Desperate Husbands (17 page)

It’s been reported that over 1200 people have now climbed Mount Everest. Worse, a fair percentage have written a book about their experiences. These are not modest, wry books, such as those written by Sir Edmund Hillary. They are thumping, self-aggrandising tomes, in which the climber is always a self-sacrificing hero.

Well, maybe. But why can’t someone put the same exciting spin on ordinary life. Staying at home. Looking after kids. Holding down a job over decades whether you enjoy it or not. Now
there’s
heroism. Now
there’s
self-sacrifice.

If only someone could write it up a little…

Many believe they’ve taken on an impossible feat, but Tracy and Steve Sweetbreath are adamant it can be done. Their aim: to live in Brisbane and raise two kids while avoiding bankruptcy, illegality or frothing insanity. Now in their early
forties, the two of them believe they’re at least halfway up the mountain.

‘But that doesn’t mean you can stop and celebrate,’ says Tracy Sweetbreath, panting heavily as she hauls ten bags of shopping up her treacherously steep front steps. ‘Some days, we really try to push forward. We make an assault on the mortgage; or search for a new approach that will take us around the Valley of Death that is my job. But most of the time it’s a matter of just plodding forward. Trying not to drop your bundle.’

Tracy pauses, struggling to find her keys, while maintaining her hold on the shopping. ‘Oh, for a team of Sherpas,’ she jokes, grimacing as the plastic bags cut into her hands.

Tracy is aware that a dangerous storm could suddenly blow up, right out of nowhere, most likely in the form of Rowan, the Sweetbreath’s teenage son. ‘At the moment, we’re trying to navigate our way through one of the most difficult sections of the whole ascent: the teenage years. There are sudden storms and many hidden pitfalls. There are also sections where everything gets very glacial. It’s pretty hard to keep everyone on the same track.’

Inside the house Steve Sweetbreath is at base camp, preparing a meal of chops, potato and broccoli. ‘Part of the problem,’ he says, ‘is that the ascent begins quite gently. You take on a house and a job, and for a while you score promotions and pay rises. You feel like you’re getting somewhere. Then, sometime in your late thirties, the slope just becomes a whole lot steeper. You feel you’re getting nowhere. Or even tumbling backwards. But by then you’re committed to the climb.’

Steve throws some chops in the pan. ‘I’ve had a few tumbles myself, as has Tracy. At certain times one of you will take a fall, drop down into some terrible dark abyss. And you just hope your grappling hooks are strong, and that you’re tied to your partner in a way that holds. Quite a few times we’ve pulled each other out of the crevasse.’

From Steve’s vantage point at the cooktop, he spots an argument building between Rowan and Tracy, the two of them standing at the doorway to Rowan’s room. ‘Classic hormonal storm,’ observes Steve. ‘Look how quickly it’s growing in intensity. Tracy’s tired from a day at work, battling uphill, virtually carrying her boss, year in and year out, and Rowan’s suffering a testosterone blizzard. I’d go over and help but, frankly, it’s too dangerous. No way do you want everyone standing on the same slippery slope. Better if I stay over here until the worst of it has passed.’

Will the climb get easier from now on?

‘In some ways, yes,’ says Steve. ‘But your body starts to tire after the first forty years. And, as you plod on, you spot climbers who haven’t made it. They’ve succumbed to the grog, or impatience, or rage. You see them bogged, unable to move forward.’ Steve’s voice drops to a pained whisper. ‘I’ve even heard tell of those who leave their families and jobs and take up mountaineering or solo round-the-world yachting. It’s sad.’

Over at the doorway, Rowan’s hormonal storm has passed and there’s a flash of smiles all round.

‘No gain without pain,’ grins Tracy. ‘People say we are heroes but we’re just doing what we love. Pitting ourselves against incredible odds.’

Steve agrees. ‘On the positive side, Tracy and I have started giving motivational lectures. We’ll have a roomful of people—say a conference of mountaineers or round-the-world sailors—and we’ll just try to motivate them. A lot of them are amazed at our stories. These are people who’ve done challenges that last just a few weeks; at most a couple of months. They can’t imagine sticking to one challenge over seventy or eighty years. Sometimes, when I’m telling our stories, I can see their eyes gleaming with excitement, realising how unchallenged they’ve been by their lives of endless mountaineering and drab adventuring. And it’s those moments, I think, which make it all worthwhile.’

I see that Australian doctors are studying what they call ‘oniomania’, or the compulsive need to shop. I just wish they’d spare a thought for people like me who suffer from shopping reluctance, or to use the technical name ‘tightwadmania’. All around I see my fellow citizens joyfully shopping, their gold Visa cards flashing festively in the sunlight, their shopping baskets full. Oh, that I could join them. Instead, I sit at home, fumbling for my wallet, only to find that my pockets are deep and my arms are short.

Everywhere I see barriers to my enjoyment of the shopping experience. For a start, have you seen the prices? Since when did a shirt cost $85 and a pair of daks $150? I feel as if I might faint were it not for the excessive price of smelling salts. Then there are the mirrors: they are everywhere. In a particularly cruel move, they’ve even put them into the changing rooms. How am I meant to convince
myself to buy an $85 shirt when, right before me, is evidence of how appalling I look in it? Couldn’t they borrow the mirror from Luna Park—the one that makes you tall and blessedly thin?

But most of all it’s the excessive choice. How am I meant to know what style collar I want? Or which of the thirteen different kinds of jeans? How am I meant to know which of thirty-seven brands of ground coffee I should buy? Or how many pixels I want in a digital camera?

Shopping, already a complex activity, is getting worse with each passing week. In the supermarket down the road, they’ve added new specialty sections. Where’s the olive oil? It could be in the Italian Section, in the Health Section, in the Gourmet Section or in Cooking Needs. It’s probably in all four, since the idea is not to assist the shopper but to make you browse. By constantly shifting everything around, you are forced to walk through every aisle about twenty times, searching, looking, yearning.

There is now good evidence, I believe, that Coles and Woolworths are basing their store design on the ancient Cretan Labyrinth of the Minotaur. Vainly do we sacrifice seven youths and seven virgins to the management, yet they refuse to change the layout. And so, every day, you see shoppers unravelling balls of string just so they can find their way back from Dried Soup to Canned Fruit. No wonder they now open twenty-four hours; that’s how long it takes to locate the Cheese Spread Snack Abouts.

I’ve long fantasised about a blokes’ shopping mall, which would offer good parking, cheap prices and
really
minimal choice. The supermarket would offer only three products: lamb chops, beer and loo roll. They’d have a whole aisle
each. No more trailing up and down the aisles, like the lost souls from Dante’s Inferno, constantly bumping into the same lady, the one who insists on parking her trolley mid-aisle while she endlessly debates the choice between the freeze-dried carbonara or the freeze-dried puttanesca. Doesn’t she realise they put the same salty goo into both packets?

In the Blokes’ Supermarket, all of that hassle: gone. Into the trolley they’d go—lamb chops, beer and loo roll—and you’d be trundling on your way. The specialty vegetable shop would then beckon. ‘Vegetables, sir?’ the kindly assistant would holler from his shop doorway and, upon one’s nod, a few head of broccoli, his only product, would be tossed into your cart. The practised shopper wouldn’t even slow his trolley, simply signalling his thanks with a few accurately thrown coins.

At the bakery, there’d be a new product called the mixed loaf—a loaf of which one end would be white bread and the other wholemeal, with a kind of light rye in the middle. Adults could start eating at one end, the kids at the other, and everybody would be happy. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but it would be the best invention since sliced bread. Using a small cannon-like device, the baker would lob a couple of loaves into your trolley as you trundled past; the charge billed to one’s account.

With all this new efficiency, the shops would be able to drastically lower their prices, at last providing some relief to those members of the citizenry suffering from tightwadmania. With a little help and sympathy, one day our arms may even grow long enough to reach our wallets.

I’ve been looking through
In Style
magazine, which arrived the other day. Every couple of pages there’s a profile of a Hollywood celebrity revealing his or her decorating tips. According to the magazine, every multimillionaire Hollywood star was born with innate style, which was displayed long before he or she became wealthy. The magazine doesn’t disclose why, this being so, each has to hire a decorator to make every decision down to colour of the eggcups—but perhaps the celebs can’t be bothered wasting their innate style on themselves.

For instance—I get this from the current issue—John Travolta lives in a fairly doozy pad in Los Angeles with his wife, Kelly Preston. Travolta gets paid $10 million to $20 million a picture, and has hired the decorator Christopher Boshears to rip out and refit the house. Yet it turns out neither Travolta’s huge wealth nor the expertise of Mr
Boshears has any real bearing on the fact that his place now looks great. Travolta has innate style that doesn’t require money.

Here’s Travolta: ‘My intent has always been to inspire others to do the same thing I’m doing, regardless of income, because I lived well when I had no money and also when I did have some money.’

At this point in the article,
In Style
quotes a friend cooing about the couple’s ‘aesthetic of living’. She says that Kelly, even when poor, would never drink out of a paper cup. Even if she could only afford to have one china cup, she would buy just one high-quality china cup. You can imagine dinner parties at their place: ‘Hey, John, pass the wine would you and maybe I could have a go with the cup sometime soon? Plus how are you going with the knife and fork?’

The idea is that to possess humdrum Kmart objects reveals that you are a humdrum Kmart sort of person. It reflects not your income level but your very nature. The quality of the soul is divined through the possession of expensive objects. Not that I believe John or Kelly ever lived like this—with the one teacup and the one tasteful wine glass. It’s a myth, of course, but one which seeks to underline the moral message: even a small income does not excuse any of us from buying stupidly expensive things. And how convenient that the advertisers are there on the next page to satisfy the hunger thus created.

The reality is that the person who fusses over the brand of their dinner plates or the quality of their glassware is generally a person without innate anything. Rather than ‘stylish’ and ‘aesthetic’ they are boring, shallow and materialistic. We all know this to be true, probably even the magazine’s editors
know it to be true. Yet if a magazine confessed the truth—that it is words and actions that tell you most about a person—its advertising would quickly dry up. ‘Talk about interesting things! Read books! Be interested in other people! Be passionate about ideas!’ Each is a useful slogan but not one that would lead to a lot of high-margin retail sales.

Truly interesting people don’t have much time for objects at all, that’s the truth of it. They don’t decorate, other than shifting the couch every ten years, and they use cheap glassware with gay abandon.

Writing newspaper profiles, I used to spend days hanging out with various astounding people—writers, thinkers, activists, musicians. I rarely mentioned the brand names of the objects they possessed and wore because the objects were so ordinary. The truly fabulous are clothed by Target, with kitchenware by Kmart and a car by Toyota. Their favourite restaurant is the local Chinese. They don’t care about the set design of their lives; they are interested in the downstage action.

In the face of the intimidating style-fascism of most magazines, I now regret that I didn’t mention the mundane surroundings of those fabulous people. I may need to go back through some newspaper profiles and insert a few Ihad-thought-obvious facts.

‘Mr Mandela, wearing a 50/50 rayon/cotton mix shirt and black pants, purchased from an outlet whose name he can’t recall, pulled a notepad from his pocket. Covered in genuine plastic, this useful pocket diary cost $4.99 at his local newsagency.’

Or this: ‘The Australian poet Judith Wright throws open her kitchen cupboards. She has chosen Laminex doors,
which have become charmingly distressed with the passage of time, and stocked the cupboards with an eclectic mixture of china and plastic, in which not one piece seems to match any other.’

‘Was such a mixture planned by the feisty poet? “Not really,” says the cardigan-wearing bard. “I’ve never noticed up to now.”’

We could call it
Out of Style
magazine. We’d have less advertising but really fabulous profiles. And, after being inspired by the people within, you wouldn’t feel the need to buy a thing—except for another copy of
Out of Style
.

I don’t know if you have noticed but the lips on American TV stars continue to grow bigger. On shows like
CSI
and
CSI Miami
, the lips now appear larger than the face onto which they are attached. With everything else immobilised by Botox, the actor has become a life-support system for the lips. Hollywood now awaits the birth of its dream woman: a woman with lips wider than her waist. It’s the culture’s way of saying: ‘You see, I’ve got a mouth big enough to eat anything I like, but enough self-control to choose starvation.’

Go to an event like the Logies and it’s like being at a Chupa Chups convention: everywhere the same body type—big head, big eyes, big mouth, all set onto a tiny, perfectly formed body. I went to the Logies a few years back and felt I should tread carefully, lest a couple of game show hosts be trampled underfoot. Wear a pair of open-toed sandals and you’d be picking out bits of weather presenter all night.

Already the TV stars remind me of Billy Bass, the battery-operated singing fish, in which nothing moves but a set of giant lips. Soon there’ll be awards for the actress who can support her lips with the least visible strain. They already have the title: Best Supporting Actress.

Meanwhile, millions of people are using Botox, a paralysing agent which is injected into the face. Since the muscles are frozen, it becomes impossible to frown, and thus one’s wrinkles begin to disappear. That’s the idea. The question, though, is why you’d want a face that could no longer frown. George Orwell famously said that ‘by fifty, everyone has the face they deserve’, which presumably should now be rewritten: ‘By fifty, everyone has the face they can afford.’

Personally, I love the subtleties of The Frown. Each frown is made up of a hatchwork of lines, mostly verticals and horizontals, yet their precise alignment can convey anything from aghast horror over politics to uncertainty about a piece of dodgy fish. This tiny ideogram, located in the centre of the forehead, has all the precision and eloquence you could hope for and is readable across cultures and generations. Imagine a spoken language that could do so much with such delicacy and in so tiny a space. And imagine, given such a language, that people would willingly render themselves mute. But that’s the glory that is Botox.

Of course, the grass is always greener. If human beings had never developed The Frown, someone would have tried to. Imagine the advertisements on late-night TV: ‘Amaze your friends. Learn how to express your emotions through your face. Tell a boyfriend he’s not behaving properly without having to spell it out! Put the pressure on a child to
do his homework without a big verbal showdown! All this could be yours with The Frown (copyright pending). Be among the first 300 callers and we’ll also throw in instructions for The Dirty Look, The Glare and The Scowl.’

Part of the problem, of course, is that frowns leave marks. As do smiles, dirty looks and expressions of surprise. Thus Orwell’s aphorism about having the face we deserve. Spend your life scowling—even in private—and in the end everyone will know your secret.

Not that I’m ruling out plastic surgery for myself. If God, or Charles Darwin, had done the job properly, all this fiddling around would not be necessary. I have long admired, for example, the concept of baby teeth. I love the way, at the age of six or seven, kids start to lose their baby teeth—and then get a whole fresh set. It’s such a great idea. It’s as if God, or Charles Darwin, realised that kids are not responsible enough to look after their first set of teeth and needed a second chance. You get one set of teeth to mistreat and misuse as a baby; then, when you’ve become a bit more responsible, you get a whole new set.

It’s a good principle and one worthy of extension. I’d like to see God supply a third set of teeth, some time in late middle age: after all, even Ikea throws in a couple of extra bolts. With the maturity of my forties, I’d look after the third set. After that, God, or Darwin, could address the matter of our internal organs, in particular the liver. The new liver could be delivered around one’s fortieth birthday. The Liver Fairy could drop two bucks on the bedside table and take the exhausted old one away.

A second chance with the belly would also be good. As with the teeth, you only start making an effort once you’ve
got the problem. And by then it’s too late. There’s the moment, again in one’s mid-forties, when the old belly starts to get a bit wobbly and loose. With a first tooth, that’s the signal the old one’s about to fall out. Same principle would work with bellies. Once it starts wobbling, you should be able to look forward to it coming loose and revealing the new flat belly below.

Slip the old one under your pillow and then the Belly Fairy would leave you two bucks and spirit the wretched thing away. It could then be sold to Hollywood for use in some Chupa Chups starlet’s lips. Think about it: in a few weeks’ time, your old beer belly could be locked in an embrace with Brad Pitt.