The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (26 page)

Suzie walked out to find me fiddling with the coathanger and some duct tape, trying to reattach the bumper bar to the car. Her father appeared with a set of pliers.

‘Thanks, Mr Fletcher,’ I said sheepishly. Soon the bumper bar was happily reunited with the chassis.

Anyway, on this occasion the Corona still had its bumper bar firmly attached, but just as Suzie peered into it, a young girl emerged from the passenger’s side. She wore no shoes and she had underarm hair and feathers hanging out of her dreadlocks. She had a bit of a muffin top, a roll of tummy hanging out over the top of her skirt that was in a bright Aztec design. I was dressed up the same way. We were quite a sight.

‘Thanks, Mr and Mrs Fletcher. I really appreciate you letting me leave the car here tonight. I’ll come back and pick it up in the morning, on my way to my stall in Hornsby.’

Her parents didn’t bat an eyelid as they waved us goodbye and we went off to our party. Inside the house, I later learned, the family went into hysterics.

‘How long has he been dating Pocahontas?’ asked her mother.

‘Is Anh going to a fancy dress party?’ her younger brother asked.

‘No. That’s just how he dresses these days!’

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Suzie and I were in a lot of classes together at uni and we were still just friends, hanging out in the same group and teasing each other in class like five year olds. One year the university camping club ran a trek, which I went on with a couple of mates from our class. The expedition was in the Moreton National Park near Canberra, in the middle of winter. It was freezing.

There was a convoy of two vehicles and, after a long drive, the car I was in got separated from the other one. When we arrived we parked the four-wheel drive and trekked for a while, but it got dark and pretty soon we just had to make camp where we were and meet up with the others in the morning. My backpack and all my gear were in the other car. Lucky my mate Steve had a two-man tent. As night arrived it was getting colder and colder and it dawned on me I didn’t have a sleeping bag. So Steve lent me all his warm clothes. I put on as many layers as I could, but I was still freezing—the kind of cold you feel deep in your bones; it makes your teeth chatter so much your whole brain starts vibrating.

I got up and started doing sit-ups to try and warm myself;
thirty-five, thirty-six
 . . . I was getting tired, my abs were hurting like there was a knife in them, and still I was freezing. Steve, he was snug in his sleeping bag.

‘Just come in with me,’ he said. I looked at the one-man sleeping bag and figured it would be quite a tight squeeze for two blokes.

‘No, I’m okay.’ I turned over and started doing push-ups.

‘All right, but if you get cold, we can share.’ Then Steve went to sleep.

I finished forty push-ups and it brought me a temporary warmth that lasted a whole minute and a half. Then I was freezing again. I lay there trying to will myself warm, thinking of everything I could that would warm me up—fires, hot sand at Bondi Beach, my brother’s great big polyester blanket with the horse printed on it. None of this worked and after another thirty minutes I figured I would die from hypothermia.

‘Hey, S-S-S-Steve.’ Nothing. He was fast asleep. I tapped him on the shoulder and woke him up.

‘Hey, Steve. M-m-m-maybe we c-can undo the sleeping bag and we can b-both use it like a blanket.’

‘All right.’

Steve unzipped the sleeping bag and we lay side by side, making sure there was a good gap between us. Halfway through the night, I woke up and discovered I was spooning Steve like a favourite lover.

‘Steve?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Ahh, I think I’m cuddling you …’ We both pulled away.

Five freezing minutes later… 

‘Anh, you still cold?’

‘Yeah. You?’

‘Yeah. How about we just not tell anyone?’

‘Awesome!’

We nudged closer to each other until there was body contact, and lay side by side, enjoying the purely platonic heat emanating from the other guy’s body.

‘We won’t tell anyone, right?’ I checked.

‘Course not.’

The next morning the other car turned up, I got my own sleeping bag and the rest of the camping trip was uneventful. On Monday morning, at our first class at uni, Steve walked in and announced to the room: ‘Guess what happened on our camping trip?’ and proceeded to tell the whole class about me pestering him to get the cuddle on.

‘Anh’s gay,’ the boys began to yell.

Suzie piped up: ‘No he’s not.’

Wow!
I was stunned.
What’s Suzie saying here? She’s asserting my hetero–ness?

‘Anh’s not good looking enough to be gay,’ she said, grinning.

I went with Steve and some other uni mates one night to watch stand-up comedy at the Harold Park Hotel, which back then was a comedy institution. It had been running for years and was famous for being the venue where many of Australia’s best comics started, and also the occasional ‘drop in’ from internationals, like Robin Williams.

On this particular night there wasn’t anyone famous, it was cheap Monday, open mic night. Open mic is where aspiring and amateur comedians get to go on stage and do a five-or-so-minute routine. Sometimes you get good amateurs and sometimes you don’t. On this occasion most of them weren’t so good.

Halfway through one guy’s attempt Steve turned to me and said, ‘Anh, you’re funnier than this guy.’

‘No I’m not,’ I said, but in my head I went,
I reckon I am
.

The next time we went to open mic night I signed up to do a short routine. I told a yarn about a disastrous holiday I once went on and it went over really well. I was so surprised. It was a complete and utter fluke! I’d told the story a thousand times before to friends, and I knew it off-by-heart, so when I got up on stage, despite my trembling nerves, my familiarity with the story got me through.

Perhaps it was fate or destiny, but I got lucky that very night because there was a woman standing at the back of the room watching the show and she came up to me afterwards.

‘Have you got ten minutes? I’m running a comedy room in Kings Cross,’ she said. ‘If you’re interested, I could book you for next week.’ My face lit up then my stomach started whirling. As I walked away, I realised I had only three minutes’ worth of material and I needed another seven.

I was in my fourth year of my five-year degree. Every year for students at that level there was a headhunting ritual in which the top firms conducted interviews early to snap up the best talent before graduation. I had every intention of finishing university, so even though I didn’t like it, it seemed like I was well on my way to becoming a ‘suit’.

I interviewed with many of the big companies—UBS Warburg, Macquarie Bank, Andersen Consulting, and others at that level. Of all these companies, Andersen had the most ridiculously intense recruitment process. First you sent in your resume, from which they culled out most applicants. Then you went through two rounds of interviews. More culling. Then the last hurdle was a three-day ‘recruitment retreat’.

It was a hellishly intimidating experience. You were in a job interview for three whole days, knowing you were being watched while you ate, slept and showered—okay, maybe not while you slept, that’d be weird. You knew that out of the hundred or so candidates, only twenty were going to get job offers and the rest would get the ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’

It was at this retreat, with ninety-nine others jostling for attention and trying to out-do each other, that I realised once and for all that I didn’t want to be in this environment. I really hated it. I’m sure they were nice people, but the competitive nature of the whole thing made everyone seem so damn fake. Candidates were stealing ideas, feigning friendships, doing everything they could to stand out from the rest of the pack at all costs.

After it was over, I got a call up for the final interview with Andersen Consulting, the one where they basically tell you you had a job. So I’m sitting in this huge, cold, intimidating office and the guy reached across and said, ‘Congratulations Anh, you’ve got the job.’

Whoo-hoooo!

‘Any questions?’

I was going to let it slide, but I really wanted to know: ‘How many hours a week do you work?’

It was a risky question to ask, and I’d waited till after finding out I had the job to ask it. If I’d asked too early, I might have sounded like I was a lazy bugger.

‘Well, Anh, at my level, I’m doing about sixty to sixty-five hours a week. I’m trying to cut back, but it can get pretty intense.’

Holy Schmoly
. It was a lot of hours to be doing something I knew I wouldn’t like.

I walked away from the meeting in two minds. On the one hand I wanted to jump for joy; I knew my family would never be poor again—I’d just gotten a job that paid well enough for us to live a much better life. On the other hand I knew I was going to hate it.

That night I was booked in to do a comedy gig at a club. It went well and after the show I went up to another comic who had been around the traps, Dave Grant, and asked him how many hours a week he worked.

‘Four.’

‘Four?’

‘Yeah, four. If it’s a big week, maybe five, six hours tops.’

Dave was what you’d call a headline comedian—a professional who made a regular living out of doing stand-up. He was a bit of a legend on the circuit, an all-round nice guy who had mentored many young comedians.

‘Around how much money do you guys make?’ I then asked.

He gave me a range; professionals started at fifty to sixty thousand a year, some made a hundred thousand, and the big boys made whatever they wanted. But for an average headline comic, the salary was between fifty and a hundred thousand. A light went on in my brain: that’s more than Andersen Consulting was asking me to do for a sixty-hour week.
That’s it
, I thought.
I’m going to switch
.

Of course, Dave forgot to tell me that it took the average comedian between five to ten years to become a headliner. He also forgot to tell me that many comedians spent years doing hundred-dollar gigs, so earning just a couple of hundred dollars a week. But something inside of me said,
This is frightening, but it’s the right thing to do
.