I’d never been more scared in my life. Then I remembered – I’m in a building. If I was forced to think of the best defence against a knife, a building would be top of my list.
They say don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Always bring a building to a knife fight. As long as I didn’t open the window, I’d be fine.
So I just stood there and watched him. And he just kept tapping.
After a while I was like, well, I’m gunna have to leave eventually, so I just went back to washing up. Kept checking over my shoulder every now and then. Still there. Then eventually after like twenty minutes, he just walked away.
I like to think that failed robbery was a turning point in his life and he quit his life of crime after that. But probably he just bought a gun.
The day after the robbery, I was the hero of Hungry Jack’s Kotara, Newcastle, New South Wales. My managers were so impressed with my composure during the whole ordeal that they gave me a thirty per cent off discount card. Then they asked me if I’d be willing to provide a description of the man to the police. They said it’d be very valuable in helping find him.
And I said, ‘No.’ Because that man was the most Rebel Team Member I’d ever seen in my life. Death to the Valued Team Members! Rebels stick together!
Three years later, I was fired for stealing sticky date puddings.
REBECCA HUNTLEY
Rebecca has three kids and a full-time job, so she doesn’t get out much. When she does, she is a researcher, broadcaster and writer. She has written numerous books, is a board member of the Whitlam Institute and adjunct senior lecturer at the School of Social Science at the University of New South Wales. She hates the word ‘awesome’.
‘Inconsistencies with the Presentation of the Pasta Special’ copyright © Rebecca Huntley 2018
Inconsistencies with the Presentation of the Pasta Special
by REBECCA HUNTLEY
This story was originally performed at the event Old School
In my professional life, I’ve operated in all kinds of organisations fraught with politics and difficult personalities. The Labor Party. The feminist movement. Fairfax. The ABC.
Nothing compares, can I tell you, to the factionalism, power plays, personality clashes and ideological schisms of a school canteen.
Last year, my daughter started kindy and I wanted to help out at her school. Food is one of my things, so I thought canteen duty would be a good way to make a contribution. A nice, easy, uncomplicated way to contribute to the school.
Let me tell you about my first day on canteen duty.
I arrived early for the lunchtime shift and was put immediately on toasted cheese sandwich duty. A challenge. Sometimes you have to make sixty-five of those babies in fifty minutes.
While buttering the multigrain, one of the other mothers sidled up to me and said, ‘I need to warn you about something.’ Here it is, I thought, the nut allergy talk – what to do if some kid grazes his lips across a contraband peanut.
Anyway, she says to me, ‘We do serve honey toast to the kids. Some mothers don’t have a problem with it, but I don’t support it.’
I didn’t know what to say. It was my first day. Where did I stand on honey toast? If I was for it, would I be relegated to a dangerous pro-sugar camp? If I was against it, would I be aligning myself with a killjoy anti-sugar faction? I was torn. In the end, I said something non-committal, like, ‘Oh well, cutting down on sugar is the thing now, isn’t it?’ Blah.
Soon after my first day I was asked if I wanted to attend the canteen committee meeting at a local café after school drop-off. And so one sunny morning I found myself in a circle of mums (yes, only mums) and lattes. First order of business, and an urgent issue at that: a change in the situation with Thursday’s sausage rolls.
The mum who usually made the sausage rolls each week had a new job and couldn’t do it any more, so the canteen coordinator planned to get the sausage rolls from a good local butcher and all we’d have to do is cook them. No change to the cost for the kids but the sausage rolls would be . . . different.
In all earnestness, the canteen coordinator said, ‘Now we know there is going to be blowback about this. The usual people are going to be up in arms so we need to carefully manage this issue internally.’
‘Blowback’? ‘Manage this issue internally’?
I thought these women were exaggerating, but I was wrong. There turned out to be a coterie of mums (yes, only mums) at my daughter’s school whose pleasure it is in life to complain but not to contribute.
The most stunning example of this was an incident with the Thursday pasta. In winter, we have a pasta special. Spirals or penne with homemade meatballs and homemade tomato sauce with cheese. One dollar fifty. One Thursday, an anonymous note gets delivered from the office to us, apparently a complaint from a parent: There are inconsistencies with the presentation of the Thursday pasta special.
Either some bougie kid who had watched too much MasterChef had complained to his-extra bougie mother about the cheese placement on the pasta and she’d decided – instead of telling him to get a life – to complain to the canteen. OR, that parent had somehow seen the pasta and decided to complain herself.
This was not an isolated incident. I’ve found doing canteen duty that there is always some bitch with a Bugaboo complaining about something.
A few months ago, the new canteen coordinator, a friend of mine, decided it would be fun to offer a Lebanese lunch special for the kids. Five bucks got you falafel, meatballs, chicken shish kebab, tabouli, hummus and all the bread you could eat. We got sixty-five orders. We were frantic trying to get the lunches sorted and labelled on top of the usual avalanche of toasted cheese sandwiches.
A mother comes up to me and says, ‘You should put a sesame allergy warning on those lunches.’
‘Oh, does your child have a sesame allergy?’
‘No.’
‘Does any child you know in the school have one?’
‘No, but I think it’s just important to have it.’
I would love to have told this concerned mother to shove a burning hot falafel up her bleached arsehole but I believe in customer service so I just smiled and said, ‘Thanks for the tip; we’ll know next time.’
Canteen seems to generate a stream of controversy about non-issues. You have normally sensible people using the most over- the-top language in relation to bread sticks and ice blocks. It still astounds me after two years of volunteering.
Consider the great banana bread debate of June 2014.
The canteen coordinator made the rather sensible decision to delete banana bread as a regular canteen item. A slice of banana bread contains a scary amount of sugar and fat. We had some kids coming and ordering two slices with butter, on top of their usual lunch. We thought we’d get rid of banana bread and offer a baked treat every Tuesday as a substitute.
Now the canteen coordinator, let’s call her Mary, knew there would be ‘blowback’ and that she had to ‘manage this issue internally’, so she mobilised the anti-banana bread forces before the P&C meeting, which included the principal, who had taken a strong anti-banana bread position from the beginning. There was quite a bit of protest from some parents in that P&C meeting about the removal of banana bread as a regular item, but I am happy to say the forces of righteousness won the day.
And yet the struggle was not over. A few weeks after this victory, one of the canteen mums bailed Mary up in the schoolyard at pickup and said, ‘I don’t know how you think you can get away with this. It’s not going to last. It won’t last.’
Will banana bread remain banished from the canteen menu? Will Mary successfully resist the forces lobbying for its reinstatement? Or will she be ambushed at the next P&C meeting by a resurgent pro-banana bread group, high on sugar and fat? Stay tuned.
When recounting some of these stories over lunch to Zoe Norton Lodge, she asked me the obvious question: why do I do it?
Three reasons.
I’m a strong supporter
of public education. Parental involvement is crucial to ensuring local public schools are the best they can be.
And I like the idea of seeing my daughter during the school day from time to time. That being said she is totally uninterested in coming to see me at the canteen. I asked her why and she said, direct quote: ‘Takes away from my play time, which is limited.’ She might send a minion to collect her ice block but that’s it. Yes, she is that terrifying, even though she is only six.
Plus I get to know the school better and the kids my daughter interacts with. The kids are terrific.
I love serving the kindy kids. First time I ever served a kindy kid: memorable. Boy, nose peppered with freckles, barely reached the top of the counter. Shyly approached me, head down, pushed ten cents over the counter towards me and whispered, ‘What can I get for this?’
I thought this was a great opportunity for an important life lesson.
‘Son, in my day you could get something for ten cents. A bag of lollies. A handful of stickers. In the right shop, you could buy a rubber. In my day ten cents MEANT something.
‘Alas, those days are gone.
‘You, my boy, have been born into a world of upfront university fees, of sky-high housing prices, of earn or learn government policies.
‘In this unforgiving world, ten cents means nothing. Actually, it would be better if you had no money. Why? Because ten cents gives you a glimmer of hope that you might be able to buy something. But the forces of the rampant capitalism crush those hopes just like that.’ [Clicks fingers.]
Now I decided not to say that to him because, well, he was five years old and it was lunchtime on a Thursday. Perhaps a bit over the top.
But I have taught kids other important lessons.
We sell frozen pineapple rings for twenty cents – so popular in summer we have a tub of them on the counter. Etiquette is: ask for the ring, give us the money, you get the ring. One time there was this eight-year-old boy who tried to snatch a ring before paying. I said to him, ‘You can’t finger my ring without asking me first.’ This is a simple question of manners too often forgotten by the men of my generation and I felt that little boy learned something valuable that day.
Unfortunately, my time as a canteen mum is drawing to a close: twin girls will be here any moment now. But I’ve loved my time behind the counter. It has left me with the rock-solid knowledge of the following two things.
Wherever there are people, there is politics.
And if I ever, ever meet the chick who wrote the note about the presentational consistency of the pasta, I will beat her to death with a hot piece of honey toast.
DAVID CUNNINGHAM
David has been writing stories, and in the fullness of time reading them, for Story Club since its very first night. He used to do a fair bit of live comedy, including being a doubtless close runner-up in the RAW National Stand-up Competition but, these days, an hour standing is a bit much on his knees and he much prefers the big, comfy Story Club chair. He works as a television writer/researcher and, for fun, is in his ninth year of a history PhD about cultural representations of naval officers who were also members of parliament between the Glorious Revolution and the fall of the Walpole ministry, but he won’t insist on you reading it.
‘The Gay, Fat, Sad Trilogy’ copyright © David Cunningham 2018
The Gay, Fat, Sad Trilogy
by DAVID CUNNINGHAM
Gay
This story was originally performed at the event When We Were Young
Perhaps my first consciously sexual thoughts arose at the age of nine or ten from an unlikely source: a computer game, first released in 1986, called Gauntlet II. While it wasn’t a clear premonition of the brisk, workman-like sodomy I would come to enjoy, it was an early milestone on my path to becoming the powerfully unfabulous gay man writing to you now. In hindsight, the roots of sexuality ran deep back into childhood, where little boys would catch and kiss little girls on the playground of Lilli Pilli Primary School; I caught and kissed little boys. At least that was the plan. I was a most ungainly child, so my only successful pursuits were during recess when the grass was out of bounds and running on the asphalt strictly forbidden, perfect hunting conditions for the amorous tortoise. Like U-boat commanders off the east coast in 1942 before the Americans sorted out convoys, Little Lunch was my Happy Time but, unlike those submariners, I didn’t understand the implications of the targets my subconscious chose.
Though the frightening, pornographic clarity of the internet was a long way off, it was a computer, our ancient Atari, which first stirred the beast within. Gauntlet II flickered open the hard eye of a horny Smaug previously asleep under the golden innocence of childhood. It was an ordinary enough fantasy game, all wizards and goblins. From the loading screen of the dungeon party, two characters struck me. Thyra the Valkyrie was an Amazon in a leather bikini, the spiritual godmother to Xena Warrior Princess, while Thor was a berserking beefcake barbarian who strayed perilously close to infringing Conan’s intellectual property rights. After playing, I would sit inside a cupboard, and imagine it a sort of transforming chamber, where I would in turn become the Valkyrie then the barbarian. Where it gets strange is that I mentally swapped the genitals, so when I was Thyra I sported a ten-year-old’s understanding of an adult penis; while as Thor I exhibited a baffled mental blank of a vagina, a smooth metaphysical absence of cock. Looking back, I don’t really know what to make of this. I was too young to know what sex was, let alone a sex change, and my perversions have ended up drearily straightforward. However, I’m happy to make myself available to any developmental psychologists who might be interested, and yes, I will accept payment in biscuits.
Time passed, the Atari was upgraded to a 486 (with CD-ROM!), and the first glimmerings of active sexuality firmed up decisively at the barbarian end of the spectrum. To answer the leading question Crassus put to Tony Curtis, I liked snails, not oysters. I really liked snails, but what did that mean? ‘What’s happening to me?’ was an excellent question, but wasn’t at all addressed in that classic guide to puberty which, when placed between a first folio Shakespeare and the King James Bible, rounds out any respectable library. This was before Queer as Folk, that faithful documentary of gay life, furtively recorded on VHS while mum slept, each tape cunningly mislabelled The Gondoliers or Scarlet Pimpernel episodes 4–6 to throw her off the scent. Given the casual homophobia of the Sutherland Shire in the ’90s, the queer studies section of Caringbah High’s library was about as extensive as you’d expect. In short, I was on my own. I had to methodically sort out just what my sexual psyche was. In practice, this mostly entailed a lot of wanking.
But to what? No junk mail quite served the purpose of clandestine porn for a young gay in the way that the Victoria’s Secret catalogue did for straight teens; the men modelling underwear for Target and Big W were too wholesome, while the bros of Lowes were vaguely lumpen and had run to seed. The new computer was no help, for there are no dicks on Encarta 95. However, the Cub Scouts had taught me to improvise in a challenging situation, so I turned to my father’s library.
His books on ancient history were stuffed with florid nineteenth-century paintings brimming with naked men. Lacedaemonian youths exercising, oiled and rippling in their Greek gymnasia. King Leonidas and his brawny three hundred ritually combing each other’s hair before the battle of Thermopylae – now THIS is Sparta. Western sculpture’s long fixation on the male nude was a godsend, and I blush to admit that I masturbated, more than once, to Michelangelo’s David. I came to the Apollo Belvedere; I stained the Dying Gaul. Some of these books, particularly those with cloth bindings, still show visible DNA evidence of their misuse. Probably my most shameful inspiration was in a book on the Second World War, a picture showing ranks of SS recruits parading in their Hugo Boss underpants. Now, before you judge, look deep within your souls; wank a mile in my shoes. Ask yourselves this: placed in my situation, which of you would not have wanked to Nazis? I thought as much.
For a year o
r so, this is where matters stood, until a couple of chance discoveries vastly expanded my horizons. One evening, some friends and I were going through a cupboard stuffed with the family movie collection – bought in remaindered bulk from a sinking video store – when one title caught our eye: FLUSH! A madcap heist in which bank robbers FLUSHED a million in gold down the toilet. We opened the case, looking forward to watching this nuanced drama, but were surprised to find, not FLUSH, but a film my elder brother had hidden called Quest for Cum XII; the eleven earlier quests had presumably ended in failure. We naturally got scared and jammed it to the back of the cupboard, but later I revisited it alone. The cast’s performances were lacklustre, the plot tenuous and the film itself was poorly made; however, it did conclusively prove that Thyra the Valkyrie and the mysteries of her crotch were not for me. More promising was the discovery, fossicking in a different cupboard, of my trailblazer brother’s collection of superannuated Penthouses, Hustlers and Playboys, pensioned off into retirement after honourable service in his journey to bread-and-butter straightness.
Too timid to actually take the magazines, I had the brainwave of cutting out all the men from their heterosexual context to spirit them away to my room, rescued from their female tormentors. I soon had a loose sheaf of softcore fragments, disembodied butts and torsos with the occasional prize of a full-frontal penis from which to assemble my own tableaux, much like a ransom note snipped from a dozen newspaper typefaces. My brother’s concealment of Quest for Cum gave me the idea of hollowing out the insides of an expensive historical atlas to shelter my secret collection. Given how finicky I was (and still am) about keeping my books pristine, Mum was justly suspicious on finding dozens of marginless pages on Rome and the Abbasids, Byzantium and the Mongols crumpled up in the garbage. ‘Why are these in the bin?’ she asked. ‘Because I felt like it,’ I snarled, coming as close as I would ever manage to James Dean rebellion. She must have known what I was about, but taking the book would have been too obvious, so she went upstream to the source. At the time, I wasn’t sharp enough to realise that I’d left behind tell-tale man-shaped gaps in the magazines. Eloquent ellipses, if you will. Loquacious lacunae, incriminating interstices, or in the vernacular, fag holes.
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