The Night my Bum Dropped

by Gretel Killeen

  And yet, despite all this, can you believe it, I asked for Jimmy’s advice regarding the ache in my heart! WHY, I ASK MYSELF? WHY? Desperation? Sugar low? PMT? The position of the planets? Sleep deprivation? Momentary insanity? All of the above? Who knows, but not only did I ask for his advice, I also actually took it! So when Jimmy suggested that all I possibly needed was just a couple of days away from routine and breathing the fresh country air, I accepted his invitation to visit his aunt in the country. In my defence I was not to know that the phrase ‘visiting aunty’ meant attending her funeral. And I was also not aware that ‘a couple of days away from routine’ included Jimmy’s expectation that he and I would spend our non-funeral time playing with assorted sex toys. I so wasn’t aware of the latter that I was as surprised as the customs officials at the domestic airport when Jimmy’s carry-on luggage was triggered by the X-ray machine and eleven objects were automatically turned on in the bag, causing it to vibrate right off the table. This in turn caused Jimmy and me to be interrogated regarding the ‘vast and unnatural quantity of sexual paraphernalia’ on Jimmy’s person, and subsequently found me signing a statutory declaration proclaiming that Jimmy and I were having a physical relationship and the entire collection was for our personal use.

  There were no bombs in Jimmy’s bag, but this didn’t stop the explosives going off on our flight, during which I refused to speak to Jimmy and he successfully picked up the flight attendant.

  The weekend wasn’t an entire loss, however, despite the fact that I was asked to give Jimmy and his ‘girlfriend’ a little privacy, and therefore spent the entire night sleeping in the bath with a cake of soap stuffed in each ear. No, the weekend was actually kind of a success because I met the entirety of Jimmy’s family and it was not unlike walking through a 3-D installation of The Origin of Species, and this was something I’d missed out on when at school because on the way to the museum, in the school bus, Robert Hillman threw up on me.

  Jimmy is a Dingbat

  Jimmy rang me about two days after the vibrator/funeral/soap-in-my-ears incidents. We didn’t talk for long because he was in the solarium.

  ‘You’re ringing me from a mobile phone and you’re lying in a metal-covered machine with electricity flowing through it?’

  ‘Yes, sorry. Is that rude?’

  ‘No it’s not rude. It’s dangerous!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m a bit distracted. I’ve just had $2000 stolen from the gymnasium change rooms.’

  ‘What! They broke into your locker?’

  ‘I don’t have a locker.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I didn’t have enough change for one.’

  ‘So they broke into your briefcase?’

  ‘I don’t have a briefcase.’

  ‘Well, where was the money?’

  ‘In my suit coat pocket.’

  ‘What? You left $2000 just sitting loose in a suit coat pocket in a change room?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t loose. It was in an envelope.’

  ‘An envelope, so it looked like a letter?’

  ‘Well, no. Yes, in a way it did, but instead of having an address typed on it, I’d handwritten $2000 CASH.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I sighed. ‘Did you ring me to tell me that you’ve just had a lobotomy?’

  ‘No, I’m ringing to say I’m sorry.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but I’m really, really sorry about whatever it is that you’re angry about.’

  ‘So you don’t know specifically what you’re apologising for and you just want a kind of general amnesty?’

  ‘I guess so … Do you accept it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I bought you a present to say sorry for being sexually inappropriate.’

  ‘Really? What is it?’

  ‘Stress-relieving balls in the shape of two tits.’

  One day later I saw Jimmy again. He said that it was a coincidence that we just bumped into each other, but he was standing outside my house and was packing up a tent so he appeared to have actually spent the night there. He stood in front of me for a few minutes looking incredibly awkward.

  ‘Do I make you feel uncomfortable?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not at all. I somehow lost my underwear during the night and I’m just standing here free-balling.’

  ‘And is that what you’re here to tell me, that your penis and testicles are dangling about like church bells in a hurricane as opposed to snuggled up neatly against your pubic hair like a newborn mouse?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry about how “the sorry” went the other day and I just wanted to say a couple of things in my defence. Firstly, while my behaviour has been unacceptable, it is understandable if you know that the only sexual experiences I’ve had of late came from wearing a really small G-string.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’ I replied.

  ‘Secondly, I would like you to know that the whole experience has made me really understand life.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, so in summary, I just wanted to tell you that you can get all you think you want from life and then you realise you’re in the room with a baboon.’

  And then he walked away and this is why I should never ask Jimmy for advice, because now I don’t know which one of us is actually the baboon.

  It Actually Sucks

  Yes, it’s true, Jimmy is one of my ‘closest’ friends (in the sense that I know all about him but I never stand anywhere near him). He’s a cheat and a liar and a sexual obsessive, and on top of that he’s a nincompoop. He has no idea of manners, no idea of etiquette and absolutely no idea of finance. He is the only person I know who can take a five-dollar cab ride and leave a twenty-buck tip.

  I realise that I probably shouldn’t have a friend like Jimmy, but when you’re single you can get a bit desperate for company. You know those movies where there’s a huge intergalactic disaster and you’re the only living creature left on the planet? Well, that’s what it feels like to be single.

  It sounds like an adventure but it actually sucks because the whole of the universe revolves around pairs. Even the Ark was filled with animals going in ‘two by two’, and never a mention of the hilarious, high-achieving and intelligent extra cow who was included on the voyage simply because everyone just loved to have her around.

  Yes, modern society would make you believe that singledom is cool but it quite frankly is not. You pay more for your health insurance, in hotels you cop a ‘single loading’, and when you have to travel through customs you have to tick a box on the immigration card that either says ‘married’ or ‘loser’. Of course we try to make singledom sound hip and groovy, simply because there are so many single people out there that it is actually referred to as an epidemic … and we need to keep the masses calm. There’s even a new word to make female singledom sound glamorous. They call it being freemale and cite occasionally single starlets as their high-profile ‘I don’t need a bloke for emotional or financial security’ proponents. Problem is that these pop icons are in their twenties and very pretty and can get any bloke they want and will never look old because they’ve been using Botox since the age of five and will always have wrinkle-free skin, even if it does mean that their facial expressions have all the range of a snooker ball. These girls aren’t wearing the scars of life on their dials, their breasts are perky and their bums sit upright at the base of their spines, not down somewhere near their ankles.

  See, it’s all very well to say that ‘life is your oyster’ when you are the pearl … but what happens when you’re older and single? Where does a single girl go to find companionship? To the shallow end of the gene pool, that’s where.

  Oh, yes, she will try blind dates with the discarded male friends of her girlfriends who’ve decided to ‘aim higher’, and she could try internet dating and meet with a murderer for a Big Mac at McDonald’s. And in between she’ll dance flamboyantly with her gorgeous gay male friend and imagine what a good coup
le they’d make if only he didn’t prefer penis, and she’ll fill the social gaps with chatty nutter single girlfriends who have either quashed the burning flame of desire and replaced it with an obsession for fifty-three varieties of organic herbal teas as displayed proudly on the kitchen bench, or are alternatively secretly honing their boy-catching skills by practising their blowjobs on a banana.

  In fact our single girl will get so obsessed with the need for company that she will even try hanging out with her smug married friends who describe their three perfect children as being ‘gifted’ (which is a synonym for ‘obnoxious’), and she’ll do this even though she knows that the only married people worth hanging out with are the ones who are completely and utterly miserable because it’s so comforting and also kind of hilarious. And then, when she has doggedly pursued every other possible pathway to companionship, she will ring an old boyfriend and see what he’s up to … which is precisely what I did to Jimmy more than twelve years ago, and we simply haven’t been able to rid ourselves of each other since.

  We Split Up

  Jimmy and I have been friends since we broke up after a relationship that neither of us is fully willing to acknowledge but that started approximately twelve years ago. We split up so each could find ‘something better’ but strangely neither of us ever found it.

  At the time of dating I was attracted to the naughty glint in Jimmy’s eye and it was only later that I realised the glint was the initial onset of glaucoma caused by an excess of sugar in his diet. But diabetes and laziness aren’t his only qualities, of course. Jimmy is also a hypochondriac, womanising con-man and a chronic liar and, as this story is told from my perspective, I will tell you that I, on the other hand, am perfect. But the truth is that as an exhausted single mother and writer in those days, I was insecure, paranoid, lonely and tired. Nowadays, as the kids are old enough to have left school, I am no longer tired but continue to be insecure, paranoid, lonely and scared … and now, should I ever walk backwards, I also have a bum that I can trip over.

  I want love but all I have is Jimmy. Jimmy wants sex but all he has is me. Can a man and a woman really be friends and never have sex? Well, according to me the answer is yes, and according to Jimmy the answer is no. So, yes, it is a friendship of relentless frustration. In many ways I guess we’re sounding like a married couple, and in many ways we are (no love, no sex) but we’re also like brother and sister, mother and son, cat and mouse, two lemmings. Yes, we are the Odd Couple, deeply resenting each other’s inadequacies yet joined at the hip through shared experience, the comfort of familiarity and a profound fear of loneliness.

  But there are times when we hate each other’s guts. Sometimes when I look at Jimmy I think I’m going to throw up. It’s not so much his appearance (thank God he passed through the ‘all beige with the gold necklace’ stage), it’s actually more his aroma, because Jimmy’s scent is a mélange of cheap aftershave, sleeping pills, Viagra, too much coffee and foot fungal cream. On the other hand Jimmy likes the way I smell, and he likes the way I walk, and I suspect he likes the way I look when I’m having an outraged hissy fit and am clutching my arms across my body, because it makes my boobs look big. Yes, I know that Jimmy likes a lot about me, he just doesn’t like me very much. He wishes that I was better-looking and often contemplates alternate methods of having me murdered.

  We went to a relationship counsellor to work on our ‘friendship’ and it nearly separated us for life. It was there, in the confines of the pale-yellow room with the ‘eye-pleasing decor’ that is so hard on the eye, that I learnt that Jimmy hates the moralistic perspective that I’ve inherited from my upbringing and he hates the way I make him feel grubby. He hates my ‘anal observation of parking signs’, otherwise known as ‘a sensible refusal to park where I will get booked’, and he hates the fact that I refuse to speak to him when he rings for a chat while sitting on the toilet.

  Jimmy also hates the way I seem to judge him so harshly yet have an entirely contradictory, more lenient set of criteria for any new blokes who pass through my life. Jimmy hates having to listen to my glorification of these new blokes, and he says, ‘What you’re feeling isn’t really love, because you can’t love someone until you’ve seen them naked.’ And Jimmy also hates the way I am so emotional, the way I need to talk about everything, the way I cry when I’m tired or hungry.

  On the other hand, I don’t like the word ‘hate’ and prefer to use the word ‘dislike’, so the visit to the relationship counsellor taught Jimmy that I dislike the way Jimmy never has any money because he spends it on prostitutes and instant lottery tickets. I dislike the way Jimmy will come to my house just so that he can use our toilet and not have to clean his. I dislike the way Jimmy will relentlessly blurt lewd and unfunny sexual puns to every waitress he encounters, the way that Jimmy is always late, will abandon our plans as soon as he gets a better offer, will never invite me out with his friends and only ever calls me when he needs to know something or needs reassurance, which is several times a day. (‘Do you think that tight shoes can lead to a heart attack?’ ‘When a girl tells me to fuck off, what do you think she means?’ ‘Do you think that I should get Botox in my penis?’) Yes, I dislike an awful lot about Jimmy but more than anything else I probably dislike the fact that my relationship with Jimmy is the most honest relationship in my life … and I’m scared we’re actually perfectly suited.

  3

  ‘Jimmy,’ I say as I call him at his work and wake him up. ‘Just wondering if you’ve noticed anything different about me lately?’

  ‘You mean other than the fact that you’re sad, scared and unemployed?’

  ‘Yes, something a little more subtle.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t noticed anything subtle, but I have noticed that your arse has plummeted.’

  ‘Oh. I wasn’t sure it was obvious.’

  ‘Are you kidding? It’s dragging behind you like a car trailer.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No, you don’t look like a car trailer. You look more like a ute.’

  ‘Well, is there anything you know of that I can do to solve the problem?’ I ask.

  ‘Absolutely nothing at all, not medically or cosmetically.’

  ‘Oh,’ I sob.

  ‘But I would be quite happy to spend the rest of my life walking behind you and just kind of holding your bum up … if, every now and then, you just let me spank it.’

  A Marcia Brady Kind of Issue

  Now that I think about it, I believe the real problem between us is the fact that I still allow Jimmy to participate in my life, and give me advice, as opposed to letting Sarah arrange for him to ‘go missing’. I’ve thought a lot about the rationale behind my behaviour and have decided that it is not rational at all. Clearly I have an inappropriate Marcia Brady kind of issue with male attention. Clearly I need male validation, clearly I believe I need male support, and yet at the same time I think the only really useful thing a man can contribute to a relationship is the lifting of heavy objects. So, in summary, I blame the continued inclusion of Jimmy in my life on low self-esteem (as previously discussed) and the sexual revolution, which taught females that they could be superwomen and taught men that women would not only continue to maintain all domestic duties in the family but also get a full-time job and contribute to the family coffers as well. The problem as I see it is that men have been rendered, at the very best, useless.

  Maybe I was just giving Jimmy something to do when I asked him for his advice regarding my aching heart. Or maybe I’ve unwittingly learnt to be sexist and I innately believe that men are more intelligent than myself and all women. This is quite possible, as I grew up in a time when men were seen to be so all-knowing and powerful that they were even used on TV ads to promote women’s brassieres. I remember one ad in particular that featured a man using a pointer to highlight the pertinent features of a bra that was worn by a female model standing beside him, who for decency’s sake was wearing a black skivvy underneath the white bra. (Of course, this
was also in the day when TV ads for tampons ran for an entire thirty seconds without ever showing the product, saying what it was called or mentioning what the product was actually for.)

  Maybe, despite acting like an empowered, oestrogen-fuelled superwoman, I actually subconsciously believe that men will ultimately save us mere women! If so, I blame my upbringing for this, because like many girls of my time I grew up with an ‘absent’ father. This was due not only to his conservative lack of emotional availability* but also to his generation’s work ethic i.e. absence from the home. As we all know, absence makes the heart grow fonder, therefore I learnt to forget the negative traits, exaggerate the positive, and basically construct an entirely fictitious ‘head of the house’ who would make everything in our world okay if only he were there.

  It wasn’t our dads’ fault. Our dads were working really hard to keep us all afloat in a time when men proved their mettle by ‘grinning and bearing’ life and asserting their masculinity by making sure the lawn edges were well trimmed on weekends. So different to the world we live in now, where aspirational ‘real men’ don’t climb Mount Everest without shoes or oxygen but walk their kids to kindy instead. ‘Isn’t he amazing,’ say women as they’re gobsmacked to see that a bloke can push a pram. ‘Isn’t he an incredible man!!!’ No. Quite frankly, he is not. In my dad’s day the father didn’t push the pram, he bloody built the pram! He didn’t bottle-feed the baby, he reared the cow and milked the cow and then he killed the fatted calf with his own bare teeth, skinned it and sliced it and placed it in an esky ready for Mum to turn the beast into fritters.