by Nick Earls
He puts one hand onto the bench to steady himself, and raises the other in triumph. We applaud.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘Thank you. It was a bastard, but I couldn’t let you down.’
Once the two of us are out the door and in the corridor, Sophie says, ‘How big a burger do you reckon we can get him to swallow? Do you reckon we can get him to black out?’
‘Hey, on the first bad sinus day, anything’s possible.’
*
Zel tells Frank, ‘Just drizzle a little barbecue sauce across it,’ and I don’t like the way she says drizzle.
‘And a bit of mayo on the bun, spread with a knife?’
‘You remembered.’ Said in way that I’ve seen described as cooing. Then she turns to me. ‘Philip, is he this attentive to all the customers?’
‘Sure. He’s a professional.’ I’m hitting Ron for nausea loading to my pay if I cop much more of this, dammit. ‘Frank was born with great people skills, but I think he did invent the Big Chicken Little with you in mind.’
‘Test drove the first one myself earlier,’ he says, omitting to mention its ugly passage through his gullet.
She eats it in a way that’s presumably supposed to resemble dainty, with a paper serviette in both hands and a dab at her lips after each mouthful. There’s a gold trinkety rattle from her bracelets every time she does it, tiny horses and carriages and pineapples jangling into each other.
When a couple of students come in for burgers, I’m happy to take the work and leave Zel to Frank. The Todds, Sophie excepted, can be one of the downsides to working here. They turn up unannounced and need a lot of looking after. Sometimes Ron even tries to make a burger, but he treats it like celebrity day at McDonald’s. He makes bad burgers slowly, he gets in the way and the whole time he’s here he’s hanging out for any opportunity to tell the customer he owns the place. ‘I’m Ron Todd,’ he says, and so emphatically I think everyone’s expecting the next bit to go, ‘and I’m an alcoholic’. But it’s not his fault that everyone notices the big neon chicken and No one notices his small neon name.
Sophie comes in to change and Zel stays talking to Frank when we go out the back.
‘How’s obstetrics?’ she says from the toilet. ‘I didn’t ask you that yet.’
‘It’s fine. Not that we’ve done much so far.’
‘Would you do it, do you think? Would you go into that?’
‘Be an obstetrician, you mean? I don’t think so. I’ve got no idea what I’m going to do, really. In medicine, at least. I keep hoping I’ll work out how to be a film maker before I have to decide that.’
‘So you’re that serious about it?’
‘Yeah. Have you seen how much video cameras cost? That’s what I’m saving for. And I know it’s not the same as film, but I think I could learn a lot from it. At least it’d be something to start with. And I’ve done some film work, so . . . ’
‘Really? What have you done?’
‘Well, not much. I acted in a couple of alcohol-abuse films round about when I was finishing school. Educational films. I had a bit part in the first one and a bigger one in the second. It was the first time I ever got paid for anything.’
I don’t tell her the obvious part. Those films are always ‘cool crowd gone wrong’ versus ‘nerd made good’, and I was never going to be one of the slick people who drank themselves stupid and fell from grace by throwing up tomato peel into the toilet. I was the nice guy who didn’t drink and therefore, of course, got the girl. And that’s just like life, isn’t it?
‘So it’s a bit of a comedown to go from film actor to chicken then,’ Sophie’s saying, and sounding as though she’s genuinely sorry for me, like I’m a Hollywood Where Are They Now? story.
‘Yeah, it’s not really like that, though. There’s a few years in between. And I wasn’t exactly co-starring with De Niro.’
She opens the door and hands me the costume. It’s warm when I get into it. It always feels a little like sneaking into someone else’s bed, putting on the chicken, particularly on a cool evening like this. And Sophie makes it smell like green apple shampoo. I always get a blast of green apple when I pull the head down, and I do wonder what kinds of smells I’m giving her in return.
Film actor. It sounds like a lot more than it is. I signed up with a casting agent after I did my two alcohol films, but all she was interested in was making fifty bucks out of the portfolio photos. But it looked easy. A film career looked there for the taking, for weeks at least.
‘It’s not much of a place for film-makers,’ I say to Sophie as she’s zipping me up. ‘Brisbane, I mean. So I figure I’ve got to get out of here and see more of what’s going on out there, in the rest of the world. We get an elective at the end of fifth year. So I’ve been having a look at a few places in America. New York, New York, mainly. It’d be good to try New York. I’ve been reading some books lately, like Bright Lights, Big City. I’ve read it a couple of times. Have you read it?’
‘No.’
‘It’s about New York. It’s about this guy’s life in New York.’
‘Like a Simon and Garfunkel song. Did you see them at Lang Park last year? I went with Dad. Who would have preferred Neil Diamond, but you’ve got to take what’s on offer. Not that he’s New York. Well, I don’t think he is. But they are.’
‘Sure. Lots of New York references. “Whores on Seventh Avenue”, “New Jersey Turnpike”. Except that’s a New Jersey reference, I suppose.’
‘And what exactly is a turnpike? I’ve always wondered about that. Like, is there a pike there?’
‘It’s a good question. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get to check it out at the end of the year. I’ll send you a postcard. If there’s a postcard of any kind of pike in New Jersey, I’ll send it to you. Anyway, I got Bright Lights, Big City for my birthday late last year. I’d read about it somewhere. And I got a camera—a regular camera—since I figured I should learn about still photography too, if I’m looking at making films. Not that I’ve done much yet—my mother’s birthday, and a few compositional things. And we started taking some photos for a uni revue sketch, Frank and me, but it kind of got canned. There was a difference of opinion. Well, Frank told the organisers some of their ideas were fucked, and that they had a real problem listening to constructive criticism. So they told us we didn’t have to come back.’
‘That doesn’t sound like Frank,’ she says. She knows him too well by now. ‘Hey, Dad says you do Shakespeare when you’re doing the chicken.’
‘Sometimes. I thought that was between him and me.’
‘We’re a close family. Get used to it.’
‘It’s pretty boring out there. You’ve got to do something.’
‘No kidding. I think Shakespeare’s a good idea.’
‘So what do you do?’
‘Just wave my arms around a lot. Try to be like a chicken, I guess.’
‘But what does your brain do?’
‘Tries to stop me falling in front of the traffic. Don’t you find the lights, like, hypnotic?’
‘I think you’re getting a bit too much into that chicken brain space.’
How did it become Shakespearean? I’m thinking when I’m back out there and realising I can’t recall enough of ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ to make it worth trying.
It was the chicken costume, and the comb on the head, which came as a separate piece of moulded plastic and had a bad lean to the left. It took a while to sort that out, so it was on my mind and led to cockscomb, and therefore to standing at the roadside mouthing faux-Elizabethan advertising slogans and insults at the unstopping traffic. And that led, irresistibly, to Henry V’s speech before Agincourt (or was it Harfleur?) and eisteddfod flashbacks and Hamlet’s soliloquy, which is so over-recited that practically No one gets the emphasis right. No one listens to it any more. No one realises that the key word is ‘be’. Except of course this seven-foot chicken at the Taringa lights on Moggill Road. The one whose brain is always elsewhere
, the one at very little risk of being fatally mesmerised by the traffic.
Frank waves me back in early.
‘Zel reckons we should pack up before ten if there’s No one around,’ he says, having already tidied some leftover chicken into three burgers that he’s now wrapping neatly and putting in a box for taking home.
*
I can remember, years ago, reading ads for bullworkers in American comics always featuring some bulky guy and a life-changing steel tube with handles. I was horrified when I worked out what their representative weakling weighed in kilograms. If only I’d left it in pounds and hadn’t put myself through the maths, I would have had years of those blissful dreams of sea monkeys instead. I always wanted sea monkeys, even if they were just tiny translucent aquatic insects that came as a packet of eggs not much bigger than dust. And I wanted X-ray glasses and the famous Black Liteª light bulb and peace patches for jeans. I must have been young. The peace symbol was everywhere on those pages.
But it wasn’t peace I needed. My life has always had peace in abundance. What it lacked, clearly, was muscle. And perhaps the people who go to beaches are kinder here than in America but I knew that, when the time came to have sand kicked in my face—the characteristic way for shame to manifest itself in a bullworker ad—it’d be at the time of maximum embarrassment. It hadn’t happened so far not because it wasn’t going to happen, but because it wouldn’t have meant enough. In the ads, the representative weakling was usually shamed in front of his girl. In the ads, the Charles Atlas way was the way of salvation. Charles Atlas never copped sand in the face, but nor did he kick it. He was above all that, oiled and buffed and able to shoulder the whole world. If Charles Atlas was on the beach, the sand kickers would look like scrawn and they’d have to run home and bullwork compulsively between now and next summer before daring to show themselves again.
It hadn’t been my plan get a bullworker for my nineteenth birthday. It had been years since the comics and all I’d put on the list had been ‘exercise equipment’. But that was too general so, when queried, I mentioned that I was thinking of something that’d bulk me up a bit, give me an all-over workout. Something that could do that in the privacy of my room. Something No one outside the family would have to know about. It was my mother who was drawn in by the claims on the bullworker box in Kmart. She even got the shop assistant to take the booklet out and, as soon as she saw that it offered forty-two different ways to a total-body makeover, she knew she was on the money.
So far, the results have not been spectacular, and my commitment to the bullworker has been in the waning phase for nearly two years. We had a plan, my mother and I, a bullworker-plus-Sustagen plan that practically couldn’t fail. It should have been very safely anabolic. It appears to be petering out into nothing. And that, dammit, is so very 1985 for me.
I’m in my sleeveless muscle shirt in my room realising that, on me, it’s just a sleeveless shirt and all it’s doing is putting my armpits on the outside. I’m pulling hard at the bullworker and trying not to grunt. Maybe there has been some progress. I grunt less than I once did and there are now only a couple of the forty-two bullworker moves where I get no compression at all, and they both involve holding the bullworker behind my back. As if I’m going to need those muscles out in the real world. Or, more to the point, as if I’m ever going to get a chance to display them. I am viewing muscles the way a peacock views tail feathers. I have been completely enslaved by those cruel sand-kicking ads. If only I’d put sea monkeys on the list instead. You got a whole damn country of sea monkeys, including a king and queen. They had a sketch of them in the ad.
That’s it. I’m stopping.
I make myself a massive chocolate Sustagen milkshake, I turn on the TV and I watch my arm veins bulge in the dim blue light. In the relevant section of my second-person bio, that part will read ‘muscles’ not ‘veins’:
You stop. You fix yourself a drink, you turn on the TV and your arm muscles bulge in the dim blue light. Not tonight, you tell her. Not again tonight. I’m spent.
Close to cool. Close indeed. Replacing ‘veins’ with ‘muscles’ and pretending my bullworker was a girlfriend certainly improved the look of my evening. That’s a tactic I won’t be sharing with Frank.
Not tonight, you tell her. Not again tonight. I’m spent. Shagged stupid like the king of the sea monkeys, slumped low in his throne.
The awesome breeding power of sea monkeys was always a feature. First they’d hatch, then they’d breed and breed until you owned a nation of them. What was I doing, taking any interest in them? Surely they’re just lice in a jar. And what was it all about when Zel turned up tonight? I’ve had plenty of times when I’ve craved invisibility, but with this one I actually got there. I vanished, Frank went into autoflirt. I’ve told him that in less than twenty years all he’ll be left with is autosleaze, but does he listen? Autosleaze won’t be pretty.
*
I’m glad she picked Frank, and that he did his duty and went with it. Made her a burger, schmoozed her like a prize customer. In the car I told him I was grateful, since I couldn’t have done it, and he just said, ‘No worries. I figure you handle Ron, so fair’s fair. And you handle Sophie, too. Or you would, given the chance . . . ’
I let that one go. Things didn’t start out brilliantly with Sophie, but they’ve improved. I think, on our second or third shift together, I might have commented favourably on her earrings and she said something as fuck-right-off transparent as ‘Yeah, my boyfriend Clinton really likes them too.’ To which I said, My girlfriend likes it when I can be relaxed enough to compliment a person without having an agenda.
So, in an instant, I’d invented a girlfriend. Invented her and, in the following instant, called her Phoebe. Yes, my mother’s name, and a present-tense girlfriend, even though it’s practically been a year other than the second weekend of last September (a relationship that lasted all the way till the following Tuesday). Pretty sad. Sad enough that I couldn’t stop myself going on to say, She’s a bit older than I am.
Sophie asks about her quite often. She’s like that. Annoyingly considerate.
Phoebe? Sure. I met her through my mother. She has brown plastic handles at both ends and an insanely strong spring in between, and she offers forty-two different ways to a total-body makeover. We’ve been together two and a half years. I don’t need a human girlfriend. I’ve found the Phoebe Atlas way. She loves me, even sleeveless, and that’s saying something. She makes my veins work, damn hard.
I can be excused, I think, for viewing myself as being in something of a rut.
In the week between psych and surgery, I wrote to six med schools in America. Two have rejected me, three haven’t replied and UCLA was the surprise, offering me the possibility of a place in an exchange program for interstate and overseas final-year students planning to specialise in emergency medicine. I’ve read the documentation. It looks like hell. I’m waiting for the three who haven’t replied, but it’s two months since I sent the letters.
I can’t imagine UCLA, LA or what it’s really like in a US emergency room when things turn crazy. The letter has an embossed crest and says that the cheque for the thirty-five US dollar processing fee should be made out to the Regents of the University of California. All I know is that that tells me nothing about what it’d be like. I wouldn’t be hanging out with the Regents, asking for someone to pass another sheet of embossed writing paper as a pierced femoral artery squirts blood across the lino floor.
What do I know? What do I know about America, really? Sure I watch every movie that comes to town, and a lot of TV. Sure there are bits of Annie Hall, and probably a few other Woody Allen films, that I can recite without ever having tried to learn them. And there are books, with Bright Lights, Big City only the latest. I ran my Dim Lights, Big Town idea past Sophie this evening, and she said she’d never thought about Brisbane that way but maybe she hasn’t read enough books.
But the small flecks of knowledge I have only make the siz
e of the gaps apparent. What’s a Hostess Twinkie, for instance? The kids in the American comics I used to read ate them all the time. What’s a turnpike? Okay, etymology: something ancient and British. Already I’m seeing a beefeater. A beefeater pointing and saying, ‘No, go that way’. And I’m remembering my mother at the Tower of London when I was about eight, pointing to the beefeater’s weapon and explaining the expression ‘plain as a pikestaff’.
I’m guessing there isn’t one beefeater in the whole state of New Jersey.
3
Frank’s reward for all the driving is fondue. There’s petrol money too, which comes out of my World of Chickens pay, but after day two of obstetrics the gratitude from my parents for Frank keeping me on the straight and narrow is expressed as fondue.
And that shits me. I am born to traverse the straight and narrow, and brought up to as well, but they’ve got it in their heads that it’s only Frank’s driving that keeps me at World of Chickens (possibly true) and that working there is somehow a worthwhile developmental experience (complete crap—it’s a way of getting them to buy me half a video camera). My parents think I might develop awkward antisocial habits without someone like Frank in my life. Frank is himself a litany of antisocial habits, most of them at the more flamboyant end of the spectrum, plenty of which could see his nose broken for a third time if he didn’t have someone like me in his life. But try telling that to them.
Before Frank, it was amateur theatre that was supposed to bring me out of myself. Before that, Boy Scouts. Frank was right that I had Scouts lurking somewhere in my past (but as if I’d tell him). Besides, I am out of myself. I might spend a lot of my home time in my room, but did they never stop to think that that might be partly about them? ‘Spending time in your room is not a disease,’ I told my mother once. ‘Not when there’s a TV in there. Even a small one, even black and white.’
