You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (6 page)

Whether I simply held no faith that a letter from a twenty-three-year-old screenwriter would carry much weight with the bigwigs (or ‘big cheeses', for the White Wings employees among you), the following paragraph proves that I was only moments away from being escorted off to the Zelda Fitzgerald Center for Slightly Hysterical Ladies.

. . . I am complaining about this program not only as a woman . . .

Vagina? Present!

. . . but as a mother. I have a sick eight-year-old daughter at
home with me today, and felt that at the very least I could sit
her in front of some harmless daytime television . . .

That's right, in order to rouse what I felt were the just and proper responses from the Channel Ten authorities I invoked a fictional child. Please note that this is the exact sort of behaviour that makes the baby Jesus cry.

. . . Harmless indeed! If I had any idea of the revolting
innuendo and sexist banter that was to be aired, I would have
rented a video. As it was, I just turned the television off. And it
will stay off until you consider running some sensible daytime
television, as opposed to this disgusting rubbish.

Yours furiously,
Stacie Mistysyn (Mrs)

So my whole non-existent family was being punished for the sins of Stan Zemanek. No television until the entire network sits up and takes notice, invisible children!

Not long after that Stan got a brain tumour (presumably unrelated to one particular letter from an angry fake housewife) and appeared in lots of women's magazines looking sad and bald with his teary wife and headlines like NOBODY KNOWS MY STAN LIKE I DO and I felt briefly sorry for him. Which quickly passed—he was a bad egg and besides which he never replied to my heartfelt outpourings. Won't someone think of the (fictional) children?

That
Beauty and the Beast
letter began a whole cunning series written with the intention of ‘hoodwinking the respondent'. Obviously in my feverish state I was obsessed with the idea of fooling whomever may be unlucky enough to receive my latest missive and fashioned my pieces accordingly. I created dead husbands and injured pets and traumatised children. I pretended to live in bush huts and government housing and Toorak mansions. And occasionally I attempted to make a political organisation sit up and take notice by coming across like an enthused fan suffering a sustained brain injury.

21.01.1999

Dear Young Liberals,
I have just heard about youre new ideas for the Young Liberals
and I am thinking about joining. I heard it on channel nine
news a week or so ago but it took me until today to write to
you. That is not to say that I have not been thinking about
it because I have been thinking about it very much. My local
Pastor says I could be an excelent person in politics as I have
very strong opinons on a number of topics.

First though I have a queston for you:

1: Is there an age requirement for people who want to
join the Young Liberals? (dont worry I am sixteen and not to
young)

b: Do I have to live in Queensland to join the Queensland
Young Liberals? I am asking this because while I live in
Victoria from what I here the Queensland Young Liberals seem
to get a lot more done than the Victorian Young Liberals who I
have not read to much about.

c: If I join the Young Liberals can I have a say in what we
talk about and so on because of the topcs raised on the news I
have some opinions about.

I have been thinking about a few of the ideas. One is the
‘G' plate for older drivers which I think is a very very good idea.
My grandma is 73 and when she was driving I found it quite
embarrsing. I would lie down in the back seat so that no0one I
would know would see my driving with her as her driving was
very bad and I didnt want people to think that maybe one day
I would drive like that to. As she is now in a nursing home this
is no longer a very big problem however I am sure other people
would like for some law like this to be past to save them the
same embarrassment from their friends when they are forced to
drive with old people who everyone knows cant drive.

Also signs that should be in english would be good to. If
people are going to come to austraila they need to learn the
language as well as speak it properly. If they just come here and
we let them put up signs in there own language they will never
learn how to join in our societry.

Also I dont think that having the politicians in Star Trek
uniforms is a very good idea to. I dont know if this was a joke
idea but it is not good to put it with youre other ideas because
people will think that the other ideas are jokes when really they
are good ideas which should be listened to and not for people to
think they are jokes. So maybe it would be good to write to the
papers and tell them that the Star Trek idea was a joke so they
can print it so people will know to.

Anyway I think John Howard is a very good prime minster
and I am glad he won the election even if it wasn't by very
much. He has some good ideas to and I will write more about
that after I join.

Anyway you guys are cool! Please write back soon!!!!

Sincerely from
Stacie Mistysyn.

Poor Stacie Mistysyn, moniker used in vain yet again, this time with the sole purpose of making fun of the Queensland Young Liberals. There was possibly some kind of stoner logic attached to writing a fan letter in the style of Snooki from
Jersey Shore
. No doubt I had pictured the right-wing twits at the Young Liberal headquarters gathering around to read with worried frowns, musing aloud that if this was the sort of halfwit fan they were attracting with their policies perhaps they should probably just rethink the whole thing, or even give up altogether.

The hobby (quest? compulsion?) of writing to companies soon ebbed, no doubt much to the combined relief of the managing directors at Uncle Tobys, Sax International and Ocean Spray, and I instead wrote to new friends. I wrote to wharfies I'd met during the MUA dispute. I wrote to distant relatives, and admired artists, and people whose stories in the press had moved me. The frothing mania of changing the world, one stamp at a time, receded as I grew older, replaced simply by a need to reach out to another human being via a medium more thoughtful, more palpable, than a 3 am text message or dashed-off gmail. There was love in a letter. There was a heart. At Women of Letters shows I too now bent over an aerogramme, glass of wine abandoned as I scrawled across the page. I wanted to belong.

After a relationship broke down I gently attempted to mend bridges and build a gentler future by writing one long, self-reflective, blameless letter per week. It was my wish that when my ex-partner held my words in his hands he would forgive my many mistakes, and sense the impassioned hope between every line of my poor penmanship. That he would appreciate that I'd taken the time to sit down and write him a letter, because no electronic missive could convey the sentiment of our years together, nor possibly help us find common ground. And I didn't use a pseudonym, and I didn't create fictional children or complain about a broken or tasteless product.

I just told him I loved him and put it in the post; he could read it as often or as little as he liked.

Forevz

This is a cancer story that has some jokes in it, so if you think perhaps that's in poor taste it's probably best that you put this book down and spend a long and absorbing hour listening to Don McLean's song ‘Driedel' and talking to your friends about how deeply meaningful it is instead of reading further. This is a cancer story that has some jokes in it mostly because the main person in the story who has cancer is the funniest person I know. I never intended to write a funny cancer story because cancer is, by nature, inherently unamusing. Michael Cera is yet to star in a feelgood buddy cancer comedy featuring dick jokes and pop culture references (‘Hey Chemo-Sabe, if I radiotherapy my balls will I become like a porno Peter Parker and shoot spiderwebs instead of semen?'). Comedian Bill Hicks had some fairly poignant stand-up shows after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer but even then he didn't necessarily make jokes about his condition, nor were many people in his audience even aware that he was dying. If you Google the words ‘cancer jokes'—look, we all have our dark evenings at home alone trying to find distractions from the recesses of our respective souls and I'll thank you not to judge—one of the first websites that appears is the rather timidly titled ‘Are You Ready For Cancer Jokes?' It manages one—just one—joke (the clumsily worded ‘Q: What do you call a person who has a compulsion to get lymphoma over and over again? A: A lymphomaniac!' Look forward to reading this one aloud from a Christmas cracker next December) before retreating rapidly, hands raised in surrender, with five lengthy paragraphs explaining that the person who runs the website has
actually been diagnosed with prostate cancer
so drop your burning torches, cease your poisonous emails, we're all dealing with our healing process in different ways and laughter/medicine, so forth.

Gen was the first person I knew to get sick, properly sick, and it hit our group of friends like a train. We were in our early thirties, still dancing around the concept of recklessness, dawdling irresponsibly with commitment like bored, aimless teenagers. There were carbon copy nights of hard drinking where we would inevitably end up back at Blair and Angie's house in East Brunswick at three o'clock in the morning, talking too loudly and attempting to crump and knocking over furniture. It was a ten-year summer; nobody could be bothered getting pregnant and everybody kept going to gigs and sticking powders up their noses and nothing really changed. There was the lazy expectation that with any luck it would stay like this forever. We were old enough to know better. We just didn't feel like knowing better.

People our age didn't get cancer. Grownups got cancer. Friends of parents, distant aunts, paper thin grandmothers with a plethora of pre-existing ailments. Or that one sad and strange kid from primary school who kept turning up to class, month after month, with considerably less hair and a big brave scared smile, until one day they didn't turn up anymore and the principal said something adult in assembly about happier places and peace of mind that nobody really understood.

Cancer was maudlin and sentimental. Cancer was in
Beaches
. Cancer was a dull reminder that we wouldn't be spared those difficult, painful feelings of process and grief the rest of the adult world had to experience. That it had happened to Gen—a woman whose brassy, milk-curdling laugh was so robustly impossible to ignore she and I were often asked to leave restaurants so other diners could continue their meals in peace—was simply absurd. She was an independent, forthright, guitar-playing smart alec. A band she had been in years before were briefly the darlings of Triple J and teenagers had lined up around the block to see her play. On stage she was all snarl and sass and 1980s prom dresses. She was known for her quick wit and collection of sequinned windcheaters. In the days of Myspace she had competed with our friend Glenn over accumulating online friends and with concerted effort had locked in over one thousand in a week. She was brash and infuriating and somebody you always wanted to be around.

She had called me directly from the doctor's office.

‘They found a lump,' she said in a flat, dull voice. ‘It's big. I know it's cancer. I just
know.
'

It was three days before her thirty-sixth birthday. She had been freaking out about the milestone, gently, in that self-deprecating, self-conscious way we all had of facing birthdays in our thirties. We had been making jokes about adult nappies and jailbait boyfriends who looked at us blankly when we referenced generational things like Mudhoney and Joan Kirner. We were planning our annual liquor-sodden picnic in the park, where we would toast each other, lushly and repeatedly, and watch from half-lidded sprawlings on the grass while the children of our friends beat a piñata senseless.

Now all of a sudden the party was on hold and Gen was sitting on my couch sobbing and I was trying to half-heartedly reassure her that everybody had lumpy bosoms and it was only recently that my GP had had a prod around my décolletage and bluntly pronounced it ‘one of the lumpiest damn chests I've ever encountered'.

Even talking about cancer felt hollow and Hallmark, like we were faking sincerity in some overblown daytime soap opera.

‘Everything's going to be okay,' I heard myself saying to Gen in a high shrill voice. ‘You're going to be okay. We'll get through this.' Given another half hour without a script I feared I would soon slip into excruciating desk calendar quotes and a montage set to the music of Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes's ‘Up Where We Belong' involving the two of us running along a beach in slow motion.

There were tests, of course. There had to be, it was apparently the regulation thing for people with obscenely lumpy bosoms. I met with Gen and her family at the Royal Melbourne to get the results, all of us full of nervous energy and optimism. We did the crossword and made jokes about the trite photocopied posters advertising African drumming workshops for chemo patients. I imagined the oncologist laughing in our faces as he tore up the test findings, promising with chuckles how he would regale his fellow cancer specialists with the tale of this buffoon from Northcote who had wasted his entire morning falsely believing she had breast cancer.

‘Wait 'til I tell the guys you thought
that
lump was
cancer
!' I pictured him saying, with matey nudges in the ribs of a giggling breast care nurse.