The Removalist King and I.

*Health and Safety Warning: Post may be rambling, incoherent, and spelling and grammatically challenged. Not unlike this warning.

The desire to purchase and possess a living creature had been strong in me for a while. It culminated, a couple of months ago, in the acquisition of a dog.

Owning a dog, it seems, makes one want to pose idiotically whilst smothering your canine.

I have been renting varied airy apartments for a while now, and whilst very comfortable in a number of ways (e.g. enough hot water, nice cooking smells from multitudinous Indian neighbours), they were beleaguered by their strict ‘No Dogs’ provisos. I had known for a while in my special place, somewhere above my big toe, but below my neck, and possibly in the organ residing in my left chest cavity, that I needed a canine companion – and if the dog ban couldn’t go, then I would have to.

Around a month and a half ago I found it, the answer to all my dreams: a fibro box. I applied for it, annoyed the real estate by ringing them every ten minutes to see if I had it, and then finally, was accepted for tenancy.

Dilapidated, and admittedly mouldy and flooding at its stilts, my fibro shack laughs in the face of modern convenience. Wryly.

With the aim of moving my entire household of bulky and heavy furniture single handedly, I asked my friend if I could borrow his Land Rover Cruiser (no European styling). Not only did he lend me it, but he also offered up his flatmate, ‘Red Shoes’. ‘Red Shoes’ is not, as you might think, a native American name handed down from generation to generation, but rather a pseudonym that I have given to this flatmate individual, because of his penchant for the aforesaid footwear.

A click of his red shod heels will not send him home, but their steady perambulation will usually take him to beer.

That shaggy gentleman, Red Shoes, was to deliver himself in the Four Wheel drive, and then help facilitate my move, mainly, I presumed, through utilizing his muscular mass for the purpose of lifting and shoving things. Whilst I had every confidence in Red Shoes’ strength, I did not have any high hopes when it came to order and organization, so on the day of the move I spent the better half of the morning sweating and groaning as I moved most of my furniture down three flights of stairs in a dangerous and chiropractically risky manner.

An hour after he said he would, Red Shoes roared up in a haze of dust and Aussie hip hop. I gave him a grin, and waved my hands sheepishly at the monumental mass of antiques and mattresses. Looking up, I saw Red Shoes’ eyes flicker, and my heart sank a little as I wondered what the two of us had gotten ourselves into. Just as I was about to excuse him in his hungover state, and perhaps call a professional mover, Red Shoes sprang to life. Apparently the eye flicker indicated careful logistical consideration, rather than post-drunken apathy.

“Fiffles,” he said, “I have a policy when it comes to moving. Everything can be done in one carload.”

With that he jacked up the stereo so that the sub in the back of the Cruiser shook, and began to pack. It became instantly clear that I was not just actively discouraged from placing objects in the back of the car, my aid was prohibited. Instead, my role was to pass him things, bang my head from time to time, and keep his spirits up with the promise of future beer.

Similar to Mary Poppins’ Carpet Bag, the Land Cruiser has a magical capacity for lamps and cushions.

When I was little, my dad had a similar rule. We women and children would pack for holidays, for example, but once the bags were lined on the gravel road, only dad had the necessary know-how to make every little thing fit with room to spare. It was like a Chinese box puzzle or a Rubic’s cube – each little part had to be slipped in in relation to the others, and one wrong move could thwart the whole thing. There was honour in a successful pack, and prestige in the careful slotting of a bag here or an umbrella there.

Red Shoes, who when drunk half closes his eyes and looks a little like a masculine snake or lizard who is stretched out in the sun and almost asleep, was alert beyond compare when piecing together my belongings in the trunk. I watched on amazed as he managed to squeeze in three tables, a number of chairs and a quantity of miscellaneous screens and lamps into one load.

We two steeled our resolve, and carried on this way, managing to complete the business in three short car trips. That was not, however, before the incident I like to call Hell in Harvey Norman.

I was ferried along to that great mecca of mass marketed white goods by Red Shoes, who was so amiable as to offer to swing past there and negotiate fridge and washing machine acquisition. When we arrived he scurried off to alleviate his queasy hung-overedness with KFC chips, whilst I sauntered in to organize financing a white goods salesman that I had already struck up a business relationship.

I should have known, I suppose. We both should have. But Harvey Norman is that perculiar sort of time vortex that makes you forget the many hours of pain and equivocation after you have left it, ensuring that you can never properly learn your lesson.

The only material difference between Harvey Norman and Hell is Signage and Typeface.

By the time 45 minutes had past, Red Shoes had forgotten all about the delicious chips, all about the joy of the move, and all about anything other than the slow revolution of his eyes back into his sockets, as he sat on a massage chair contemplating ways to kill me for holding him up for so long.

Red Shoes tore himself away from the chair eventually, ending an hour of motorized Shiatsu massage to saunter over to me and the salesman.

“Do you know what this lady is?” asked Red Shoes of the salesman. The man shook his head. “She is an idiotarian” stated Red Shoes. “By that I mean that not only does she not eat meat, she also doesn’t eat wheat, sugar or dairy, and for no apparent reason!” The salesman began to smirk, warming to the idea of being one of the boys, and ganging up on me.

One dietry need not being sufficient, my penchent for fussiness makes it difficult to eat at restaurants, and maintain social ties.

“Before I met Fiffles,” Red Shoes elaborated, waving his hand for emphasis, “I loathed and despised vegetarians. But after meeting her, their eating ideology seems completely rational and reasoned by comparison. This woman is in dire need of being taught a lesson, methinks.”

At this the salesman giggled, his attention completely diverted from me and our transaction. He enthusiastically picked up a power drill that was lying on his desk, and began to drill through a piece of paper with a sort of false nochalence. This, I presume, was done in an attempt to be reciprocal and show off to Red Shoes. This sort of juvenile and abusive behaviour continued until we left the store.

It was not, in fact, the first time that Red Shoes had called me an idiotarian. It was not, in fact, the last. We eventually escaped from that Harvey Norman hell, not, unfortunately leaving behind a smoking mass of burned rubble, but rather 4000 of my dollars.

From there on in the move progressed smoothly, and was sanded around the edges, metaphorically and at times literally, by the continual aid of Red Shoes, his flatmate (owner of the Land Cruiser, and builder my washing machine), and various others (e.g. carpenters).

Now I am presently sitting at the desk, in my beautiful fibro palace, still enjoying the fruits of Red Shoes’ labour (that is, furniture). A little dog sits quietly in the hall, gnawing on a particularly objectionable and blackened bone. The ambivalence I feel towards Red Shoes has not dulled but rather intensified due to his helping hand, and whilst it was all in all a great experience I am considering offering up a small sacrifice (possibly my new neighbour’s new infant child) to the moving Gods if I can stay put for at least a year or so.

Idiotarian, the term coined by Red Shoes to describe my gustatory persuasion, is also used by militant Right-Wing War Bloggers to describe citizens who object to America’s invasion of Iraq, or support Gay Marriage, Gun regulations, or civil liberties in general. The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, I presume, acts as a Bastian of the political Right by eating any pesky Liberals that attempt to go near a ballot box or a political protest march.

My one, my true, my own.

When I think about the women that I have loved, frantically, passionately, wonderfully and wholly, one name springs to mind. That name should, of course, not be published here for reasons of protecting the identity of a dear friend. But then this woman adores notoriety and is whatever the reverse of ‘privacy protective’ is, so I will give her real name, which is:

LETTY!

Letty is short for Leticia, which means ‘Joy’ – and whilst Letty is never far from mining the depths of human suffering, when she is not down there she is scaling the heady peaks of rapture, and thus experiencing a lot of it. In her mania, madness, and rare moments of lucidity, she gives me a lot of joy too, hence my ode to her here.

Letty and I met around the time of my conception, I believe. We have, however, maintained from a young age to have shared a couple of lives together, previous to this one. In line with this, a psychic we once went to told us that we had been a mischievous couple of lasses around the time of the Salem witchhunts, and killed a man through our impish experimentation.

The night after we heard this spooky past-life reminiscence, we were hanging out on Letty’s bed. staring at the sheets, oddly silent and serious minded in our reflection. Slowly, slowly our eyes moved up and met. As they did we both experienced a vivid and visceral flash of remembrance – a man, dead at our hands! We both stifled shrieks in unison, noise being unseemly at such a time. We were two young and imaginative girls, thoroughly freaked out by the psychic’s strange vision and a creation of our overactive teenage minds. We didn’t speak for a week – too scared to face our reincarnated selves.

With witch hunts widely discredited, Letty and I live to fight another day.

 

One night, when Letty and I were having a sleep over I was woken by a sort of mad rumbling sound. That sound transpired to be Letitia. I was 13, and whilst not believing in sleep during a sleepover on principle, was happy at that time to be enjoying it. Letty continued to moan and thrash, eventually sitting bolt upright, proceeding to rant at me in a strange, satanic voice.

I was scared… very scared.

Letty, it turned out, was not. She did it for a joke, to give me a little fright.

Did Letty emulate Linda Blair, or vice versa? Debate continues.

Another night, different bed, I sat next to her, trying to talk her down from a precipice of despair and rage. She produced, this time, a knife from behind her back.

I gasped and Letty let loose; not on herself, but on her pillow. She was frenzied, stabbing it and sobbing until the feathers flew.

Letty, you see, has a taste for the dramatic. She later used that same knife to slash to shreds a painting I drew for her, when she became jealous of my friendship with another girl.

When she was 16, Letty was going through a stage where she refused to don any attire that was not black or purple, experiencing coinciding teenage angst and gothic experimentation. I too, turned goth for a day, however with my blonde hair and fondness for maths I was never suited to the role. During this period Letty slept on a futon on the floor, under a giant poster of Robert Smith. I vividly remember my heart straining with love for her as I watched her dance to a cassette of his music, her image muted by the perpetual haze of acrid, nicotiney smoke that encompassed her.

That enigmatic and somewhat gender amorphic lead singer of the Cure.

When dancing, which she does at home, out and at various other intervals, Letty twirls and girates, like some sort of endlessly feminine dervish. She has that innate rhythm that I so sadly lack. Where I can wield a calculator, and navigate a computer, Letty can dance and sing with ease and pleasure.

Letty could shake her hips like she was from Columbia, if she wanted to.

Letty was pregnant at 17, and used to walk around lithely in bikinis, tanning her ever expanding stomach. I sat next to her at the hospital, just before she gave birth. She was sitting naked, crying in the giant hospital shower that they must use exclusively for the very pregnant, or the very fat.

Throughout the years Letty has, at alternate times, sworn off men, and proposed lesbianism as a viable life choice for the two of us. She has been in relationships with a schizophrenic pot dealer, a philandering Fillipino, and is currently romantically entangled with a 19 year old football player who breeds horses in Japan, and sells advertising for a newspaper.

I called her the other night, looking for a bit of support and guidance. She ranted to me for a while about her plan to sell up, and take to the road as a human praying mantis – copulating wildly and leaving her unwitting victims behind.

Now I’ve made her, and our friendship, sound utterly mental. But fortunately, or unfortunately, it is not. There are times of cups of tea, watching of movies, talking about our days at work. But when it comes to Letty, the madness and ferocity is what makes me smile, and I always romanticize her and our friendship.

Like now.

To truly love a bird

A Green-Bridge is being constructed at my university, linking the campus by road to afor-separated suburbs. The verdure descriptive does not, I am told, give clue to the paint job of the completed bridge, but rather the environmental message it sends (only buses and pedestrians will be allowed to cross). Anyway, the building of this worthy connector has necessitated the closing of a road that I travel everyday to uni, forcing me to motor a detour each morning.

 

The detour is one of those windy roads that reminds me of engineering students (probably because it is near the engineering faculty, although I am making no assumptions), and has more than its fair allocation of pedestrian or zebra crossings.

 

As I was driving through these roads this morning I saw a little duck, standing nervously at the end of one such pedestrian crossing. Now a duck’s legs are short, and my Volvo is long, I think that I could have made it over the crossing before the duck hit the road. But conditioning was too strong for me, and the force of habit pulled the car to a halt at the stripy strip.

 

“Well go on!” I yelled at the duck, waving my hands in encouragement, as another car pulled to a sharp stop at the duck’s perambulation.

 

The duck honestly seemed to listen. He (or she) looked both ways, and then carefully waddled across the pedestrian crossing, never deviating from the road-rules sanctioned path for a second.

 

Wonderful things, birds, really. I like it when they act like humans, or when humans act like birds for that matter (the miracle of flight anyone?). Seeing the sweet little duck’s strange behaviour this morning brought to mind a couple of other poultry interactions I have had, one of which I will describe below.

 

One time, again at uni, I was sitting quietly on a bench outside my lecture theatre. I was enjoying an apple in the ten minute break afforded to me by the Nazi-lecturer. As I sat there, a crow flew by, and then dropped down beside me.

 

I looked solemnly at him, and he back at me. Now a crow’s gaze can be quite intense you must realize, so it was with unwavering care that I broke of a piece of my apple and dropped it softly on the ground in front of the crow.

 

The crow considered my gift, and then finding it acceptable, began to eat. We both sat there for the next little while, that crow and me, munching on our fruit and shooting the breeze with one another. He waddled around me (yes, I have used that word twice, but what word can so adequately describe the stunted walk of a bird!) pecking away, and I felt at one with this beautiful black bird.

 

Birds are my favourite animal, I feel a special kinship with them. The magpie, so cheeky! The Noisy-Minor, a perpetual skally-wag! The butcher bird, so regal! It all started with my pet Budgerigar, this personal love of the feathery kind. But I have to say, once you have yourself, truly loved a bird, you will know what I mean.

The Volvo Monologues

When my parents first brought a brand spanking new white Volvo 850 in 1995, I promptly burst into tears, and swore never to ride in it with them for fear of public scorn. It was not until a couple of years later, brattish teenagehood subsiding, that I deigned to enter its boxy leather interior. By that stage I had got my license (fourth time lucky), and I took that magnificent white beast on camping trips and picnics – ferrying with me hoards of people that the roomy backseat of the 850 allows.
When I moved to Brisbane to go to university my parents kindly supplied me with a beaten up old red Subaru with clunking gears, no airbags and unreliable breaks. I thought I was happy with it… but oh how wrong I was.
One weekend after staying with my olds I left the Subaru with them (ostensibly to provide my sister with a geared car in which to learn to drive), and took the Volvo back to Brisbane. The moment he (the Volvo is, of course, masculine) and I hit the road I knew that the bond between us was special – pure, true and not meant to be broken.
My dad was fond of saying, after a long drive,
“I called on the Volvo, and it answered.” These words summed up exactly how I felt. When driving an 850 you feel like you are navigating the road in a tank, a tank kitted out with armchairs on the inside. No journey is too long for the Volvo, as it eats up the kilometers hungrily and still asks for more. The drive back to Brisbane from my parents’ is about 2 hours long – but to me it was no more than two minutes, such was my comfort and exhilaration.
After that trip I refused to go home, telling my parents that I would come back when they promised that the Volvo could be left with me. Extreme measures I know, but sheer Volvo passion had taken over.
It is now 5 years on and that car means as much if not more to me now, as it did then. And so, to the present.
Two days ago, after a long slog at the alma mater I tracked back to where my Volvo was parked, and upon reaching it, slid my key its hallowed door. But nothing! The key would not turn! I fiddled and twisted but the door wouldn’t open.
“My love, my one, my own!” I mentally lamented, becoming slightly panicky as I considered the possibility of lack of safe passage out of St. Lucia.
Straightening up, I looked around, only to see my own sweet car three parking spaces down. I had been attempting to open someone else’s dearest treasure! I may be forgiven, of course, at times one white rectangle looks like another. Yet I should have looked for the telltale customization of stickers and scratches that is my boy, and recognized that I was trying to force upon another’s Volvo.
Not that I think the owner would have minded. See, there is a camaraderie between Volvo drivers. When passing another proud master of that swarthy Swedish steed, I raise my finger off the wheel (not the middle one of course) in a salute to the chosen. For a true Volvo driver is one since birth, I believe. Sometimes the grandmas and grandpas blink back at me confusedly, but other youthful motorists like me always wave and smile a knowing smile.
One time a sweet new Volvo C70 pulled up next to me, and the man driving signaled for me to wind down my window.
“I love my Volvo so much,” he said simply to me. “Do you love your Volvo?”
“I do,” I replied, “I do.”

Indiscriminate Love

Recently a lot of people have been talking to me about love, that heady or pragmatic (depending on whom you talk to) state. I am given to understand that when reached in a relationship this ‘love’ precipitates bells ringing, birds singing and both parties living out their lives together in a state of perpetual nervous ecstasy.

I consider discussions of the aforementioned emotion as both fraught and embarrassing, however I persist in them, my eyes rolling back in my head as I imagine committing my own special brand of hari-kari that consists of slitting myself open lengthways, as opposed to the more traditional horizontal disembowelment.

I once met a boy at a nightclub in Darwin. We had but a brief meeting – he attempted to lick my armpit and I attempted to catch the first available taxi back to the apartment at which I was staying. The upshot of this one-time encounter was a frenzied series of calls over the next month or so which would usually transpire thus:

Me: “It is 2am.”

Boy: “I love you, I know it is strange to say it so early, but I really think that there is something about you….. I LOVE YOU!”

No such namby-pamby ineffectual and unrealistic declarations on my behalf I assure you. I have only said I love you to a boyfriend once, and in that case I had known him since childhood and it took me a full ten years to build up to it. Even then, I am not sure that “Do you want to go to the movies?” constitutes as a full declaration.

In fact, I have a relatively small list of people I love (note to self, possibly make wallet sized card of said list and monitor change over a year), and my love for them has shown itself to be enduring, and more often than not based on blood ties, deep feelings or a track record of stable support and friendship.

All this to say that I do not take love lightly.

And yet…

I went to a Beatles tribute concert the other night and sitting in front of me was a be-jumpered, clearly bored, man with Downs Syndrome.

“I love you,” I thought as I looked at him, the words diving directly into my head. And I felt it.

Driving to uni today I passed a group of disenchanted council workers, scratching their heads as they surveyed the seemingly unchanging mess of witches’ hats, stretched tape, and gravel. My eye was caught by a bearded fellow who looked to be around 65, still smart in his orange helmet,

“I love you,” I thought, and then shook myself.

I remember very clearly walking around Toowong a few years ago, and being caught up behind a slow old codger, dressed shabbily in what would have been his 1940’s best. As I stumbled behind him, trying to measure my stride, I saw him pull out a comb from his back pocket, and comb back his thinning greased hair. Who was he doing it for? I wondered at his desire to appear his best, given his age, and situation. He was so neat, so futile and neat.

“I love you,” I thought – and I remember this one very clearly because it played on my mind for weeks. I had a mad desire to sweep him up and read to him, clean his house and fill it with flowers, and make sure that he felt appreciated.

In terms of vociferously loving things, I have also noticed that I frequently declare my love of inanimate objects and foods, cheese high among their number.

With my guarded and limited dolling out of love I think that it is somewhat ridiculous and contradictory that I can be so judgmental and serious about that emotion, and yet seem to feel love indiscriminately for strangers and objects.

I begin to wonder if people I feel sorry for, and cheese, have a monopoly on my love.