning.
However much the kids wriggle, I can’t take my eyes off the bold headline in the free magazine. It’s on the fashion page, in the same type they normally use to announce that ‘Spring Dresses will be Shorter’ or ‘Winter Coats are Darker’. Except this time it says, and I am not making this up, ‘Summer Legs are Longer’.
Lying in bed, with my string-tie pyjamas cutting into my growing roll of fat, with last night’s Mudgee red still pounding just behind the eyeballs, and with two children bouncing up and down on my ribs, I wonder just how I am meant to use this information.
Already, the fashion industry seems to have totally removed women’s secondary sexual characteristics. The sexy arse (‘the Lopez’) is, of course, long gone; and even the breast is a fading memory. (In the latest designs, it is finally uncovered — but only in order that we may note its virtual disappearance.)
It’s only a theory, but with every passing day the fashion models are getting thinner while I am getting fatter. There’s good evidence, I now believe, that Eva Herzigova is channelling her buttocks onto mine — rather in the way that Lake George, just outside Canberra, rises and falls according to rain levels in Western Australia. Every time
she
eats a hamburger, I put on two kilos.
And now this. ‘Summer Legs are Longer’. Clearly, in order to be fashionable, I’ll have to make mine grow. But how?
Already, the fashion industry demands its brutal entry price. For the women, starving yourself until you are a celery-stick off death, then surgically gouging any loose skin from your face. And now the ultimate: demanding we strive for longer limbs, presumably by being stretched on some sort of medieval rack. The fashion industry may be swinging away from the torture of animals, but not from the torture of its own customers.
Back in the bed, I am sweating slightly, lost in my nightmare, while Batboy mutters to his brother, explaining how to use one’s father as a trampoline.
I ignore them and show Jocasta the headline, hoping to share the horror, but she says I’m being stupid — they mean summer legs will
look
longer because of the different clothes.
Of course, she’s the one being naive. Lots of ideas from the fashion industry have sounded stupid, but that hasn’t stopped them. For instance: the trend of getting fuller lips — achieved by having fat suctioned off your bum and injected into your lips. Who would have believed that a few years ago? Or believed that, in the 21st century, when a group of style-setters smother each other with kisses, they are literally kissing each other’s arses?
Then there’s my personal favourite, the cover headline that announced in huge print: ‘Small Breasts are Back in Fashion’.
What a great headline it was — a really practical fashion tip for all those readers confused about what size breasts to choose. You were really left wondering: what does the editor imagine? That women like Jocasta have sets of these things, just sitting there in the wardrobe? That they get up every morning and stand in front of their mirrors, umming and ahhing about whether they’ll slide on the 38 double-Ds or the 32 As?
Or that reading their magazines, they’ll let out a whoop of excitement: ‘Oh, thank God I didn’t throw out those squitchy little ones back in 1982. I just knew they’d come back.’
Out at the Royal Easter Show a while ago, my friend Jennifer was staring at the signs outside the funfair ride. Each ride had a masonite cut-out of a little boy, and a sign: ‘If you are not as tall as me, you can’t come on this ride.’
Jennifer reckons city dress shops might as well go the same way. Outside each store they’d be a masonite depiction of a model: ‘If your waist isn’t as thin as mine, I wouldn’t bother.’ They could even have a cut-out in the doorway: to get in the door, you have to be able to squeeze through.
Which store will you be able to enter? Which size breasts should you choose? And what length legs would be right for me?
I lie there distracted, as Batboy begins his climb on to the bedhead, ready to perform the dive-bomb on my belly, shouting to The Space Cadet to move aside.
Finally Jocasta has had enough of my blubbering. She grabs my ankles, heaving me out of bed just as Batboy launches his dive-bomb. There’s an ominous crack but I’m sure my legs are longer.
My body destroyed? Of course, but fashionably so.
A
ll I need to know is how much olive oil to put in the mix,’ I say to Jocasta, ‘and then you come in and try to highjack the whole operation.’ I wave an egg flip towards her in a vaguely intimidating way.
‘Well,’ says Jocasta, ‘if you don’t want my advice, I’ll just leave you to stew in your own juices. Over-oiled though they may be.’
She shoots the fish a look of commiseration, as if she wished its life had not been so clearly in vain, and marches from the kitchen. This is the problem with Jocasta: too often she does exactly what I ask. In this case, leaving me alone in the kitchen with a rather threatening piece of fish and no recipe.
What Jocasta doesn’t understand is that, in the kitchen, I want exactly the
right
amount of advice. Enough to make the meal edible — and to prevent any outbreaks of disease — but not so much advice that I’ll have to share any resulting glory. If the guests love it, no way do I want to find myself forced to mumble it was all down to her recipe.
Women claim to know plenty about cooking, but still they seem ignorant about that special culinary area: Bloke’s Cooking. Maybe some guidance would help.
Rule 1: We do it for the glory
Forget the ‘special delight of providing nourishment’. Forget ‘the quiet warmth of watching people eat’. That’s girls’ stuff. Blokes want feedback. Lots of it. Women’s cookbooks may display Expected Preparation Time; the blokes’ edition instead lists Expected Praise and Adoration (expressed in hours). After the basting, in other words, should always come the basking.
And luckily we’re happy to help, with a series of subtle, after-dinner, conversation starters, including:
– ‘Go on, everybody, say it, I’ve overcooked the meat.’
– ‘Does anybody else think I’ve hideously overdone the
nuoc mam?’Or, on occasions where the meal is actually awful:
– ‘It’s certainly a bit dry; I think Jocasta’s going to have to change that recipe of hers.’
Rule 2: The greater the mess, the better the meal
Others can cook the hum-drum, everyday meals. (For instance: women.) We prefer something that’s a bit of a challenge, something with a degree of difficulty, something, in other words, totally beyond our ability. Which is why we choose the most show-offy, fancy-pants recipes in the book. Recipes that involve Tahitian spices, bundt tins, and obscure German sweetmeats.
Not only do such recipes lend themselves to lengthy discussion afterwards; they also turn your kitchen into a vivid monument to each stage of the bloke’s heroic struggle — filth, mess and unwashed pots covering every surface. Remember the basic rule of Bloke’s Cooking: no real meal has been produced in this kitchen before. Nor, it seems, will be again.
Rule 3: The more ingredients, the better the meal
There is no requirement, under the rules of Bloke’s Cooking, to use ingredients economically. By the end of your preparation, the place should be full of halfcut lemons, open packets left to go stale, and cheeses left out of the fridge. Remember: you’re an
artist.
Rule 4: When in doubt, barbecue
It’s outside, it involves dead animals, and it’s dangerous. (Particularly once you and your mates are onto the second cask, and Mark suggests a bit more oomph via the lawnmower fuel.)
Rule 5: Men’s cooking is exempt from any need to be balanced or nutritious
That’s right: a bloke’s meal is so special and fabulous it can’t be judged by such narrow parameters as nutrition. Any passing woman can make the salad; he’s too busy creating the homemade pizza with triple cheese and extra oil. Expected praise: Five Days.
Rule 6: Don’t expect the kids to eat before midnight
This is our one confession. Blokes make fabulous cooks: flamboyant, emotional and vocal. But we have been known to stuff up the timing. Indeed, the expectation that artists like us should be kept to some sort of suburban timetable is just a little bit offensive.
Besides, even if the meal ends before midnight, it’s not as if the diners can leave straight away. There’s the meal to discuss. ‘Come on, admit it, I overdid the
tabia lombok,
didn’t I?’