If You Can’t Handle the Ugliness, Get Out of the Kitchen
Relief, pleasurable moaning, escape, release and evacuation. All phrases closely associated with not only finishing a job that in its final month required me to complete tasks rarely more challenging than burrowing feverishly through filing; but also attributable to feelings experienced shortly after desperately gulping down two Imodium tablets. All praise anti-dihorrea medication, eh?
There’s no rest for the vocationally challenged, though: the very next day after my slightly pensive release into the job market at large, I scuttled around the city happily attending three interviews, all for great jobs. There was a feeling of slight sluttishness to all this, though - normally I’d only register with one or two recruitment agencies. Strangely, this activity used to calibrate quite nicely with my unemployment welfare recipient status. This time around, though; I’ve learnt that I’ll have to become pretty loose with my faithfulness to recruitment companies and I’m now flinging my resume around so wildly that if it was a set of genitals it’d surely be carrying an industrial dose of public lice by this stage.
Fulfilling my guarantee to myself that I’d look for work seriously this time around, I clawed my way into our apartment and sprawled across the lounge, panting in post-interview exhaustion. Then again, perhaps the fact that I’m simply porking up and I’m an unfit bastard had something to do with it. If I’m going to be honest with myself, I may as well admit that the chasm between personal fitness and my slightly drooping body is so large you could construct a cable car across it.
My mind, as it invariably does on a Friday evening, turned to thoughts of what to do that night. Normally these thoughts are rudely interrupted by the knowledge that cash is a little scarce at that time, and any plans for a night out are quickly evacuated from my brain.
For once in recent times I realised I actually had enough money for Adam and I to go out. The loss of my employment had resulted in a modest payout which could at the very least be interchanged for some alcoholic beverages. See? Losing a job isn’t always bad. Last time I was retrenched, my payout financed Adam and myself to move from the scenic hills of Campbelltown (well, scenic in a burning tyres everywhere kind of scenic) into the scenic… er… criminally decorated inner city burbs.
With my mouth agape, I numbly sat in front of a blank television screen pondering these thoughts for approximately ten minutes, when something registered in my brain: I’d forgotten how to go out.
It had been that long since Adam and I actually went out for some drinks that I simply didn’t know what to do. Under regular circumstance, a Friday evening piss-up is something I look forward to all week. Apparently I’d just become used to the banality of my daily commute to work that this was all I expected from life.
With little more than two weeks until my 22nd birthday, I’d engorged myself into the mentality of someone in their mid-40’s. Something inside me urged to suddenly apply for jobs in the finance and insurance sectors, and to splash out on a tweed suit.
NO! I shouted to my inner tweed, realising that I’d actually yelled this out loud due to a young woman suddenly looking incredibly alarmed in the courtyard of our apartment block. She’d been taking out some garbage but had now commenced craning her neck to see into our apartment.
No. I wouldn’t fall into that. A quick phone call to Adam later and it was decided - we’d go out to the Albury Hotel for some drinks.
The Albury Hotel sits firmly in the midst of Sydney’s gay Oxford Street area. Seeped in gayness to assert it’s uber-homosexual image, this is one of the reasons I try not to populate the venue excessively. That, and the fact that a drag queen I once saw there bared her (his?) chest, revealing nothing but a puny hollowed-out pathetic hair-speckled chest of a man. I drunkenly choked on the beer I was drinking at the time and felt suddenly sexually unsure about not only men in general but women in general as well.
However, on this particular occasion my feelings about the Albury didn’t particularly matter, mostly due to the bottle of bourbon Adam and I shared with Rick prior to making our way to the hotel. The events of the evening hurdled along in a bit of a giddy blur, leaving me only with fleeting memories such as:
* the DJ playing a Primary song, and me cackling myself silly that a song on Triple J’s playlist was actually being played in a gay pub;
* pretending to be incredibly offended when the barman put a straw in my bourbon, then huffing out my chest and smiling proudly when he quickly removed it;
* the DJ playing a dodgy Eurotrash house song, and someone near me remarking that it sounded like the music that accompanied their friend’s appearance in a home-made leather fetish porno video;
* being given a stern warning by one of the hotel staff after I mistakenly tried to enter a staff-only area, which I thought was actually another bar; and
* the DJ playing a dance song which I uncharacteristically found really catchy and had me bopping around, until I found out it was a Leann Rymes song, which left me feeling slightly dirty and betrayed.
Invariably I found myself requiring use of the toilet, and this is really the only clear recollection I have of the evening. Toilets in gay hotels are always a cause of concern for me and as such I make attempts to avoid them at all costs. Many gay outlets, for fear of offending any gender-confused patrons, choose to avoid labelling separate ‘male’ and ‘female’ toilets in place of one giant hyperbathroom. This is not a desirable predicament for me (especially after having endured a unisex toilet at one of my old jobs - the tampon dispensing machines got me off guard a little).
Fortunately, I noticed the Albury has graciously separated male and female toilets. Signalling to Adam that I’d be back within a few shakes (so to speak), I began gently shouldering my way through the crowd. There came a point where I was faced with a cellulite dead-end between two angry-looking ladies who didn’t want to move for anyone.
Wearing my politest smile, I asked meekly if I could move past them. Scowling, one of them turned to one side, then swiftly lurched back to her original position as I made my way through. The effect was akin to a baseball player socking a ball into the back of the field, although her elastic stomach proved a veritable slingshot as I was flung towards the toilet door. I looked back and she simply scowled some more, obviously not intent on mouthing any sort of apology at all. Apparently it was Apology Exemption Week for Fat Cows in Tight Dresses and nobody had told me.
Catapulted into the men’s room, I looked around. Breathing a sigh of relief as I noticed the piss-trough was separated into little mini-cubicles for my peace of perversion-worried mind, I quickly unzipped and began to relieve myself.
A young man who appeared to have been given an all-over body gloss with a spectacularly plastic-looking bowl haircut sidled up to my left and, with a sigh, began to urinate as well. Suppressing a snicker, I couldn’t help but notice that he seemed to be Tupperware personified.
Not appreciating my smirk, the man turned to me and cast a look as if he was the Minister for Immigration and I was an angry skinhead who’d just bashed four people of a racial minority with a baseball bat in front of a foreign dignitary.
Swaying from left to right, he obviously was far more intoxicated than I. He clumsily opened his mouth wide, as if computing a sentence to compose aloud, then hastily closed it in a verbal retreat. This happened three times before he could construct something to say.
‘You,’ he spat at me, ‘You are too ugly for this pub, and you should leave.’
Raising my eyebrows, I realised my hands were, uh, full and powerless to form any physical threat in return. In leiu of such a response, I instead began urging my urine stream forth even harder than before, ensuring that it was thundering against the aluminium wall in front of me as angrily as possible. If bodily fluids were celebrities, then my urine right then would have been Henry Rollins confronted with the leader of the KKK.
(Sidenote: Perhaps I should change that sentence before I start getting search queries like “henry rollins +urine porno”).
His accusation struck me as particularly strange, because - without wanting to sound up myself - I don’t see myself as particularly good looking nor ugly. I could be physically likened to the Democrats: not leaning towards either the beauty or ugliness of their business, but turning a blind eye to their recent right wing leanings just as I am unable to see out of my blind right eye.
Before I could reply with a suitably witty response involving the requirement for a restraining order against his haircut from the hotel, Tupperware man had zipped up and retreated. Proceedings from there follow a blur, although I do remember someone called out my name and I said hi, except it later hit me that they’d called me Jeb and not my real name, which was a little unsettling. Adam also offered to go and sort out Tupperware man, but I advised him that with haircut like that, someone else would inevitably perform that action for us by the end of the night.
But to be perfectly honest? I’d much rather be teetering on becoming overweight, being abused by a freak in a dodgy hotel’s toilets and be bounced between two large disgruntled lesbians breasts than sitting at home on the couch with a hot chocolate in my tweed suit after a hard day’s work at the bank.