The Night my Bum Dropped

by Gretel Killeen

  the night

  my bum dropped

  Gretel Killeen has been a stand-up comic, an advertising voice-artist and a television host, and she has written more than twenty books (sold here and occasionally internationally) including Visible Panty Line (for adults), My Life is a Toilet (for teenagers) and My Sister’s a Yoyo (for kids).

  While a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF she wrote and directed a television documentary about AIDS orphans in Zambia. She’s entertained the troops in the Middle East, she’s fished for piranha in Bolivia, survived a motorbike accident in Thailand and gas poisoning in France, she’s squatted in a Florentine hotel, escaped drug dealers in Morocco and dropped out of uni twice.

  Gretel has taken a detour from the path predicted for her as captain of the state school debating team and captain of her strict private school … and she’s done it while being the single mother/slave of her two children. She would now like to put her feet up, marry someone rich and live in a very big house (so that her bum will fit).

  N.B. Some of the above may be gleefully exaggerated.

  Gretel

  Killeen

  the night

  my bum dropped

  A gleefully exaggerated memoir

  VIKING

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2009

  Text copyright © Gretel Killeen 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228627-3

  N.B. None of the characters depicted here are based on real life. This especially applies to any persons referred to as ‘my family’, ‘my mother’, ‘my father’, ‘my mum’ ‘my dad’, ‘my brothers’, ‘my sisters’, ‘my siblings’ ‘my son’, ‘my daughter’ ‘my children’ or ‘my friends’ … and to the character referred to here in as ‘me’, ‘I’, ‘myself’ or ‘Gretel’.

  Thank you

  I am a table top, my friends and family are my legs.

  I need them all to share my weight.

  Without them I would tip and fall, And the biscuits might slide off the plate.

  1

  I dial Mum’s number.

  ‘Hi, Mum. It’s me.’

  ‘What’s the matter? You sound distressed.’

  ‘I think my bum just dropped!’

  ‘Well, dear, that’s what happens when you get older.’

  ‘I know, but I thought it was part of the gradual aging process, not like suddenly rising from a chair and feeling as though the pillow has adhered to your thighs.’

  ‘Well, if it’s any consolation, darling, my bum did exactly the same thing when I turned sixty.’

  ‘But, Mum, I’m forty-five!’

  – plagiarised from the film of a book based on a conversation Gretel had with her mother, June 2008

  Something’s Wrong

  You know something’s wrong with your life when a friend tells you they’ve contracted a terminal disease and you find yourself feeling jealous.

  ‘It’s so difficult,’ my friend said to me as we hugged. ‘I’m staring death straight in the face.’ Half your luck, I thought to myself, because I’m staring at life.

  I have two children named Frog and Tadpole, whom I adore-adore-adore and whom also appear to adore me, despite wanting to change their names to Princess Aurora and Kevin. I have friends who, although not rich or famous, magnificently attractive or bright, are kind, funny, accommodating and willing to put up with me despite the fact that, when I laugh, I look like a chihuahua. I have a ‘supportive’ family, not enough money but a bit, some vaguely edible food in the fridge, and I also have my health (although I do suffer from swimmer’s ear – not from training for the Olympic water polo team, but from taking really long showers). So, add to these positives the fact that I can also sing the theme song to The Sound of Music while both exhaling and inhaling … and even I find it difficult to accept that I’ve felt like something has been missing from my existence since I first recall existing at all.

  It’s not a thought that ‘something’s missing’, it’s not a physical visible absence, it is precisely a feeling. It’s an ache, it’s a yearning, it’s an emptiness, it’s a cliché. It’s like I was born with a broken heart. I probably should have been a country and western singer, but I’m not. I’m an unemployed celebrity looking for a new job, a different job, a job where strangers don’t yell at me as they drive by, ‘Hey, you’re famous. Do you want to suck my dick?’

  I’ve been offered several jobs since the last one spontaneously combusted. All were either humiliating, unpaid or somewhat illegal and, quite frankly, they were tempting. But with my kids almost grown up, I think it’s actually time for an entirely new career and an entirely new life though I suspect that such grand new aspirations won’t come easily. In fact, I suspect that they won’t come at all if I don’t first get rid of the old me. And so to pursue my goal I must start afresh, I must throw out the me that has passed its ‘use-by’ date, and I must cure my achy-breaky heart.

  Okay, I Lied

  I’ve just stated that I’ve had this ‘yearning aching space in my heart’ since I first recall existing at all. This is actually not true. My first memory is of being born, and I seem to recall feeling quite happy and complete as I was coming down the birth canal and heard the nurse ask my mother if she wanted to go on a drip.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ my mother replied. ‘That’s what got me here in the first place.’

  I then remember popping out, glimpsing the obstetrician, who looked like a hard-boiled egg in a pair of golf shoes, and of course wondering whether I’d got out at the wrong stop. But by and large life seemed pretty good on the day I was born. So, when did this crack in my heart first appear?

  I remember at the age of three I felt quite okay as I spent a summer in the backyard knee-high swimming pool with my siblings, despite the fact we were wearing the ‘swimming cozzies’ Mum had made for us by utilising the massively heavy fabric from the former living-room curtains. I remember I even felt okay while we all tempted ‘death by headbutt’ as we ferociously bobbed in the wee-warm water for carrots
(because they were cheaper than apples).

  And I remember feeling okay when I was four, even though the little boy next door said he had a surprise to show me, and I thought he meant some kind of lolly, but instead he just showed me his penis.

  And I remember I was fine that afternoon when I had a quick word with my mother as she made our rissole and tomato sauce sandwiches and forgot to put the rissole bits in.

  ‘Mummy, why do boys have a penis?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s so that they can have sex,’ she replied.

  ‘But, Mummy, what’s sex?’

  ‘Sex is what women do to get the lawn looking nice.’

  ‘Is it like a lawn mower?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Sex is like ironing, because as soon as you’ve done it it’s wrinkly again.’

  And I was even fine days after that when I went to school and announced at Show and Tell that you could mow a lawn with a penis.

  I remember twinges. I remember vague twinges. But I don’t remember when these twinges became an identifiable ache.

  Perhaps it grew slowly over the years. Perhaps I was my own boiling frog in my very own battered saucepan of boiling water. The answer is I just don’t know. If I did know, then maybe I would know the cause, and would then be able to cure the problem. But I don’t know the cause. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.

  I just know the ache is there and I’ve been a pain in the neck about the ache in my heart now for nigh on forty-five years. But it got a little worse, and actually unbearable, about seven days ago when my life splattered like a bug on the windscreen.

  Let Me Explain

  Fourteen days ago I was the harried working single mum of a son and a daughter both finishing their final years in high school. My neighbour was arrested taking naked photos of me while hanging from the fig tree outside my bathroom window, my son was bashed at a party, the washing machine exploded, and I was flying back and forth between work in two cities to support my children financially and emotionally as I both worked on ‘the most controversial TV show in the universe’ and nurtured my hospitalised daughter through an exploratory stomach operation. Meanwhile, amidst all of this, the media, ignorant of our domestic situation but hungry for any story associated with the scandal-filled TV show I was hosting, chose to focus on me … and revel in the depths of the profound global issue – no, intergalactic issue – of whether or not I was looking fat.

  The ache was there fourteen days ago but everything was bearable, everything was do-able, including hosting my son’s graduation/birthday party (which somehow left three shoes planted on the inside of the freezer door) and the possibility of a surprising new relationship with a man who was kind, intelligent, laughed at my jokes and was, extraordinarily, not gay.

  Then suddenly one week ago – kapow – the metaphorical rollercoaster of life took a severe eye-bulging, g-force, tongues-out, windblown-facelift downturn! The TV show was cancelled and my job vanished. The roof blew off our home, the newspaper I was a columnist for replaced me with a blog, our kitchen burnt down after my great-aunt dropped her vibrator in the toilet and then tried to dry it in the microwave, and a robber attempted to break into our apartment but this guy fell off the fig tree while trying to gain access and then decided to sue me for damages. At the same time our washing machine repairman dropped dead in the laundry, my only son was accepted to study on the other side of the world for three years, we lost most of our savings in a ‘financial hiccup’ (please remind me never, ever to buy shares again, no matter how much the broker’s watch may sparkle), my daughter entered her fourth year of adolescence (‘Mum, can I get an operation to make my eyebrows more equal?’), and the ‘new’ man with whom I’d considered spending the rest of my life revealed himself to be a masochistic masturbator and I was therefore faced with the fact that he actually had less passion for me than for the local hardware and vegetable stores, which he viewed as sex shops.

  And on top of all this, that was the night that my bum dropped!

  Now, I don’t want to whinge. My children and I have experienced a lot of difficult things in life. I’ve been mugged, defamed, blackmailed and stalked and my kids have had to put up with my cooking. But I suspect the collision, or collusion, of events over this past week almost tipped me over the edge. Just as one can be a functioning alcoholic, I wonder now in retrospect whether I wasn’t, at least for a moment or so, a functioning nervous breakdown.

  After the Bum Drop

  For the seven days after the Bum Drop I was simply not capable of looking for work, despite the fact that I continued to have to support my selfish children who refused to stop wasting our money on flippant luxuries like food.

  I found myself waking at three in the morning with all-consuming worries and fears feeding upon my neurons, while self-loathing rattled through my brain. I was worried about money, worried that I would never get another job, worried that I was a failure, a loser, unloved, perhaps reviled. I was worried that I’d made mistakes, that I’d missed opportunities, that I’d essentially ruined my life. I would wake and worry that I was awake and worrying, because I knew that if I didn’t get enough sleep, I would be too tired the following day to do anything but worry. And then I would worry that all of this worry would give me cancer, and that if I died, my children would grow up poor, homeless, unfocused and undisciplined and spend their lives living under a bridge playing a one-stringed ukulele.

  So then I’d get out of bed and worry about whether or not I should have worn a bra to bed because all night is a very long time to just lie there on your side with your boobs completely unsupported, particularly when they bizarrely seem to get bigger as you age (which is actually proof that female humans have not finished evolving, because if they had, then our boobs would not get bigger as we get older – they would instead turn into a cask of chardonnay and a plate of assorted cheese and Jatz biscuits).

  And then I’d have a shower and worry that my swimmer’s ear was getting worse, and worry whether the soap had germs on it, and worry about spending our last dollars on getting my bikini line lasered or whether people who have their bikini lines lasered will regret it one day when all of a sudden pubic hair becomes really, really fashionable.

  And then I’d go to wake my sleeping teenagers and realise that neither of them needed to be woken yet as it was only four o’clock in the morning. So after that I’d spend the rest of the day worrying that my worrying was making me go mad.

  Finally I’d have a calming cup of chamomile and, once refreshed, I’d worry with a shiny bright new perspective that I’d reach the end of my life and realise that none of the things I’d worried about had ever been worth worrying about, and that I’d inadvertently fulfilled my biggest worry of all – i.e. completely wasted my existence by spending my whole life worrying.

  Le Worry Problem

  To my credit I did speak casually of the Worry Problem to the mother of a distant friend of my daughter, whom I fortuitously found sitting next to me at one of those school concerts that you attend in order to support your offspring, even though they’re only on stage for two and a half minutes of the seven-hour program, and when he or she does appear to perform you can’t see them because they’re short and standing in the very back row, and you’ve arrived late because your child told you the wrong starting time and you have found yourself sitting behind a man with a head the size of a bus.

  Anyway the point is that the woman I was seated next to was an anxiety counsellor, so I chatted to her as we spent the interval waiting in a two-kilometre line for the portaloos, and I told her that I was stressed because I had too much on my plate and was possibly exhausted. She listened intently and then she casually said that she suspected I might be stressed and have too much on my plate and was possibly exhausted. And then she also ‘casually’ asked where she should send her $250 bill.

  This didn’t ease my stress.

  But then, once I was squatting over the toilet, someone else came to my aid.

  ‘Hello …’
I heard a voice call.

  ‘Hello?’ I replied as I wondered whether I’d inadvertently sat on someone.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry to bother you,’ the voice continued, ‘but I’m in the cubicle beside you and I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. I just wanted to let you know that I completely understand how you feel because my life had the same pressures and I used to think I was going nuts.’

  ‘So how did you manage to maintain your sanity?’ I asked. ‘Did you resign from your job … or just adopt out the kids?’

  ‘No, I didn’t get rid of any of my commitments, I just decided to change my attitude by watching relaxation videos.’

  ‘Relaxation videos! But how on earth did you have time for those?’

  ‘I used to watch them on fast forward while my husband and I had sex.’

  ‘And what about your bum? Can I ask if that dropped too?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I remember it well. It plummeted at six-thirty p.m. on September 7, 1996.’

  ‘And what’s your solution to coping with that?’

  ‘Are you kidding? I haven’t found a solution … and that’s why I’ve been sitting here on my arse for the twelve years since it happened.’

  Not surprisingly I continued to worry. Round and round and round my thoughts would race, problem-finding, problem-solving, problem-creating, as I tried to comfort myself about the future while at the same time being my own greatest tormentor. I’d go to bed tired and wake up exhausted, which led to more worrying through the day. I’d go to sleep anxious that I wouldn’t sleep and be so anxious that … I wouldn’t sleep. People started to tell me how terrible I looked (which, let’s be honest, didn’t help). A friend of mine told me earnestly that I should try taking sleeping pills and gave me a bottle of his. I recall the bottle had a label that read WARNING: Take two a night. If sleeplessness continues after a period of five days, then seek medical advice. So I didn’t end up taking the pills because the friend who suggested them has been taking seven a night since I first met him over fifteen years ago, and the only time he seeks medical advice is when he needs to get another prescription.