A TATTOOED HEART

In 1990 I tattooed my girlfriend’s initial on my right ankle. Did it myself with a needle bound in ink-soaked cotton thread.

I know – stupid, right? But when you’re fourteen years-old, and some deeply screwed-up girl fucks your mind at the same time as the rest of you, the tendency is to believe it will last forever. Thankfully, being fourteen and an idiot, I used India Ink; that initial – and my other two tatts – finally faded to nothing. It only took twenty years.

            Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t regret the tattoos themselves; it’s just that they were ugly and amateurish – they looked like prison tatts. I learned a valuable lesson: Think first.

            Over the next few years, whenever I had the money and the urge to get inked overcame me, all I had to do was spend a few minutes looking at that initial. That and the memory of the bathing beauty on my grandfather’s forearm, getting older and saggier as he did, were enough to persuade me to wait.

            “Wait” is the operative word. Teenagers are morons. So are most twenty-somethings. Had I done it in my twenties I’d have ended up with a winged guitar, the standard skulls and daggers or something equally naff. God forbid, today I could be looking at a dragon every time I remove my shirt.

            You see some beautiful body-art. Very little of it, though, comes from the tattooist’s wall. The best stuff tells a story; tells you something about the person underneath it. The best stuff is original. Over the years I’ve designed one or two pieces for friends. Because I knew them, I was able to come up with art that expressed their personalities better than number thirty-seven from the album could.  And there’s little chance they’ll ever bump into someone with the same tattoo.

            There’s an adage that says, Never tattoo anybody’s name on your body (unless, of course, it’s “Mother” or “Jesus”). Indeed, tattooists do a roaring trade in disguising such errors of judgement. Not sure I entirely agree. It’s that body-art as life-story thing again. And, having decided to mark yourself with someone else’s name, cover-up or removal is a cop-out.

Trying to erase a name or initial, or cover it over, is like trying to erase a person from your life – it doesn’t work. Your mind still knows they were there; you’ll still have the scar to remind you; and covering it up usually just makes a bigger mess. Even if it doesn’t, each look at the replacement will remind you of why it’s there; of what’s underneath.

It’s only fitting that my ex-girlfriend’s initial took twenty years to fade. In the two years I associated with them she and her family did twenty years-worth of damage. During those twenty years I lived a life worth remembering. My next tattoos will encapsulate some of it. They’ve had time to grow in my mind, and are already a part of me; I see them already. A deep part of myself will be visible on the outside – which is how it should be.

One of the old ones was a heart on my forearm. I could cover it up or show it, depending on my mood. It was mine. Now, it’s dissolved into my body. Only a faint scar betrays where it once was. There’s probably something in that.

PREJUDICE, HYPOCRISY

They’re funny things, prejudices. We all have them – to an extent, we need them. It can come as a surprise, however, when somebody has one against you.

            I was on my balcony smoking a cigarette when a car full of South-East Asian Muslims drove by. One of them happened to look a lot like Amrosi, the Bali bomb-plotter. “Fancy being brave enough to drive around looking like Amrosi,” I found myself thinking. “That takes some guts.”

            It wasn’t a malicious thought. It was barely a thought at all. But it stopped me. It got me thinking about friends and family who visit from the country and talk about “playing spot the Aussie”. To my memory, no Aboriginal person has ever made the same remark to me. No need, I hope, to elaborate that point.

            To visiting Caucasians the Asian population of Sydney’s Inner-West are all “chinks”; “slopes”; “fuckin’ gooks”. Those same “Aussies” might spend a moment to reflect that, to a certain generation of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian immigrants, they look just like the people who killed their brothers, raped their sisters and daughters, and burned or bombed their villages – and that it’s for those reasons that they fled their countries to build a new life here.

            The twin sister of prejudice is hypocrisy. Spending a couple of decades in Kings Cross, up to my eyeballs in the drug and sex industries, was a real education in that regard. Nobody does prejudice or hypocrisy like junkies and hookers.

            You have to see it to believe it. It’s really very funny. The dealers look down on the junkies and hookers who provide their living. Most of the hookers and junkies hate their dealers. The sex-workers look down on the junkies. The junkies look down on the sex-workers. Everyone looks down on the ice-freaks.

            And the sex industry’s even better. It’s almost like a caste system, where everybody despises the rungs beneath. The massage-parlour girls think they’re better than the hookers. The brothel workers think they’re better than the street-walkers; the high-class escorts better than both. The strippers think they’re better than all of them. Burlesque performers place themselves above the whole seedy business. And rent-boys? Forget about it – everyone looks down on rent-boys.

            We all need to feel better than somebody – especially if we’re fuck-ups. It’s a comforting thought, as you cry yourself to sleep, that somebody, somewhere, has screwed their life up worse than you have.

            Prejudice is an evolutionary throwback. Our distant forebears, in order to survive, needed to know that certain people, places and things were just bad. Belief is the same. If we had to spend time evaluating every single thought that comes into our heads or every situation or idea we encounter, we’d be simply unable to function.

            So, they’re helpful. That doesn’t mean, though, that we shouldn’t examine them occasionally and re-evaluate them. We all need to take time now and then to look at what we believe and throw out unreasonable prejudices.

            That’s how we avoid becoming assholes.

IRON MIKE

I never did explain my thing about Mike Tyson.

He was my hero. Aged eleven, I considered nobody more worthy of my adulation. It was because of Mike that I’d drag myself out of bed three hours before I had to be ready for school so I could destroy my ankles running around and around my block. Because of Mike I did it again when I got home in the afternoon. And the jumping: the endless, tedious jumping-rope.

            I defended him. Long before Lance Armstrong made us all feel like assholes, I stuck-up for Tyson. When he beat-up his wife I argued with my friends: ‘We don’t know what really happened. Maybe it’s been blown out of proportion. And, anyway, the media needs to leave him alone – it’s just not fair’.

            When he had to postpone a title-fight after breaking his hand on some guy’s head in a night club I figured, ‘Hey, the fool probably deserved it’.

            Then there were the fights. He seemed to stop caring. Guys obviously beaten in the first two rounds would waltz him around the ring for another seven or eight or sometimes the distance. The man who eventually knocked him out in Japan, Buster Douglas, once lost a decision on Tyson’s undercard (The winner of that fight, a thoroughly ordinary monolith named Tony Tucker, went on to tie Tyson up for fifteen whole rounds).

            Then he raped that girl. Even then, knowing he was guilty, the naively adoring part of me rationalised, ‘Sure, he did it – but what the hell was the girl doing there anyway?’ Anything but admit it might be Mike’s fault. If even that didn’t kill the magic, his comeback did. Emerging from prison he phoned-in big money wins against a series of tubby, middle-aged never-weres I probably could have knocked-out.

            When he finally faced a real challenge he was no longer up to it. Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis were good fighters, but neither should have been in Tyson’s league. He knew it too. But they didn’t. Faced, for possibly the first time, with opponents not half-beaten before the opening-bell merely by his reputation, he went to pieces. Thwarted in his old tricks he snapped and bit-off part of Holyfield’s ear.

            By the time he got Lewis into the ring even Mike knew it was all over. As if doing penance he submitted to the mother of all beatings. And if that was the last time we saw him his career, though wasted, would have ended with some dignity.

            But Mike, it seems, doesn’t do dignity. From speaking tours to stupid film appearances via a brief wrestling career he kept the freak-show going. First he became an animal – then he became a joke.

            Tyson should have been great – the greatest. Instead his crash-and-burn dragged Heavyweight boxing down in its wake. That cancer, Don King, had already been white-anting it for a decade, but the wrecking-ball he used to finish the job was Iron Mike Tyson. And my inner eleven year-old has never gotten over it.

I THOUGHT THEY WERE VITAMINS

Greens Senator Richard Di Natale wants a senate inquiry into drugs in sport. He wants leading players and coaching staff from the AFL and NRL to appear and explain how it could have happened. He’s right, they should.

When the ASADA investigation exploded in the media my first response was, “Suffer, scumbag hypocrites”. It seemed like vindication. I and some of the best people I know are viewed as filth by much of society. We will always – no matter what we do to improve ourselves – be defined by what we once did to assuage appalling emotional and psychological damage. Accordingly, every time we let someone new into our lives we face an uncomfortable decision: whether to be honest or lie about a mistake we can’t un-make.

And now here came the nation’s sporting heroes, held up as models of virtue for children to emulate, showered with money, adulation and all the privileges afforded by fame, revealed at last as the cheating thugs some of us have always known them to be.

I was long ago disabused of any romantic notions about footballers or cricketers – fifteen years in Kings Cross, watching them get drunk or wired, start fights, abuse women and generally be obnoxious, took care of that. This recovering junkie felt good knowing the rest of the country finally gets it too. Unlike the rape scandals a couple of years ago, this time there would be no excuses.

But I’ve had some time to think. Senator Di Natale’s proposed inquiry is so important precisely because the drug issue highlights many of the same institutional problems that produced those ugly sex stories.

Take a seventeen-year-old from the suburbs or the bush. Put him in a situation where his only job is to turn up at training and at the game on the weekend; where he’s the subject of hero-worship disproportionate to his actual accomplishment; where he rarely hears the word ‘no’; and where, so long as he keeps winning, his most outrageous behaviour will be excused or covered-up. It doesn’t take a genius to predict the likely result.

Football, by its nature, is a community.  A few leaders come to the fore; the rest are followers. That same seventeen-year-old will be impressionable. He will cast about for role-models. He will accept as normal whatever the coach, officials or prominent players do or say. If he’s told, ‘Take this “supplement”’ – he probably will, whatever his qualms.

A senate inquiry should hear those stories. Not to excuse them – most drug users have an external locus of control; given a chance to blame someone else they will – but to expose the complexities of the issue. It should be more than a public skewering of the end-users and their suppliers.

The players need a chance to take responsibility for their actions; the clubs and governing bodies need to be exposed in their complicity; it needs to be addressed as a cultural issue, not the misbehaviour of a few rogue individuals or clubs.

 And along the way maybe, just maybe, we’ll stumble over a more compassionate, more realistic understanding of the drug problem in the wider community.

Or not ...

MARCH WINDS BLOW COLD

Seasons shift. Time marches on. The icy drizzle of our weird new climate settles over Sydney. On the mute TV the old Pope waves one last time from the balcony then, Nixonesque, boards the holy helicopter into gilded exile. He did what he felt was right.

            My ex-wife has, at long last, found a good man close to her own age and seems ready to settle down; a weight off my mind. My bf has a new tattoo I may never see up-close, thanks to a mutual capacity for emotional denial and poor impulse control.

            One friend prepares to depart these shores and live out his dream of being a successful touring musician. Meanwhile another friend moves to Sydney from the bush to find work and build a new life – his dream of being a champion jockey shattered, with his sternum, pancreas, spleen and most of his bones, in a riding accident.

            My sister’s boyfriend, made redundant a few months ago, consoles himself by purchasing one of those titanic American SUVs. Even my mother contemplates trading-up – a four-wheel drive just big enough for herself, her grand-daughter and her German shepherd.

            The Labor Government marches inexorably toward destruction; the Opposition, and its Howard era front bench, readies itself to revive the good old days of increased middle-class welfare, populist xenophobia, wedge politics and no spending on any infrastructure outside marginal electorates; some things change – others never will.

            And me? I’ve given up on changing. Rather, my project these days is to become more myself. I think it’s going well. In a few weeks I’ll be a qualified copy-editor, and will begin the daunting process of setting-up shop. It’s not exactly the most exciting business, but I’ll be largely my own boss; and it won’t hurt to make a few contacts in the publishing industry.

             My only real worry is that it will chew up time when I could be writing, but somebody once told me that you don’t find time for the important stuff – you make time. Anyway, having to worry less about the little things – like paying the rent and feeding myself – won’t be an unwelcome change. Who knows, I may even end up in a position to keep a roof over someone else’s head while they chase their own dream. I’d like that.

            Or, I could follow the old Pope’s lead and devote the rest of my life to prayer. That always works.

LOVE, DESTINY

All kinds of nonsense have been written about love; all manner of romantic foolishness. Terms like “destiny” and “soul-mate” abound – the idea that there’s one perfect person out there for all of us, if only we can find them.

            The truth is you can be content with just about anyone. As long as two people are relatively sane, and share some common goals, you can make it work. It just takes a little effort.

            So, you stumbled into this thing because it was better than your previous situation – or better than being alone – that doesn’t matter. Time, familiarity and shared experience breed a deep affection. You may even come to believe you love this person who’s suffocating you.

            And anyway, before too long you’re depending on each other: you’ve rented an expensive flat; you’ve got furniture and appliances; you’re living beyond your means and the bills keep rolling in; your books and CDs are all mixed-up; things become your “our”; friends and family no longer view you as a person – only as part of a couple. With all that going on, it’s easy to think your lives are inextricably bound.

            Who cares that your own life is getting further and further away from how you’d pictured it? No-one but you will notice. So what if every faltering step you take in the direction of those quickly fading ideals is sabotaged by something your partner does? It’s not really that important that this person doesn’t nurture the better nature you know lives inside you.

            And hey, if they keep making stupid decisions that affect your life without consulting you, well, that’s just the way it goes. Compromise; you can make it work. You can be content.

            But then you see that other; the one who strikes you like a thunderbolt on first sight. Suddenly content is harder. Should you ever actually spend some time together, then content is out of the question.

            Sure, you can try lying to yourself. Go on, try. Just makes things worse, doesn’t it? You can stand on principle – and on the expectations of others – that won’t do any long term damage; won’t sink your relationship with your partner like a torpedoed tanker.

            Now you’re worse-off than ever. Reality puts on a mask and makes night-raids on your unconscious. And daytime’s even more confusing. If only you hadn’t met that other person.

            After your relationship has imploded, you take a while to put yourself together. You might even go on a few dates. It doesn’t work. None of them are that one. Knowing that person exists, you can’t bring yourself to make the effort with anybody else.

            So you live with it. Maybe one day it’ll happen, but you’re not waiting for it. You’d rather be alone than “content”. If only you hadn’t met that other one; then you’d never have realised.

            All kinds of nonsense have been written about love; all manner of romantic foolishness – and it’s all true.

CATS AND DOGS

You are, so they say, a cat person or a dog person. One or the other. Never the twain shall meet. And in a world where we are judged, increasingly, by how we answer bland questions in social media profiles, which one you are supposedly says a lot about you.

            Everyone seems to like dog people; and it’s not affected by how many dogs are involved. In fact, the more dogs you have, the more kind-hearted and likable you’re perceived to be (There are, of course, exceptions. Most people are suspicious of someone with a Pit-Bull terrier – especially if they’re tattooed, and shaven and hairy in all the wrong places; and heaven forbid you should have a Rottweiler and a rat’s-tail).

            But, own a cat? You’re lonely, and a little pathetic. Two cats? You’re suspect. More than two? You’re clearly insane, and you’ll die alone – at which point your cats will eat you.

            Me, I don’t have a preference. I like both (Bi-petual? Reject all labels! Rage against the machine!). And yes, funnily enough, that probably does say something about me.

            Dogs represent my better side – what I’d like to be, or what I’d like to be more often: unquestioningly loyal; instinctively able to find their place in the pack and be content with it; teachable; fierce in defence of home and family; affectionate; easily amused; a comfort to those who love them.

            Cats, on the other hand, are more like what I really am: solitary; prickly; aloof to a point easily mistaken for arrogance; indolent; vicious when rubbed the wrong way; capable of extreme affection, but usually when I need it – not always when my companion does; built for exceptional self-reliance, but inclined to let others look after me if they’ll do it.

We can’t change our personalities and, as the formula goes, “Personality plus environment equals behaviour” ... and there’s the key.

While unable to change them, we can understand our personalities; we can examine our thoughts, our environment, and how we react to them. If we make this a habit – and are, above all, honest with ourselves – then ninety-nine times out of a hundred we can act according to our values rather than our impulses; our behaviour is still based on the same personality, thoughts, and external stimuli, but the result is different.

            There’s a school of thought which says that if you’re able to imagine and wish for something, then it’s part of you and you’re capable of achieving it. Not sure I completely believe that, but I’d like to think I won’t remain a sad old bachelor getting crankier and more set in my ways with every passing year.

            At the moment life is about standing on my own two feet, dealing with my own shit, and trying to be more like the person I want to be and to share. It’s a job best done alone.

            One day though, given the opportunity, I’d still like to show the right Lady my inner German shepherd.