Dear Fucking Diary, You Fuck

Captain's log. Star date, your wife's testicles

I drive past the usual commission flats which tower over the gentrified west of Footscray looming like an anti-hipster spectre taking a fictitious dump into people's tangello fucking cold brews. 

And at the bottom of the flats, almost in the exact place I used to buy a stick of weed for twenty from the Italian boys seventeen years ago, there’s a bit of a scene. 

N I remember how all this shite started.

It was a humid February night.

Friday night. And Joe had drunk his usual six Yuzu Schwoltzbangers and was getting frisky with all the clientele, kissing both the women and the men on the lips and offering them all small white tablets with an imprint of a giraffe on them.

And I was supposed to be out the back doing homework, but I’d sneak in and watch my mum do her usual eight-thirty dance where she would dress up as Marty McFly’s ma and have Biff come in and try to rape her and then old Joe’s son Terry would come in dressed as George McFly and say,

Hey you, get your damn hands off her.

And—well—you know the rest.

The punters would fucking love it. The men would throw their leopard skin g-strings on the stage and stuff crusty twelve-dollar notes down the front of my mum’s underwear.

And I’d clap with my eight-year-old hands and smile cos she’d do such a fuckin fine job. And Old Joe would come sit next to me and say stuff like,

Yer Mama is such a fine dancer aint she? Maybe ye could also be a fine dancer one day, Frank, what do ya think?

By nine-thirty, all the punters were fucked on Old Whoreskin Bourbon and Apple Marghertitas and Joe would get up n do his usual poetry reading. N as an eight-year-old, I just didn’t get it. He’d talk about,

‘Doing his wife with a knife’

and

‘Beating his meat for a treat,’

And I’d ask my mum, who was by that point sitting next to me smoking a cigarette and wearing a bearskin jacket, what it all meant. She’d tell me Joe was a passionate amateur chef and all the stuff about meat and knives was about his passion in the kitchen.

Later, Joe would come back to our house. And my mum would get well fucked up on Pear Cosmopolitans and Ashwagandha, which in those days had the street name of Krishna’s Left Nut. And she’d pass out on her bed in her underwear, usually with the TV blaring.

And I’d ask Joe, who was watching Knight Rider with me and drinking his eleventh bourbon, what he had meant by beating his meat.

“What’s that, Kid?” he’d say. “Don’t ya ever get ya goddan ding dong out and roll it around like ya making saveloys at Christmas?”

“I don’t know,” I’d say. “I like Transformers though.”

Joe would nod.

“Yeah, it’s kinda like that, Kid,” he’d say. “Well, ya know how that leader fuck, what's his name? Optimum Primo. That’s it. Well ya know he’s that fuckin red truck. But then he needs to spring into action n he becomes that big fuckin robot with the spiked blue ears n that? Well, it's like that with ya goddan ding dong. Ya go down n rub it a bit n it transforms from that little fuckin peach shrimp into a big fuckin magic sword like that fuck He-Man n that homo green tiger of his. Amma makin’ any sense at all, kid?”

It was the peak of my fuckin sex education.

Years later, I was writing the dirtiest text message to send to the woman down the chip shop I’d been banging when I went down to order my fish, chips and curry thrice every thirsty Thursday in Theptember.

She usually texted me something like,

Yeah, Bog Boy. Come down n feel me cans would ya. I’m harny as phuck for yer phallus. N by the way yer phuckin phish, chips n curry thrice is ready, chuck.

And it might sound like a small thing to you, but I wanted to tell her how much I was looking forward to getting my tiny gob around her massive oversized clit.

But my phone autocorrected oversized clit to oversized clot.

And it sent me on this spiral of depression into the depths of my cranius minimus, through the fourteen levels of the gods with donkey dicks, down through the six hells of the various itchy cocks. Itchdingi and the rest.

And it all led up to this turd of a day a few months ago.

It’s Monday now

And I’m heading back from the gym after a heavy lifting session. I’m thinking about the correct ratio of coconut milk in a Thai brown curry and mentally making it while commentating in a Thai accent. It feels racist but it’s in my head so no one knows. 

And I drive past the usual commission flats which tower over the gentrified west of Footscray looming like an anti-hipster spectre taking a fictitious dump into people's grapefruit cold brews. 

And at the bottom of the flats, almost in the exact place I used to buy a stick of weed for twenty from the Lebanese boys seventeen years ago, there’s a bit of a scene. 

A cyclist woman in luminous green lycra has stopped and is on the phone. Next to her on a bench is a lurching tall man passed out and drooling. Next to him, another tiny, skinny man holds his hand. 

And my perineum begins to buzz the lyrics to Haddaway’s What is Love in Morse code. Dot dot dah etc. That's my version of the spidey senses.  And it’s telling me that this long gothic bastard might die at some stage. 

So

I swing around my Impreza and pull up at the bench. I jump out of the car and say something like,

Hello, what’s going on?

The cyclist woman tells me she’s on hold to the emergency line because this long gothic dog has been unconscious after shooting up a fist full of junk forty minutes ago. 

I check his pulse and it’s weak as hell and I know he might die here on this busy street by the time the damnbulance gets here. 

Fuck it, I say. I'll put him in my car.

The hospital is just round the corner.

Are you sure, says the lycra pony, but I've already got my arms around the bastard. And he feels colder than a witch's clit and I wonder if the fucker might be dead already.

I tell his anaemic mate to grab the bloke's feet which he does with the look of someone who has not long had a fucking shot of heroin. And I go to lift but realise my arms don't fucking work properly cos I've been lifting hard at the gym. I might as well be a skinny fucking junky like William Burroughs over here. But it's too late now. Lycra Pony expects things of me and she’s mildly attractive and she keeps goin,

Oh thankyou, thankyou,

like I’m paying her fucking mortgage.

So I can’t stop now.

Besides, a few others have gathered for the party. And I don't wanna look like a fucking pansy so I give it everything I've got huffing the fucker onto my chest and shuffling like a man carrying a rhinoceros corpse.

I can feel a vein coming out the top of my head and my left eyeball feels like it might shoot out. I take another step back and my right foot slips into the gutter and it feels like I might have broken it.

And I wish I could say that the adrenaline is carrying me through but it aint cos I don't give enough of a fuck. And the long dog is so fucking cold now that I’m sure he’s fucking carked it like Alan Rickman.

Lycra Pony opens the door and she thinks she’s helping but she’s just in the fucking way now. And now a whole serious fucking crowd has gathered round and I’m thinkin' they may as well have their fucking deck chairs and egg sandwiches out if they're not gonna fucking help out.

I go to shove his head in the back seat of my Impreza but my back tweaks.

How can this bastard be so fucking heavy? It must be his shoes. His feet must be size sixteens. There's more meat on them than the rest of his body. I try to throw him sideways into the car but his head smacks on the door. I try to adjust and push him in again, but his head smacks harder into the door this time.

And I’m fucking thirsty. My mouth is as dry as a camel’s cock and I haven't eaten anything and I think I’m gonna collapse like this cunt then it's gonna be two for the price of one. I tell Harvey Keitel to push and I run round the other side and I pull the fucker till he’s in and Harvey jumps in behind and holds his head, stroking his hair and weeping.

The fuck is so skinny. His trousers are six sizes too big and he’s whispering,

Don’t leave me,

like a creepy fuck and I wanna tell him to get his shit together but I don't. I ask his name and it's Elliot and the giant Frankfurter splayed out on my back seat is Rhythm or Riddim or some crap.

I start my car and he gets a fucking ear full of LTJ Bukem and Elliot nearly pisses his pants with fright. And I think if that didn't wake the fucker he ain't comin' back. I turn it down a touch and take one last look at Lycra Pony and her incredible buns and I burn off up the road toward the hospital.

How long’s he been out? I ask and he tells me forty-five minutes and I think yeh he’s definitely fucked. And I try and think of other questions to ask but it ain’t that far before I pull into the emergency entrance.

I jump out and try n remember the time my wife made me watch seasons one and two of ER and what kind of stuff they wanna know n that. N in my head I’m pretending to be Clooney that bastard even though he is a kiddy doctor and even though he’s a twat for fucking with that hotty the Good Wife.

We got a long dog passed out from the junk, I yell in a Chicago accent at the woman behind the counter.

How long’s he been out, she yells back and her twin sister presses some fucking button.

Forty-seven minutes, I say. And he’s cold as a witch’s cunt.

And I know then I’ve fucked it.

Cos she says,

We’ll take it from here.

N I wanna explain that I meant to say clit not cunt. N I wanna explain that I’m not his junky friend driving him in. I don’t even know the long dog. I just look anaemic cos I’ve been to the gym and I haven’t eaten a damn thing all day.

But she’d never understand.

So I watch as eight or ten green-scrubbed bastards come out with one of those trolleys and start trying to get the long dog out of the back of my car. And I just stand there and put my hand on Elliot’s back like I’m fucking ET or something.

And I tell him Rhythm is gonna be alright, even though I’m fairly fuckin’ sure he died already on that bench back there.

And he nods and says thanks.

And one of the green-scrubbed ladies asks if we’re going in.

And I tell Elliot I’ll be right there.

But I don't go in. I wait till he’s inside. And I start the engine. And I look at the back seat with the long dog’s imprint. And then I crank Bukem and I screech out of the hospital car park.

Cos life fucking goes on. And we can't all just sit around waiting to hear about whether cold long dogs will get to shoot up another syringe of junk.

And I go home where I should be thinking about those massive shoes.

But I'm not.

For a second I think about Lycra Pony and her hot buns.

Then I think about Old Joe who was found hanging with his grandfather’s memorial world war three tie round his fuckin neck and his vaseline-soaked hand gripping his Optimum Primo. And downstairs his fuckin empty fridge buzzed for two weeks before they found the cunt cos of the smell.

And I think about the old woman down the chippy who stuck her head in the deep fryer one night.

And I think about Phillip Seymour Hoffman and wonder what films he might have made if he were still alive.

How was the gym? says my wife.

I don’t answer. I go upstairs. And I call my mum.

How ya doin’ Mum? I say.

She doesn’t answer.

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