I might be a bad listener, but I’ve done a lot of listening, one on one lectures time after time. I feel tired from so much talkin’ that I do, I don’t think I can do that much listening. But there’s definitely some kind of knack for listening that I seem to have, because authoritarians talkin’ to me just about anything, within the realm of advice, pile up high within my brain. Few times can I see myself just getting a punishment from someone, there’s always something to be said. I guess I have an understanding face. But the compounded years of youth within a memory tell you most people just wanna talk, they don’t tend to care too much about what’s said in return, not if your giving advice. There’s not much of a response to advice, so by shutting up and looking solemn you give them a great rush of significance, some kind of feeling that they’ve done something. Confrontation is something for TV and Films, not for me, sure I took myself seriously, but another person was just a joke to me. So I recoiled at responding, staring through people’s faces could guide you pleasantly through any kind of lecture. I found that I could look at the bridge of their nose and un-focus my eyes until a third one appeared there, or look just past one of their eyes when un-focused and there’s a semi-transparent slice to look through. Or I could stare right into their eyes if they were interesting enough. Some elderly people had intricate veins, or blood vessels on bulbous noses. Some men had huge eyebrows which always had defiant hairs sticking up, some women had painted eyebrows or cheap lipstick that became a thin line along the edge of their lips, but looking at chins was the most dangerous, that’s noticeably out of eye range.
When I remember teachers and bosses I remember mostly their focus feature. It was usually close enough to their eyes, but occasionally they had intriguing limb features like the Principle in third grade. He was only there a year and I never gave in to any pressure he gave, I didn’t like him at all, which isn’t unnatural but the principle up until that point was a legend, a nice middle aged woman whom everybody loved, and her son babysat my brothers and I. She even took me and my brother to the little mermaid at the local single screen cinema whenever that was out. I don’t know when that was or why she took us, but that left a big damn shoe to fill and this giant black haired man with a first name unpleasantly similar to mine, and a last name as uninspiring of fear as “Say”. He wasn’t mean, he wasn’t cruel, he wasn’t destructive, he just had nothing to offer. There wasn’t a principle to be proud of in any way. But teachers still had to send me out of classes and assemblies, so he’d give me a good talking while I looked around the huge caramel coloured office, with crimson carpet. I’m not making that up for alliteration, they had that colour scheme going on, there were wicker chairs with metal legs curling down like a snake rather than four separate legs, which were a little pain due to the increased difficulty in tilting backwards while he was out of the room. Then his desk had to match the timber shelf set-piece. And through the whole building the carpets were a dark red, sometimes maroon, other times dirty red, and in that office, damn well crimson.
If I was in trouble I just listened and stared at their features, which I can still mostly remember. Mrs Hor had cheap lipstick and a gaunt head, Mrs Armstrong had constant black re-growth and a typical bleached ‘90s fringe, Mr Say had the darkest five o’clock shadow I’ve ever seen, Mr Curran had skin cancer scare, Mr Doherty had a thick fluffy patch of soft white hair at his cheek bones where he stared dragging the razor down his beard, Mr Walters had a very spherical head always shaved at 3 or 4mm, and very pale blue eyes, there were the white-blue of a strangely forecast autumn day, and Mr Gray had such a grey and turkey like face his jaw was always sagging, perhaps unconsciously to hide his second chin newly grown as he entered his fifties. However, it was sometimes more drastic, and I used my first acting skill to escape. Actually it would probably be my second, as I developed movement imitation first, as in 3rd grade I was voted the best portrayal of Jesus in one of the ‘Passion Stages’, and in 4th grade I had a major acting role in a dance concert. But my second skill was far more useful. I speak of crying on cue.
Crying is like swearing, a sliding tear can be poignant, and punctuating to a drama, just like a sighing ‘fuck’. And a red-faced, choking gush, can be tragic and trenchant, just like a roaring ‘cunt’. And a good cry to me, on whatever level of intensity, reaches down through my throat and shakes out whatever it is that gathers up like dust upon my emotional baggage. When I cry, sincerely, when I break down, I am broken apart, and sensibility of environment, maturity, resolution et al. don’t clutter about. You could say letting tears flow from your eyes can bathe you, but it’s not as simple as washing away things. I just like to look deeper than through the mirror, showing accomplishments and actions of mine, words I threw out in social obligation, and my fear of communal silence. Crying takes me down, somewhere else. But this is how I appreciate those tears aplenty, already spilled, in my hindsight. As a kid it just happened, and I didn’t stop it because nothing bad came out of it. And on occasions I found many good things coming out of a bit of crying; mostly whenever I was in trouble, and I managed to find that situation regularly.
Thought before action is only learned, it is not instinctual, the reverse is clearly instinctual, that’s the plain reason why I got into trouble, I’m a slow learner. It was through Nietzsche that I first learned this axiom; that a criminal doesn’t believe himself to be one until he is told so, in fact an action is rarely made with whole knowledge of “immorality”, at one level or another there’s justification in everything we do. So once I’d acted, I realised it wasn’t accepted, and then I had to act again, in the lying sense. But instead of making an excuse for my non-existent thought process, or misunderstanding of what I was doing, I could just show remorse by crying.
It proved more effective after an incident in the 6th grade. I was being punished for whatever the flavour of that year was, by sitting the other side of the large double-classroom (a perk of being the seniors of primary school I suppose, similar to the kindergarteners getting a double classroom for being brand new.) while the class finished off the last lesson; I just slipped out of the class through the second door about fifteen minutes before the bell. The following day I side-stepped a serious reprimand being furthered to the principal by breaking down as my teacher spoke to me outside of the classroom. Of course, the Principle was already informed, and my teacher had to send me off regardless of my tears, but I made the teacher look upon me as a simple child, it helped that my teacher was a woman around forty, she hugged me and apologised for scaring me, and for my needing to present myself to the new Principle. That guy was in nobody’s favour. Mr Say was not liked for being stiff and almost cartoonishly bureaucratic, but Mr Curran, he was severely loathed for being false and joyless; he took away the seniors trip to the state’s biggest theme park, need I say more.
Two years later in middle school, our grade was given brand new lockers and classrooms. A benefit of these new toys was super crisp air-conditioning and lockers large enough to fit our whole backpacks, which some of the smaller students could easily fit into. These backpacks were ridiculously big, and when filled, would stick out about half a metre, and weighed so much they needed and waist belt to save our developing backs from breaking. However, the lockers were made of a very soft wood, and I was the first one in the school to discover that the weight of a 14 year old couldn’t be supported by their bottom planks when I tried to get a boost up to reach my bag on top. Too bad I had the top locker, and too bad for my friend Aaron it was above his. Aaron was nice enough not to rat me out for destroying a locker and kindly ignored the problem by propping his bag underneath, in the roughly half-metre gap. But that defeated the purpose of the locker, and after a fortnight I was in the 8th grade supervisor’s office. For the first time in two years I cried in confessing the truth. There was no punishment at all for me, Mr Doherty was just too shocked, and he even offered comfort to me. In another two years I still used crying to evade punishment but I was making the tears come from the teacher instead of me.
Yeah, I quite like crying. I did a lot of it growing up, and never hated myself for it, and I’m not ashamed of anything, if I didn’t cry so much I might not have been such a school sensation for my acting. I didn’t fake anything, I meant those tears in a yr. 10 group drama competition. Our acting onstage was among the best, and my emotional breakdown as I was sentenced to death just for upholding a belief was a pleasant surprise for begrudging parents. It was our inability to act offstage that cost us the competition. The Catholic Commission of Performing Arts Community Group demanded an interview covering the whole process, and in our group of experimenting atheists, our most religious actor was the least talented. I should have wept for love of ‘Jesus’ then I’d have gotten that damn trophy and $3000 cheque. It might have kept me in that ostentatious school legitimately, into the end of the school term at least.
Y’know that wasn’t the name of the bastards running the competition. I feel I should be honest about this, but the specific name isn’t too important. They were catholic, and they were a group for performing arts, there you go, mix around for whatever pompous acronym you like. I remember a lot about that mini-play. That it was put together over about 3 weeks around the spring break, and that the five of us rehearsed just once in that time. It was housed by a blonde kid whom I also had English with. He was a genuine and gentle guy, but he was also the first guy in our year who got his stomach pumped in hospital after school dance. His name was Lachlan, and it was at his house mostly because his dad had cigars. That’s fairly exciting to a bunch of kids still getting a buzz from regular cigarettes, but Lachlan wimped out on stealing us a couple of those bad boys, figuring his dad didn’t have enough cigars to not notice exactly how many he had. He only got us his mum’s cigarettes, menthol ones.
I also remember freakin’ out that I’d left my stage blacks behind as we unloaded from the cars, and having smarmy Michael, that slightly religious, talentless hack, (I don’t know why I’m still bitter about losing this competition.) jostle up and hand the bag up to me as I confessed to our supervising teacher. Also that I was the last one to use the toilet in our dressing room before it broke and layered the floor with it’s water. I had to take a bad (figurative) hit over whether or not I flushed the toilet after using it. If I did, that may have tipped it over the functionality edge, or if I didn’t then a cocktail of my piss and blue bowl cleaner was soaking into our shoes, and the shirt Michael had left dangling on the bench too loosely. I left it up in the air so to speak.
I remember sitting cross-legged like a bunch of children in a line in the massive green room/function room of the drama centre, with a group of girls behind us, being a cliché of incessant amusement, and vainly trying to discover our school, while I focused hard on brooding and hoping upon the judges choices to come up following our performance. I might have talked with them had I not grown a gigantic pimple right by the corner of my lower lip, amongst other flecked red devils. Then again I think I would have said something inappropriate and childish or passed out. Those things I remember, but a name? Not today.

Part Six
The following is a true story.

Why I wanna be a comedian. That’ll be the sub-header for this if it becomes a book. Others say that stand-up comedy is the dentistry of performing arts, you go into it because you can’t succeed at the other more serious professions. Most notably, rock stardom. Being a comedian is like being a rock star, but with less work to do, a lot longer to struggle toward the success, but ultimately it’s all you, no bullshit worries with being with a band. A lot of the fun comes from being selfish, a vice you’re meant to embrace to be good? Awesome.
It does have to be said that when talking about comedy, we are talking about elitist, egotistical, cliquey, jealous, lazy, cynical, childish, daydreaming bastards, and most importantly, we are talking about Stand-Up entertainment. Not inclusive of those failed actors called improv comics, theatresports and musical spoof comedy. ‘Comedy’ means ‘Stand-Up’ and that is everything. What a world. Did I mention the constant party? What are you gonna do when you’re place of work is a pub or a club with free drinks, or even if they aren’t free, they’re there, it’s night time, you’re with friends, or you’re alone. You get to test out material on your friends or you get to be entertained by your friends, you get to meet bigger time comics, you get to bitch and gossip about smaller time or bigger time comics. What a fuckin world.
I think one of the most universally appreciated aspects of the comedy world is that nothing is really wasted in your life. A boring or stupid, inane, horrible, disgusting conversation, is hilarious to us later on, we save it like pack rats and I think you’ll know what I mean if you listen to this clip:

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To sum it up would be too lacklustre, so let me make things a bit more interesting.
I was at a small party at a friend’s house down the road from where I live, I knew only a couple of the people, the booze and food was free, there were travellers from a few countries there, and there was a 21st party next door. It was gonna be a good night. So, this friend had his two housemates move out recently, causing him a bit of personal strife. I have no interest in that beyond wanting to know when one of them is coming out of the closet. The guy is in his thirties, gayer than Elton John, and clueless as to the cause of his depression and loneliness. I want to know what he’s been jerking off to for around twenty years, I mean you’d have to figure it out some time.
So with all the applicants, my friend chose a German backpacker for both rooms. Two independent Germans on a working holiday, and he gets them to move in on the spot. They way he summed it up was, “There was a girl, and she was hot, and German. Welcome. Then there was a guy, he sounded like Borat. Come on in”.
I might mention here that on my last night out in Ireland in 2006, after living there for eight months, I met a gorgeous, stunning, sexy girl who was 27 with the body of a 20 year old, and she was German. That got me so blindsided that night I ignored all the friends who’d gathered to get drunk with me and pose for photographs we all regret but look so fondly at as years go by because, “that was our last night together…”. after two years I still dream of her occasionally. But here’s the kick in the balls, I never even kissed her. Yeah, that pisses me off every time I think of her, of Ireland, of random hot brunettes, and of fucking hot German girls. We got along so well, I charmed her, I let slip I was only 20, but “hey I was just dating a 25 year old” didn’t ease her mind, so we danced, we grinded, but she wouldn’t give it up. I told her she was beautiful and I was leaving the country in two days. Yep, of course, that failed to peel those jeans off. She’s forgiven for not believing me. And so we parted, though, while she caressed my chin and said “I’ll see you here next week…” I quietly wept. Now I’m at a small party, a pretty young German girl, quite similar looking to my elusive Irish affair, and I’ve got some unfinished business.
Things started slow, I couldn’t just go diving in there full force trying to ‘get to know’ the German girl whom we’ll call R__. I hung back and took care of a few beers while chatting with the guys I knew and set up some music for the party. The friend whom we’ll call W__ is mostly in possession of Indie cds, so I spent some time trying to hook my iPod up to some speakers of his but to no avail. I let the party unfold and for R__ to get cosy and pass by the excitement period at the beginning of the night, then at the cool off, chill out ‘maybe this should be my last drink?’ and ‘what do I miss most about home or my childhood?’ stage, I‘d slide in and exchange some embarrassing stories. So, with the indie music keeping the lounge room company I ended up partying out front with the smokers and the other guy I knew whom we’ll call F__. (Keeping up with these names? Fuck off, it‘s how they used to do things in books, I prefer it to thinking up pseudonyms which just rhyme in some way with the real name, like if it was Amy, her character would be Annie, yeah real clever, pssht) Luckily R__ smoked, or maybe she was just drinking out there like I was? I’d prefer she didn’t smoke, I don’t like girls who smoke, though this one girl I went with smoked. Though it was okay as she had to chew gum immediately after a smoke, and she brushed her teeth 3 times a day. Anyway, the German guy, M__, knew a couple of Spanish friends from one of his Hostel stays, and they swung by with a bottle of wine. Then there were a couple of miscellaneous Italian girls, Korean girls and other Australian people I did not know. I was standing on the porch with the two Germans, the two Spaniards and F__ who soon leaves to avoid drinking himself into a drunk driving situation. He did not possess the will power to be around beer and not drink it. I can empathise. Before he left he’d taught the Germans a bit of English slang in ‘No Wuckin’ Forries’. On the porch M__ taught me some Spanish to greet his friends with, ‘Your Father Fucks Goats’. Yeah, we could stand to lose F__ . I taught them a joke quote from ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’, (what the kids teach the foreign exchange student in that film) ‘Would you like to touch my penis’ and ‘I am a Sex Machine’ That was a much more amusing greeting to the people arriving at the 21st next door. ‘No Wuckin’ Forries’ just didn’t get a reaction. And nothing could really get a reaction out of the Korean girl with us with limited English. I tried. Just to get her to practice, laugh when I cued her, and to try to tell us a story like we’d been telling each other. I stopped when I tried to act out my words as you do in that situation. I found myself humping the air and dry heaving to illustrate, seemed a bit too far to go. But she was cool and laughed it off, regretful to answer,
“oh, no, no. I don’t have nothing. I, no, sorry, I have no stories like that”.
How much would you want to say,
“Would you like one? Let’s get you a few beers here…”?
I didn’t. Well, I did, but, it was totally facetious.
Once the beer and the conversation began to more or less dry up around midnight and yet the mood wasn’t quite ready to fade away, we decided to accept the invite, extended that morning, to crash the 21st. With a coupla beers in our hands I led the backpackers into the breach, leaving behind the unadventurous Australians, and all I knew.
Parties in townhouses don’t afford much privacy, if that’s a suitable way of putting it. I suppose they are more conducive to the spirit of the unknown that is being alone at a party; there’s nowhere you can hide. Townhouse parties usually have three areas you’re crammed into, the lounge area by the door, then the kitchen, and then the backyard. I led this motley crew of backpackers all in their mid twenties and me looking scruffy as usual with torn cargo pants and faded band t-shirt, and I’m greeting these uni students with their fucked up 80s fashion retardation,
“Hey! What’s up? Sorry we’re late, where’s Toby? 21, huh? Geez, they’ll let anyone have a birthday these days huh? Okay, I’ll catch you later for some spin the bottle or Yahtzee”.
They just urged us to the back where ‘the party’ was, and we were halted in the outside passage to the yard, like a line up looking into the frosted glass of the bathroom. But, we were in.
The first guy I talked to knew we were from next door, the bastard. It didn’t mean we had to leave, just that I couldn’t sneak in a speech a la ‘Wedding Crashers’. I told him they were all backpackers and I was the only fluent English speaker. He feigned interest really well. He was Asian so I asked if there was any chance he was Korean so that he could translate for the shy girl we had with us. Nope. He soon went to the toilet and never came back. Well there I was virtually alone in a small space with R__, and M__, and a few too many beers. I lost focus a bit, and just joked around with the dude. Pretty soon I was daring him to say one of the lines to the girls as they walked by, and that ended in me saying one myself, in an accent of course.
Typical of a twenty year old girl, she seemed accustomed to having sexual bullshit snap at her ears, but also typical of a twenty year old girl she was instantly titillated by a foreign accent. (Yes, there is the exception of a few accents, those which are just annoying, or those which are commonly heard in their day to day life. I do wonder if an Indian accent is sexy in some part of the world, they get a rough deal. It’s just unfair, everybody deserves a place in the world where they can go and have girls swoon at the sound of their voice) So this girl actually walked right back and sidled up beside me. Leaning on the fence she coyly pursed her lips and asked me rhetorically,
“So, wait, you are the neighbours? Are you backpackers?”
“Ja”. I could pretend.
I was not going to hurl myself back into the flock of moronic young ‘Ozzy’ guys standing around in their skinny jeans, slipper sneaker, flouro super low neck shirts and quasi-emo/fucked up hairstyles, drinking Cascade Premium Lager and talking about sport or uni or a bullshit talentless band they saw in Wynyard the other week. So I went with it, and fuck yeah did the others run with me for the ride.
“O-kay, cool. So where are you from?”
“Austria, ja, a little town called Zell am See, very beautiful. You remind me of it…” Stupid normally, but under these circumstances it seemed smooth. And again, my face was not attacked by the girl’s palm, nor even a scowl. Anything but.
“Ha haha ho.” Her eyes widened and then narrowed as they left contact with mine and drifted downwards to her drink, following it upwards for a sip. “And what about you guys, are you all friends?”
She was probably seeing if either me or M__ was ‘with’ R__. And it’s called politeness. R__ just quietly enjoyed this turn of events and nursed her cider, (I have to say I like cider drinkers, it’s like wine but they don’t get as drunk or pompous when they drink it) and M__ went with it, and we riffed a bit.
“Ja, we’ve been friends for, oh, 3 hours. Ja, we go waaayyy back.”
“Feels like forever hmmn?”
“Ja. No, I am from Germany -”
“But we’re okay, we get along” I don’t think this girl is aware of any reason for animosity between Austrians and Germans so I probably lost some points there, but R__ just slid right in,
“And so am I, but we from different cities. We are the two that live next door. Just moved in.”
“We have some other friends here, from Italy, Korea, and eh Spain. We just thought, y’know, we would come and have a see, at the party here”
“Oh I love Spain! I dream of learning guitar on a beach somewhere in Spain or like Portugal even.”
I was kind of pissed at M__ right there, way to go dude. Ja, bring up the Latinos, they won’t seem a hundred times more exotic and sexy than us beer drinking, sausage making, sour kraut eating beardies! (yeah, M__ had a beard too. I didn’t have a good place to bring that up before. What?)
So, a few minutes passed before those damn sexy Spaniards walked past, being ushered deeper towards the yard because a couple of the Australian friends of W__ had crashed and were looking for a seat and some snacks. This girl virtually ditched us Austro-Germans for the rest of the night, but stayed leaning against the fence, she just rolled to her other side with her back to us. This meant that I now couldn’t drop the accent or she’d overhear and possibly get mad. She had earlier noticed that my English was very good, the best, fantastic really. I deflected any suspicion by patting M__,
“You here that? I am a English Machine! Ha ha…”
Then I slowed it down a bit and pretended to misunderstand some things she said for a few minutes. That worked well to keep up the guise, and it was hilariously fun too. By the way I said I was Austrian because, for one, I’ve actually been there so I wouldn’t be caught out lying. And also it could explain away the difference in our German accents, after all, I’d had a few so my ears weren’t tuned perfectly for imitation.
I guess you win some, you lose some. Literally. The pretty young party girl was gone, though still within ear shot of course, hell, within breath shot. But, R__ was still there so the party continued, I knocked of a bit of her cider and started a new beer, whilst we called out insults to W__ over the fence and he sent us texts in return, “I can hear everything you guys are saying y’know…” . We hung out for a while, joking around and whatnot, and no mention of the fact I still spoke with a mongrel Austrian brogue until some later time. Time is not finite enough in my memory for an accurate adjective at this point, but the next interesting thing I remember with clarity, was a beautiful woman trying to walk past us but stopping all of a sudden right in front of me. Fortune laid a drain right below me, and along with her fiery auburn summer dress, she wore stiletto heels. So it wasn’t my magnetism, good looks or arousing fake accent that halted her, but having her heel wedged in a drain. However, those three reasons would not have allowed me to calm her with a gentle look in the eyes and to hold firm her ankle as I eased the heel free. This olive-skinned beauty had a girlfriend to attend to in some need, and of course her desire wasn’t so easily triggered by a European accent as my previous encounter, the white cocktail still locking me into this amusing charade, by gushing over the Spaniard not one foot to my left.
(If anyone ever avoids calling an Australian born mongrel Anglo-Saxon, a ‘white person’, because that may be offensive in some deranged form of logic, and so refers to them as ‘Aussie’, then that person is either a moron, or a racist. i.e. both, and I didn’t infer that this girl was not Australian born simply because she was olive-skinned. I found out later she was Lebanese/Chilean/Irish, and her name was Natasha, which I shouldn’t say seeing as I’ve set up this lovely system of initials, but I just love that name,. Anyway I’ll keep with the system, and hey, I could be lying about her name anyway.)
And so N__ left me there, but she let her deep eyes drag across me as she weaved her way into the messy yard of diminishingly attractive people. But I found her again after I’d gotten a good slice more out of touch with reality, and R__ had returned to her new home, living to fight another day, and I guess I would have to as well. With her I mean. This party was just to much fun to ignore and put in all the effort of trying to safely attack my friend’s housemate. So it came about that the two Australian mates of W__, we’ll call them G__ and O__, had snatched a sit-down with N__. The conversation was split between the bullshit I spat around with M__ and a couple of the male members of the actual 21st party, and the strange, awkward, and deluded attempts at charming N__ made in a warring manner by G__ & O__. Breast surgery was a prominent point of order for G__ and O__ could no help but be inappropriate, yet with the stern belief that his mockery was in itself charming because of his self confidence and devil-may-care disposition. Horror seemed prominent in those pretty and lingering eyes of N__’s. She wasn’t long for this section of the party. However all the magic for me came when I stumbled my way to the bathroom not long after that. There was a good five minutes where I was simply there with M__, two young guys very comfortable in their chairs if you can imagine a reason why, and the debate between G__ and O__ as to whom was responsible for scaring away the ‘fucking hot chick we just had right here in our grasp’, and I kept the Austrian flag a-flyin’. Connections of course, for there were those two guys still in earshot, and others about, and my eyes weren’t sharp enough to be alerted by her return, or of course that Spanish groupie. I couldn’t go from suave saviour of N__’s leg, to a weird beardie guy, drunk and faking an accent. Case closed. Innocent of wankery? Indeed. And so I passed through the kitchen on my voyage to release the beer with my wang. A minute of that fun and I was on my way back to re-fill and seek out more amusement, but manhood held a hand out to my arm and gave me an apology for leaving so soon and an exchange of mobile numbers. That meant I was sort of released from the spastic accent I’d been using to M__’s great amusement and G__’s indignation (poor guy didn’t have my advantageous party trick to boost him up in the ladies’ esteem), but I could also do a primal victory dance if I wanted to. Or maybe a ‘Good Will Hunting’ allusion. I figured that both of those things would kill the fun I was still having; the young guys being confused by most things M__ and I said, and G__ and O__ would either not believe me, or stop bickering about whose fault N__’s departure was. The death of that party came soon after regardless, and it was a fairly peaceful passing on, leading us back to W__ to drop off M__ and head out for some late night fast food.
Thus we came about this conversation I speak of, the one that was outrageous enough for me not to entrust cranial memory with, but to video tape what I could for future finite reminiscence. And I am a comic, (don’t quibble over fiscal semantics here, getting paid gigs regularly is a while after you actually become a comic) so conversations will often nest atop detailed thoughts on rape, abortion, genocide, masturbation, and porno. But there, chuckin’ back chicken burgers at 2am, I was witnessed ‘comedy gold’, albeit bullshit lies directed at a beautiful girl I still had a chance with.
It did mildly dam my lust for N__ to hear O__ go on so animatedly and with that truthful conviction of his, about witnessing fumes, with the odour of decaying fish, emanating from this Helenic woman’s crotch. But fortune was yet to give up on me I suppose, and while I was in sobering up, yet still in drunken hysterics with that conversation, N__ was just starting to enjoy herself. By around 3am, while I was winding down back in my own place, she had danced and drank herself past prudence. What I had put down as a typical selfish bitch of a girlfriend taking N__ away, was actually an angel taking her to a more evocative atmosphere in an apartment just a suburb over. There they were having a going away party for a flatmate and it was running all night because if you can believe it, the geniuses had padded most of the walls, and the lounge room was hard wood. I know this because I saw it for myself around 3:30am that night/morning. After she called me to (ever so slightly) slur out an invite I dressed more appropriately with jeans and a shirt with buttons, slickly black, freshened up, grabbed a condom and commenced an Australian cleansing. To seal the deal, so to speak, I had to keep up the Austrian charade and that meant planning ahead by ditching Ids from my wallet and more importantly from my room in case things got interesting. I hung my spare bed sheet over my tall bookcase with all my cds, dvds, magazines and whatnot also in it. Luckily it’s a sexy maroon so I kind of liked the look, just needed some candles. Thus I was on my bike and riding past the hospital towards the flat thinking how lucky I can be so very occasionally.
Nurses, her friends were nurses. One of them was going overseas on a type of exchange program, and when I heard that from N__ in an envious voice all I thought was, ‘don’t fucking be going to a German speaking country!’ which led me to audibly sigh when she told me it was Nice, France. That brought on a short farce about WWII, and I resolutely attended to N__ from then on, as all I had to offer in the way of the German language was how to say “I’m sorry, I don’t speak German”, should a request for phrases arise. I danced with N__ for what seemed bitter-sweetly like forever, and I demurred the possible traps of conversation by feigning occasional puzzlement at her words, aided by our state of lucidity. So we just held each other sweetly while she tried to simplify her words and I just gazed into her eyes. Then, and I can’t believe it came out suave, I told her I was too distracted by her beauty to strain to understand her words, so if it was okay, ‘I could speak with my body?’ That was the best thing I’d ever said before a kiss and I don’t know if I can top it actually.
There were a couple of energetic songs in the mix so she was too tired I guess to take me back to my place, and her nurse friends were not crashing out in a hurry, so there was no need to leave the flat. Like teenagers we were “ooed and ahhed” as we clambered into her friend’s bedroom, though there were only about eight other people at the party, so attention had been focused on us for a while. I assumed the diminutive numbers had initiated my invite anyway; a lack of men might have led to the desperate decision to call up a random guy she’d just met. But, I didn’t ask, I like to imagine that it was N__’s desire which’s been quelled by her friend from the prior party, probably judging me on my rugged appearance, or any other valid reason. But after 3am people tend to be easier to persuade. Regardless, I had wound up caressing this amazing woman on the end of a bed, kissing her neck and almost undoing the clip of her strapless bra with my teeth. I was working on it, and really it’s just like doing it one handed, but I was being careful not to pinch her back, and she got a bit overheated, so brusquely rolled me over and pulled my shirt off. That was a bit awkward as I hadn’t undone one button yet. However, having the shirt coarsely dragged across my skin left a residue feeling of blazing sensitivity, to which the soft warmth of her skin was exaggeratedly welcome. I breathed her perfume in; it gave me a déjà vu nostalgia and connection to another life, not overly pleasant nor in any way negative, but vivid and enticing.
I don’t need to get any further detailed about the next couple of hours unless I want to sound like a bragging wanker or lying penthouse writer. I will say that being a vastly unknown Comedian allowed a lot of this to happen as it did, and I can at least be happy with being where I am for the moment. I can also conclusively say in regards to the conversation of comedy ‘gold’, that N__’s crotch was actually full of fragrant roses, and O__ was just full of shit.

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