Sex and guns and the Waterview tunnel
All I ever think about is beautiful girls and how I’m never going to get them. And I think about all those dudes out there who are going to get them instead of me. Those are the dudes I can’t stand: the movie dudes. The musician dudes. Those are the dudes who get all the beautiful girls. The dream is being stolen by a handful of dudes who have been selected and blessed by an arse of a God. So, I’m going to go through my whole life and never ever get a single one. Maybe if I pay. But the girls you pay don’t really want you. They’re polite and all that. But their eyes go weird. They call you babes. At least the one I went to called me babes. Who calls anyone babes?
My ex-wife, Lor, has turned into the opposite of sex. By the end of our stupid marriage, we weren’t just not having sex anymore. It was worse than that. It was like the sight of her drove sex right out of the whole world. Right off the planet. Actually, it was even worse than that. It was like sex was still there in the world but it had turned into anti-sex. Like sex-hate. Like all my stored-up heat or whatever was still with me but had turned around to eat me like cancer. That’s how it felt — like I had cancer and it was eating me, and Lor was the only thing making me stay there and get eaten. It felt like if I got away from Lor, I could get away from cancer.
So I did.
I know. I know. Poor old Lor didn’t really make me get eaten by anti-sex cancer, but that’s how it felt. These days she’s a good mate. We do movie nights at her house. She enjoys the company. She curls up on the couch and drinks her wine and I sit in the armchair with my beer. To me, Lor’s no sexier than a wheelie bin. She’s turned into that sort of shape now: a wheelie bin shape. I’d be ashamed to be seen out with her, but I’m not ashamed to watch a movie with her.
The other night we watched a movie: Me and My Girls. I hated it. It was all about this guy — Lor would say, Yeah yeah, it’s always about this guy — who was played by Josh Paley. The guy he was playing was some sort of gangster. It was in the States. Of course it was in the States. Anyway, the guy decides he’s going to start running some prostitutes. Lor would say, Funny how all the movies in the world that need to be made are all about a guy who is more or less the same age as the director and a whole lot of schoolgirls with no pants on. So, anyway, this gangster guy meets this group of three really young, really pretty girls, and then he falls in love with all of them. I mean, really in love. You can see it in the guy’s face, he really loves them. He strokes their little faces like they’re dolls, his big hand going over their little cheeks and his big thumb against the sides of their tiny little faces, going up and down. Just stroking them. I don’t know how big the actual Josh Paley is in real life, but he looked a lot bigger than the girls when he stroked their little faces in the movie. Actually, the real guy in real life is probably not that big. A lot of those guys aren’t. A lot of the action stars are really small in real life — they just make them look big on the screen. In real life, I could probably knock the crap out of Josh Paley. I could probably make him shit himself just by stepping up to him. I could probably just say, You got a problem? and front up to him, and he’d shit himself.
But of course I’d never get the chance. They have rings of security people around them. Ex-marines or ex-Navy Seals. Guyswith black headphones who all stand around towering over some short-arse who everyone wants to kill because he gets to fuck so many pretty girls. So many pretty girls. Josh Paley, the real guy, the actor, makes a point of it. Goes into rehab to recover from sex addiction, so-called, and then comes out and does it again. The only one he claims he’s never fucked is Maddison Nilsen. We know that because the prick did an interview and the interviewer, the one with the big beard and all the hair, asked him about it, because Maddison Nilsen is really delusional and keeps saying she’s done things she hasn’t. Lor would say, Leave the poor bitch alone. People. So, he denies that one. Says Maddison actually stalked him but he wouldn’t do it. The hairy interviewer said, "What? Too busy to bother? Do they have to line up and take a little ticket with a number on it like at a juice bar?"
The interview is on YouTube from start to finish if you want to watch it. The whole thing.
So, Josh half covers his face with his hand and says, ‘It’s not like that,’ to the hairy interviewer, but you can tell by the way he says it, by the way he covers his face with his hand, that it’s exactly like that. That all the beautiful bitch energy out there, all the young female sexiness, is being sucked off the planet by this one little arsehole, Josh Paley and a few of his short, famous friends.
Even the girls here are too busy watching dudes like him on their phones to look up. No one goes to the pub after work anymore. There’s no one at the pub, only guys my age and some of the old girls from the office with their low tops. Why do they do that? The low tops? Always too much creased-up old chest on show. Just don’t, please. Put it away. Nice clean hair and a good body and I’d do it. I don’t care. If they work out at the gym and just stay nice and fresh and groomed I’d do it. But just to be nice. Just as a favour.
*
When Lor paused the movie to go for a pee, I went and put the jug on. Most of the time Lor drinks wine and I drink my beer, but when it gets late we always have tea. If I can’t be stuffed driving, I stay over. I sleep in the spare room unless there’s too much of Lor’s crap all over the bed.
No, the one I really want is that Dakota Bolton. The one who bounces around on Paley’s lap in Me and My Girls. That’s the one I want. She squealed. She laughed. She was happy. She loved it. You could see in his face that he was loving her. The guy he was playing, of course. Not the actual Paley. The gangster guy. He had those things on his teeth. Those brace things. Grills. I’ve got no idea why they do that. So, he wasn’t looking his best. He was looking weird and scary and unwell. He was looking like he had spots. The real guy, Paley, doesn’t have spots. And he’s got these big eyebrows and he smiles like someone’s got a gun to his head to make him smile harder to break some sort of fucking smile record. Like his face is going to split apart, which frankly, I would like to see.
Anyway, I went into the kitchen and put the jug on for tea. The kitchen at Lor’s place looks down over a gully at the back of Glen Eden. There’s a lot of bush out there and you can hear moreporks sometimes. Not this night though. There were no moreporks on this night but on some nights you can hear them. Just when I was looking down the gully waiting for the jug to boil, just when I could half-see my reflection in the window, that was the moment when I decided to kill Josh Paley. It just came to me. I thought, Well, fuck it. My life is going nowhere. I’m being eaten alive by thoughts of girls I’m never, ever going to get. Like actually never, ever. I might as well do something big. I might as well do something that makes an impact. So, I’m going to kill him. Other people commit murders. Why not me?
I even had this thought, There’s no law against it, and made myself laugh, because of course there are laws against it. There are lots of laws against it. What I meant was, there’s no law against it being me who murders someone as opposed to it being someone else who murders them. I mean, there’s not an official list of people who are allowed to do murders. Anyone, in theory, can do it and nobody’s allowed to do it.
Which brings me to Devin Ross Jones, the guy who shot Jack Quarryman. I hate the prick, of course. But you can see his point. You can see how he might have been thinking, Why didn’t the universe choose me, Devin Ross Jones, for something special? And then, thinking, Oh! Maybe it did choose me after all! I realise it probably wasn’t as simple as that. I realise he was a special case. All I’m saying is that I had a glimmer of understanding what he might have been feeling. The universe isn’t fair. It never was fair, but now it shoves its unfairness in our faces all the time. Every time I turn on my phone, I see a story about who else Josh Paley has or hasn’t or might have had sex with. I mean, there were always tribes wandering around, and there were always alpha males dominating everything and spare, unwanted men who hadto go off somewhere else. But now the tribe is the whole fucking planet and only about ten men plus a few teenage boys are getting any nice-looking girls. And it’s now clear to me that if I don’t get a good-looking girl to be with soon, I’m going to die. That’s it. I’m just going to die. No great loss. Fair enough. But I might as well go out with a bang, so to speak.
You might say if you’re going to kill someone, if you’re going to go over to the illegal side of things and commit murder, and it’s sex you’re after at whatever cost and you don’t care about anything or anyone else, why not force yourself on someone? But that’s the thing. When I thought about it — which I did, standing there, looking out of Lor’s kitchen window, listening to the no moreporks — I didn’t want some poor little screaming girl hating me and then to go to jail for doing that. Hurting her and upsetting her. No. Where’s the fun in that? That’s the last thing I want. That’s the point. That’s exactly what I don’t want. I want what he gets. Not screaming and terror from women. I want the opposite. So, no. Anyway, I was suddenly past all that. My thinking had shifted. A new page. Standing at the window, looking down the gully, I’d moved on. I’d accepted it. I’d never get them. Okay, I thought. Not me. Never me. So it’s killing Josh Paley that I need to do now. All the rest of it, everything else, went sour on me.
Lor keeps the plain ordinary tea for me because that’s what I like. Plain ordinary tea. No herbal crap. No milk, no sugar. I got the mugs and the teabags out of the cupboard.
Then Lor came into the kitchen and opened up the slideout pantry thing she’s had installed at huge fucking expense and got out her chocolate biscuits. That’s something I would never do myself, get out Lor’s chocolate biscuits for her. I never know where she is with her chocolate-biscuit thing. It’s a tricky area. I never know whether she’s currently on them or off them. If she’s off them, shoving a big bowlful down in front of her is not very fucking supportive, is it? So I leave it to her and let her make the decision about the chocolate biscuits.
"I don’t think I can stand watching this silly prick anymore," I said.
Lor was shaking chocolate biscuits into a bowl. I tried not to notice how many chocolate biscuits were going in but there was a fucking hell of a lot of them. I figured she must be doing the Go With Your Natural Appetite thing again. Avoiding a Deprivation Mindset. The other approach she sometimes tries is: Put Sugar Out of Your Life Forever. You have to pretend sugar is a fatal poison. I could see she wasn’t in one of those phases.
"Might as well see how it ends now," she said. "Know what I’ve decided?"
"What?" I knew it would be a chocolate biscuit-related thing she would have decided.
"I’ve decided, fuck it. I’m going to get fat. Fatter. I’m going to get as fat as I possibly can and then die. How about that for a life goal? Also, drunk if I feel like it."
Lor went back into the living room and sat back down on the couch with her cup of tea and her bowl of a million chocolate biscuits and picked up the remote. "But I’m not going to drive drunk," she said, "Any other sort of drunk, fine, yes. I’ll do that."
I went back into the living room, sat down on my armchair and planned my next move. I’ll tell you something: having a fucking plan made all the difference to my state of mind. The change inside me was magic. It was just like everyone says: happiness comes from within. I had my time all structured out in front of me, my goal nice and clear and shining in the distance but not too far in the distance, just a nice stretch of distance out in front of me, like looking through to the end of the Waterview tunnel with a little bit of sun strike on the native-grass plantings beyond the exit.
I wasn’t kidding myself. I knew there would be challenges. For a start, there was the whole issue of gun ownership. Mad as we all know the US is about guns, can a tourist just jump off a plane and go and buy one? Maybe they can. Maybe they have guns in vending machines at the airport along with the candy bars and whatever they call chippies. Crisps? Maybe you can get a Mountain Dew and a gun and a packet of potato crisps or whatever. Or maybe they hand them out with the moist towelettes when you land in the plane? Enjoy your stay, sir, here’s your complimentary welcome-to-America semi-automatic. Just our way of saying, hi there! Or maybe you’ve got to get a licence? That’s what you have to get here to own a gun: a licence. You have to fulfil certain conditions. You can only buy a gun if you have acertain sort of checked shirt and a truck or something. You have to show them a picture of your truck. And then you can get your gun licence. Something like that. If you have a dog in the back of the truck you can have two guns.
Of course, there are other ways of killing people. Not just guns. But you’d have to get up close to them. Strangling, knifing. Knifing would be good. I’d enjoy knifing. Or maybe getting up that close and seeing his actual face would put me off. On the other hand, getting up close would give me certain opportunities. I could say something to him like, This is for all the stolen girls. All those heart-shaped bums you’ve got your hands around while the rest of us were missing out. In a funny way, I think he’d understand where I was coming from. I think he’d see my point. I think he’d be thinking, Yes dude I’ve had them all and I can see why you’d be so fired up you’d have to kill me. I get it.
For the first time ever, I put sugar in my tea. There was no reason. I don’t even like it. But I did it — I put two sugars in and stirred it round and round. I’d discovered my purpose. After this, after I’d done the murder and been jailed or electric chaired or whatever, people would say, You know Lorraine? The lady from Inwards Goods? The big one? Looks a bit like a wheelie bin? You know it was her ex who killed that actor guy. And people would go, You’re kidding me! And then they’d look at Lor as if there was something she could have done to stop it. Something that maybe was her fault. And then they’d probably say, Does anyone know why he did it? Did anyone ever find out?
Well? What would people say to that? No, no one ever found out? Or, yes, it was about not getting enough sex, or not getting the kind of sex he wanted. Not getting the pretty girls. He blamed Josh Paley for that. Like, if there was no Josh Paley, Maddison Nilsen would be stalking him instead. Ha ha. As if. He was a heatpump installer from fucking Ranui. How was Maddison Nilsen going to stalk him? She didn’t know he existed! How was Dakota Bolton ever going to jump up and down in his lap?
But there might be someone there, a guy listening to all this, who would be thinking, Well, someone had to do something. We can’t keep on seeing all these beautiful bodies out there and not do something. Either they’ve got to share the beautiful women around fairly or stop showing them to us all the time. Just keep them off our screens, keep them off our phones. Because they ruin everything. They just ruin everything. Taken with kind permission from the new collection of short stories How To Get Fired by Evana Belich (Penguin, $37), available in bookstores nationwide.
Next week's short story is by Kirsty Gunn.
