Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (3 page)

.

*****

“
Dare to be
average.” said Dr Susie.

Dare to give me a fucking
break.

If I succeeded in being
any more average the likelihood of her getting three hundred and
fifty dollars an hour would diminish somewhat. We had agreed that I
would write down my dreams and so when she asked me if I had
anything for her I took out my notebook and read her the following
scenario; “I’m setting out chairs in the gym for my Sunday night AA
meeting when I become suddenly conscious of making too much noise.
I look around and there, between the stacks of chairs are at least
seven or eight young boys arranged in sleeping bags on the floor.
It’s a strange sight but I assume for some reason that they are a
junior basketball team who made bad travel arrangements and need
somewhere to sleep. As I continue putting out the chairs they begin
to wake up and without speaking they stand up and bunch together by
the wall waiting for me to finish. This is when I notice they have
no arms. I wonder how their vests can possibly remain in place on
those smooth rounded shoulders. And because they are well-behaved
and respectful it somehow feels ok to introduce them to some of the
AA members who by this time are starting to arrive I feel proud of
these boys even though I have no idea who they are.

“
That’s so
beautiful, can you see what it is?”

I stared at
her.

“
It’s your
sub-conscious telling you it’s ok now to bring your younger self
into the AA meetings. The boys have no arms because that’s how you
felt when that guy was touching you.” The boy was contacting the
man.

Later that night Yvette
called me an asshole with such conviction I almost felt grateful to
hear such an honest utterance. Advertising had all but gutted me of
any genuine emotion. We had been talking about
us
. Or rather
she had been talking about
us
while I stewed.

“
Do you want
to be that guy who has to change his girlfriend every three
years?”

Silence.

“
Because
they’ll all want the same thing.”

Silence.

Every three years didn’t
sound so bad to me. If anything, it was a little optimistic.I
prayed that I might be struck in love with her. She was after all a
ready-made wife, highly cultured, French, great in bed, (if not a
little demanding) her mother was an aristocrat and an artist and so
well-connected in France I could already see the dappled summers in
Belle Ille, the publishing deals in Paris and the French-speaking
children showing me the contents of their mouths. But even as I
tried to sell it to myself I couldn’t conjure the required flutter
in my chest. Or if I did it was more like a twitch. Yes, the sex
was the best I’d ever had. No doubt about it. Guiltless soaring
orgasms that felt like time-travel. So what was wrong? Other girls
I’d met were boring in comparison or older or uglier or worse;
American. Was I was in denial? Would I only find out how deeply
embedded I was when I tried to pull out?

I could think more clearly
when we hadn’t had sex. In the time we’d been together the orgasms
were so intense and so regular they’d had the same effect as
medication. Once every two days after meals; and depending on the
dosage-level I’d see Yvette as gentle, beautiful and kind and
myself as loving, caring and truthful. But now that she was on
sexual strike I couldn’t find this girl or that guy. Maybe lust was
all I’d ever felt for her. There was no point in making us both
miserable just because she wanted to have a child. I knew I’d find
it impossible to love a creature whose first act on entering the
world would be to demolish the one thing I really did have genuine
feelings for. Her ass.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Open on a classroom full
of boys supervised by a priest. He walks between the desks craning
his head to read the copybooks and pauses to
point things out. He stops next to a ginger-haired boy and
slides in beside him. The other boys exchange amused looks. Beneath
the desk in a close-up shot we see the priest’s hand emerge from a
pocket slit in the side of his gown and crab-creep towards the
boy’s crotch. The forefinger and thumb pull at the fly fastener on
the boy’s trousers but it doesn’t budge. He tries
again.

Nothing.
After one more tug we notice the boy’s
zipper is pierced by a safety pin.

Cut to a close-up of the
boy’s face as he allows himself a barely perceptible smile.
Match-dissolve to the same boy now wearing an outrageous punk
outfit complete with a daisy chain of safety pins from his ear to
cheek. The music returns at full volume;
I am an
Anti-Christ.
The boy gives the finger to camera. Multi-Pack of
Xtra-Strong Safety Pins from Boyles Chemist.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Browsing menus of single
willing women was intoxicating at first. Pornographic even.
Beautiful girls with cocked heads and laughing eyes competing for
my attention in a modern day harem. I toiled over half-written
messages and deleted them in disgust only to start anew. Finally
after agonising over every comma, period and apostrophe I’d send
one out like a dove into the night. Annette87 was absolutely
gorgeous but believe it or not it was not her beauty that caught my
attention. She listed Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare,
in her last great book I read section and for which superpower
would you most like to possess she’d answered; “I’d like to read
minds.”

So yes, I wrote her a
poem.

Look ye to these blackened
leaves,

Deathly froze ‘neath icy
screen,

Neglected thus by suns and
moons,

These worried words seek
news of you,

Thine eyes to them are
planets bright,

Whose orbit brings the
gift of life,

Sayest not thou art bereft
of powers sublime,

Thou canst read words and
therefore minds.

No reply. Maybe she never
received it. Should I send it again? Maybe the internet was down.
In many ways a fleeting glimpse of a beautiful girl in the street
was more merciful. You saw her and she was gone. Here you could
ogle what you couldn’t have for days on end. Meanwhile capitalising
on your disappointment, ads for cars, aftershave and clothes
promised to make you more attractive. But I wasn’t about to give
up.

Intelligence, height,
wealth and wit.

These were the most
commonly sought qualities on datemedotcom. I already had three of
them and I could mimic the fourth in the right shoes. I was never
going to attract many replies on my looks alone but I was confident
that most girls were going to at least feign interest in a guy who
made two hundred thousand dollars a year as an Advertising Art
Director. And as such, having worked with some of best digital
retouchers in the business I couldn’t help but notice that many of
the photos had been modified. Skin lightened, blemishes blended,
legs lengthened, weight reduced, children removed.

It quickly became clear,
after only a few dates, that if a seemingly gorgeous
twenty-five-year old girl was willing to meet a guy nearing forty,
it meant he was going to have to pull up an extra chair for her
ass. Witnessing a girl rearrange the table in front of her as she
waited for her anatomical entourage to catch up was not something I
wanted to repeat. I felt like the victim of a crime but with no
emergency number to call because legislation had yet to catch up
with whatever this was.

Scrutinizing the profile
photos even more carefully I realized to my horror I had been
deceived by three very basic methods of in-camera trompe l’oeil. 1)
Lying face-down on a plush carpet absorbed all manner of immensity.
2) Holding the camera high created a false perspective that
funnelled even the most amoebic madness into a neat vanishing
point. 3) Posing between two friends converted a milk-churn
silhouette into an hourglass figure.

I was looking at this all
wrong. Instead of being the customer, I needed to become the
product. Instead of buying I would sell. At first I didn’t catch
the significance of profile names like Erin76, Shannon12 and
Colleen111, but it soon arrived in me like a smile. As a walking,
talking, realistically rendered, three-dimensional, life-sized
export of that mythical faraway land called Ireland I had something
to sell after all. These misinformed females, having grown up with
stories of the old country strained through generations of omission
and embellishment, were ripe for the romantic advances of a
native-born Mick.

An Irishman
with a girl’s name?

Yes, that’s
going to be my headline for this e-mail. You probably get a lot of
messages(gorgeous girl like you) and as you trawl through them
going…DELETE...DELETE...DELETE….I thought I’d at least grab your
attention with an eye-catching line.…and let’s face it, it must
have worked because you’re still reading. But why would my parents
give me a girl’s name? Well, since they had me late in life they
knew I’d grow up with less attention than my siblings, and like the
Johnny Cash song, A Boy Named Sue, the hope was that I’d grow up
independent and tough (imagine the playground taunts). Did it work?
You can judge for yourself when we meet. Girlsname

At first I only copied and
pasted this message to girls who referenced Ireland in their
profiles but pretty soon I began to send it out randomly. Why not?
Irishness was attractive to all cultures except the British and
there weren’t too many of them over here. And anyway I could always
screen the responses later. The objective was to see just what kind
of quality I could attract. It was revealing how grateful they all
were, beautiful or not, for being referred to as gorgeous.
Seemingly, this was enough to blind them to the fact that what they
had received was a form letter. And almost all of them wanted to
meet, or at least learn more about the man behind it.

“
You have two
new messages. First message.”

Beep.

“
I hate
you…I hate you…I hate you…I hate you... I hate you…I hate you…I
hate you… I hate you...”
It continued, with a few breaks for
inhalation, until the tape ran out.

“
New
message.”

“
I hate you,
I hate you, I hate you….”

Yvette had obviously felt
a need to underline the passion of the first message with the
comparative composure of the second. Why was she so aroused?
Talking on the phone earlier I had made the mistake of mentioning
Dr Susie’s suggestion that I might want to think about online
dating and she immediately hung up. Which was just as well because
I was about to remind her that it was she who insisted I see a
therapist in the first place. If it hadn’t been for her I would
never have even considered online dating. But when she called back
I let the call go to voicemail. Twice. When I felt an urge to call
her back I listened to those messages.
They were
my equivalent of a fat person-picture on the
fridge.

Dr Susie said I looked for
conspiracy everywhere.

“
Whenever
you’re stressed or overworked you look around for the enemy. That’s
your pattern. You learned it from childhood; abuse from your
teacher, denial from your mother and now you’re doing the same
thing with this guy Andy”

Andy was the creative
director on Falfaux who very rarely left the building. It seemed to
me that if you were any good at what you did you should be able to
go home every now and then. But not Andy. On weekdays we worked
into the early hours and on weekends we just worked late.He needed
me there because of my experience writing tv commercials and yes I
had a better showreel than him but was there really any need for us
both to be there at 1am on a Friday night? He tried to make it seem
like we were goodpals hanging out together. Just two guys checking
out chicks.

“
Look at that
ass,” he’d say as one of the junior account girls walked
by,“...look at the swagger, it’s innate”

“
It’s a
nine.“ I said

He shook his head in
awe.

“
That’s why
they pay you the big bucks, buddy.”

I had actually misheard
him but I he didn’t need to know that. That was when I saw through
him. Why go home to a complaining wife and screaming kids when you
could hang out in trendy office with gorgeous account girls and
your witty Irish art director? I was his creative
butler.

When I assured Dr Susie I
welcomed the idea of being fired she sighed loudly.

“
I’m sorry.
You’re stuck.”

This new candour amazed
me. Was it some sort of technique used by therapists? Remain silent
for the first five sessions then open up with all sorts of
observations? And by encouraging me to remain employed was she
thinking not just of my job but her own? I was after all, her
misery-mortgage.

“
You look
smaller this time, last time you seemed taller, you stood more
erect, you had greater presence”

This wasn’t at all like
her. Ordinarily she was much more tactful about making comments of
any kind. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that last time I’d
worn my Brothel Creepers. They add at least an inch to my height. I
was sparing my therapist’s feelings now? This was the equivalent of
neatening the apartment before the cleaner arrived. Something was
wrong. When I first lowered myself into the chair at the beginning
of that session the cushion and arm-rests were scorching hot.
Re-evaluating my near-collision with a huge mannish-looking woman
in the hallway I couldn’t help but wonder if I had inherited some
of the mood from the previous session.