Occupational Hazard
She was breathtakingly gorgeous
by almost any eurocentric standard of feminine
beauty
without having to work on it at all, or even
trying.
She’d procured a whimsically suitable job –
as some kind of receptionist or something –
for which her principal duty was, as she told
me,
‘being pretty all day.’
I wondered if this could somehow become
onerous,
if, for instance, some Wednesday afternoon or
something
she just didn’t fucking feel like being
decorative, for a change.
The element of choice did seem to be missing.
Paul,
Nicknamed Pete
It was 1963 and Pete was
eighteen,
a freshman at a faceless
university,
good-looking, medium-short, and
muscular,
with buzzcut hair and a sly
grin.
From an impeccable small-town
upper-middle-class family
one state away,
he exuded the maturity and
confidence
that only the sort of people
who naturally exude maturity
and confidence can.
He had a girlfriend back home
whom he fucked when he could,
no small deal at that time and place.
He became the protégé of a frat boy named Steve,
similarly good-looking and well-groomed and good-familied,
who’d gone to my high school
a few years earlier
and who’d always had a reputation
for getting as
much pussy as he wanted.
I remember once hearing Pete ask Steve about cunnilingus,
apparently in regard to a request from his girlfriend.
Steve replied sagely that he knew the technique,
and explained it, adding
that he himself might give it a try
“when fucking stops being a thrill for me.”
Pete seemed to
accept this with approval.
Their sexual progress over the next few decades
is something about which
I’d rather not contemplate.
She was the niece of the middle-aged girlfriend
of a friend of my stepfather,
who told me to look the family up
when I went to Montreal
The family was German and
conservative,
but even though I was a
21-year-old bearded Jew
they were friendly because they
knew my mother and stepfather.
Still, they were fearful of
hippies,
complaining about one
long-haired suitor
who’d sat cross-legged on their
front lawn and played the flute,
and planned to send gorgeous,
blue-eyed, 17-year-old Patti
in the autumn to an all-girls boarding
school in I think Austria
They invited me to spend a long weekend with them
at their lake house on Lac Tremblant,
about 110 km north of Montreal
Patti would show me the way.
About halfway there she told me to pull over
at a notably isolated patch of countryside.
We got out of my minibus and she produced a joint.
I must have looked nervous because she told me to relax,
the nearest cop was umpteen miles away in Saint-Jovite,
and he was the village idiot.
After we’d passed the joint back and forth a few times
she didn’t pass it back, locked onto me with eye contact,
and let her
teen-age hormones take over.
As I drove the rest of the way to Lac Tremblant,
she told me about one of her boyfriends
who was in the local Sicilian mafia,
how she smuggled hash for him up from the United States
and how after a run she’d get naked, go into his sauna,
put a large
amount of hash on the rocks, breathe deeply, and relax.
If her parents had been sharp,
they would have welcomed that long-haired flautist.
Intelligence
When I was
teaching
in a gifted and
talented education programme
somebody asked me
what it meant
for people to be
gifted
and if having a
high IQ
just means being able to remember more
stuff.
It was difficult
to explain to her
that differences
in intelligence
are far from
unidimensional,
being differences in
the way people’s minds work and how they see things
and their
adeptness with higher-order cognitive skills
as well as in mental speed and memory
capacity.
I also didn’t tell
her – although I should have –
about a friend I
once had
who talked kind of
dumb, had an apparently limited vocabulary,
and when he wrote
me a note once when he was out
and put it on the
door because he knew I was coming by
it looked as if a
six-year-old child had written it.
He could, however,
beat me at chess
every time in
seven moves or less.
I knew when our
games went longer
that he was just
toying with me.
He also enjoyed
working calculus problems in his head,
was able to read
people as I never could,
and had social
skills far superior to mine.
Bess
the Greek
She had an annoying tendency
to utter the inanely cliché
expression,
“The whole nine yards”
with passionate forcefulness,
several times a day,
pausing for a beat
before the last two words each time for
emphasis.
She was gobsmacked when I declined
her offer
to shout me for a long weekend
in Las Vegas
even though I explained
that I’d never been to a place
I liked less.
She couldn’t understand why.
Mutual sexual attraction
obviously wasn’t going to
sustain that relationship for long,
and it didn’t.
Mistaken At First
It was a month or two after I’d
met the bloke.
I was walking my then-puppy
around the lake
on Waitangi Day, I think it
was,
and encountered him
in a group of mutual
acquaintances.
He asked me what my dog’s name
was,
and I told him, ‘Rhonda.’
He scowled at me and
remonstrated,
‘That’s not a dog’s name!’
as if I’d violated
some immutable, irrefutable
universal law.
I thought it just might have
been
one of the stupidest things
anyone had ever said to me.
All I could think of to say in
reply was,
‘Well, it’s this dog’s name,’
before continuing on our walk.
And to think, when I’d first
met him
I’d thought we’d be friends.
He also turned out to be
a physically violent proponent
of some bullshit religion of
sorts
involving, as I recall,
sacred rainbows,
aliens,
and the number seven.
Or was it six?
Skateboard As Fashion Accessory
My daily drives to Day’s Park,
back before my dog died,
took me past Fairfield
College
a secondary school that doesn’t make its students wear uniforms,
just after nine o’clock, except in the summer,
so I got to notice those who were deigning to turn up for school
a few minutes late – either slouching along
or darting
between moving cars to force a bit of braking.
One chilly autumn morning one of the slouchers whom I noticed
was a blond girl who had a conventionally pretty, childlike face
with a vapid, vacuous expression
and more than enough maquillage for a catwalk gig.
She was wearing bright-red, skin-tight short shorts
that were little longer than underdacks
and carrying a
skateboard.
When I’d been in high school I would have considered such a bimbo
to be overwhelmingly desirable,
but none of them would’ve given me the time of day.
Of course, back in the early sixties
she would’ve been sent home from school dressed like that.
We didn’t have skateboards then, either.
Denz
He used to be a rugby player,
obviously a prop forward,
and he looked as if he could
still
pack down in the Mooloo scrum
despite being old enough to
have progeny
who competed some years ago
in some overseas
adolescent hip-hop dance
championship
and who worked for him,
sweeping and staffing the cash
register,
during the school holidays.
He decorated the walls of his
barber shop
with rugby pictures and signed
team photos,
of course,
but also, from time to time,
with left-wing, anti-establishment
posters.
After several years he knew
exactly how I wanted my hair
and beard trimmed,
and even though he displayed a
fondness
for extreme hair styles for himself,
he did my natural look
with enormous bonhomie.
I hated to change barbers
at that point in my life,
but he shot through to Oz.
