NEWS: I'VE COMPLETED MY MANUSCRIPT. I've sent it away, and now I'm waiting and hoping for the best. My name is Dean. I live in Brisbane city. This is my life. (Disclaimer: www.alwayseighteen.com contains language and imagery that may be considered offensive).
Our young love is different. It’s hard to understand. At first it starts off with a conversation, or even just a word, or maybe not even a word – all it could be is a smile from across the room, a smile up close, a kiss behind the ear. And afterwards the love pours down like cheap alcohol, smothering our entire bodies with every single emotion you could think of. Our love will never have a definition. We’ll call it love, but we’ll change its meaning when we’re angry, when we’re happy, when we’re talking to friends or parents or therapists or our journals or ourselves.
My young love started like this: a conversation, an e-mail address, a phone number, a date, and from there she became a partner. She became a camera that photographed me and giggled as I drove. She became a hand holding mine in the cinema, in a party, in the car, on the walkway. She became a set of eyes that watched me sleep, a short skirt on my birthday and a candle that glowed and overpowered the tonne of black night sky around us. She became my encouragement as I’d write, she became the force behind my studying, that girl I carried as we ran around the beach, the girl that danced and then giggled when she caught me watching. She became sinking bed sheets, cotton pillows and closed and opened curtains, cigarette ember and smoke, music volume raised and my partner against the fucked up world. She became someone who recognised my new clothes and old clothes. She became a set of crying eyes, an angry yell before a dead silent mobile phone. She became a slap on the face. She became yells and things thrown and making up and making out. She became this bright, piercing thing inside my heart. She became the source of my everything, the thought behind every second pulse, every first pulse; I’d be happy because of her, I’d hate because of her, and there was no piece of advice or parent or best friend that could change what either of us felt. She then became a rare phone call, a gradual decline in interest. She became a photo, a memory, that story to sometimes pick out of my brain or heart, this short piece I now write. We annoyed everyone, we were ridiculous, we only ever spoke and complained and bragged about each other, but who cares, that was it, we were in love, that was it, that was us, that was our young love, and when I closed my eyes I remembered the way she’d touch my face and smile and tell me that I was worth something.
Young love exists behind our young masks. We smile and fuck and smoke and get cut and go to parties and drink but deep down, it’s that love story that’s the most important to us. Our radio stations are littered with songs that all deal with love and sap and corny lines that we all secretly listen to and adore. We won’t admit it, but we’ve fallen in love with our friends and have never told them. We’ve fallen in love with a teacher or two and have never told them. We’ve fallen in love from simple, stupid embraces or compliments or gestures we so desperately needed at the time. We’ve fallen in love with actors and musicians and posters and cartoons and friends’ partners and statements and arguments and ideas and ourselves and these feelings either stay with us, stay well and deep within us, or sometimes these feelings last only a second, or a second of a second and vanish and appear where we won’t see them again. Our hearts are forever damaged, but their shapes are always changing. There’s nothing that affects our sex more, our decisions more, our beings more, our anger more, our sadness more, our stupidity more, our thoughts more than this beautiful, tragic monster scrape along the road.
I think what bothers us the most about our friend Barry is that he’s not the stereotypical gay. He’s gay, but he’s sort of not. He doesn’t walk around with his hand high and limping down his wrist. He doesn’t gossip about celebrities, he doesn’t dress well. He’s fat and he doesn’t shave and he’s not funny and he doesn’t like shopping and he doesn’t know Will and Grace and has never seen Queer Eye and he hates Kylie. Barry doesn’t know what a latte is. He’s introverted but doesn’t appreciate art. He hates dancing. His name is Barry.
He does, however, manage to have sex with a lot of guys.
It was Jude and Vail and Barry and I eating sandwiches on the hood of Vail’s BMW.
“You know what I hate?” Jude looked at all of us. “I hate paedophiles. They ruined it for all of us. I can’t go around saying I love kids without people thinking I’m a fucking sicko.” He looked down, sort of embarrassed. “Because I do. I love kids. My girlfriend and I have been talking about them a lot. We want to have two kids.”
Vail rolled her eyes. “Stop talking about her. Stop it!”
Jude pointed at Barry with his sandwich. “I mean, like, if Barry went around saying he likes kids he’d go straight to prison.”
Barry laughed and didn’t say anything.
“Where should we go now?”
I shrugged. “Drinking?”
“Shut up.” Vail pulled out her mobile phone. “Hey, let’s all take a photo.”
We all squeezed near her and posed in front of her mobile’s camera. One, two, three, captured for good. Vail turned it around and laughed at the photo. Barry tried to get her to delete it. Jude laughed and mentioned something about how his girlfriend takes photos at a certain angle to make herself look good. Barry told him to shut up.
I caught up with Iris today. I never had to “catch up” with friends while I was in high school. The whole “catching up” thing only ever happened after I graduated.
There’s this thing called friendship that juggles around on the palm of my hand. I bend it and form it but its colour stays the same. I’ve kissed friends, I’ve loved friends, I’ve slept with friends, I’ve gotten drunk with friends, I’ve hit friends, I’ve cut friends. There are a lot of messed up things in this world. There are a lot of messed up people in this world. There are fathers keeping their daughters as sex slaves, there are children gunning down other children, there are children raping women and beheading them. There are people in incredible, unjustified pain. There are hurricanes tearing people apart; pools of lava melt and destroy whole villages, generations of stories, they murder smiles and songs and innocence and faith. A homeless woman is carrying her baby and the baby is crying. People will not believe in you. People will hunt you and laugh at you and strip you naked and not care. People are dying. They’re falling and falling and they’re landing and they’re dying. And all of a sudden, when you’re with a friend, all those incredible, overbearing thoughts vanish, at least for the meantime, anyway, and you’re left with a relieving lack of seriousness. And all of a sudden you’ll remember that good things also exist.
What I’ve learnt is that thinking too much accomplishes nothing unless your thoughts are matched with actions. The world never asked you to think about it all at once. You have to take it in bit by bit and do your part.
“You look tired,” Iris said.
“Your name,” I said.
“What about my name?”
“It’s the same name as that song by the Goo Goo Dolls.”
Iris smiled.
We both levitated towards different directions. It was something besides the drugs. My shoulders were light, and, contrary to the teachings of science, the clouds felt like warm, feather pillows.
There was too much alcohol that night. It was the night I met this girl who was actually my age, for the first time in goodness knows how long. She kept asking me if I knew about these fashion magazines.
Do you know, like, Oyster?
No, I said.
Well, Monster children?
No, I said.
She shrugged. I shrugged too. She put a pair of Wayfarers on me and everything became dark. She told me that girls like to wear checkered now, either checkered or big shirts with big belts. I said, I’m not a girl. She said, I know. She giggled. She touched my wrist and asked if I wanted to smoke with her. I told her that everything was blurry, that everything was crumbling down and that I don’t think I should smoke. She looked at my lips. They were dry again. She told me that she likes Bloc Party. I said, People only say they like Bloc Party because other people tell them that they like Bloc Party. She told me she likes fashion photography and wants to get into it. I told her, Good for fucking you.
I woke up with as many regrets as I usually have when I wake up. I felt lost and hung over but there was nothing new about that. I watched this documentary the other night, this documentary about people who sell their children in China. Because they’re poor they can’t keep their child, so they sell their kids to wealthier couples who want kids. The better looking kids get sold for more. Boys get sold for more (because of the One Child policy). They interviewed this woman whose neighbour kidnapped and sold her child. They interviewed this guy who sold his first girlfriend; some years later he sold his son. They videotaped this mother negotiating the price of her child as she cradled the little boy with her hands.
Sometimes I look at the mirror, sometimes at people, sometimes at actors, sometimes I look in my wallet, I look at cars and buildings and houses for sale and crying and laughing people and ads to lose weight and Brad and Angelina and Britney and Hillary and Obama and a homeless guy checking out a young girl and someone dead on the news and I wonder where the hell this is all going.
Sigur Ros. Untitled#1:
Note: for those of you who are interested in what the documentary was about, it was a documentary called "China's Stolen Children" shown on Four Corners. Click here.
I downed too many drinks with an editor of a university magazine. The editor, Bob or something, liked an article I wrote for the magazine last year. The article was basically an essay that complained about everything. Bob is an intellect. Intellects love it when people complain about everything. You can’t be an intellect and think that there’s nothing wrong with the world.
It was hard making Bob laugh. Usually, I can size a guy or girl up and think up of a few words to make them laugh. Bob only laughs at political humour. I’m not a political humour sort of guy. I’m a dumb, dirty sex joke sort of guy. If you get a microscope and zoom into the depths of me, you wouldn’t find a poetic secret or some beautiful, limitless soul – all you’d find are dirty sex jokes. So what I did was, I thought up of all the sex jokes I knew and replaced their punch lines with Brendan Nelson, or even any other politician’s name. And so the Jewish Minister of Agriculture says to her he says, "Lady, your clit is as delicious as Brendan Nelson’s apology speech!"
Bob likes to make fun of women who read gossip magazines, but I really don’t see the difference between gossiping about Britney and having a joke about the Prime Minister. They should release a gossip magazine that’s all about politicians. People would buy it. Bob kept asking me if I watched the Chaser. I told him that I saw it once and didn't find it funny. He rolled his eyes and called me ignorant and said that I wasn't funny.
Bob asked me what my opinion of Mao was. I said, “Would she even care what I think? If I was Mao, I wouldn’t give a shit about what people like me think.” Bob said, “Mao is a guy, you dumb bastard.”
He fiddled with his glass a little. He took a sip and put the glass back down. He looked at me, stared at me. He told me that lawyers don’t play chess with tradesmen, and tradesmen don’t play checkers with lawyers.
“Well, do they at least play football?”
Bob laughed. We kept drinking. Bob bores the hell out of me but I like him anyway. He appreciates writing as much as I do. I asked Bob what would happen if a gay Mexican Scientologist who is considering converting to Islam campaigned to be the next president of the United States. Almost instantly, as if he were some made up robot with a predefined set of words, he said:
You see, Dean, you get people like him and her, like this and that, like me and you. I represent everyone behind me; you represent who you speak for. Brisbane is littered with posters for Marxism meetings. It’s littered with photos and news of protest. Politicians and judges and lawyers and barristers and university students and whatnot all walk throughout the city, coffees in their hands and everything in their minds. Construction is going on everywhere and things are growing, things are shrinking. On random moments, people in strange outfits will come out of nowhere and begin to sing and dance for Hare Krishna. Christians will make speeches, everyone else will complain. Someone will yell, Tibet! You get people who understand all this imagery, who comprehend all that’s happening, who believe in all that’s happening. And then, and then you get the people who don’t react to this constant, free exposure, you get people who yawn and then give this scene their middle finger because other things are more important to them, and maybe they actually are. A large percentage of our population have no interest in this country’s government, let alone know how to vote properly. Is this alarming news, is this new news, does it matter? Do we need to blame anyone, or has this reality always been here? What should we do? What the fuck should we do?
Bob's monologue faded and died and never resurfaced again. Bob vomited into a toilet bowl and his vomit smelt and looked like shit. Literally like shit. Arms around each other’s shoulders, we found a park bench to sit on until we became sober again.
I took this photo when I noticed a protest in front of Parliament House. Some people looked curiously, some people kept on walking. I didn't ask anyone what it was about. All I heard was, Anna Bligh something something something.
There are points in life where you firmly believe nothing will go wrong. Everyone is nice, the weather is dandy, you look sexy in the mirror, money is a lover that can be taken for granted. But we’ve all been scarred by the shit times, so in some moments of our highs that fragile little thought lingers just above our head, that subtle, two worded warning: be careful. One small mistake and things could come crashing down again.
Grass is always greener on the other side. Weed isn’t. It’s always there, available, so we smoke the hell out of it and live with the bad breath.
As a writer in this often confusing, chaotic and highly contradictory world of people and fucking and greed and good times and booze and pills and fighting and love and lust and relationships, I often argue with myself whether life should be understood, or whether it should simply be lived.
I woke up and got dressed and ended up in a bar with Jennifer. “I read your blog the other day. The one about Eva returning. It was lame.”
“Why the hell was it lame?”
She shrugged. “It was funny, but it was all over the place, and I was, like, reading your life, but not your life.” She shrugged again. “It was lame, that’s all. It’s like I was actually there. It was sort of realistic, but I read it all the way through. You should write about vampires. Or about, like, computer hackers.”
I had a beer. She showed me a card she made for her boyfriend. It was a giant, cute penguin.
A lot of people have been falling in love lately. Jude has fallen in love. As soon as he and his partner realised that they were in love they jumped into a rocket and flew to space and never came back to earth.
There are great, horrific divides between single people and “in a relationship” people. There are even more subtle divides between single people who are happy and unhappy, and “in a relationship” people who are happy and unhappy. There are single people who choose to be single, there are single people who are pretending to choose to be single, there are single people who are fucked up and lonely and desperate and would pretty much be okay with anyone. There are “in a relationship” people who thrive off being with a partner or two, who cannot breathe without a partner or two. There are “in a relationship” people who are trapped in their relationship, iced in this confusing block of guilt and wavering love, of fear of letting go, of a greater fear of seeing their partner with someone else. There are “in a relationship” people who long for the single life, there are “in a relationship” people who are completely happy with their partners, who have found their love. There are “in a relationship” people who are living a lie; there are “in a relationship” people who define “commitment” differently from their partners.
The “in a relationship” people rule the day and the single people emerge after midnight. The single people rise like zombies and populate the city, charming the fuck out of everything they see. They have a certain smell that only they can understand. They wear sunglasses and designer clothing and have poetry in their wallets. They take photos without cameras and grin wider than the devil. They feed off each other, they feed off the earth. When the sun rises, they go back home, and the rest of the world will continue its progressive cycle.
Vail drove to my house in her BMW. She was wearing a short skirt and a shirt that said:
Red?
I didn’t ask her what it meant. She was crying. She and Peter or whatever his name is had just broken up. We looked at each other. I laughed. I laughed so hard I could barely breathe. I laughed so hard I cried. My sunglasses fell off and shattered on the driveway; bits of plastic mixed with tears. She gave me the finger. I had a beer. We got into her car and drove and drove and drove.
Sometimes you get to that point where you wonder if something is still fun, or if it’s merely obsession. I sat down and wrote a short story and afterwards, I felt nothing. There was no happiness, but there was no sadness, either. I looked around my room and called out my name and listened for an echo.
Eva flew to Brisbane for the weekend. She decided to surprise me. My, was it a surprise. We hadn’t spoken in months. She was standing outside my door, her arms stretched out and an enormous grin on her face.
Dean!
She ran to my room and found photos of girls on my wall and we fought for an hour about who the hell they were.
There are guys on my wall too! Do you even care about them?
Eva had gotten taller, which was unfortunate for me. She had gotten more beautiful, which was unfortunate for me. The evening slowly draped itself over the day. I showed Eva my new car, which wasn’t really a new car. It was a secondhand bomb with stains and strange smells coming from the back seats. She frowned. We went for a drive, somewhere, anywhere. We parked at Kangaroo Point, by the river, and by then the darkness of night had completely taken over; buildings shone their lights in defiance. The Brisbane River, which lay in front of them and in front of us, looked like a giant, sleeping monster. It rained slightly but we kept sitting on a bench table, staring at the river. Eva leant her head on my shoulder.
I’ve never forgotten you, I decided to say.
She told me that she’d been reading my blog and voting all the time. She told me that I write about sex too much. Doesn’t your mother read it? She punched my arm and asked me who the hell Vail was, who the hell the girl at the bar was, who the hell that Cupid or whoever was. Is it real? Is it all real? She punched my arm some more. She told me that I sound like I’ve lost the plot, that I was turning into someone she never thought I’d turn into. She told me that I have to come back to uni. She told me that she came to Brisbane to force me to enroll again. I told her that I don’t want to be like everyone else: study, study more, work for someone and make them rich, study again, work again, survive for more money, die without retirement benefits. She told me to shut up. So you want to be a self absorbed alcoholic? I told her to shut up. I want to be a writer. She laughed her head off and told me to shut up again. She asked me if I was even getting published. I told her to shut up. She told me that she’s seeing someone now and that she likes him a lot.
When she said that, I thought about the first time we kissed. I wasn’t really thinking about how romantic the kiss was. I don't know what the hell I was thinking about. I was hoping that we would last. I thought about how we used to talk about getting married, having a little dog named Dick. I thought about the time I called her up, saying how some company named Orble decided to take me on as a paid blogger. I was going to call it Always Eighteen or Forever Eighteen or something corny like that. She told me that she was proud. She was the reader and I was the writer. She was the only girl I’ve been with who wanted to read all my crappy writing. I never followed her to Sydney, never even tried.
Well that’s fucked.
We drove back home. I showed Eva her room. She made a phone call, I got incredibly drunk. She saw me and laughed. She touched my face. I watched her fall asleep.
Sometimes you can love someone so much and they can love you so much that you both hold hands until you grow old and ugly and die. Sometimes you can love someone so much even if it’s impossible to talk to, or even be in the same room as that person. It takes an infinite amount of nothingness to diminish certain bonds. When we tell the world our hearts our broken, it asks us, So what the fuck is new? Kids are starving. You want to worry about them for once, dickhead?
I drove Eva to the airport. I looked at her standing there, her luggage in her hands.
Send me your manuscript, Dean.
No.
She laughed. I put a cigarette in my mouth but she pulled it away and punched the hell out of my arm.
I’m about to lose something, aren’t I?
We hugged and she walked away from me, into the big grey building that sends people away.
They ought to have a club for the rejected. They ought to have a club for people who get constantly judged and gossiped about, for the people who get looked down upon. In this club they’ll give free drinks to alcoholics and cigars to the smokers. They ought to have clubs for girls who don’t shave and guys who are plain ugly, no matter how much gel they put on. They ought to have a club for outcasts and failures, for the people with no ambition, for the people who don’t want to work for someone who will always be wealthier than they are. They ought to have a club for kids like us who were beaten around for being who we are, who were never able to claim what we worked so hard to get.
They ought to have an exclusive club for us ungrateful dickheads who feel sorry for ourselves, who cry from petty little things. They ought to have an exclusive club for those people who were pissed off during Christmas, who had no one to greet them a Happy New Years. They ought to give Free Entry passes to those who didn’t spend shit on Valentine’s Day, who actually know what the hell Easter is really about. They ought to have a club for ugly people, for naughty people, for fat people, for smelly people, for the bullied, for the hypocrites, for the scum of the earth. They ought to have a club that will put all the world’s dirt on a pedestal and be reminded that dirt is still worth something.
In this club we can have spelling mistakes, we don’t have to appreciate Shakespeare, we can listen to disgusting money making mainstream pop music and still be cool. In this club there are no mirrors there is no guilt there is no hatred and everyone is okay, everyone is great, everyone is not bad at all. We’ll no longer want to be somebody else. We’ll no longer want to march in this one furious line. We’ll no longer hate ourselves. We’ll no longer be tired. We’ll no longer be heartbroken. We’ll no longer be insomniacs. We’ll no longer be second preference. We’ll no longer be confused. We’ll no longer be empty. We'll no longer be the masked models in magazine photographs or the actors in movie posters. We'll be actual people.
They ought to have a club for the geeks, the wankers, the unfunny, the non-charming, the hypocrites, the mentally unsound and the fucking idiots. I’ll be first in line. I’ll be yelling and screaming and attempting to dance, and everyone else will be there, yelling and screaming and attempting to dance. I’ll be the happiest person in the world.
They ought to have a club with a big sexy neon sign on top of it. On the sign would be the word, Heaven.
Video: Heaven, by Talking Heads, set over clips from a film of the same title.
My friend noticed how poor and cynical I was becoming and offered to help me get a job at the advertising agency he works for. It was a job to be a casual, two day a week online copywriter for businesses for sale. A copywriter is a person who writes copy for ads. If you don’t know what copy is, it basically means text. So if someone says he’s writing copy for an ad, he’s writing text for an ad. I have no idea why they call it copy.
The boss of my friend’s agency is a severely wrinkled, white haired man who looks upset all the time. Some people look good because they look experienced. He looks like an arsehole who’s experienced far too much.
He looked me up and down with a disgusted look on his face. Why do you think you’ll be good for this job? he asked.
Because I lie all the time.
He laughed. We shook hands.
I need a raise! I said.
I just gave you the fucking job!
My friend and I went to this club called Common People to celebrate. He made me buy him eight beers. Think about all the poor people in Africa, he said. He didn’t make sense. Some time after some songs my friend vanished into the darkness and I met a sort of older girl who I hoped looked pretty during the day time, without the flashing red lights and the little glitters on her cheeks and all. I decided to lift her up a little bit.
Lift me higher! She giggled.
I wanted to say, You’re too fucking fat! but didn’t. I lifted her higher, so high that she was above my head. I nearly broke both my arms. I nearly cried.
We stumbled to her apartment. She went to the toilet to vomit then went back out and knelt down on her bed, facing me. There were photos of some guy all over her room. Some were torn up and thrown on the floor. She couldn’t sit up straight.
I’ve never been with a younger man before, she said.
Neither have I.
She giggled. She’s one of those girls who like to put their hands on their mouths and raise their shoulders when they giggle. I tried to say something else but instantly fell asleep, and when I woke, it was so dark that I couldn’t see my hands, my feet; I could only hear things like moving blankets, the wind, the slow cars outside. I heard her move around her sheets. I walked out of her apartment and caught a taxi, and after telling the taxi driver where I wanted to go, neither of us wanted to speak, we just looked ahead, things and non-things trembling in our minds.
There are some days where life has a tangible, one line definition. I can look it up and read it and this world and its people would make complete, blissful sense. There are some days where I would have no explanation, no reason for anything. Some days I would not be where I am. I’ll be this floating, drunken set of words, just floating around, seeing everything and not understanding anything. Once in a while people would notice me floating there and be confused, and they’ll wonder why I looked at them that way. Sometimes I would see a ghost, and she would be a beautiful ghost with a bad sense of fashion, and she would ask me how to find Monday.
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