by Steve Toltz
“Where’s Anouk?” I asked.
“Not sure.”
Maybe with Oscar Hobbs, I thought.
The pasta sauce was spluttering, and in another pan he seemed to be overboiling vegetables so as to bleed every last nuance of flavor out of them. He gazed at me with a rare look of affection and said, “I understand you were a bit shocked. We should’ve told you. But anyway, you know now. Hey—maybe the four of us can go out sometime?”
“The four of who?”
“Anouk and me and you and your plaything.”
“Dad, I’m leaving.”
“I didn’t mean tonight.”
“No. I’m leaving leaving.”
“Leaving leaving? You mean…leaving?”
“I’ve found an apartment in the city. A studio.”
“You already found a place?”
“Yeah—put down a security deposit and the first two weeks’ rent.”
There was a shiver running through him, a shiver I could see.
“And you’re moving out when?”
“Now.”
“Right now?”
“I’ve come to say goodbye.”
“What about your stuff?”
“I hired a van. I packed everything I need.”
Dad stretched his limbs strangely, and in a dull, artificial voice he said, “You’re not giving me much say in the matter.”
“I suppose not.”
“What about your hut?”
“I’m not taking it with me.”
“No, I mean…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t know what he meant. Dad started breathing heavily through his nostrils. He was trying not to look wretched. I was trying not to feel guilty. I knew that by losing me he was losing the only person who understood him. But I was guilty for other reasons too; I wondered what was going to happen to his mind. And how could I leave him with that face? That sad and lonely and terrified face?
“You need help moving?”
“No, it’s OK.”
It was as if we had been playing a game all our lives and the game was ending, and we were going to take off our masks and our uniforms and shake hands and say, “Great game.”
But we didn’t.
Suddenly all my bitterness and hatred for him evaporated. I felt enormously sorry for him. I saw him as a spider who woke up thinking he was a fly and didn’t understand he was caught in his own web.
“Well, I’d better get going,” I said.
“Do you have a phone number?”
“Not yet. I’ll call you when I get the phone on.”
“Right. Well, bye.”
“See ya.”
As I turned and walked out, Dad let out a little rumbling grunt, like the sound of troubled bowels.
FIVE
Author’s note: My original version of this chapter went hurtling into the shredder as soon as I discovered among my father’s papers the first five chapters of his unfinished autobiography. I’d just finished pouring out my entire story and I was frankly annoyed—mostly because his account covered this period better than my version of the events. Not only was his version more concise, because it did not contain my long digression on the recent glut of calendars featuring sexy priests, but I was irritated that Dad’s version of events contradicted much of my own, and even some of the previous chapter (four), which I’d really labored over. Nevertheless, under the influence of my two guiding stars, impatience and laziness, I’ve not amended any part of Chapter Four, and decided to print Dad’s unfinished autobiography here, slightly edited, as Chapter Five. My version of Chapter Five is still around somewhere—I didn’t really throw it in the shredder. Hopefully, in years to come it will be of curiosity value—to the highest bidder.
My Life by Martin Dean
A Loner’s Story by Martin Dean
A Loser’s Story by Martin Dean
Born to Be Snide by Martin Dean
Untitled Autobiography of Martin Dean by Martin Dean
Chapter One
Why write this autobiography? Because it’s the privilege of my class. Now before you start screaming, I’m not talking about working, middle-, or upper-middle class. I’m talking about the real class struggle: the celebrity vs. the ordinary schmo. Like it or not, I am a celebrity, and that means that you are interested in how many sheets of toilet paper I use to wipe my arse, whereas I have no interest in whether you wipe your arse at all or just leave it as is. You know how the relationship works. Let’s not pretend it’s any different.
All celebrities who write their biographies play the same trick on readers: they tell you some terrible degrading truth about themselves, putting you in a position where you think they must be honest chaps, then they turn on the lies. I won’t do that. I’ll tell you only the truth, even if I come off smelling like lawn fertilizer. And, just so you know, I understand that an autobiography should cover the early years of my life (e.g., Martin Dean was born on such-and-such a date, went to such-and-such a school, accidentally got such-and-such a woman pregnant, and so on), but I won’t be doing that either. My life up until one year ago is none of your business. Instead, I’ll start from where my life was at the moment when the great change occurred.
I was forty-one at the time, unemployed and living off child support even though I was the parent. Admittedly, this is not the spirit that has made our country great, but it is the spirit that has made it so you can go to the beach on a weekday and see it full of people. Once a week I would make myself busy at the dole office showing them a list of jobs I hadn’t gone for, and this was taking increasing amounts of energy and imagination. I tell you, the jobs out there are getting harder and harder not to get. Some bosses will hire anyone!
On top of this, I was going through the humiliating process of aging. Everywhere I went I met my memories, and I had that old sinking feeling of betrayal, of having betrayed my destiny. I wasted many months thinking about my death, until it began to feel like the death of a great-uncle I didn’t know I had. It was at this time I became addicted to talk-back radio, listening to mostly elderly people who stepped out of their houses one day and just didn’t recognize anything, and the more I listened to their interminable griping, the more I realized they were, in their way, doing the same thing I was: protesting the present as if it were a future one still has the option of voting against.
There were no two ways about it: I was in a crisis. But recent shifts in behavioral patterns of different age groups had made it difficult for me to determine what type of crisis I was in. How could it be a midlife crisis when the forties were the new twenties, the fifties were the new thirties, and the sixties were the new forties? Where the fuck was I? I had to read the lifestyle supplement in the Sunday papers to make sure I wasn’t actually going through puberty.
If only that was the worst of it!
I suddenly was mortified by how ridiculous I was to live in a labyrinth of my own design. I was scared I would one day be remembered for it, and equally terrified I would not be remembered at all, unlike my fucking brother, who was still being talked about, still the focus of my countrymen’s affections, still popping up in semischolarly books about the characters that typify Australia, in paintings, novels, comic books, documentaries, telemovies, and the occasional student thesis. In fact, my brother had become an industry. I went to the library and found no fewer than seventeen books that chronicled (incorrectly) the Terry Dean story, as well as countless references to him in books on Australian sport, Australian crime, and those that tackled the tedious, narcissistic topic of pinning down our cultural identity. And the pinnacle of my creative life was to build a stupid labyrinth!
I wondered why nobody had stopped me. I wondered why my friend Eddie loaned me the money so willingly, knowing full well that a man who lives in a labyrinth of his own design must necessarily go mad. On top of which, I had not paid him back, and since then he had continued to support me. In fact, when I thought about it, he had mercilessly loaned me money ever since
I’d met him in Paris, and worse than that, he had brutally, without conscience, never asked for it back. Never! I became convinced that he had an ulterior motive. I worked myself up into a paranoid frenzy about it, and I realized that I hated my closest friend. When I thought about his gestures and expressions in my company, it occurred to me that he hated me too, and I thought friends must hate each other the world over and I shouldn’t be bothered by it, but I was bothered by this sudden conviction that Eddie actually loathed me. I was bothered by the question of why the hell I’d never noticed it before.
To top this off, I found to my shame that I had all but lost interest in my son as a person. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe the novelty of seeing what my eyes and nose looked like on someone else’s face had finally worn off. Or maybe because I felt there was something sleazy, gutless, restless, and horny about my son, something that I recognized in myself. Or maybe because despite a lifetime of my trying to wield my personality as an influence on him, he’d managed to turn out utterly different from me. He somehow became dreamy and positive and took sunsets dead seriously, as though the outcome of the event might not always be that the sun sets but that it might freeze just above the horizon and start going up again. He seemed to be amused by walking in the outdoors, listening to the earth, and fondling plants. Imagine! A son of mine! Isn’t that a reason to turn away? Maybe, but to be honest, the reason I lost interest in him is that he’d lost interest in me.
I was increasingly unable to talk to him, or even at him, and more and more regularly the intervals of silence between us lengthened, and then I couldn’t utter a single word without disgusting him, or make even a single sound, not even “Oh” or “Hmm.” In every look and gesture, I could feel he was accusing me of every possible parenting crime there is short of infanticide. He absolutely refused to talk to me about his love life, sex life, work life, social life, or inner life. In fact, there were now so many subjects he forbade me to discuss, I was waiting for him to outlaw “Good morning.” I thought: It’s not my conversation he finds distasteful, it’s my very existence. If I greeted him smiling, he’d frown. If I frowned, he’d smile. He was fervently working to become my mirror opposite. What ingratitude! After all I’d tried to teach him: that there are four kinds of people in this world, those who are obsessed by love, those who have it, those who laugh at retarded people when they are children, and those who laugh at them right into adulthood and old age. A veritable wisdom bonanza, right? But this ungrateful son of mine had chosen to reject everything, totally. Of course, I knew he couldn’t help but be confused by the contradictory directives I’d boomed at him his whole life: Don’t follow the herd, I’d preached, but don’t be as miserably apart as I’ve been. Where could he go? Neither of us knew. But look—even if you’re a total shit of a parent, you are still burdened by your children, still vulnerable to the pain of their suffering. Believe me, even if you suffer from your chair in front of the television, you still suffer.
This was where I was placed psychologically when the great change occurred.
I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on. I didn’t feel nauseous and I wasn’t in any pain. I didn’t have any buildup of phlegm or odd-colored feces. It was completely different from both my childhood illness and the time my mother slipped rat poison into my food. I just felt a little off-kilter, a similar feeling to the one I had when I realized four months late that I’d forgotten my own birthday. But was there really nothing physically wrong with me? Well, there was one thing, though it was more odd than anything else. I detected a faint, strange odor rising out of my skin. Very faint. Hardly an odor at all, really. Sometimes I couldn’t smell it. But other times I caught a whiff and yelled out, “There it is again!”
One morning I worked out what it was.
Anyone with an overactive imagination, in particular a perversely negative one, need never be surprised by anything. The imagination absolutely can catch out imminent disasters as they’re warming up, especially if you keep your nostrils open. People who can accurately read the future: are they gifted at seeing or gifted at guessing? This is just what my imagination did that morning. It saw all the possible tomorrows, then narrowed them down in a short instant to only one. That one I spoke aloud: “Fuck me! I’ve got a terminal disease!”
I guessed further—cancer. It had to be cancer; it couldn’t be anything other than cancer, because it was always cancer that haunted my waking nightmares, ever since I saw my mother devoured by that king of diseases. Even if you fear death on a daily basis, there are certain deaths that you dismiss—scurvy, giant squid, falling piano—but no one with a brain cell left rattling in his head can ever dismiss cancer.
So! This was it! Death! I always knew that one day my body would kick the shit out of me! My whole life I’d felt like a lone soldier trapped in hostile territory. Everywhere were enemies to my cause—back, legs, kidneys, lungs, heart—and they would eventually conclude that the only way to kill me was a kamikaze mission. All of us were going down.
I rushed out of the house and drove fast out of the labyrinth. Speeding through the green suburbs, I was horrified to see that everything was bathed in gorgeous summer sunlight. Of course it was—nothing brings out sunshine faster than cancer. I took myself straight to the doctor’s. I hadn’t been for years and I went to the one closest to my house. I needed any doctor, just as long as he wasn’t too fat (one must be as suspicious of obese doctors as of bald hairdressers). I didn’t need him to be a genius either; I just needed him to confirm what I already knew. DR. P. SWEENY the brass plaque said on the door. I sprinted into his office. It was dark inside, the dark of a room in which everything is brown: the furniture, the carpet, the doctor’s mood. Brown. He was there drumming his fingers on his desk, a middle-aged man with a placid expression and a full head of thick brown hair. He was one of those men who never go bald, who go to the grave needing a haircut.
“I’m Dr. Peter Sweeny,” he said.
“I know you’re a doctor. You don’t have to wave it in my face. Don’t you know the title is only useful for directing mail, to distinguish you from all the unpretentious Mr. Peter Sweenys of the world?”
The doctor reclined his head a couple of millimeters, as if I had been spitting.
“Sorry,” I said, “I guess I’m a little stressed out. So what if you call yourself doctor? You worked hard for the right to plunge your hand inside the human body! Elbow deep in viscera all day, maybe you want to let everyone know you’re a doctor so they won’t offer you offal or a plate of haggis. What right have I to cast judgment on a man’s prefix?”
“You seem pretty wound up, there. What can I do for you?”
“I’m pretty sure I have cancer,” I said. “And I just want you to do whatever you have to do to confirm or deny it.”
“What kind of cancer do you think you have?”
“What kind? I don’t know. What’s the worst sort?”
“Well, prostate cancer’s the most common for men in your age bracket.”
“You’re the same age as me!”
“OK—our age bracket.”
“Well, my cancer won’t be the most common, that much I can tell you. What’s the worst one? And I mean the absolute worst.”
“Do you smoke?”
“Sometimes.”
“If I smoked, the cancer I wouldn’t want for myself, for fear of kicking myself all the way to the grave, is lung cancer.”
“Lung cancer. I knew it! That’s the one. That’s what I’ve got.”
“You seem pretty certain.”
“I am certain.”
Even though he was obscured behind his desk, he made a shift as though he’d put his hand on his hip. “All right,” he said finally, “I’ll order the tests. They aren’t pleasant.”
“Neither is lung cancer.”
“You’re right about that.”
I won’t detail the weeks that followed—the intrusive tests, the cruel waiting periods, the stomach-pum
meling anxiety. Of course Jasper didn’t notice anything, but Anouk sensed something was wrong. She kept hounding me to tell her what it was, but I was tight-lipped about it. I wanted to be 100 percent sure before I told anyone. I didn’t want to get their hopes up.
It was a month later when I went back to Dr. Sweeny’s office to hear the results. In the waiting period I had been plagued with hope, and nothing I could do could put those pesky optimistic feelings to rest.
“Come in, Mr. Dean. How are you feeling?”
“Let’s not waste time. It’s cancer, isn’t it?”
“It sure is.”
In the old days the medical profession didn’t tell you that you were dying. It was considered a breach of ethics. Now the reverse is true. Now they can’t wait to tell you.
“Lung cancer?”
“I’m afraid so. How did you know?”
Christ! It was true! I was being murdered by my own body! I burst out laughing.
Then I stopped laughing—I remembered why I had started.
I left the doctor’s office in a daze. So! It turned out my lifelong pessimistic stance was entirely justified. Imagine if I had been optimistic all this time! Wouldn’t I be feeling ripped off right about now? Yes, I was in for a slow, violent death. And I don’t sleep peacefully, so dying peacefully in my sleep was out of the question. The best I could hope for was that maybe I’d die fitfully in my sleep. Oh my God—suddenly all the other possible deaths had slipped into the unlikely. How often does a man dying of cancer suddenly choke to death on a chicken bone? Or get decapitated by jumping up and down on his bed, forgetful of the ceiling fan? Or die from asbestos poisoning or obesity? No, there just wasn’t enough time to get really, fatally fat. If anything, my illness was probably going to make me thinner.
Over the following weeks I was an emotional wreck. The slightest thing sent me into tears. I cried at television ads, at the autumn leaves turning brown. One night Jasper came in and caught me sobbing over the death of some idiotic pop star I’d never even heard of. He’d been shot in the head and died instantly, lucky bastard!
