Fortune Cookie #5

These posts are words of wisdom that have got me through life reasonably happy and sexually satisfied. If you want to pass these words of wisdom onto friends or younger members of your family, cut out the sayings one by one, there will be about one fortune cookie each week - and buy a cheap packet of fortune cookies from your local Asian supermarket. Using tweezers, remove the existing naff saying from each cookie and replace it with one of Krissy's words of wisdom. Throw a party. Distribute the cookies. Everybody happy.

Fortune Cookie #5

Jealousy is the spark that lights the tinder of desire.

Her ex

There are rules about ex boyfriends.

He was her ex.

I knew the rules, and when he asked me to come dancing with him after work, I felt myself pause. I loved my friend with the kind of force that seemed unbreakable.

He was her ex.

I wanted to dance. I wanted to fling myself at drunk and sweating strangers. I wanted the speed he offered me, and, speeding, I wanted to run with him out into the birth of tomorrow. He was her ex.

We danced at a club. Dark and muggy with sweat and the scent of strangers. At some point he sat down on a bar stool cradling a beer and I knew that he was watching me but I continued to dance with the kind of joyous abandon that only children, and drunk women on speed have the energy for.

The inevitability of his bed.

It was a kind of segue like you see at the movies. A slow fade from the bright lights of the dance floor to the same woman, me, bouncing on the creaky springs of his bed. The same tune was ringing in my ears. I was humming and bouncing and he was still cradling a beer and sitting on a stool beside the bed and watching me.

Had we caught a cab? Had we danced all the way back from the city, singing and laughing and sipping from bottles hidden in brown paper bags? I don't remember any of it. I remember the club and then I remember his bed.

He was her ex and I was on his bed.

I remembered the rules as he was taking off my clothes. You don't sleep with your best friend's ex boyfriend.

The song came to an end at that point. I couldn't remember the tune. I was still swaying in the dying chords, but the music was gone and I was suddenly naked on his bed in the throbbing silence. My skin was touching his skin. His penis was resting in my hand, fully erect and twitching. I remembered then what she had said about his penis, how it was far too large and used to hurt her. She felt all torn up inside, and, weighing it against my palm I realised why.

I wasn't going to sleep with her ex-boyfriend.

The head job was to buy time. I wanted it all to go backwards, bouncing off his bed fully-clothed, bouncing back to the nightclub, blowing the speed back out of my nose through the rolled-up banknote. But that was the movies and this was the real world and his erect penis was in my hand and he was reaching for my crotch. I backed away. I was on my knees and it was easy enough to put distance between him and me just by leaning down and slipping his penis into my mouth.

My best friend was a small woman, short as me and thinner. She was all slim hips and swelled breasts. I stretched my mouth to accommodate his penis and wondered how she had brought herself to come back to it again and again. I wondered if he was listing our similarities and our differences. I wondered if he was comparing us against each other. He was her ex. I was her best friend. I was giving her ex a head job and I hated myself for it.

I held my fists around the length of his penis to stop him from pushing it in too far. He was drunk and a little rough. He locked his hands into the thick wild scratch of my hair and I felt like I might suffocate if I continued. I tried to pull back but he was numb to the struggle and I had to reach out to squeeze at the dangling sack of his balls before he opened his eyes and found me there, locked onto the length of him and struggling for air.

I pushed away and drew breath and said it before I lost the nerve to say it at all.

"I am not going to sleep with my best friend's ex-boyfriend."

We looked at his wet and jittery penis and I shrugged.

"You'll have to finish that off yourself."

He was a good man. I liked him. I felt bad for him. It would have been easy enough for him to guilt me into finishing the job but he just nodded and eased down onto his haunches, defeated.

"I'm sorry." I told him. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come home with you."

"There's my flatmates bed. He's away for a couple of days."

He hid his penis behind his hands, suddenly shy of it.

"We'll go out for breakfast." he said, and I nodded.

We would both masturbate in our separate beds and we would lie there afterwards, feeling slightly sullied by the act. We would go out for breakfast and it would be awkward and a little embarrassing. There would be an odd little peck on the lips as we parted.

There would be that fight a couple of days later, where I couldn't convince my best friend that I had put his penis in my mouth to stop him from having sex with me. There would be the weeks of regret and a slow hard crawl on my knees to sneak back into her affections.

"I'm sorry," I said, with my clothes bundled up against my breasts.

"That's okay," he told me, but he was wrong.

I realised then that it is never okay to be naked with your best friend's ex.

Break-up Sex

Good but sad.

I lay next to him and we were holding hands, sticky with our sweat and juices and I could hear his heart pounding in his wrist.

"Why didn't we have sex like that when we were together?" he asked, and I turned away because I was afraid that I might cry. I held my breath till the wave passed and I was dry-eyed and tired and sad but I would always remember the break-up sex I had with him.

Not a word was spoken. I was there when he opened the door and we kissed, a desperate kiss, something long and taken in stages like a degustation. A gentle kiss with the door wide open behind us, a pause to close it, an ever desperate descent into the kind of passion that we never managed when we were together.

There was this sinking sensation which was just our love for each other surfacing briefly, bobbing up and falling away again, the corpse of it, plummeting.

There was nothing new revealed in our sudden nakedness. There was his skin and mine. An abundance and a poverty. So many contradictions. I loved him like family. I knew him like my own self. I would never make love to him again. Just this once more. A full stop.

We used out teeth gently although we wanted to bite down on each other's skin, to ingest a piece of our history so that we would never forget.

We would never forget.

I would never forget the time he made a flower for me out of paper, crafted by his own restless fingers. I would never forget his timidness and his care. He gentled the bars of my cage with his concern, thick and soft as cotton wool, and when I flung myself against his boundaries, wild animal, longing for some other kind of life, I knew that I was safe in his clutches. Bored, panicked, crazed, limited and safe.

The sex we had that night was not the comforting kind that we had grown used to. We stole pieces off each other, samples of skin secreted away under our fingernails, the taste of sweat, the bitter burn of his semen that I would taste at the back of my throat for days. He pressed his thumb into my skin so fiercely that I felt the flesh give and his fingerprint is still on me, a lasting scar.

We didn't speak of the bad times but they were there too in the way we tugged at each other's hair and in the tears that inched their way out of our eyes and into each other's mouths.

We lay then in the ruin of our relationship and the glory of our sex, all contradictions, loving each other and hating that there was nothing left to do but part.

"Why didn't we have sex like that when we were still together?"

"Because we were still together."

I unknit my fingers from his large safe hand. And on that note. We parted.

Racial stereotypes and the reasonably discreet penis

I don't know what it is about Japanese men.

I haven't actually slept with a Japanese man, but when they pass me in the street I find myself looking twice, following them down the road. It is all racial stereotyping. I assume that their skin will be that fine satin finish, kind of hairless and warm but softly furred like our Freedom Furniature couch that I love to be naked against. I love the young Japanese men with their man-girl features and I always suspect that they are hiding a reasonably discreet penis. Something that would be appropriate for any orifice. Something well-proportioned and polite.

It is a terrible mistake to stereotype someone by their cultural background. They might look at my Slovene family and imagine me harsh and cold in that mid / eastern European kind of way, or Australian girls who are all blond and bounce on the beach in their tiny bikinis.

"He could of course have a huge penis," I explain to my friend who is still shaking his head in disbelief. "He could be enormous. Ridiculously large. I admit it. I have jumped to some racially motivated conclusion."

But I watch the young Japanese man order a beer and slip up onto a bar stool, gorgeous, thin-hipped, girlish, and I can't stop thinking about the size and shape of his penis.

What not to post.

I have been avoiding the topic. There was that time, and it would be a perfectly acceptable scene in fiction. It has dramatic structure. It has all the elements, but I am ashamed to write about it. I was too young to know better. It is a small thing. Just a moment in the inner life of a child that will resonate with a reader. I should just let it be on the record, laugh about it. Move on to the next blog post as if it does not unsettle me.

There are other moments that will be omitted. The breaking of a moral code that I have built my life on. A moment when I probably acted inappropriately. That time I made someone cry and wished I hadn't. The moment when I debased myself and it was no one's fault but my own. A liturgy of unspoken moments. The silences are deafening.

The secret blogposts burble beneath the vacuous chatter. Yes I did this and I did that and isn't it all so funny and shocking and sexy. Under all the frivolity I remember that there were moments that I am not proud of and I am still not brave enough to write them down. Cowardly vagina. Scared and secretive vagina. The brittle bravado shining on the surface of my body like a piece of armour.

Cat Piss.

The cat pissed on my bed.

It was the only mattress I owned and it was winter. There were holes in the floorboards and the winter came up through them along with the scent of marijuana. She had pissed on my mattress and my pillow and my doona. I hugged my coat around me, dragged four pairs of socks over my frozen toes. I huddled in the corner of the room and listened to the incessant drone of the traffic trundling through the Normandy five ways.

He had written his number on a piece of paper and even though I didn't really like him, I had kept it. I liked his friend. His friend said he was a talented artist, huge canvasses, exhibitions. He used to live in my flat and there were cryptic lines of text scraped into the floorboards from the days when he would sit in what was now my bedroom smoking dope and making art and living the whole Hunter S kind of thing.

He leered at me and I knew he liked me, but I didn't even return his smile. I was polite for the sake of my friend but he had come back up the stairs an hour later and passed me the slip of paper with his number on it.


He wasn't my first choice. I wanted to stay with my friend, but he had started experimenting with the needle and he raised his head, bleary eyed and there was the smell of vomit on his breath.

"The cat pissed on my mattress"

He blinked at me. He looked sick. I couldn't bear it if he had to throw up while I was in the room with him. I trudged out to the telephone booth. I didn't have the phone on. I didn't have the money for a phone. This new home was one step up from the park I used to sleep in, not far from it at all. Already I had had an urge to wander out and curl up under a hedge and watch the boys queuing up for the toilet block.

"The cat pissed on my mattress."

I heard his heavy breath rasp into the phone.

He was happy to hear from me. He had a car. He was more than happy to get into it and drive all the way across town to pick me up. "I'll sleep on the couch" he said and I almost believed him.

I waited in my flat. I hissed at the kitten when she tried to crawl into my lap. The whole place smelled like urine. My life smelled like urine.

In his car I weighed up how much a night in his bed would cost me. Sex probably. Maybe just a head job. Maybe even a hand-job without even having to take off my clothes. I sulked in the passenger seat and he put his hand on my knee as he took the corners quickly with a little screech of the tires.

"You've had a hard day, haven't you?" He asked me, hungry eyes wide with fake concern.

I steeled my self for the whole shebang. Sex, head job, hand job, everything all at once probably. I resolved to up my end of the bargain. Dinner, a glass of wine, maybe even two.

There was never another mention of the couch. No dinner, but a bottle of wine presented to me beside his bed. It was a beautiful house. There was an ornate bedside table and he told me that he had found it in my flat. He had stolen it because no one cared about the place, no one would notice. I touched the mahogany swirls, the little clawed hands carved into the wood, the wings and curliatures. It would be worth a fortune and I wished it was back in my flat where it belonged. I began to hate him a little bit then. I wouldn't be able to hide it. I removed my belt and gulped wine and when I lashed him with it it felt right. I wanted to hurt him.

He wrestled the wine out of my hand and picked me up and threw me onto the bed. Sex. The kind of unlovely, scratching, fighting kind of sex. I have to admit that I enjoyed it. I lunged for his face with my fingers and he caught my hands and I put all my force behind it, knowing that he was stronger than me. That he'd always win the fight.

I wouldn't let him touch me. Wouldn't let him kiss me and when he was done I kept on him even though I knew it would hurt. He struggled away from me and tried to lie peacefully but I wouldn't let him.

He stood up eventually and slept on the couch. I helped myself to his wine and sniffed my armpits which smelled of cats piss and fury. I was hungry. I wanted to help myself to the contents of his fridge. Rich kid, living off an allowance from his parents.

I hated him for that. I hated that I had to ask him for a place to sleep. I hated that the only other option for a bed for the night was a schizophrenic junkie with breath like vomit. I sat in his luxurious bathtub and ran the shower too hot and felt sorry for myself. I scrubbed myself with expensive hand-made soap and soaked my hair in organic conditioner and cried.

In the morning, when he dropped me home I smelled like sandalwood. He sniffed my neck and kissed it and told me that he had had the best time. He wanted to see me again. Tonight. He wanted to pick me up before dark.

"I'm fine" I said, "I'll call you." and I dragged the heavy mahogany door closed. I looked at the mahogany picture rails, thick with dust, the ornate fireplace, the badly painted wall with a ghosting of graffiti bleeding through the thin top coat. I longed for the bedside table that he had stolen from the house, from me, from every other renter who would find some refuge here.

I fed the cat and hugged her and scolded her gently with a kiss to the back of the neck. That night we curled up together in the fading reek of her urine and her body heat was comforting. Sometime after midnight there were footsteps on the dark wood stairs. Someone hovering just outside the door. I held my breath. I stubbed the tiny glow of my cigarette out into a jam lid.

A moment later, the footsteps padded away down the staircase and then they were gone.

Painting

"I would fall in love with you," he told me, "You would be the one I dream of if I didn't have that perfect blond teenage girl to fall into bed with."

He said this whilst he was concentrating on the canvas. I had constructed a kind of easel for him made out of furniture, an old wooden chair frame and a second chair wired in place to rest the canvass against. Bored old chair, legs in the air like a seasoned prostitute. His canvass was large and dark and there was an angry angular figure glaring out at me in shades of grey.

I was painting a hunched figure, white headed, sad-eyed. I was cheering the whole thing up with flowers, sweat peas, bright red against a white fence. My hands were coated in acrylics and a sticky layer of Estapol. I had a headache. I was allergic to Estapol or perhaps it was the reek of turps in a tub beside my mat board.

"I am Jesus." he told me suddenly, pulling up from a screeching flurry of black lines.

"I don't believe in you then."

"No, it is true. Hard to believe. But true." He explained it all to me as I added little green leaves to the sweet peas. I sat back on my heels and rubbed paint into my neck and wondered if my headaches came from the way I leaned over the work, inhaling the fumes, ingesting them through my pores, craning my neck down and across the painting.

I rolled a smoke and lit it and my brown fingerprints crackled when they touched the flame. The tally-ho sparked up and I sucked in tobacco and paint and a host of other toxins. My headache eased a little with each inhalation.

"Do you believe that I am Jesus?"

I nodded. It made sense, the way he looked at it. "Yes," I told him. "You are Jesus."

I lay down on my mattress and watched while he filled all the grey spaces up with black, a black canvass. The figure was completely obliterated, but I knew that he had been there at some stage, perfect, peering. Now he was just a few stray lines under all that sharp-edged fury. He lay down on the bed and wrapped his charcoal hands around me and I would have rocked back onto the hard shape of his penis if I didn't have a fierce burn on for someone else.

"You know I'd go for you," he sighed into my hair, my mad friend, my midnight painter friend, "I'd really have you right now, if it wasn't for that perfect blond angel."

"You're mad." I told him, "You know there's no such thing as Jesus."

He groaned and rubbed himself against me for a moment before rolling onto his back and lighting a rollie for me and then one for himself.

"Why do I have that Angel? Why can't we just go for it?"

"Because you're mad as fuck and we both love someone else."

He looked at my painting, the one with the sexless hunchback and the floral fence.

"That's a picture of you."

It was of course, a picture of me.

"You feel like you are outside of everything and everyone else is part of a club that you're not invited to."

This was a month before he stabbed himself in the chest sixteen times. Before his casual heroin use overtook his painting and his carving and his whole flat and his life. Before his blond angel stole all my Kate Bush CDs. Before he killed his best friend's pet rat. I put my hand on his chest and felt his heart and it would have been so easy to slip my fingers into his jeans and find some comfort there, but I was not his blond angel, and he was not the other crazy man that I thought I was in love with and tomorrow we would be painting again, together and we would fall asleep holding hands and bemoaning the fact that we couldn't bring ourselves to make love to each other.

"You are a better person than my blond angel," he said, "you are not as mean, not as pretty, but infinitely more beautiful on the inside."

I thanked him for his honesty, his almost compliment.

"And you're not alone on that side of the fence." We rolled back into our contained desire for each other, settled instead for body heat and the scent of nicotine on each other's fingers.