Chapter 4 #5
I write back: Sounds seedy. Count me in! And the peace sign emoji.
I don’t know if that new bar will be any different than the ones I despise, but I’ll suck it up to reconnect with Charlie.
Seeing him on Wednesday made me happier than I’ve felt in years.
It’s not just having my friend back. When I’m around Charlie, it’s like I’m my whole self.
When we lived in the hostel, for those glorious months we were led by our guts, not our brains.
Charlie’s the only person who knows I’m a man whore, and he’s fine with it.
It’s my fault my life didn’t turn out happier.
If I’d stayed with him in Perth, years ago, I’d be well rounded and normal.
Instead, I went home. What kind of dumbarse mouse escapes certain death, then wanders back into the trap, lies down on top of the cheese and waits for the metal to snap his neck?
This dumbarse mouse.
I vividly remember the moment I returned.
I stepped off the plane, walking across the Geraldton Airport tarmac, determined to be myself.
Then I reached the sliding airport doors, my parents waiting on the other side, and I felt all the air disappear around me.
I walked through those doors and my shoulders hunched over, crushing the oxygen out of my lungs.
The self I had found in Perth flew out of my body. He was gone. I was Beige Zeke again.
Maybe if I hang out with Charlie now, I’ll find my way back to who I once was.
I tap out another message to Charlie: I missed you, man.
There’s a long silence. My cheeks go hot. I feel like a soft, sentimental idiot.
Charlie replies: Gayyyyyyyyyy
I snort-laugh.
Before I can reply, Charlie heart-reacts to my message and adds I missed you too, you big wanker.
I’m half-watching the footy, half-cruising Grindr when the doorbell rings. I collect my pizza, garlic bread and lemonade from a delivery guy in a parka.
When I get back to my room, Sabrina’s off her phone call. Her slender shape is leaning against the door frame, her blouse and skirt both marked by cupcake frosting from her drive home. Her pale arms are folded as she fixes me with this exasperated you-won’t-believe-what-Shane-did-now look.
‘Did Allison threaten to leave him again?’ I prod, by way of hello.
Sabrina’s eyes widen. ‘Oh no, she actually left him this time – but between Victoria’s first text and this phone call, they’ve now gotten back together.’
I snort. ‘The saga continues.’
‘Shane’s a fucking arsehole,’ Sabrina states. ‘If he doesn’t have anything to hide, he shouldn’t care about Allison going through his phone.’
I pause. I disagree with Sabrina with every fibre of my being.
I know how it feels to have your privacy and boundaries violated to hell.
Nobody should have their phone viewed without their consent.
But disagreeing with her would lead to an argument which could only be defused by me eventually caving in. Not worth it. I just want my pizza.
I offer one of my generic phrases that sounds agreement-adjacent. ‘I guess some people never change, huh?’
‘Tell me about it!’ Sabrina chirps. ‘What’s all this, then?’
I tap the Domino’s box. ‘It’s our favourite thing, Sabrina: junk food,’ I say. ‘It’s how we eat our feelings instead of processing them. I’d offer you a slice, but I’m a fatty and I’m gonna eat the whole thing.’
Sabrina tut-tuts at me, tilting her head. ‘Zekey, for the last time, stop fat-shaming yourself,’ she says. ‘You look gorgeous and you know it.’
Here’s the thing: we both have the same diet, but Sabrina’s metabolism keeps her slim no matter what she shovels in. I just glance at a cannoli and I gain a kilo.
‘I look like shit, Sabrina,’ I deadpan. ‘But sure, I’m beautiful just as I am, yada yada yada.’
‘That’s better!’ Sabrina coos. ‘And anyway, that isn’t what I was asking about. I meant – what’s all this about?’
Sabrina gestures to the TV in my room, still displaying the green oval of the MCG, footy players sprinting down its length.
For real, it’s like being caught watching porn.
‘Oh, it’s – uh – a football game,’ I manage.
Sabrina’s lips curve. ‘A football game?’
‘Like, as in football,’ I explain uselessly. ‘Aussie Rules. AFL. Footy.’
‘I know what football is,’ she says delicately. ‘It’s all Shane ever had on the TV. But I don’t get why you have it on your TV. Are you watching it ironically?’
Good Lord, that is the most Victoria thing I’ve ever heard come out of Sabrina’s mouth.
I can see them sitting with their uni friends over a grazing board of vegan dark chocolate and figs to ironically watch a game of AFL with the intention of dissecting it.
One of them would go on to write a sententious opinion piece in The Conversation about how the milieu of Australian football upholds both rigid heteropatriarchal gender norms and white supremacy.
Nobody involved with the AFL would ever read it.
‘Some guy I’m seeing is into footy, so I was watching it out of curiosity,’ I say.
Sabrina smirks. ‘Oh, this is too funny. Zeke Calogero! Watching sports! Who are you trying to kid here?’
‘It was just one game,’ I mutter, like a straight boy found with a cache of shirtless male beefcake pics. It’s my first time, I swear.
‘Oh, I get it – trying to impress your new guy … a hangover from your crush on Hammer,’ Sabrina says matter-of-factly.
I’ve never told Sabrina everything about Hammer.
But one drunk night not long after I first moved in, we did have a big D&M, and I got uninhibited enough to admit I had a crush on Hammer in high school.
She doesn’t know that crush was partly reciprocated, or that he fucked me, but that’s enough for her to feel qualified to judge the situation.
‘This guy’s name is Jack,’ I tell her. ‘He’s not Hammer.’
‘No, but … it’s a bit cringe when you’re going after, like, proxy macho meathead guys in place of Hammer, you know? Like psychologically?’
Sabrina originally enrolled in a psychology degree. She excelled in the classwork but failed the practical component: instead of listening to her patients, she always tried to fix them. She swapped into biomedical science, but she never misses an excuse to wheel out some vague therapy-speak.
‘I dunno if that’s it,’ I say. ‘This guy’s totally different to Hammer.’
If anything, he’s more meatheaded than Hammer, but she doesn’t need to know that. And what she never gets is that I go after macho meathead men because they’re fucking hot.
‘Oh, I’m sure – just looking out for you,’ Sabrina says, touching me lightly on the shoulder.
‘I’ve dated a meathead. You can’t get anything real out of them.
I just don’t want to see you get hurt. And I’d hate to see you take on this guy’s hobbies to impress him.
Football isn’t you.’ Sabrina looks into my eyes with her piercing, ice-blue irises.
‘You are Zeke. Sweet, soft Zeke. That’s why we love you.
No need to pretend to be something you’re not, okay? ’
My hand twitches involuntarily. I hide it behind the pizza box, but it keeps going, like there’s a damaged nerve trying to form a fist. ‘Of course not,’ I reassure her, with my sweet Mehrabian smile. ‘I’d never pretend to be who I’m not.’
‘Good,’ Sabrina says, with finality. She grabs my remote and switches the footy off. ‘On that note, it’s movie night! Bring your pizza into the lounge and I’ll order Shining Dragon. You can pick the movie! Oh!’ She pauses, pointing at my wall. ‘What’s that still doing up?’
On my bedroom wall is a Tom of Finland poster of the most gloriously homoerotic image I’ve ever seen.
It’s a classic black-and-white print of a muscular, shirtless cop sitting on top of two African American leather dudes’ laps.
The cop has a cartoonishly humungous bulge in his jeans.
The Black men are sitting either side of him, each sucking one of his nipples, while their hands grasp beneath his bulge, reaching for his arsehole almost as explicitly as Jack reached into mine today.
The leather men both have a patch on their jackets branding them Tom’s Men with a symbol of a dick and balls.
I bought the Tom of Finland poster when I was sixteen.
Even though it’s not nude, it felt more suggestive than porn.
I posted it up in my and Charlie’s hostel dorm room and we had a ritual before bed each night where we’d touch the poster and say, ‘Goodnight, Tom.’ When I moved back to Gero, I taped the poster to the back of my wardrobe, and continued the ritual.
I stumbled across it in a box of my old Gero stuff a few months ago, and taped it up to the wall of my bedroom-cum-jail cell.
‘It’s a Tom of Finland poster,’ I tell Sabrina. ‘Erotica.’
No man in history has ever more cautiously chosen the word ‘erotica’ over ‘porn’.
Sabrina screws her face up. ‘I just … it’s a bit … borderline, don’t you think?’
‘Borderline what?’ I ask.
Sabrina’s next words see-saw on the fulcrum of her frown before falling on the side of a smile instead. ‘Look, never mind,’ she mutters. ‘Let’s watch a movie.’
My shoulders relax. ‘Keen,’ I say, seizing the moment to turn my bedroom light off, hiding my poster and signalling that conversation is over. ‘But first, tell me what went down with Shane and Allison …’
We shuffle to the lounge together to have a big bitch session over vodka and Prosecco while Sabrina orders Uber Eats.
Tonight’s movie is a romcom I thought might be good cause it has a hot actor in it, but it turns out to be the same-sex version of Hallmark slop.
The two male leads cuddle and peck on the lips but never go below the pants, which might be the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen on TV.
I mean, it’s sweet, but I can’t help thinking this movie was made for straight women who like to see gay guys as cute and sexless.
Which we fucking aren’t.
‘It was a bit cliché, but I liked it,’ Sabrina says at the end of the movie. ‘Like, it’s beautiful and happy. It’s like they want you guys to feel joy now and you really should! It must resonate for you, right?’
‘Oh yeah, it’s so great, I love it,’ I mutter meaninglessly.
Before I get into bed, I touch my Tom of Finland poster.
‘Goodnight, Tom,’ I say. ‘You’re a legend.’
I lie in bed awake longer than usual. Seeing Charlie on Wednesday, then Jack and the footy today, and the graduation tomorrow – where I’ll see my parents – makes me feel like I’m swirling into a whirlpool. Life was structured at uni, and now I’m rudderless.
I can’t stop thinking about Sabrina saying I’m meant to feel joy.
Why? Because straight people want me to feel joy?
What if I don’t? Was ‘it gets better’ our message, or theirs?
I mean, coming out did make me better, but it didn’t solve my every problem.
It never does, and nobody ever admits that.
I feel like I’m not allowed to say it out loud – like the gay mafia will shoot me if they hear my treason.
If I’m honest, and a Catholic boy always is, joy is not something I feel. Watching a show made by straight people telling me to ‘feel joy, or else’ doesn’t change that. Day to day, I feel miserable, lonely and empty.
On Wednesday at Steam Works, I thought of myself as light and dark.
But maybe there’s no me at all. I’m a series of masks and illusions, dancing and performing for whoever is in front of me, and beneath the masks there’s nothing.
The oxygen in my lungs is other people’s air disgorged into me, tumefying my rib cage – never my own breath.