Ve haf vays of gettingk your attention…
When I was younger, and not that much younger if the truth be known, I had a lot of sex. Nothing like the thousand or more claimed by certain rock stars. Nor did I ever envy them their wretched excess. Why would you do it with so many that you would not remember them all? Still, I think my activity was rather more than moderate. To give this little study some perspective I should point out that I have reached an age where I would not care terribly much if I was told I would never do it again. The psychology is strange.I do not regret my indulgences, but sometimes think that I should.
Here is something quite odd. There were times when I very much wanted to do it with a certain woman, and could have done so but desisted due to some scruple – you know what I mean: ‘I have always wanted to fuck you.’ ‘I feel it too, but, you know…phew!’ – and could have done so, but desisted for some ethical reason. For instance, they might have been married to someone else. You know what I mean: ‘I have always wanted fuck you. I’m not going to, we can’t, but actually saying it delivers some strange satisfaction.’ ‘I feel it too, but, you know…. Phew!’ These rather drenching exchanges tend to run to formula but are ridiculously stimulating nevertheless. I would congratulate myself on my surprising virtue at first, but would soon come to regret it. And if I think of it I regret it still. Pride in my admirable self control has vanished in the aether. In the amorphous hindsight of a parallel past no one would have been hurt. Of course not.
I have sometimes thought that sex, and a sensual, aesthetic interaction with the world in general, were compensations for failure and sheer uncanny bad luck in my career so called, but one reason why I am glad to have had all that sex is that it has sometimes involved curious adventures, some quite bizarre. An example follows.
One the evening I was walking home up out of the city when I ran into a fellow we will call Herman the BL. In fact that was exactly what we did call him. It was in that stretch where Broadway rises out of George St on the fringe of China Town. I had just passed Sol Levy the tobacconist and a pinball parlour that has now gone. It was called The Happiest Place In Town – ironically enough, for it seemed less than buoyant from the outside. A headless man and another with his head in stocks loomed over the doorway. Still, I did sometimes spend a happy hour or so in there playing the Ted Nugent pinball machine. There was a juke box. I remember I’m On the Highway To Hell coming up through my body from the bare wooden floorboards and the startling reports, like gunshots, of multiple free games.
Back to the relevant past. Herman and I had known each other during that great struggle between the developer and residents in Victoria Street Kings Cross. The Builders Labourers Federation had imposed Green bans here and elsewhere, and they were joined by middle class radicals, including Herman who, as a gesture of solidarity, had registered and begun to work as a BL. It was good to see Herman again, and as we walked together up the hill toward Central Railway he invited me to a meeting of men just ahead in a place above the shop awnings. What sort of meeting? It seemed they were a kind of club who met to discuss men’s business, which I assumed would include their insecurities and guilty sins against feminism. I was not keen, but when Herman said that for a small donation we would have something to eat and watch a film, I changed my mind. I was getting hungry and I would not mind watching a movie, as we had begun to call them. Another attraction was that I would in some obscure way be penetrating part of the mystery of China Town. There was nothing Chinese about this event, but who after all had gone up above the shops, even on the edge of China Town? Actually there were restaurants up above some of the shops, but I think you might get my drift.
I’ll make this brief. I was introduced. We ate and talked in a large nondescript room at trestle tables as I recall. Actually I just listened. A discussion went on around me in which men’s fear of women was discussed. What could I say? Finally Herman drew me into it.
‘We’re all afraid of women, aren’t we, John? I mean even you. You’re afraid of women, surely?’
‘Um, ah, not unless they’re armed,’ I replied.
This was true. I had three sisters. My only fear regarding them was that they might tell our parents that I had been having sex with Judith, the catholic girl who lived in the flat upstairs, before we had even begun school. When I say sex, I mean that we went into the coastal heath near the flats, took our pants off and lay on top of each other and pushed. I hope that is not too much information, or too little for that matter. A little more will follow. If you are curious, we kept this quasi sex up until we began doing it ‘properly’, and then she went to confession and was told she would go to hell if she did not stop. Well before this, incidentally, she had told me, in a matter of fact tone, ‘You protestants will go to hell.’ Purgatory, actually. As I discovered much later. That didn’t stop her, but Father eventually did.
Anyway, back on Broadway nobody attempted to include me after my only-if-they’re-armed crack.
Now, the film. It plays its part. I enjoyed it. Locally made, it managed give the impression that it was intended to look low budget, due to being shot in mildly stylised black and white. Forget all that. You could hardly call me a film critic. It was good, it was funny, and it was called The Leaping Jeweller of Lavender Bay. It was about a fellow who caught a ferry each morning from the North Shore to the southern CBD, where he owned a jewellers. Each day he waited out of sight beside the shelter until the ferry had begun to pull away. Then he raced down the path and leaped across the gap between ferry and wharf. Each day his leaps became more prodigious as he allowed the gap to widen. Most passengers watched him blandly, preoccupied with imagined problems lurking in the day ahead, but curiosity was beginning to stir as his leaps got longer. Now they watched for his appearance each day and he began to noticed an attractive young woman sitting with the passengers outside at the rail, who watched with an enigmatic look that could have contained an element of admiration. It was not long before he began to fantasise. In one revery he saw her sitting on a trapeze swing in tights and a very short skirt or tutu, wistfully smiling, thinking perhaps of the man who was meant for her.
‘I’m in love with that woman,’ said Herman in a passionate whisper.
‘She’s very nice,’ I responded.
‘Very nice?’ said Herman. ‘She’s beautiful!’
‘Ssh,’ said someone in the dark.
‘Well, yes, I suppose she is,’ I agreed, at a lower volume.
A few weeks later, or more likely a few months now that I think of it, I stood at the counter of the Post Office that used to be on Broadway, near where it plateaus out from the city and soon turns into Parramatta Road. As usual I joked with the young Asian woman behind the counter. Another young woman beside me laughed at one of my efforts and our eyes turned and met.
Outside, we gravitated toward each other and I asked her, or she asked me, to have dinner that night. One of us asked, the other agreed. Over our meal, in nearby Glebe Point Road maybe two hundred metres from my place, she confessed that she once embarrassed and appalled herself terribly – she being a feminist – by appearing in a locally made film dressed in a trapeze artist’s tights and a short skirt.
‘Who would have seen it?’ I asked.
‘My friends saw it,’ she said, and her eyes rolled upward.
By this time I had looked more intently. It was her.
As we finished,she said, ‘I’m assuming that you want to fuck me.’
Yes, definitely. But my reply was more casual: ‘Why, coitingly!’ (Certainly). I think one of the Three Stooges used to say that.
At her place, also in Glebe, I went to the loo and when I came out she was standing in her bedroom doorway with no clothes on. I took my clothes off and we closed and went to the bed. As her guiding hand reached down and her very nice legs came round me, I thought, ‘I wish for Herman’s sake that I was him for the evening.’ That noble and momentarily sincere thought was soon lost.
But the sex was not so good. She had put on an album – vinyl; it was that long ago – of Linda Ronstadt singing old Broadway and jazz standards over arrangements by Nelson Riddle, who had written the arrangements for at least three of Frank Sinatra’s greatest albums. Now, I never had any truck with the infantile chauvinism of the rat pack and the ‘ring-a-ding I’m swinging’ side of Sinatra but he was a very great singer. Paul Kelly is a fan and Bob Dylan wrote that when he heard Sinatra singing Ebb Tide he had, ‘… heard the voice of God’. But it was hard for me to concentrate on sex when any music was playing. At first I thought Ronstadt was making a fair fist of it outside her idiom. And she was. But as she went on I felt her phrasing was just a little off here, and then again her, and this became so distracting that I got up and took the record off. An absurd thing to do, but what was he alternative? To just sort of run down to a stop? This created a certain disjunction, as you might imagine. Next time was much better, but I knew there was always going to be something missing.
We met again a few times and it turned out that she had her problems. Being a catholic (so many of them, so many ) she had given up sex due to feelings of self doubt. I didn’t quite follow, but was flattered I suppose that she had chosen me with whom to break her drought. And then I’d got out of bed in the middle of it and turned the record off. Further to that she could not understand how anyone could be as mindlessly happy as I was. She was a self-confessed neurotic, self critical and sometimes depressed. My happiness, she declared, was based on wrong premises. It was so middle class. Hmm.
I had run into this before; being called middle class by very middle class people (hell, she was in the process of buying a second house in the Blue Mountains), when my background was working class. Admittedly my interests and my occupation had led me into the company of the middle class, but I felt no different than I had when I was a child and I had loved riding horses, riding my bike, surfing, writing, diving, and music. Only the horses had left my life.
‘So middle class,’ she repeated.
She was meant for Herman, really. She would have appreciated his fear of women. I bowed out. And another episode began when an attractive woman smiled at me in the street and we both looked back and then turned back…
But I didn’t really get much to write about from these highly enjoyable encounters. Unless you want some pornography.
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