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Love and Other U-Turns Page 5
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Fifteen minutes later, Jim appears at my door, dripping wet, handing me a block of Toblerone and some lemonade, nonchalantly heading towards the shower. I never told him Toblerone was my favourite chocolate. And lemonade was always a treat for feeling under the weather. I toss him a towel, like we already live together.
Afterwards, he sits on my couch, showing me some of the comedy work he’s compiled into a DVD, and we talk for four hours. We watch Pink being interviewed by Denton, and he rests his head on my belly like I always imagined old couples do when they’ve been together for years. Despite lifestyles at opposite ends of the spectrum, we share a synchronistically parallel value system on ideas of society, fear, money, freedom and creativity.
When he leaves, just after midnight, to catch up with a comedian friend who has just come off stage, I feel something huge has occurred.
I think I’ve met my soul mate.
Who tells crude jokes for a living. Jim had been single for over seven years. With an unpredictable lifestyle and a bawdy stage persona very different to his introverted private side, a salary which hadn’t exceeded $18 000 for a few years and no particular desire to settle down and live in a house, he wasn’t exactly ‘perfect catch’ material in the traditional sense of the word.
‘Besides,’ he’d said to me the night before, ‘if you have a wife or a girlfriend you’ve usually got to have a house to put them in.’
I, too, found it hard to even consider a ‘conventional’ relationship, but for different reasons. With a strange hankering for freedom myself, I railed against the idea that just because I was nearing thirty, I was supposed to put procreation deadlines and mortgages before true love and adventure.
I wasn’t that shocked when Mystic emailed me to say that Jim had spontaneously declared he was ‘in a relationship’ with me, the day after we’d met, in the car drive back to Sydney. But I was delighted. I couldn’t stop grinning, and I smacked into the wall of my bedroom after doing a little dance of happiness.
‘He is from a very good background,’ she wrote, concerned that I wouldn’t look beyond the veneer of the crude jokes and sparse belongings. Little did she know I’d fallen so madly for him that I couldn’t have cared less if he’d finished high school.
‘You both have Uranus conjunct your sun. The relationship will be characterised by freedom …’
A week later, he turned up in Melbourne, vaguely referring to a gig he had booked, which I later found out didn’t exist. He stayed over for two nights, and I asked him question after question about Australia, like it was a country I’d never visited.
‘When we go to Broome …’ he murmured in bed the second morning, and it didn’t even sound that strange to hear a man I’d known a week mentioning our visiting a place three thousand kilometres away like it was going to happen. Stranger still, I believed him.
‘I’d better go home now Lou,’ he said at about ten in the morning, referring to Sydney like it was just up the road. He had a gig that night in Windsor, just north of Sydney.
‘Well, drive safe,’ I said, as I watched the Mazda pull out of Barkly Street.
All day as I numbly checked my emails and zoned on and off planet earth, I checked the time and tried to calculate where he was on the Hume Highway.
Sometimes you don’t even need to think rationally, to know someone has it figured out. After too long adrift in a sea of money-seeking city slickers, I’ve fallen in love with a man whose sole purpose is to make people laugh, and roam the country. No contracts, no trappings, no fears. A life based simply – and authentically – on freedom.
Here was someone whose company gave me more pleasure, insight and comfort than anyone I’d met my entire life. So the outer details of his life didn’t really matter, like the goat jokes, and the fact that he owned nothing but a car. That all came second to this central, deep desire to spend as much time as possible in his company.
After a restless night pacing the streets of Fitzroy, I pause on the corner of my street, and notice a piece of graffiti I never saw before: ‘Do you really think you’re in control?’
I walk up the stairs to my flat, deliberating on whether the feelings I have are reciprocal. An old episode of Water Rats comes on the screen, with a familiar-looking figure juggling balls on a beach. The credits roll: Jimbo the Clown.
For a Pisces like me, signs like that are dangerous.
So since the next day was fine and sunny, I owned a car, and I’d just completed the last of five stories due for three weeks, I decided to drive to Sydney to see him. And that’s probably when I started to come undone.
It’s strange, how easy it is to drive to another state of Australia in just one day. People usually refer to borders and state lines like they are significant things, forgetting that once upon a time, they didn’t exist. Someone constructed that delineation out of nothing. It’s all just space, and we make up the lines.
I turn right at the end of my street to the sign on Sydney Road. I don’t even need to look at the map. I know this will take me straight there.
SYDNEY 888 KM.
I’d just texted him about an hour ago, from a café, where I couldn’t concentrate on anything. ‘What if I drive to Sydney – today?!’
And, the freedom-loving soul that he is, honouring instinct and whimsy over planning and forethought, he calls me straight back, inviting me to tour the coast with him, saying we’ll have a place to stay in Sydney, when I get there.
Phew. I race back to the flat to pack. I’m glad it’s not just me.
I feel I’ve been given a get-out-of-jail-free card by virtue of having a car. The Eagles croon to me from the car stereo, making me feel like a gypsy cowgirl, and I relish the crispness of the air as I alight from the car at Seymour in the darkening night, to grab a takeaway coffee.
The air tastes like freedom, and the eucalypts shiver in the night, whispering change, whispering mystery by the side of the seemingly endless Hume. As I drive through unknown towns I feel I am heading towards something big, unknown and crazy, far from everything I’ve ever experienced before. But what’s perhaps strangest is that I don’t feel scared. It all feels inevitable.
I ponder the story I know so far, rehashing our two encounters to date. Our conversations have been epic – like biographies written in fast-forward. It was like we were both in a hurry to fill the other in on the details so we could just get on with it.
He couldn’t care less about the difference between lino or tiles when you’re renovating, but he does know the name of every small town in Western Australia and has a personal best of driving from Perth to Adelaide on less than three hundred dollars. His set of street directories, for every city in Australia, takes pride of place in a sacred box in the back of his car – his ‘office’. He’s probably driven down more roads and crossed more state lines than most Australians would in their lifetime. He’s given me an impression of country Australia so far from the Wolf Creek perception that is all we ever really hear, in the city.
‘The ones with no teeth, Lou, they’re usually the gentle ones …’
He’s so philosophical at the idea of danger it’s funny – drug addicts, hobos, jailbirds don’t scare him – in a way only someone who is at peace with their dark and light sides can be. He’s been performing for over fifteen years, and only went bush when he had reached the limit of freedom he felt he could achieve, in fickle, media-slick Sydney. After a stint at a clown course in Japan to becoming Sydney’s most popular children’s party clown, he decided to give stand-up a go at age thirty, winning a new talent award and getting a few prime TV spots in the early days which set him on track.
He is just as restless as me, with lack of growth, even when he does reach certain goals. ‘I got bored, Lou. The jokes had to be a certain level of tame to keep the agents happy. And I started to do improvisation, which used my clown skills. I always loved that more.’ So he set up his own night, building up a crowd at the Albion Hotel in Parramatta which was, according to the bouncer, ‘The
only night we never had any fights.’
We share something else – big – in common. Our major decisions are made from a more instinctual, feeling level than logic. It’s something I’ve never been able to explain to anyone else, when I quit a job at a moment’s notice or I’ve taken a risk – like this drive to Sydney. Sometimes you just know things. Words – and explanations – get in the way of the truth.
Bringing in at least a couple of hundred punters with his rogue mix of stand-up, improvisation and a crude send-up of Perfect Match, he’d reached what he then thought was his peak, until he pushed it too far one night and the politics of the venue booker saw him given a warning to ‘tone it down or leave’.
‘But the punters didn’t want me to tone it down, Lou. This is the west of Sydney, they aren’t going to laugh at the musings on supermarket packets that might work in the corporate market. I was giving them what they wanted. But it’s like the agents – or the venue bookers – are ashamed of what makes real Australians laugh.’ So he left. The clown ran away from town.
And that’s what really pulled me under, so that now I am free-falling under a sort of spell, feeling like I’ve been hit up with cocaine and he’s my supply store. That I’ve met someone so purely devoted to one single thing in life that they wouldn’t compromise it for anyone. Like he can’t help but put the amusement of people – and himself! – before the financial rewards of staying in the city or the ambitious trajectory of impressing an agent, or seceding to worldly values. His certainty of purpose, and his own philosophies–regardless of how great, or small, that purpose is, in the world’s eyes – is almost pure and holy. And to me, it’s a relief. He’s not wasting time searching. He knows what he needs to do. And whether or not it will ever pay off doesn’t influence his decision to do it.
Some would probably see it as stupid. I think it’s beautiful.
Never having been further than the east coast, he decided to put his things in storage and set off on a three-month tour of inland New South Wales and approach publicans for one-off gigs as he drove through town.
‘When I got back to Sydney I felt alive again. I had all these stories. But everyone was just the same. Nobody wanted to hear any of it. They just wanted to show me their renovations.’ So he gave away all his possessions, bought a car reliable enough to tour in, and gave notice on his flat.
‘They never censor me in the outback pubs, Lou. I can just do what I love. In essence I was pushed out there but in it I’ve found this freedom, I’ve made all these friends, all over the country, blokes who have taken me in and I’ve stayed in so many houses with these people. I found the real Australia and it’s pretty damn beautiful.’
I turn up the Eagles, challenging myself not to look at the odometer until a new song begins. The dark road doesn’t scare me, even though I’m on my own and nobody – except a guy who I know by first name only – knows where I am.
I don’t know why fortune smiles at some
And lets the rest go free …
I accelerate towards the future, and the road passes in a blur. All that’s gone before – fading – oh so fast.
After nine hours of driving, and the same Eagles CD on replay number ten, I cross the threshold from country to city, suddenly finding myself at Sydney’s bright, shining entrance. The lights come on, despite it nearing midnight.
‘WELCOME TO SYDNEY’ claps me awake from country roads and daydreams. It’s not the type of town you can cruise into in sleepy mode. With its confusing spaghetti-strap roads, bridges, tunnels and tolls galore, I’m not in the streets of the Melbourne I know. I snap to attention. No more daydreaming, Lou, even if I have been in the same position for hours and hours and hours.
I spilt my coffee all over my legs three hundred kilometres back. In such a hurry to keep driving forward, I couldn’t even stay still to drink it. By now, it’s dry, with a java-scented patch the only physical proof that I’ve covered ground since this morning. Proof that this is really happening.
Since I haven’t eaten anything since the morning’s toast, my hands are shaking and my bloodshot eyes are wide. JIM flashes from my phone and I jump in my seat.
‘Get into the right lane after the second tunnel. I’ll meet you at the taxi rank along the Harbour at the end of George Street! See you soon!’
I want to giggle and scream, it all seems too ludicrous. Have I gone crazy? Who drives nine hundred kilometres to see someone they’ve known for a week, except a stalker? And where the hell are we going to sleep tonight? He doesn’t have a home!
Finally, I pull over near the water on Circular Quay, its surface shimmering under the moon like glittering diamonds under a globe of stars. His smiling silhouette is standing on the street next to his car.
‘Oh, Lou.’
It doesn’t take long, for someone to know your name, for someone to say it like it matters.
He looks at me like he can’t believe how lucky he is. I pretend not to notice. The intensity of all of this is overwhelming.
‘It’s not stalking if we both do it,’ he says with a laugh, and I pat him down, as if to check he is real. Satisfied I’m not dreaming, we kiss.
Home.
I hop into his car and we take a spin around Sydney, walking down King’s Cross streets and chatting at sparkling ferry coves in the night until two in the morning. Finally, he leads me in my car back to his parents’ house, the house he grew up in, where we’ll be staying for the next two nights. It’s like we’ve fast-tracked a year’s worth of dating landmarks into a week.
Those next forty-eight hours, Sydney had never looked so beautiful, and I have never been so enamoured by its swooning views and sparkling waters, shimmering like gold in the amber autumn light. The miner birds are singing their seductive tune when I wake, thinking it’s spring, and frangipani leaves litter the footpath in Lane Cove, like a bridal scattering. It’s as though the place was waiting for me – eager to reward me with beauty, joy and sun, for taking this risk, starting this love story.
We walk around the harbour, visit the Museum of Contemporary Art and randomly decide to order oysters at Circular Quay, our arms in a permanent coil around each other’s hips, laughing like kids every time we ‘wake up’ to how preposterously fantastic this whole love thing feels.
As he pulls out his wallet to tip a busker playing the didgeridoo, I hear his phone beeping with messages. It’s been running hot since I met him – I gather he has a lot of friends.
‘It’s my sister, Lou. I haven’t brought a girl home in seven years. They just want to check you haven’t got two heads.’
We catch the ferry to Manly to meet his sister and her husband, walking up the stairs to their apartment overlooking the water. His sister greets me with warmth and curiosity, pulling down a huge map of Australia, marked with pins.
‘I rode my bike from there to there.’ She points to a huge stretch of the coastline from Adelaide to Queensland.
‘Did you do much training?’ I ask, assuming she had signed up to do a program with a group.
‘No, I just rode the bike around the block a few times before I left.’
She talks later of how people would just turn up at certain moments in her ride with parcels of food left at her tent or encouraging notes.
Her eyes sparkle with excitement when she points to dots on the map.
‘Wow.’ Adventure must run in the family.
When her husband gets home he looks exhausted, until he sees Jim. ‘So did you two meet at one of Jim’s gigs?’
‘No – Lou hasn’t seen Jim perform yet,’ his sister replies.
His eyes grow wide and his head swings from me to Jim to her and back to me. He shakes his head. ‘Might have to get the country NSW bus timetable for you, Lou. Just in case.’
Since heading back from a twelve-month trip to Western Australia and the Northern Territory to emcee his sister’s wedding, Jim has a littering of gigs for the next fortnight up the coast of New South Wales to Gympie in Queensland. Jim grew up in
Sydney, which is why his phone is running hot with friends wanting to catch up and reconnect. When I’d arrived the night before, he’d been to two comedy rooms to drop in on friends and sat on one beer at a pub in Paddington while catching up with a particularly unhappy old school friend for two hours. The friend had then suggested they head to a strip club to continue the conversation.
‘Did you go to the strip show?’
‘I have to compete with the nude jelly wrestlers every week at my Windsor gig. And people take their clothes off at my gigs all the time. It’s kind of like the fire-juggling at my children’s clown shows. It’s just the currency we play with as adults. But to me it’s just entertainment, keeping it all naughty or taboo so that people will be interested and call it a great night out … and like with my friend from school, it just helps him keep that vision of women as one of three archetypes, either mother, virgin or whore …’
He’s on a roll now, ranting philosophically. I gently bring him back to the point.
‘Did you go to the strip show?’
‘No, Lou. I’ve done about a thousand gigs in those kinds of places. It’s kind of like work, to me – I see how hard those girls are working, distracting men from their lives. I’d rather have a conversation like this, sitting on the ferry dock, looking up at the stars.’
Tonight, he’s arranged to catch up with another private school friend. He hasn’t seen him for a couple of years since he ‘went feral’, in their words. But I get the impression he’s fiercely loyal, and it would take a lot for him to cut someone out of his life. Actually, I don’t think he’s ever done it.
‘I told him about you! You’re coming, aren’t you Lou? I want to show you off!’
We’ve already done the rounds of three houses in Leichhardt, Lane Cove and Milson’s Point. I’ve been drinking cups of tea and visiting other people’s bathrooms all day, meeting friends from primary school and his clowning days, talking about everything from nature to relationships to Buddhism and creativity with these wonderful people, openly accepting me into their homes. Jim’s been circulating me around like he’s picked up the last four-leaf clover on earth.