Loose Living

by Frank Moorhouse

  The Clinic is in somewhat acrimonious debate over whether good service in restaurants and other places is ‘stylised affection’ or ‘commercialised affection’.

  The performance of good service does include some of the features of fondness—the warm smile, the conventional greetings such as ‘good to see you again’, and may even at times resemble flirtation. If you ‘act’ friendly you are inclined to become friendly.

  I have been a customer in a bar in Washington where the female table attendants touch customers on the leg or genital area when serving drinks. Frankly, I find this confusing. Perhaps I was in a special sort of bar and didn’t know it. As to what followed, I can only suggest that someone Slipped Something Into My Drink and that this does not concern us here.

  Some restaurant staff both in Australia and the US have begun the practice of resting a hand on the customer’s shoulder while discussing the order. I find that when this happens I think that the waiter must know me from somewhere or that he may be trying to Slip Something Into My Drink or whatever.

  Or that I met him after he had Slipped Something Into My Drink the last time I was there.

  I remember being embarrassingly confused on my first visit to the US when, in a restaurant in the deep south, a woman staff member said, ‘Now, honey, you come back and see me soon.’ I took it as a personal invitation and returned that day after she had finished work to discover she did not recognise me. I came to learn that it is a simple Southern courtesy.

  Which is not to say that bona fide affection cannot be found in commercial relationships.

  However, Dr Bricolage argues that, leaving aside serendipitous exceptions, good service is not, and should never be, seen as an order of affection and nor should it be treated as such.

  He maintains a strict formality in all his commercial dealings.

  I share his objections to the advertisements which use the language and promises of love, sex or friendship.

  For example, American Express, which promises us that we will never be a stranger in a foreign land if we carry an American Express card. This is not my experience.

  A credit union advertises that ‘to us you’re family’. That could not be true. They would not want me as ‘family’, I’m sure. And I do not wish to ever be ‘family’.

  The advertising for Clive James’ last visit was ‘A One Night Stand with Clive James’. I found this misleading, although, I suppose, very few other people went to Clive James’ performance expecting what I would understand to be ‘a one night stand’.

  I object to merchandising which offers you membership of a ‘club’. As if one could be truly a member of something as subtle and as occult as a club by buying the advertised product.

  I argue to the contrary of Dr Bricolage about the possibilities of affection between service people and their customers. There are people who unceasingly fall in love with table attendants, flight attendants, bank clerks, bar staff and nurses—with people met in the daily round of business.

  I argue that there is a delightful grey area in the service industries and there is much trespassing and wonderful excursions over the boundaries—without, that is, committing a criminal offence.

  To take the most obvious case, in houses of ill fame, the confusions between ‘good service’ and genuine affection and passion are of course intentionally confused by the nature—by the theatre, as it were—of that service.

  Clients and, indeed, those in this profession can be forgiven if occasionally things become ambiguous. And professional sex workers do sometimes marry clients.

  Speaking of confusion, I told Dr Bricolage and the others that the restaurant as a place of therapy has been important to me.

  Although, in the interests of intellectual generosity, I did recall to Dr Bricolage an embarrassment from my own restaurant life.

  I had been dining regularly at a restaurant with pretty much the same people for a couple of years, a lunch club. We had always enjoyed the witticisms and the quiet wisdom of our Greek waiter. All great waiters are professors. He taught us our Greek food and our Greek culture. He made pertinent but wise remarks and, because of his trade, which by its nature required him to come and go, his interventions were always ‘pithy’, his witticisms ‘throwaway’.

  One Christmas Eve, after the restaurant quietened down, we asked Con to join us at the table for a drink. He at once became a ‘real’ person. He was garrulous. He was opinionated. He drank lavishly. He revealed a very narrow and prejudiced mind. He was arrogant. He was full of spite for the rest of the staff and for many of the customers. It was most unpleasant.

  The reason that conversations with bar staff and waiters and so on can be on a slightly higher level of amusement and more considered than other conversations is that the two participants in the conversation have time to think and polish what they wish to say in between the comings and goings. Waiters and bar staff have to go away from the conversation to wait on others (and I suppose carry on conversations with those other customers, although it dismays me to think that they have good chat with others as well as with me) and it is in this time of separation that both can ponder what it is they wish next to say. Waiters and their customers are playing something which resembles simultaneous chess. The staff are the chess masters and we, the customers, are the challenging amateurs.

  I privately noted, there at the meeting, that most of us are preferable and perhaps most desirable when in our social and professional roles (psychiatrist, priest or, in my case, Bon Vivant). I do not have time to discuss the wearing of uniforms and the impact of this on the human sensibility.

  In these roles we display control, confidence, and we ‘present’ ourselves. We have on our well-cut and well-designed uniform of personality. As ‘real people’ we lack something. We lose style, we lose our ‘art’. We become ragged, grubby, low-powered, un-neat.

  There is another disorder abounding in our western societies which is related to all this.

  It is that there is something reprehensible about being sexually or otherwise engaged by ‘part’ of the person. There seems to be some kind of emotional policing of this area. The rule seems to be that you should ‘love’ a person in their entirety and that every encounter with another human being should be deep, committed and ‘whole’. At the Clinic we consider this a grim derangement.

  There are times when we play-act and when we enjoy the part divorced from the whole personality. We enjoy stars and celebrities this way.

  We can, in our own way, for a short time, ourselves offer a dream, a fantasy, a symbol.

  Sometimes we enjoy others because they remain in a role, remain a brilliantly facetted spectacle.

  We enjoy celebrities, great beauties, Femmes Fatale, and Regency Rakes, Father Figures, Mother Figures, in this way.

  Some years ago (or was it months?), when people were forever Slipping Something Into My Drink, I sometimes became a vamp, or worse, and did not conform to the Californian model of a mature person.

  I am left with many ‘happy’ memories. I do not think that it did me that much harm. It is, though, for others to say. We are not required by the Rules to always present all our defects and to ‘slip out of role’. Sometimes we enjoy others because they remain in role.

  We fear that there are Emotional Auditors who are out to discover if our particular affair, engagement, involvement, is deep, whole and committed. Those who are incapable of this are to be disqualified from having any part of sexuality or any emotional life.

  These Auditors are themselves, of course, fully wholesome, correct and perfectly loving people.

  We at the Clinic support those who love imperfectly; those who are sexually errant.

  We fear that the standards set by the Emotional Auditors are too high for many of us.

  But it is for these reasons that intimacy and domesticity can be rather unadorned, artless and unrefined in our contemporary world.

  In a word, in domestic intimacy we become slouchers. We let slip the standards of self.


  I, shamefacedly, admitted to the staff meeting that I am forever falling into the confusion between considerate service, kindness and love.

  It may be a sad commentary on my personality, but it has been my secret conviction that one should take and give fondness, or anything resembling fondness, wherever you find it in life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  On the

  DISORDER of the

  Unceremonious

  LIFE

  I wear silk hose and nothing more…

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, 1533–1592,

  ON EXPERIENCE, BOOK THREE, CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  OF ALL the thoughts of Montaigne, it is this which has kept me bewitched the longest: ‘I wear silk hose and nothing more…’

  I think, however, I know what he means. I also have been known to wear only silk stockings (after someone has Slipped Something Into My Drink). And, I am sure that Montaigne was hinting at that sort of thing.

  I think he would argue, as I would, that there are occasions where only silk stockings, and silk stockings and nothing else, are the befitting attire. One should live in such a way that these occasions are presented, at least now and then, in the course of a busy, unambiguous and otherwise circumscribed life.

  For the master’s agreement on this I rely on another quotation from Book Three, Chapter Thirteen:

  A young man ought to break his rules in order to stir up his energy, and keep it from getting mouldy and weak. And there is no way of life so foolish as one that is carried out by rule and discipline … The most perverse quality in a well-bred person is fastidiousness and attachment to particular ways; and ways are particular if they are not yielding and pliable.

  This, I would argue, when read together with the opening quotation, elucidates the matter of the silk stockings.

  I have been asked by Dr Des Habille, who worries about Disorders of Apparel and Costume, to look into the current status of the wearing of jeans.

  As Des points out (a little too frequently), the French invented denim. Denim is a word for the cloth of Nimes, as in, de Nîmes.

  On my part, I enjoy reminding him that the word jeans itself comes from the Italian word ‘gene’—a cloth similar to denim but from Genoa. The cloth of Genoa.

  It is an opportunity to introduce that hopelessly ideologically dated nightclub gag (circa. 1930):

  First man: ‘Did Genoa?’

  Second man: ‘Know her? I didn’t even sleep with her.’

  I happily recall my first pair of jeans. I was about twelve and I passionately desired them—against my parents’ wishes.

  My mother felt that they had a delinquent cast to them, as in fact they did. Marlon Brando in The Wild One wore a leather jacket and jeans and he was very louche.

  It was years before I had my first leather jacket and I have never managed to be louche. Nor, as a child, did I wish to be a ‘juvenile delinquent’—the outcome which my mother feared most.

  I seem to recollect that the jeans were my first self-chosen piece of clothing (apart from a brass roller buckled US naval webbing belt).

  Jeans were the first piece of clothing which expressed my sense of myself rather than being that which my mother thought I should wear.

  Back then, I wore the jeans with the excess denim of the legs turned up to make a large loose contrasting cuff. The way American sailors wore them.

  I certainly wanted them for their Americana mystique. They were of the US Navy and of the wild west but more, they were the insignia of the American movie teenager.

  Come to think of it, the naval webbing belt was related to the jeans. I was later to know some American sailors but that was after someone Slipped Something Into My Drink.

  As a boy I was somewhat preoccupied with gender. I was acutely aware that the word ‘jeans’ in English was a female possessive and that girls also wore jeans.

  Now, when wearing them, I am still aware that it is only in the near-forgotten past that they were a definitively masculine garment.

  Today they are the most uni-sexual of all the items of clothing. Jeans designed especially for women did not appear until the seventies.

  I am pleased to learn that Oscar Wilde admired jeans when he first saw them on miners in Colorado during his visit to the US in the last century (or was it ‘minors’?).

  Maybe he was just using flattery with the miners following the well-known Wildean saying, ‘That flattery inevitably leads to buggery.’

  The silk stockings and knickerbockers which Oscar wore on that trip must have beguiled the miners.

  Jeans were designed to avoid binding and constriction to the lower body, to allow squatting to cook at the camp fire and bending and horse riding, and to have more than enough room in the seat and crotch.

  Women have from time to time reversed this feature by wearing jeans that are skin-tight.

  In the sixties, a friend of mine had herself sewn into her jeans on special occasions, and the lower legs of the jeans had then to be unstitched for the jeans to be taken off.

  For a time in the seventies there was a practice of putting on new unshrunken jeans and lying in the bath until they shrank to the contours of your body.

  This was a way of displaying the shape of buttocks, crotch, hips and legs. It also perhaps yielded the bliss of being corseted as well, although this may be going too far in the Wildean direction.

  Many Australian men only feel comfortable in jeans or in shorts and T-shirts. In a story by Anamari Beligan called ‘A Few More Minutes with Monica Vitti’, the male narrator describes himself as wearing ‘crusty jeans’.

  I suppose it is because these rudimentary garments release them from the demands of tasteful choice in clothing and decisive self-presentation.

  Many Australian men are so insecure about dress that the buying and selection of clothing is an ordeal for them and is often delegated to wives or women friends.

  Good clothing and good taste also yield this affective condition without abandoning the pleasure of clothing.

  It is the condition achieved when the clothing feels familiar and so well-fitting as to be ‘part of oneself’—and good clothing does this more successfully and appropriately than basic casual clothing ever could and, moreover, offers the possibilities of aesthetic nuance and permutation.

  To modify this slightly, I find that a certain sporadic awareness of one’s clothes and their beauty is not a bad thing during the course of the evening. Once, when in Washington, I had trouble with over-consciousness when I wore an Italian-made white linen suit which, inexplicably, made me feel like a small-town Southern lawyer.

  Sartorial insecurity results in the appearance of jeans in all sorts of social situations in Australia, including at the opera, for heaven’s sake.

  It is an abandonment of the significance of occasion, a failure to salute the event, and a failure to express respect for one’s fellow audience members or the performers. But more than that, it is a failure to honour one’s own presence at the event.

  I know that some people have their ‘good jeans’ for special occasions but usually they alone know that they are their ‘good jeans’. One of my young American informants told me that she owns seventeen pairs of jeans that, in her mind, are graded from best to whatever.

  Jeans are still de rigueur for male and female college students in the US. There was once an Australian junior male academic fashion for ‘ironed jeans’ with dark shirt and wool tie.

  It was a nice transitional style from graduate to adult professional.

  There is a San Francisco style of wearing tweed sports-jackets, wool ties and jeans, which tries to raise the jeans from the casual to the informal. I rather like that style but it is limited.

  I do not like the affluent jeans style of frayed cuffs and split knees, or jeans cut down to be shorts, or pre-worn tattered jeans (available at normal prices in specialty stores).

  This is a stylised poverty and within a society where poverty does exist it shows a certain social numbness by the afflu
ent who adopt this style.

  Maybe it is defensible as a ‘vagabond’ look, but I do not think so.

  I do, however, rather like the split at the back of jeans which shows the crease of the buttock cheek and the leg. I can’t explain this exception in the short space of this chapter.

  In the US, jeans (designer or not) are not ‘classy’ in the sense of showing or claiming upper-class identity.

  I do not agree that the wearing of jeans is an example of ‘low status assertion’ any more than the wearing of camos is identification with the potency of the military (although in the rougher sub-cultures it might be). Jeans have never had working-class associations for me.

  Chinos or ‘khakis’ are what you wear if you want to signal stylishness and an affiliation with the educated middle class (khaki, officer-quality cotton).

  We don’t wear jeans when we visit the Hamptons. We wear chinos.

  Hence, the series of advertisements running in the New Yorker by Gap.

  I quote the advertisement copy: ‘Legendary: the drama of simplicity. Actors, dancers, entertainers, who dared to challenge expectation, all in those cotton khakis made with style. Casual. Elegant. Just like those we make for you. Gap khakis, Traditional. Easy fit, Classic fit, Slim fit.’

  The punch line of the advertisement is ‘Balanchine wore khakis’, and it displays a photograph on the facing page of the advertisement of a nonchalant, meditative Balanchine, legs crossed, in what appears to be khakis, loose blouse, and ballet shoes, sitting outdoors. Perhaps resting between … well, between whatever.

  By the way, chinos are not the same as the wearing of army greens trousers or ‘camos’.

  In western culture, people with the inclination to cultivate an interest in clothing and style will take from any sub-group or class or occupation or culture, once they recognise the stylishness or pleasantness of a garment or once their attention is directed to the garment by the perceptive originality of those in the fashion business.