Tactics
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Karen Hitchcock
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Karen Hitchcock's biography and other articles by this writer
In the '80s I was in love with Robert Smith. I also hoped against all rumour that Morrisey's croon was for me. Before that it was the boy from our local grocery store, the one who helped shift the crates of sweating milk between the cool room and the fridges, cap pulled low over frantic blonde hair, refusing to look at me whenever I walked past. Once or twice I dropped my school bag and stood right in his path, hands on what was fast becoming a waist. He edged around me like I was just another fridge.
The news about Morrisey, when confirmed in print, hit me and every other girl in 10C hard. That had Mr O'Shaw chuckling to himself. A crush on a homosexual singer! For a day, his chuckle skirted a sneer. After that, it was something else. He'd stare out the window, blue eyes hovering above the car park, and let out these soft Irish noises we'd never heard him make before.
Then Ben transferred to our school. A boy with lyrical understanding and the latest personal compact disc technology. It was the start of the-smaller-the-better. A new era. He was everything my family wasn't: a suburban exotic. We shared earbuds over ham and pickle sandwiches. We listened to the entire Cure library burned on to a plate of shining chrome. He reintroduced me to The Smiths and spoke often of his lust for a Bang and Olufsen stereo with a flat remote control and hidden speakers in every room. He never mentioned his lust for Rosa Mioli, the girl from 11B. She showed me the compilation tape – held it out in front of her two preposterous breasts – proving what she had and that for her he was willing to use old-fashioned technology.
My friend Jane and I turned vegetarian. I followed the Moose-wood prescription: sprouting my own mung-beans for a superior protein; eating tofu as if I liked it. Jane studied for final exams. I hung out at Greville Street Records. The boys who worked there balanced records on their fingertips and polished them like they were the back of a newborn's neck. They took my cash, looking right through me, reluctant to let go of their babies. I bought Bad Brains and Rites of Spring and Bauhaus, all of them on vinyl. I listened to them at home on mum and dad's plywood cabinet turntable. At Nan's house, I'd still watch dinnertime TV and eat roast lamb. She promised not to tell. It was almost time for university anyhow.
JANE AND I ENROLLED IN OUR BAs IN A UNIVERSITY as far-flung from our suburb as possible. We moved together into a flat above a cafe. I read Kundera and DeLillo. She read Dworkin and Plath. I worked as a waitress; she cleaned five-star hotel rooms. By then it was the '90s and I was trying different tactics. So when a boy called Daniel showed up in my tutorial, sporting these big brown eyes and a vintage Bowie t-shirt, I acted like nothing had happened. Other girls sat next to him, looked up through their eyelashes and asked him questions about deconstruction; I moved around Daniel as if he were a fridge. One day he cleared his throat and asked me if I had read The Gulf War did not take place. I turned half my face towards him, eyebrows, nose and chin reaching angles Elizabethan. "Yes," I said, "I have," and I turned back to the front.
Daniel asked me to The Lounge to see a band with fringe-type cultural capital. I wasn't sure what to wear and Jane was no help. She'd recently decided that clothes and boys and Lounges were simply aspects of the patriarchal apparatus. I chose archetypal things dyed black and, before I left, revised Baudrillard for Beginners.
Turns out Daniel and I agreed on the big three: Neuromancer, Hunky Dory and Joseph Cornell. It was the era of the incommensurate.
Our meetings escalated. I went to his place – as small and neat as a converted ATM. I'd never before seen books meet top to toe. He arranged them by form rather than content. He had a titanium computer and a turntable. I couldn't beat his arguments and so we shared a couple of hamburgers. We smoked imported cigarettes. And all night long we'd make a gentle kind of sense.
He came to my place and precipitated thought experiments: Jane, attempting to will him to death.
"De Beauvoir," she'd say, slapping overcooked gnocchi into opshop bowls. "Rejected feminism outright when she crawled into the grave with Sartre." We sat and listened to the slapping. She took the pan back to the kitchen and threw it at the sink.
"I'm not so hungry," Daniel would murmur. For a boy, he had a sensitive stomach.
Things could have turned nasty, but Daniel won a scholarship for a year at UCLA. It was a fantastic opportunity, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and something he had to do. It was the first time I'd heard him speak in clichés. I pictured blue skies and inordinate suns. I pictured Californian girls with breasts rounder than Rosa Mioli's. I didn't even know he'd applied.
So. I had other things to do. I had books to read, film festivals to attend, papers to write, music to hunt out, clothes to dye. I had Jane. I had a boy called Simon in my Postmodern Narrative tutorial who was willing to come out and play. I drank macchiatos. Lamented past time. Worked hard to erase history. I was so busy I had to drop down to part-time study. Daniel's aero-grams became mournful, then tragic, then frantic. He wrote in tiny clustered letters, between lines, in margins, around the space for the return address. I refused to get email, paced my replies like Tai Chi. Life is fine, I wrote to him, Let's just be rational, philosophic. I was making the most of my assets.