Odyssey In A Teacup (6 page)

‘Why do you suppose he does that?’ Vette asked Ralph.

‘How would I know?’

‘Uh, you’re a guy, and guys are mathematically minded.’

Ralph just shrugged, and while Maxi and Vette were throwing around some possibilities, he whispered in my ear,
‘Maybe Zach’s also got OCPD.’

 Then Maxi piped up, ‘I reckon he gets two bites of the cherry because he just never succeeds in popping anyone’s!’

Zach eventually did, though. He got married ten years later, presumably for love, or maybe just because he’d exhausted the whole alphabet.

Not long after I ditched him, I met Reuben. Sylvia and Joe dragged Myron and me along to a fundraiser. We were sitting at the same table as Reuben and his parents, and he and I chatted for most of the evening. Even at eighteen and a half (two years older than me), Reuben was a staid, dependable sort. Of medium build and medium height, with thick black hair, brown eyes and a dark complexion, Reuben was good-looking. He was also fun to be with, but after four months of dating, I lost interest in him. I wasn’t ready for Mr Reliability. I was looking for Mr Excitement. So I moved on, mostly through dead-end relationships, though. Like my friends, I had my share of these.

Because Maxi, Vette and I knew the best place to meet guys was at a discothèque, most Saturday nights the three of us would go to Swinger, a mid-city disco. Ralph came with us occasionally, but he preferred to save his money (probably for more underpants).

I already had my driver’s licence and I had a car. Joe owned a service station and a small used car yard, so he gave Myron and me cars to get around in. Mine was a Mini Cooper in British Racing Green, and Myron drove a Holden HK Monaro GTS with mag wheels and a Lukey Muffler. It was yellow and had two thick black stripes running vertically along the hood and the boot on the driver’s side. Myron liked to show off in it; it was the only time boy wonder let his short, back and sides down. Myron ‘Wild Thing’ Roth burned rubber! He’d rev and rev, and then floor the accelerator. This car was his window of opportunity to make noise.

I didn’t need a souped up car for that. Making noise is what a
pest
does best. For most of the week, I drove Sylvia up the wall and round the bend. And on Saturday nights, I drove Maxi, Vette and myself to Swinger.

Although we hadn’t yet reached the legal drinking age when we first started going to Swinger, we looked over eighteen and were never asked for ID when we bought drinks. I usually got an ouzo and Coke, not because I liked the taste; I didn’t. I just needed to look cool in the eyes of the man I’d fallen in love with.

He was tall and lean with a set of teeth so white and straight and perfectly aligned, they could have been dentures. He had shoulder length, wavy brown hair and a pair of substantial but not too bushy muttonchops flanking an angelic face with patrician features. I felt dizzy (and jealous) every time I watched him slow-dance with a woman. He was Barry Gibb (well ... he wasn’t really Barry Gibb, he just looked a lot like him). Maxi nicknamed him ‘BAG’. I so desperately wanted to bag BAG.

BAG always fronted up at Swinger with a girlfriend. A bit like Zach, seems BAG was a serial monogamist. But his cycles were shorter. He changed girlfriends every month (although he didn’t recycle like Zach), and by the looks of things, he had no specific type. There were tall ones and short ones; there were blondes and brunettes. Some had long hair, some, short hair, either straight or curly. The only constant was that they were all very attractive. Another constant was that everywhere he went, BAG dragged a pair of Hobbits along with him: two short, feral looking men with bushy beards.

Each Saturday night, it pained me to watch BAG get hot and heavy on the dance floor with the girl he was dating, while
I
suffered from a Saturday night fever. I found comfort in the thought that he discarded them because he was yet to meet the love of his life.

Here I am!
Hello ... HELLOOO ... over here.

Or, maybe not. Would I measure up? Was I attractive enough? I wasn’t sure. I was sure, though, that I wanted to have his babies. I needed a plan.

Sylvia would often say ‘All things come to those who wait’. She didn’t much like it if you threw this cliché back at her.

‘Go and polish your furniture,’ she’d say.

‘I’ll do it later.’

‘You’ll do it now!’

‘No. Later. “All things come to those who wait”.’ This earned me a cuff on the ear and a stretch in my room with a yellow polishing cloth and a tin of Pledge.

But where BAG was concerned, Sylvia may have had a point. I needed to polish up my ability to wait. So, I waited. I waited on the dance floor, making sure to dance near him. When he suddenly faced the other way as he spun his girlfriend around, I shuffled around with whoever happened to be my dance partner so that I always remained in BAG’s line of vision. But BAG didn’t see me. When BAG sat down during breaks between dance brackets, I sat down at the table next to his. And waited. I waited until I was drinking bloody ouzo and Coke
legally!
Then, finally, that waiting paid off. Sort of. A plan was hatched.

Late one evening, as I was sitting with Maxi and Vette, and watching BAG bebopping with his girlfriend (who would probably be bopping him in the back of the car later), a tall skinny guy approached him, shook his hand, had a brief exchange with him, then came and sat at the table next to us. I stared at tall skinny guy, as if just by looking at him I could extract information on BAG by some strange osmosis. Tall skinny guy caught me looking, so I quickly turned away. When the band started up again, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up to see tall skinny guy’s face inches away from mine, his eyes boring into me.

‘G’day. I’m Lee. Ya wanna dance?’ he yelled over the top of the music, blasting me with hot, bad breath.

Fuck no!
‘Sure.’

Lee was fugly. Anaemic-looking, he had fine, greasy, sepia hair, and crooked teeth. In his sepia suit, which was a close match to the colour of his hair, he seriously looked like a newly sharpened sepia pencil. He had a pointy head, a bit like a newborn baby whose skull is a little compressed from coming through the birth canal. It looked like Lee’s head had yet to round out, but after twenty-odd years on the planet, this was unlikely to happen.

Lee and I had one dance and then he sat at our table,
uninvited
. I indulged him, though, and we chit-chatted for a bit. Lee had a sepia personality to match his suit and his hair. He asked me out. I accepted.

‘Why?’ asked Ralph when we spoke the next morning.

‘Because it’s one step closer to BAG, and there comes a time when it’s just not enough to wait, when you need to do something, even if it means leaping into a snake pit.’

‘As in the kind of snake pit that contains trouser snakes?’

‘
Ecch
... no! And anyhow, you wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing. Or worse!’

‘Hmm ... ’ Ralph thought about that one. ‘Maybe there are times I sell my soul to the devil, but Satan has to be damn fine looking for me to do it!’

‘I don’t see that I’m selling my soul; this is strictly reconnaissance. I’m just out to gather information.’

‘By sleeping with the enemy?’

‘No! Well ...
yes
, but only metaphorically. It’s just a fact-finding mission. How else am I supposed to plan my tactical moves to get this guy? Do you have a better suggestion?’

‘Why don’t you just say hello to him?’

‘Oh. Why didn’t
I
think of that? Jesus, Ralph! You, who weighs up everything—
twice
—suddenly oversimplifying the situation!’

‘Ruthie, you already have the moves.’

I blocked my ears. ‘La la la la la la la la.’

Ralph was being matter-of-fact and I didn’t want to hear it. On the odd nights he came to Swinger with us, BAG wasn’t there, so Ralph didn’t know what he looked like or the kinds of girls he was attracted to. BAG hadn’t noticed me even when I was standing right in front of him. I didn’t care what Ralph said. I intended to pull out all the stops. I was going on this date with Lee come hell or high water. As it happened, both did.

My intention was to minimise the risk of running into anyone I knew. It was bad enough going out with an ugly guy, but to be caught with one didn’t bear thinking about. And Lee made it easy—he asked me where I wanted to go. I picked a club off the beaten track (about half an hour’s drive away).

Lee was wearing the same sepia suit when he turned up in his grey rattletrap the following Saturday night. After introducing him to Sylvia and Joe, we left. This was going to be a one off; they didn’t need to grill him. Only I did.

We had just got round the corner when his car coughed and spluttered, made a hissing sound as smoke came out from under the bonnet, and ground to a dead stop.

‘Shit shit shit!’ Lee slammed his fist into the steering wheel. I was equal parts shocked and fascinated. Frightened by his sudden outburst, I shrank away from him, yet at the same time, I felt a perverse kind of admiration because his language and behaviour were bursts of colour in the drabness.

‘Oh no, no. No. I’m
really
sorry.’ Lee suddenly realised there was someone else in the car with him. Even so, when your date has to apologise to you in the first five minutes, it’s not a good sign. I was tempted to walk home, but remembering this date wasn’t without purpose, I steeled myself to suffer for the cause.

‘I can take care of this, no worries.’ He sounded confident.

It started raining heavily—bucketing down—as he tinkered under the bonnet for the next half hour. Another half hour later we walked into the disco, he, sodden and with grease stains on his shirt. It was forgivable because it gave off a manly vibe. Here was a guy who could fix his own car. But when Lee greeted an acquaintance with, ‘How ya goin’, mate?’ and mate replied, ‘Good till I saw you, shithead’ (and didn’t laugh after saying it), I wondered if it was all worth it.

Mercifully, it only took an hour until mission accomplished. I’d wrung as much information out of him about BAG as I could. Talking about one bloke to another bloke didn’t seem to put Lee off, strangely enough, but enough was enough.

‘I have a headache. I’d like to go home now.’

‘Oh no!’ Lee was genuinely concerned, a little too much so (it wasn’t like I’d announced I had a brain tumour). He raised his left hand as if he was stopping traffic, and with a knowing look, he leaned to the left, fossicked around in his pants pocket, and pulled out two foil-wrapped Disprin. He even took them out of their tatty little packaging and handed them to me with my glass of ouzo and Coke.

‘Go on, take ‘em. You’ll feel good as gold in about fifteen minutes.’

Shit shit shit!
I felt obliged to take pills I didn’t need (you really need to pick your ailments). Half an hour later, I had a stomachache.

‘It’s probably from the Disprin,’ I said. ‘Taking them on an empty stomach can unsettle it.’
Especially if you take them unnecessarily. And with alcohol.

‘Oh God. I feel
so
bad that I didn’t get you something to eat first.’

Lee was a bit of a tragedian. It was like being on a date with Sylvia, who also made mountain ranges out of anthills. Kind of makes you feel over-responsible for their angst. So I felt bad that he felt bad, but not bad enough to stay any longer.

‘I’m going home, but you stay—I’ll catch a cab.’ I was insistent.

‘No way, José! Wanna make sure you get home safe ‘n’ sound. Else your folks won’t let me in the door again.’

Please God.

Once in the car, he kept asking if I was okay. I wasn’t; I had gas. But if I’d said no, it would have sent him into a tailspin. Still, saying yes sent him into a cloying monologue about movies he wanted us to see together, friends of his he wanted to introduce me to, poems he’d written that he wanted to read to me.
Jesus H Christ!
Lee was mapping out a nauseating future with me. Obviously, it would be cruel to tell him he was just a means to an end, but drastic measures were now necessary.

As a kid, I’d learned to burp the alphabet. Half of it, anyway. I’d only ever made it as far as ‘M’, which was still pretty impressive. I drew on those skills and went for it.

I’d have scored full marks for resonance, but lost points on range—wouldn’t have registered much past ‘G’. But Lee was shocked. He just stared at me, slowly shaking his head.

‘Wow. Any other girl would have held that in. I love that ya feel comfortable enough with me to just be yerself.’

Sweet merciful crap!
What do you say to that? Fortunately, we weren’t far from my place. We pulled up front, and with my hand on the door handle ready to flee, I quickly turned towards him to thank him. But he was already zeroing in with puckered lips.
Shit!
Family-size air gulp—
GLUUUG
—and this time I broke my own record. I got to somewhere between ‘N-O’ (how apt). Lee shrank back but then, he looked at me sympathetically.

‘Oh. Ya really did have a nasty tummy ache, din cha? That should ease things a bit.’

Oh boy.
Getting rid of this guy was as difficult as cleaning dog shit off the bottom of a ripple sole shoe.

‘I’ll walk you to the door,’ he offered.

‘No.
Stay!
’ I commanded, as if speaking to the dog whose shit I was trying to remove. I bolted before Lee could say any more.

As I relived the whole experience when I went to bed that night, I was horrified at how low I had stooped. But then, another one of Sylvia’s platitudes came to mind: ‘When you look back on your life, you'll regret the things you didn’t do more than the ones you did’. I mulled this over as I lay in the dark, thinking about the things humanity would have missed out on if someone hadn’t taken a chance.

1. Would feminism have suffered a setback if the FBI hadn’t started employing female agents?
Yes.

2. Would Trekkies have felt deprived if the first
Star Trek
fan convention had not taken place?
Yes.