Diminishing Returns
Nov. 16th, 2008 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waitingmanFor the few remaining curious ~
CHAPTER 4
(White Punks On Dope)
Next morning, loosely defined as when the sunlight got too bright to ignore, rolled around as clumsily as our last couple of joints. From my somewhat precarious viewpoint - upside down on the couch - I noticed that Justin had been couth enough to use the bed in the spare room. Well, if I was awake, I saw no reason to be the only one. A quick blast of Metallica’s ‘Ride The Lightning’ brought him crashing into the loungeroom on a collision course with the volume control. By the cold light of Dr Phil, we surveyed the wreckage of the night before; most of which appeared to be us. There seemed to be only one cogent response... we rolled another one.
Daze Of Our Lives, Parliamentary Question Time & Bob The Builder later, it was time for food. Being of English lineage, there’s only one antidote for a night of excess. The local Indian place knows my name, address & favourite morning after dishes. Didn’t Justin have a job, a woman or several homes to go to? Not necessarily. Stuck in the middle with a guitar player who’s in so much heaven he’s forgotten all about his long-suffering girlfriend, what more can a poor boy do? There was way too much in the case to keep it to ourselves, so being socially (if not morally) responsible people, now seemed like the best time to repay some old favours & curry some new ones. A little madras to be free, we had nothing to vindaloos. It’s... PARTY TIME!!!!
Designing invitations to such a do can be problematic. It wasn’t a matter of simply rounding up the troops & instructing them to smoke themselves senseless on our good fortune. Without a degree of subtlety, the right kind of message could get through to the wrong kind of people. But with a little decorum & diplomacy regarding the invites & the guest list, life could soon be coming up roses, or at least another popular greenhouse plant.
Anyway a party it definitely would be & the only person to organise it had to be the Redhead. She’d just be knocking off work; we could catch her before she picked up Adam from daycare. Adam was one of those cripplingly beautiful knee-high creatures whose sense of humour had been plagiarized so successfully by Harpo Marx. If we caught the Redhead early, she’d be able to deal with most of the mundane organisational details & all Justin & I would have to do was roll yet another one.
I dialled the number of whichever sector of the public service she was with this week. “Department of the Underprivileged & Overeducated. Can I help you, or are you beyond it?”
“That kind of day is it?”
“Yes. And I don’t need to hear from you.”
A quick fill-in about our gift in a suitcase made her reconsider her flextime status. She agreed to roll up her sleeves & get to work organising our so-far hypothetical soiree, in return for a job as our independent quality referee. Adam was being picked up by his father, so our timing couldn’t have been much better. She’d be straight over, with the intention of not leaving overly straight.
A short time later, drugged & disorderly, she announced her desire to interfere with the event catering as well. But with the Kate & Vicki culinary collective - the sexiest dumplings we’d never tasted – also being involved, that meant there’d be strong competition in the kitchen. I blame the plethora of cooking shows on TV. In this age of the celebrity chef, everyone now thinks they can whip up a piece of resistance in a kitchen the size of a postage stamp with nothing more than twenty dollars, a wok & a set of steak knives. Justin & I were known as inventive cooks too, though our style owed much less to Jamie Oliver & more to Keith Floyd. ‘Always cook with wine, occasionally adding it to the food.’ If it came to a Mexican cook-off in the kitchen, the two of us could hold our own. Which may seem an odd way to express it, but with the threat of so many women wielding sharp implements of destruction intent on slicing, dicing & roasting, I was feeling a tad self-protective.
An hour or so later, the fist of God stamped its approval on our plans for a real party. With the help of some appropriate picture books, record covers & PhotoShop, the invitations were being designed. How many suggestive pictures of people smoking ambiguous looking cigarettes could we find in an hour? Heaps!! Well, three good ones anyway. A cryptic message about sharing one of Mother Nature’s greatest gifts, a reminder to bring your own papers, the time, place & date in a stylish font, then everything saved to disc for free printing, collating & mailout courtesy of the public service. Attractive, engaging invitations your friends will love receiving, all done for the right price... nothing. Eat your heart out Martha Stewart!
CHAPTER 5
(Killing Time)
A week later, your typical late Saturday afternoon... that time of day when you’re stuck in the limbo of too early to party, too late to do anything else before it. There’s only enough time for killing time. I don’t know if Justin had been back to any of his own homes, but between him & the Star Trek fan club, who’d come & gone virtually unnoticed in my cosmic neutral zone, there was a real dearth of toilet paper in the place. Still, you know what they say - “Have suitcase... won’t travel.”
The sun had plummeted to earth, leaving a pink glow over the roofs & rail tracks. Ashfield gets a short but quite unique twilight; the pink sky gets a funny grey tinge before joining the rest of Sydney in the soft, warm velour of an early winter night. Cars were racing past, all in the general direction of away. The ones being driven by testosterone-riddled teenagers had modern R&B subwoofing from their own mobile dance parties, the rest were on a relentless quest for stray dogs, cats or unwary pedestrians.
Kate & Vicki, the Redhead, Adam, Justin & I, had all tried to be the Kitchen Domination League, but being a quiet, retiring kind of guy, I had fled to the stereo & was being quite successful at finding & playing stuff that absolutely nobody wanted to hear. By this stage I’d learned to make a nice face & appreciative noises at the conglomerations of munchies being assembled, so if they ever give out awards for ‘Best Actor In Comedy/Drama’, I was sure to be amongst the more fancied nominations. I did a quick round of the flat, picking up & straightening things while I could. Later on, when I wasn’t straight, I probably wouldn’t be able to pick up anything.
The suitcase & other smoking paraphernalia were stashed in my bedroom & a sign reading ‘The Cutting Room’ was pasted to the door, ’cause sooner or later, everybody was bound to wind up on the floor in there. I considered changing the sheets, or at least making the bed, but decided against it. Everyone would be far more interested in the suitcase & its contents to notice anything else. With the door closed, I could still hear Mott The Hoople blaring from the loungeroom, along with various complaints about it coming from the kitchen, but hey... you win some & you don’t. There was definitely time to enjoy a quiet spliff before returning to the battle for the oven & plunging into a special adaptation of Kim’s cupcake recipe.
This one’s dead easy & quite impressive, if on the bizarre end of the Devonshire tea spectrum. Start with your ordinary cupcake tray, oil the cavities, then (& this is the loopy bit) line them with specially cut, thin bits of puff pastry. Into each, put somewhere between a smidgen & a dollop of marmalade (the stuff from little old ladies at fetes-worse-than-death is the best). Then you dump on top a spoonful of packet scone mix, liberally laced with extra currants & whatever herbs may be hidden in your suitcase. Garnish with a glace cherry; bake till they look good... & never feed them to your mum.
Justin proved himself to be one of the great kitchen hands - he stayed out of my way, asked no questions & had a tasty little viper ready when it was all over. I told the women to get the buns in the oven & to make sure they didn’t burn, the smoke would smell... distinctive. My kitchen hand stood up, stretched, gathered his wallet & keys, then announced he’d be back in an hour or so with Allyson & an even smugger grin than the one he left with. It was about time I got ready for the evening as well. Kate headed straight for the stereo, her patience with Mott The Hoople had finally run out. She found an old Suzi Quatro album, which sounded perfectly fine to me.
I had first seen Kate on enrolment day at Art School, where she’d pulled a totally miraculous stunt... she looked different. Picture this. It’s the late eighties & I’m surrounded by a ton of weirdos, dropouts, Goths, punks, derros, hippies, a couple of bikers, lost-looking Surry Hills waifs & wastrels, North Shore convent girls with Laura Ashley wardrobes & crushes on Morrissey... & Kate. It wasn’t the Iron Maiden jacket, or the ripped jeans - they were a bit commonplace - it was the addition of a white dinner shirt, a grey waistcoat, John Lennon shades, Union Jack painted sneakers & a slightly disbelieving look at the company she found herself in the middle of. All topped with a shock of long red hair. Without even having spoken to her, I knew another special redhead had entered my life.
As luck would have it we ended up in the same Glass class. This was my chance to be noticed, so I made a rather lame, crude crack about her dress sense & taste in music. She regarded me quietly for a moment, sizing me up, was even ruder about my black tailcoat & before the class was over we were in the closest pub, where we stayed for the majority of my college career. Who was it said ‘I didn’t have an education, I went to Art College’? Somehow we both passed - her with sheer talent & inventive uses of medium, me with sheer desperation & inventive excuses for late assignments. I maintain I’ve learned a lot more by hanging around in pubs than in any lecture hall. I have the degrees to show for it.
She had been gay for years, but I never twigged. I made the usual passes one does, was definitely turned down & I left it at that (I can take ‘no’ for an answer... most of the time). It wasn’t until after she was teamed up with Vicki & I was disastrously married, that she took the opportunity to ‘fess up. We’d escaped from a dreadful suburban party & ended up at her place watching an old TV show featuring Jon Pertwee playing a vampire. It came as a total surprise... her being gay, not Jon Pertwee playing a vampire.
I was the only person in our gang who hadn’t guessed. Mind you, I’d been great camouflage - while she & I were a drinking team & in some of the same party bands, none of the pretentious Lesbian Feminist Separatists at Art School would dare go anywhere near her. And that was exactly what she wanted. Women are so much better at managing human relationships than men; which is obviously why so many of the best of them prefer each other to us.
Her friend Vicki is short, shapely & has a capacity for ferocity unequalled this side of Newcastle. She & I have had our rough patches, each of us is occasionally jealous of Kate’s friendship with the other, but for the moment I’m in the good books & if I could figure out exactly how I’d managed it, I’d make damned sure I stayed there. It’s better to have a friendly Vicki around than an unfriendly one... if it came to a blood feud with the Griffith mafia; you could send her in first &, as long as she had her dander up, be quietly confident of victory.
Hearing a break in the music, the Redhead leapt out of my closet sized kitchen, but when she saw the forces ranged about the stereo, she retreated. Kate & I had been joined by Adam, who was determined to get a dance out of one of us. He succeeded.
The old blues standard ‘(If You’re Lookin’ For) Trouble’ must have been written with a three year old in mind. They have their own sets of priorities, with effective strategies to achieve their goals & more commitment & guile than any power-hungry middle manager I’ve ever come across. If the public service was staffed at the supervisory level by knee-high people, the government would get a lot of stuff done. And it would be heaps more interesting than what they usually do.
Adam was teaching us how to teach him to do a fifties style rock’n’roll twirl without anyone but him hitting the floor, when the first of the guests arrived.
CHAPTER 4
(White Punks On Dope)
Next morning, loosely defined as when the sunlight got too bright to ignore, rolled around as clumsily as our last couple of joints. From my somewhat precarious viewpoint - upside down on the couch - I noticed that Justin had been couth enough to use the bed in the spare room. Well, if I was awake, I saw no reason to be the only one. A quick blast of Metallica’s ‘Ride The Lightning’ brought him crashing into the loungeroom on a collision course with the volume control. By the cold light of Dr Phil, we surveyed the wreckage of the night before; most of which appeared to be us. There seemed to be only one cogent response... we rolled another one.
Daze Of Our Lives, Parliamentary Question Time & Bob The Builder later, it was time for food. Being of English lineage, there’s only one antidote for a night of excess. The local Indian place knows my name, address & favourite morning after dishes. Didn’t Justin have a job, a woman or several homes to go to? Not necessarily. Stuck in the middle with a guitar player who’s in so much heaven he’s forgotten all about his long-suffering girlfriend, what more can a poor boy do? There was way too much in the case to keep it to ourselves, so being socially (if not morally) responsible people, now seemed like the best time to repay some old favours & curry some new ones. A little madras to be free, we had nothing to vindaloos. It’s... PARTY TIME!!!!
Designing invitations to such a do can be problematic. It wasn’t a matter of simply rounding up the troops & instructing them to smoke themselves senseless on our good fortune. Without a degree of subtlety, the right kind of message could get through to the wrong kind of people. But with a little decorum & diplomacy regarding the invites & the guest list, life could soon be coming up roses, or at least another popular greenhouse plant.
Anyway a party it definitely would be & the only person to organise it had to be the Redhead. She’d just be knocking off work; we could catch her before she picked up Adam from daycare. Adam was one of those cripplingly beautiful knee-high creatures whose sense of humour had been plagiarized so successfully by Harpo Marx. If we caught the Redhead early, she’d be able to deal with most of the mundane organisational details & all Justin & I would have to do was roll yet another one.
I dialled the number of whichever sector of the public service she was with this week. “Department of the Underprivileged & Overeducated. Can I help you, or are you beyond it?”
“That kind of day is it?”
“Yes. And I don’t need to hear from you.”
A quick fill-in about our gift in a suitcase made her reconsider her flextime status. She agreed to roll up her sleeves & get to work organising our so-far hypothetical soiree, in return for a job as our independent quality referee. Adam was being picked up by his father, so our timing couldn’t have been much better. She’d be straight over, with the intention of not leaving overly straight.
A short time later, drugged & disorderly, she announced her desire to interfere with the event catering as well. But with the Kate & Vicki culinary collective - the sexiest dumplings we’d never tasted – also being involved, that meant there’d be strong competition in the kitchen. I blame the plethora of cooking shows on TV. In this age of the celebrity chef, everyone now thinks they can whip up a piece of resistance in a kitchen the size of a postage stamp with nothing more than twenty dollars, a wok & a set of steak knives. Justin & I were known as inventive cooks too, though our style owed much less to Jamie Oliver & more to Keith Floyd. ‘Always cook with wine, occasionally adding it to the food.’ If it came to a Mexican cook-off in the kitchen, the two of us could hold our own. Which may seem an odd way to express it, but with the threat of so many women wielding sharp implements of destruction intent on slicing, dicing & roasting, I was feeling a tad self-protective.
An hour or so later, the fist of God stamped its approval on our plans for a real party. With the help of some appropriate picture books, record covers & PhotoShop, the invitations were being designed. How many suggestive pictures of people smoking ambiguous looking cigarettes could we find in an hour? Heaps!! Well, three good ones anyway. A cryptic message about sharing one of Mother Nature’s greatest gifts, a reminder to bring your own papers, the time, place & date in a stylish font, then everything saved to disc for free printing, collating & mailout courtesy of the public service. Attractive, engaging invitations your friends will love receiving, all done for the right price... nothing. Eat your heart out Martha Stewart!
CHAPTER 5
(Killing Time)
A week later, your typical late Saturday afternoon... that time of day when you’re stuck in the limbo of too early to party, too late to do anything else before it. There’s only enough time for killing time. I don’t know if Justin had been back to any of his own homes, but between him & the Star Trek fan club, who’d come & gone virtually unnoticed in my cosmic neutral zone, there was a real dearth of toilet paper in the place. Still, you know what they say - “Have suitcase... won’t travel.”
The sun had plummeted to earth, leaving a pink glow over the roofs & rail tracks. Ashfield gets a short but quite unique twilight; the pink sky gets a funny grey tinge before joining the rest of Sydney in the soft, warm velour of an early winter night. Cars were racing past, all in the general direction of away. The ones being driven by testosterone-riddled teenagers had modern R&B subwoofing from their own mobile dance parties, the rest were on a relentless quest for stray dogs, cats or unwary pedestrians.
Kate & Vicki, the Redhead, Adam, Justin & I, had all tried to be the Kitchen Domination League, but being a quiet, retiring kind of guy, I had fled to the stereo & was being quite successful at finding & playing stuff that absolutely nobody wanted to hear. By this stage I’d learned to make a nice face & appreciative noises at the conglomerations of munchies being assembled, so if they ever give out awards for ‘Best Actor In Comedy/Drama’, I was sure to be amongst the more fancied nominations. I did a quick round of the flat, picking up & straightening things while I could. Later on, when I wasn’t straight, I probably wouldn’t be able to pick up anything.
The suitcase & other smoking paraphernalia were stashed in my bedroom & a sign reading ‘The Cutting Room’ was pasted to the door, ’cause sooner or later, everybody was bound to wind up on the floor in there. I considered changing the sheets, or at least making the bed, but decided against it. Everyone would be far more interested in the suitcase & its contents to notice anything else. With the door closed, I could still hear Mott The Hoople blaring from the loungeroom, along with various complaints about it coming from the kitchen, but hey... you win some & you don’t. There was definitely time to enjoy a quiet spliff before returning to the battle for the oven & plunging into a special adaptation of Kim’s cupcake recipe.
This one’s dead easy & quite impressive, if on the bizarre end of the Devonshire tea spectrum. Start with your ordinary cupcake tray, oil the cavities, then (& this is the loopy bit) line them with specially cut, thin bits of puff pastry. Into each, put somewhere between a smidgen & a dollop of marmalade (the stuff from little old ladies at fetes-worse-than-death is the best). Then you dump on top a spoonful of packet scone mix, liberally laced with extra currants & whatever herbs may be hidden in your suitcase. Garnish with a glace cherry; bake till they look good... & never feed them to your mum.
Justin proved himself to be one of the great kitchen hands - he stayed out of my way, asked no questions & had a tasty little viper ready when it was all over. I told the women to get the buns in the oven & to make sure they didn’t burn, the smoke would smell... distinctive. My kitchen hand stood up, stretched, gathered his wallet & keys, then announced he’d be back in an hour or so with Allyson & an even smugger grin than the one he left with. It was about time I got ready for the evening as well. Kate headed straight for the stereo, her patience with Mott The Hoople had finally run out. She found an old Suzi Quatro album, which sounded perfectly fine to me.
I had first seen Kate on enrolment day at Art School, where she’d pulled a totally miraculous stunt... she looked different. Picture this. It’s the late eighties & I’m surrounded by a ton of weirdos, dropouts, Goths, punks, derros, hippies, a couple of bikers, lost-looking Surry Hills waifs & wastrels, North Shore convent girls with Laura Ashley wardrobes & crushes on Morrissey... & Kate. It wasn’t the Iron Maiden jacket, or the ripped jeans - they were a bit commonplace - it was the addition of a white dinner shirt, a grey waistcoat, John Lennon shades, Union Jack painted sneakers & a slightly disbelieving look at the company she found herself in the middle of. All topped with a shock of long red hair. Without even having spoken to her, I knew another special redhead had entered my life.
As luck would have it we ended up in the same Glass class. This was my chance to be noticed, so I made a rather lame, crude crack about her dress sense & taste in music. She regarded me quietly for a moment, sizing me up, was even ruder about my black tailcoat & before the class was over we were in the closest pub, where we stayed for the majority of my college career. Who was it said ‘I didn’t have an education, I went to Art College’? Somehow we both passed - her with sheer talent & inventive uses of medium, me with sheer desperation & inventive excuses for late assignments. I maintain I’ve learned a lot more by hanging around in pubs than in any lecture hall. I have the degrees to show for it.
She had been gay for years, but I never twigged. I made the usual passes one does, was definitely turned down & I left it at that (I can take ‘no’ for an answer... most of the time). It wasn’t until after she was teamed up with Vicki & I was disastrously married, that she took the opportunity to ‘fess up. We’d escaped from a dreadful suburban party & ended up at her place watching an old TV show featuring Jon Pertwee playing a vampire. It came as a total surprise... her being gay, not Jon Pertwee playing a vampire.
I was the only person in our gang who hadn’t guessed. Mind you, I’d been great camouflage - while she & I were a drinking team & in some of the same party bands, none of the pretentious Lesbian Feminist Separatists at Art School would dare go anywhere near her. And that was exactly what she wanted. Women are so much better at managing human relationships than men; which is obviously why so many of the best of them prefer each other to us.
Her friend Vicki is short, shapely & has a capacity for ferocity unequalled this side of Newcastle. She & I have had our rough patches, each of us is occasionally jealous of Kate’s friendship with the other, but for the moment I’m in the good books & if I could figure out exactly how I’d managed it, I’d make damned sure I stayed there. It’s better to have a friendly Vicki around than an unfriendly one... if it came to a blood feud with the Griffith mafia; you could send her in first &, as long as she had her dander up, be quietly confident of victory.
Hearing a break in the music, the Redhead leapt out of my closet sized kitchen, but when she saw the forces ranged about the stereo, she retreated. Kate & I had been joined by Adam, who was determined to get a dance out of one of us. He succeeded.
The old blues standard ‘(If You’re Lookin’ For) Trouble’ must have been written with a three year old in mind. They have their own sets of priorities, with effective strategies to achieve their goals & more commitment & guile than any power-hungry middle manager I’ve ever come across. If the public service was staffed at the supervisory level by knee-high people, the government would get a lot of stuff done. And it would be heaps more interesting than what they usually do.
Adam was teaching us how to teach him to do a fifties style rock’n’roll twirl without anyone but him hitting the floor, when the first of the guests arrived.
