Green (12 page)

‘Sure. Lots of New York references. “Whores on Seventh Avenue”, “New Jersey Turnpike”. Except that's a New Jersey reference, I suppose.'

‘And what exactly is a turnpike? I've always wondered about that. Like, is there a pike there?'

‘It's a good question. I don't know. Maybe I'll get to check it out at the end of the year. I'll send you a postcard. If there's a postcard of any kind of pike in New Jersey, I'll send it to you. Anyway, I got
Bright Lights, Big City
for my birthday late last year. I'd read about it somewhere. And I got a camera—a regular camera—since I figured I should learn about still photography too, if I'm looking at making films. Not that I've done much yet—my mother's birthday, and a few compositional things. And we started taking some photos for a uni revue sketch, Frank and me, but it kind of got canned. There was a difference of opinion. Well, Frank told the organisers some of their ideas were fucked, and that they had a real problem listening to constructive criticism. So they told us we didn't have to come back.'

‘That doesn't sound like Frank,' she says. She knows him too well by now. ‘Hey, Dad says you do Shakespeare when you're doing the chicken.'

‘Sometimes. I thought that was between him and me.'

‘We're a close family. Get used to it.'

‘It's pretty boring out there. You've got to do something.'

‘No kidding. I think Shakespeare's a good idea.'

‘So what do you do?'

‘Just wave my arms around a lot. Try to be like a chicken, I guess.'

‘But what does your brain do?'

‘Tries to stop me falling in front of the traffic. Don't you find the lights, like, hypnotic?'

‘I think you're getting a bit too much into that chicken brain space.'

How did it become Shakespearean? I'm thinking when I'm back out there and realising I can't recall enough of ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' to make it worth trying.

It was the chicken costume, and the comb on the head, which came as a separate piece of moulded plastic and had a bad lean to the left. It took a while to sort that out, so it was on my mind and led to cockscomb, and therefore to standing at the roadside mouthing faux-Elizabethan advertising slogans and insults at the unstopping traffic. And that led, irresistibly, to Henry V's speech before Agincourt (or was it Harfleur?) and eisteddfod flashbacks and Hamlet's soliloquy, which is so over-recited that practically No one gets the emphasis right. No one listens to it any more. No one realises that the key word is ‘be'. Except of course this seven-foot chicken at the Taringa lights on Moggill Road. The one whose brain is always elsewhere, the one at very little risk of being fatally mesmerised by the traffic.

Frank waves me back in early.

‘Zel reckons we should pack up before ten if there's No one around,' he says, having already tidied some leftover chicken into three burgers that he's now wrapping neatly and putting in a box for taking home.

 

*

 

I can remember, years ago, reading ads for bullworkers in American comics always featuring some bulky guy and a life-changing steel tube with handles. I was horrified when I worked out what their representative weakling weighed in kilograms. If only I'd left it in pounds and hadn't put myself through the maths, I would have had years of those blissful dreams of sea monkeys instead. I always wanted sea monkeys, even if they were just tiny translucent aquatic insects that came as a packet of eggs not much bigger than dust. And I wanted X-ray glasses and the famous Black Liteª  light bulb and peace patches for jeans. I must have been young. The peace symbol was everywhere on those pages.

But it wasn't peace I needed. My life has always had peace in abundance. What it lacked, clearly, was muscle. And perhaps the people who go to beaches are kinder here than in America but I knew that, when the time came to have sand kicked in my face—the characteristic way for shame to manifest itself in a bullworker ad—it'd be at the time of maximum embarrassment. It hadn't happened so far not because it wasn't going to happen, but because it wouldn't have meant enough. In the ads, the representative weakling was usually shamed in front of his girl. In the ads, the Charles Atlas way was the way of salvation. Charles Atlas never copped sand in the face, but nor did he kick it. He was above all that, oiled and buffed and able to shoulder the whole world. If Charles Atlas was on the beach, the sand kickers would look like scrawn and they'd have to run home and bullwork compulsively between now and next summer before daring to show themselves again.

It hadn't been my plan get a bullworker for my nineteenth birthday. It had been years since the comics and all I'd put on the list had been ‘exercise equipment'. But that was too general so, when queried, I mentioned that I was thinking of something that'd bulk me up a bit, give me an all-over workout. Something that could do that in the privacy of my room. Something No one outside the family would have to know about. It was my mother who was drawn in by the claims on the bullworker box in Kmart. She even got the shop assistant to take the booklet out and, as soon as she saw that it offered forty-two different ways to a total-body makeover, she knew she was on the money.

So far, the results have not been spectacular, and my commitment to the bullworker has been in the waning phase for nearly two years. We had a plan, my mother and I, a bullworker-plus-Sustagen plan that practically couldn't fail. It should have been very safely anabolic. It appears to be petering out into nothing. And that, dammit, is so very 1985 for me.

I'm in my sleeveless muscle shirt in my room realising that, on me, it's just a sleeveless shirt and all it's doing is putting my armpits on the outside. I'm pulling hard at the bullworker and trying not to grunt. Maybe there has been some progress. I grunt less than I once did and there are now only a couple of the forty-two bullworker moves where I get no compression at all, and they both involve holding the bullworker behind my back. As if I'm going to need those muscles out in the real world. Or, more to the point, as if I'm ever going to get a chance to display them. I am viewing muscles the way a peacock views tail feathers. I have been completely enslaved by those cruel sand-kicking ads. If only I'd put sea monkeys on the list instead. You got a whole damn country of sea monkeys, including a king and queen. They had a sketch of them in the ad.

That's it. I'm stopping.

I make myself a massive chocolate Sustagen milkshake, I turn on the TV and I watch my arm veins bulge in the dim blue light. In the relevant section of my second-person bio, that part will read ‘muscles' not ‘veins':

 

You stop. You fix yourself a drink, you turn on the TV and your arm muscles bulge in the dim blue light. Not tonight, you tell her. Not again tonight. I'm spent.

 

Close to cool. Close indeed. Replacing ‘veins' with ‘muscles' and pretending my bullworker was a girlfriend certainly improved the look of my evening. That's a tactic I won't be sharing with Frank.

 

Not tonight, you tell her. Not again tonight. I'm spent. Shagged stupid like the king of the sea monkeys, slumped low in his throne.

 

The awesome breeding power of sea monkeys was always a feature. First they'd hatch, then they'd breed and breed until you owned a nation of them. What was I doing, taking any interest in them? Surely they're just lice in a jar. And what was it all about when Zel turned up tonight? I've had plenty of times when I've craved invisibility, but with this one I actually got there. I vanished, Frank went into autoflirt. I've told him that in less than twenty years all he'll be left with is autosleaze, but does he listen? Autosleaze won't be pretty.

 

*

 

I'm glad she picked Frank, and that he did his duty and went with it. Made her a burger, schmoozed her like a prize customer. In the car I told him I was grateful, since I couldn't have done it, and he just said, ‘No worries. I figure you handle Ron, so fair's fair. And you handle Sophie, too. Or you would, given the chance . . . '

I let that one go. Things didn't start out brilliantly with Sophie, but they've improved. I think, on our second or third shift together, I might have commented favourably on her earrings and she said something as fuck-right-off transparent as ‘Yeah, my boyfriend Clinton really likes them too.' To which I said, My girlfriend likes it when I can be relaxed enough to compliment a person without having an agenda.

So, in an instant, I'd invented a girlfriend. Invented her and, in the following instant, called her Phoebe. Yes, my mother's name, and a present-tense girlfriend, even though it's practically been a year other than the second weekend of last September (a relationship that lasted all the way till the following Tuesday). Pretty sad. Sad enough that I couldn't stop myself going on to say, She's a bit older than I am.

Sophie asks about her quite often. She's like that. Annoyingly considerate.

Phoebe? Sure. I met her through my mother. She has brown plastic handles at both ends and an insanely strong spring in between, and she offers forty-two different ways to a total-body makeover. We've been together two and a half years. I don't need a human girlfriend. I've found the Phoebe Atlas way. She loves me, even sleeveless, and that's saying something. She makes my veins work, damn hard.

I can be excused, I think, for viewing myself as being in something of a rut.

In the week between psych and surgery, I wrote to six med schools in America. Two have rejected me, three haven't replied and UCLA was the surprise, offering me the possibility of a place in an exchange program for interstate and overseas final-year students planning to specialise in emergency medicine. I've read the documentation. It looks like hell. I'm waiting for the three who haven't replied, but it's two months since I sent the letters.

I can't imagine UCLA, LA or what it's really like in a US emergency room when things turn crazy. The letter has an embossed crest and says that the cheque for the thirty-five US dollar processing fee should be made out to the Regents of the University of California. All I know is that that tells me nothing about what it'd be like. I wouldn't be hanging out with the Regents, asking for someone to pass another sheet of embossed writing paper as a pierced femoral artery squirts blood across the lino floor.

What do I know? What do I know about America, really? Sure I watch every movie that comes to town, and a lot of TV. Sure there are bits of
Annie Hall
, and probably a few other Woody Allen films, that I can recite without ever having tried to learn them. And there are books, with
Bright Lights, Big City
only the latest. I ran my Dim Lights, Big Town idea past Sophie this evening, and she said she'd never thought about Brisbane that way but maybe she hasn't read enough books.

But the small flecks of knowledge I have only make the size of the gaps apparent. What's a Hostess Twinkie, for instance? The kids in the American comics I used to read ate them all the time. What's a turnpike? Okay, etymology: something ancient and British. Already I'm seeing a beefeater. A beefeater pointing and saying, ‘No, go that way'. And I'm remembering my mother at the Tower of London when I was about eight, pointing to the beefeater's weapon and explaining the expression ‘plain as a pikestaff'.

I'm guessing there isn't one beefeater in the whole state of New Jersey.

 

 

 

3

 

 

 

F
rank's
reward
for all the driving is fondue. There's petrol money too, which comes out of my World of Chickens pay, but after day two of obstetrics the gratitude from my parents for Frank keeping me on the straight and narrow is expressed as fondue.

And that shits me. I am born to traverse the straight and narrow, and brought up to as well, but they've got it in their heads that it's only Frank's driving that keeps me at World of Chickens (possibly true) and that working there is somehow a worthwhile developmental experience (complete crap—it's a way of getting them to buy me half a video camera). My parents think I might develop awkward antisocial habits without someone like Frank in my life. Frank is himself a litany of antisocial habits, most of them at the more flamboyant end of the spectrum, plenty of which could see his nose broken for a third time if he didn't have someone like me in his life. But try telling that to them.

Before Frank, it was amateur theatre that was supposed to bring me out of myself. Before that, Boy Scouts. Frank was right that I had Scouts lurking somewhere in my past (but as if I'd tell him). Besides, I am out of myself. I might spend a lot of my home time in my room, but did they never stop to think that that might be partly about them? ‘Spending time in your room is not a disease,' I told my mother once. ‘Not when there's a TV in there. Even a small one, even black and white.'

I don't mind fondue. I just don't like to admit it. Frank thinks it's excellent, is happy to admit it, and regularly talks his way into being invited over with fondue in mind. My parents happen to like Frank and they've got no sense of boundaries, so he's here a lot. I've discussed it with them, I've said that petrol money is the prescribed payment, and I've told them they should think this through. They should realise Frank's parents will make me go over there for a barbecue. They're totally into payback. To which my mother said, ‘They're not gangsters, Philby. And you know how Frank likes fondue.'

Since we have a guest tonight, we move into special-occasion drill. My mother has put the wine cask in the fridge.

She squirts some into a glass for Frank and he turns to me and says, ‘Wine on a weeknight. Your family . . . ' As if he couldn't be more impressed. ‘This is like . . . France.'