by Mark Dapin
I booked a personal lesson with an instructor called Peach, from Brisbane (‘That’s north of Sydney,’ she told me). I never saw her hair (it was hidden under a beanie) or her eyes (they were guarded by goggles), but I suspect she was blonde, blue-eyed and in her mid-twenties. She was initially surprised that a 37-year-old could have lived life with all the motor skills of a newborn foal, but she quickly took control.
My first lesson was wildly unsuccessful. The difference between skiing and sliding out of control down a steep hill is the ability to snowplough: to position the skis in a wide V-shape, with the apex in line with your nose. If you cannot make a snowplough, you cannot stop. I found it impossible to turn my feet to the correct angle, and when I finally did make a V, it was so wide I could not move out of it. Peach pulled from her pocket a length of rubber with a clamp at each end. I guessed it was not something normally used with adults when she told me it was called the ‘edgy-wedgy’. She tied the tips of my skis together with the edgy-wedgy, but I still could not hold the V. She skied backwards down a slope, holding my skis together with her hands, but even that didn’t help. I was a disgrace to the ski school. I made no progress at all. I went out and drank beer until two in the morning, and woke up feeling like a map of the human body. Every sinew throbbed individually, each joint was marked by its own particular pain.
I had another lesson with Peach. She was startled. I’d got better. She said, ‘You should go out drinking every night.’
I told her I did. There are ten (of course) rules in the Alpine Responsibility Code. Rule 9 is: ‘Do not ski . . . or undertake any other alpine activity if drugs or alcohol impair your ability.’ That was not me, then.
Peach said she’d had a merry evening back at her chalet, telling her mother-in-law she had tried the edgy-wedgy on a grown-up ‘and he did not mind at all’. She taught me how to turn, using preschool metaphors: to scrape the snow with the backs of my skis as if I was spreading peanut butter on toast – which I have never done – and to bring down the arch of my foot as if I were squashing a spider. It became apparent that she was relating to me as a toddler. When I turned more easily to the left than the right, she told me I had ‘one mongie leg’. At the end of the second day, I skied all the way down Wombat’s Ramble – a twenty-minute run at learner’s pace – and only stacked when I hit a patch of mud.
Ski runs all seem to be named after people who have suffered terrible accidents. If somewhere is called ‘Harry’s Rest’, it usually turns out Harry had not stopped for a smoko, he had actually died there, possibly while attending ski school. The mud patch became Dapin’s Curve, and was quickly joined in my mental geography of the resort by Dapin’s Folly, Dapin’s Downfall and Dapin’s Plunge.
At Falls Creek, each stage of junior ski school takes its title from a native animal, none of which is particularly known for its alpine adaptability. An absolute beginner is a ‘koala’ (which would die immediately if you pulled it out of its eucalypt and left it to slide around in snow). Next comes a ‘platypus’ (which can only live alongside riverbanks). I was amazed at the end of the day to find I had reached ‘possum’ status, especially since a possum might actually survive on a mountain.
Peach taught me to ski as if she were feeding a baby, chopping up the skills into small, easily digestible portions and slowly spooning them to me. I understood she still thought of me as a preschooler when she yelled delightedly, ‘Look at your little legs moving!’ as I executed a turn. My legs are hairy, muscular and tattooed. They are not, by anybody’s standards, little.
Learning was exhilarating and satisfying, especially when we both had such low hopes. After three days, I told Peach I had not hit anybody on the slopes.
‘It’s just luck,’ she said.
The truth was I had built up enough command of the skis to steer them in the direction I wanted to go, and I could start and stop my descent pretty much as I wished. That day I woke up a possum, but I went to bed a blue possum. Blue possums have all the powers of a possum, plus the ability to exercise them on blue (intermediate) runs.
As a blue possum, I finally realised I had been wearing my ski boots far too tight, and released the pressure. This made the whole exercise indescribably easier, and I found I could handle the intermediate runs with the confidence and grace of the average terrified marsupial.
We began discussing parallel turns, the next stage of my skiing development. Peach, who seemed unable to open her mouth without saying something honest, said, ‘I can’t believe we’re talking about this technical stuff . . . I thought we’d be talking about pizzas or something.’ I couldn’t believe it, either. I looked at Peach with a child’s admiration. She seemed to tower above me, even though I was about twelve centimetres taller.
On the final day of our course, I reached cockatoo level (called, for some reason, ‘rocky cocky’) but I was never to progress to the fat-arsed heights of wombat-hood, because bad weather closed down the lifts.
I learned a couple of new things about my staff at the snow. I found out Ash could throw a snowball 30 metres with an accuracy sometimes attributed to precision bombing, and Chriso could cook fajitas (if Fi helped him). The most useful thing I learned, however, was how to change gear in a car. Ash insisted on taking me for a drive one snowless day. I think he did it for the entertainment value, in the same spirit as you might try to get your dog to bark ‘Advance Australia Fair’.
For two hours, we taxied around the car park at Falls Creek, then drove up and down the mountain itself. It was surprisingly easy, compared with skiing, and I acquitted myself quite well until I drove into oncoming traffic on my way back to the car park.
It inspired me to get back behind the wheel at home. I started taking lessons again, this time in an automatic. I made the mistake of ringing around driving schools until I found the cheapest guy. I might as well have gone back to Fiji.
My new instructor was an Asian bloke. It was difficult to understand what he was saying (although it was usually ‘Brake!’ or ‘Noooooooooo!’) and he was on edge because he was giving up smoking.
I took one lesson in the late afternoon, and after about thirty minutes sitting beside me as I raced happily up the wrong side of the road, he lit a cigarette. ‘It’s my first one today,’ he said.
My next lesson was in the morning. Again, he lit a cigarette. ‘It’s my first one today,’ he said.
Every time he took me out, he started smoking again. Meanwhile, I was clocking up my required fifty hours in Claire’s Laser. She was genuinely shocked that I didn’t know what broken white lines meant (maybe they were trying to save on paint) or why there were zigzags painted down the middle of some roads (drunks, probably). She yelled in terror as I tried to overtake a turning bus, swerved into the wrong lane and finished up, as ever, driving into oncoming traffic. My driving instructor made a similar noise on Anzac Bridge when, instead of accelerating, I braked as I changed lanes.
He lit a cigarette. ‘It’s my first one today,’ he said. I wondered how much longer I could keep doing this to him.
I was woken up one night by fire trucks outside the window. All the neighbours were standing around looking at something. Claire asked if I thought we should leave the building, but I have never thought I should leave a building at 4 am. I probably should have, though, because the apartment block was on fire.
On my way to work that morning, I noticed the underground car park had been burned out. Somebody had firebombed the Laser. The exterior of the car had virtually disappeared, and the front bumper had melted into the tarmac. All that remained was a skeleton of a machine, with the steering lock clinging ironically to the useless, roasted steering wheel.
I presumed it was just kids, and not somebody campaigning to keep death off the roads. Elisabeth told me there was a maniac going around torching Ford Lasers in Stanmore, so perhaps the car had fallen victim to a serial killer. Either way, it was obvious the Fates didn’t want me to drive.
The skiing holiday was Ralph’s only group s
porting function, but periodic fitness fads seized the office the way hula hoops and hotpants briefly gripped school playgrounds in the 1970s. One week, all the girls were doing yoga; the next week, all the boys (except James) were lifting weights. Squash had several bursts of popularity, encouraged by Brad, who was – as in all things – a master tactician.
For part of each year, Brad ran a team in a local touch football comp. It won the trophy, of course. Boxing came and went. A trickle of staff attended the Boxing Works gym, which opened a few doors down from the office. Carlee, like me, was going to have a fight, but somehow, like me, she never quite got around to it. One season, Dom and Daz played fourth-grade Rugby Union.
People often came to work with the intention of going for a run at lunchtime, but regularly got no further than the pub. Ash once took Carlee and Elisabeth for a jog, and came back saying the girls ran so slowly he had to look down at his feet to check that they were moving.
Gym drifted in and out of fashion. One year everyone was a member of the Hyde Park, the next we all joined the Catholic Club gym (I was, I think, its only Jewish affiliate). Even particular pieces of equipment enjoyed spurts of popularity, from the rowing machine to the punching bag.
Everybody seemed to be on strange diets. Ash appeared to eat nothing but sushi and tuna. Daz lived on two-minute noodles, because they were cheap. Chriso’s diet was equal parts beer and oxygen. Elisabeth had a strange allergic condition that caused her lips to blow up as if they were Botoxed and her eyelids to swell into ping-pong balls if she ate anything but chicken and potatoes. Chocolate was a particular trigger for her terrifying transformation, and I often left pieces on her desk, in the hope it would make her head explode.
I started training at Boxing Works and realised I had forgotten everything I ever knew, except how to sweat. My only exercise became the walk to the Windsor, which was half a block away. Once again, my belly started to swell like Elisabeth’s face. I was 10 kilograms overweight, my surplus body mass composed entirely of the bulges that result from the unique chemical reaction that occurs when curry meets beer.
I decided to lose weight like the stars, to strip off fat like Calista Flockhart, and diet down to a body like Geri Halliwell’s. I read NW and Woman’s Day, and figured out that a diet low in complex carbohydrates had the most celebrity cachet. Complex carbohydrates include rice, bread, potatoes and pasta: basically, everything that makes you feel full. Except beer.
On the advice of Ash, I adopted a no-complex-carbs-after-3 pm rule. For six weeks I ate grilled meat and salad every evening. I was hungry all the time. I tried to fill up with sparkling mineral water, which is a bit like trying to gorge yourself on air. Then I turned to beer. A couple of bottles were all I needed to turn chicken-breast-and-lettuce into a satisfactory meal – but eight schooners transformed it into a feast.
I was drunk through most of the diet, but I went to the Catholic Club gym every other day, performed hundreds of sit-ups each morning, and after a month and a half, I had lost four kilos. I began reading diet books and talking to girlfriends about their own punishing regimens. I realised what I had missed in not dieting. I loved following a program, being forced to conform to an arbitrary set of rules to reach a quantifiable goal. It was like being an elite athlete. Sort of.
I was especially impressed by Lisa, who had dropped ten kilos in two months to fit into her wedding dress. She had used the Atkins Diet (as, apparently, had Jennifer Aniston) which allowed no complex carbohydrates whatever. For the first fourteen days of the Atkins Diet, you can eat as much meat, poultry, fish, butter and cheese as you like, and two cups of loosely packed lettuce, capsicum and olives. And that’s it. The aim is to send the body into a state of ketosis, to make it believe you are starving so it starts to burn its own fat reserves. In effect, dieters in ketosis eat themselves. With cheese on top. The ‘induction’ stage of the Atkins Diet also bans alcohol and caffeine (and probably dancing, singing and mixed sunbathing, as well).
The initial effects were spectacular: I went mad. My staff called it ‘chicken rage’ – a state of constant, irrational, violent frustration caused by eating nothing but roast chicken all day. I could not concentrate. I thought everybody was forging their expenses and plotting against me. I had all the paranoia and anxiety of a smoker who had just quit. I ordered an air ticket across the world with the stipulation that I came home before I left, then flew into a fury when the travel agent could not book it. Elisabeth had to physically restrain me from attacking the production editor. It might have been alcohol withdrawal; it might have been that complex carbohydrates help the body produce serotonin; it might even have been all the hormones pumped into chickens. Eventually, it passed. In the second week of the Atkins Diet, I felt clear-headed and healthy. To be certain you are in ketosis, you can perform home urine analysis with Ketostix, which are designed to warn diabetics they are about to go into a coma. You pee on a strip of treated paper and hope it turns purple.
‘What kind of sicko would do that?’ a friend had asked Lisa, laughing.
I did. Every evening. And I loved it. If there’s one thing better than a regimen, it is a regimen with equipment.
I was in moderate ketosis by day three, eating myself. I lost another four kilos. It was weight that should have been harder to shift, and I shed it twice as quickly. All in all, I dropped eight kilos in eight weeks and trimmed five centimetres off my waistline.
While I was on my diet, a freelancer called Rich Pelley volunteered to eat nothing but McDonald’s for a month, three times a day. (The food group he axed, I think, was nutrients.) His skin went yellow and his eyes turned red – a bit like the McDonald’s logo – but he lost three and a half kilos.
Later, Carlee, who had put on half a kilo for every week of her two-month holiday, tried the Atkins Diet, and lasted one and a half days. This was the kind of figure more readily associated with giving up drinking – something else that everyone was always doing. One of the most common exchanges at Ralph was:
‘Fancy a beer tonight?’
‘No, mate, I’m off the grog for a month.’
A month generally lasted four days. It was as if we had started to measure time in dog years. Monster planned to give up drinking for fifty days, lasted five, and lost a $5 bet with Chriso. I quit beer for the month of January, and had to use my executive powers to declare an early February before the first week was out.
This was by no means the most sweeping, imperious, or even surreal use of executive powers at ACP. Since the establishment of the intranet, we were bombarded by management initiatives and new corporate policies, not one of which made any worker’s job any easier, or any magazine any better. They came from all the usual offenders: idiotic codes of practice that might have quite easily applied to their own essentially non-productive departments, but were either irrelevant, inappropriate or crippling on the shop floor.
HR led the way, with its directive that nobody who had worked full-time for the company should be permitted to return as a casual within one year of leaving. I presumed this rule was an attempt to stop people taking huge redundancy packages then coming back as consultants – which might happen in the world of HR, but is almost unheard of in the world of journalism. They were applying an inappropriate corporate model to an industry they did not seem to be familiar with. The rule hit designers and subs, who had left the company to become rock stars or alcoholics. They were usually the best people to fill in when their former colleagues went on holiday, because they knew how to operate the company’s desktop publishing systems, and were familiar with the way the office worked, and the house style. They were always looking for casual shifts when EMI sent back their demo by return post, or the pub refused to extend their credit. Instead, HR thought it would be best if we used untried staff who had not recently worked on our magazine, or any other magazine in the company (which included more than half the titles in Australia), making it impossible to build a serious backup for illness, injury or extended leave.
The year lay-off policy was a detailed convention that had been formulated painstakingly, pointlessly and – I would guess – at some length, over a languorous series of meetings. Like most directives, its actual period of influence lasted about two weeks, before it was quietly abandoned as unworkable. Later, I was rehired twice as a consultant – in April 2000 and later in November 2002 – in direct contravention of its principles.
As more and more office practices became offences against an ever-expanding corporate code, I devised my own crimes and punishments for the staff. I declared a crackdown on ‘stealing keystrokes’, a felony characterised by navigating the screen using the arrow keys instead of the mouse, and therefore wearing out the keyboard too quickly. I tried to put a stop to ‘mousal abuse’ – the act of leaving the mouse in any position other than perfectly central on the mouse mat – and I banned James from urinating while standing up.
Brad was always careful to stick to the obdurate letter of each new law. He was an able boardroom lawyer, careful to give nobody a chance to challenge him on procedural grounds. He would usually tell me to implement the changes, then a fortnight later I would speak to Finance and be told we did not have to do things that way anymore.
A decree was issued that effectively stopped subs from earning extra money writing for the magazine at weekends. I followed it for the customary honeymoon period then assumed it had gone the way of all romantic dreams and got fucked. I sent Ivan – in his dual identity as Eric the workie – on a bush-survival course, with the instruction that he had to eat witchetty grubs and ants, and asked him to write it up in his spare time. When I tried to get him paid, Brad refused to sign the form.
I paid Ivan in cash, from my own wallet, because the company would not come up with the money to buy content for its magazines. This gave me a good feeling, but not one I would like to have again. I had hoped it would make me into Ivan’s hero, and he would spend the rest of his career embarrassing me in front of other people by bringing up my unbelievable generosity. ‘Oh, Ivan, not that old story . . .’ I imagined saying, for the thousandth time, to a table of wide-eyed and nubile admirers.
