I'Ll Go Home Then, It's Warm and Has Chairs. The Unpublished Emails. - (15 page)

Understanding science Part 1: Biology

Ten reasons I probably shouldn’t be alive: being stabbed

There is an old saying that you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your relatives. If this was true, I would be friends with Brad Pitt and he would buy me lots of presents and take me shopping. Probably for expensive watches and boats that have lounge chairs in the back.

There is usually some form of bond between relatives, but I never felt it with one named Christopher. I didn’t have a lot to do with him as a kid and while family gatherings demanded some small interaction, for the most part we kept to ourselves. My interests centred mainly around reading and drawing while Christopher’s one fixation was the World Wrestling Federation. His bedroom walls were covered with posters of some guy wearing a kilt named Rowdy Roddy Piper. The one above his bed had the words 'Hot Rod' emblazoned across it in a lightning shaped typeface. He was a little slow but not in the Forrest Gump kind of way, more the 'patiently explaining instructions twice before doing it yourself' kind of way. It was a common rumour that he wore a nappy until the age of eight but I have always suspected this was due more to laziness than anything else as he was a fairly fat kid.

After I left home to attend University, I didn't really have much to do with him. He lived at home until his late thirties so I would, on occasion, catch up with him at family events but as his interests only expanded enough from wrestling to include pornography, we did not have a lot to chat about. Mentioning anything about art and design was met with statements such as "designers are poofters unless they are the kind who design custom graphics for Harley Davidsons" and "I’ve got tons of naked chicks on my computer, that's all the art I need."

Somewhere along the line, Christopher gained 300 pounds in body mass and a girlfriend named Joylene of similar dimension.

I visited the flat they rented together once but twenty minutes of sitting on a dog's beanbag within touching distance of a kitty litter tray that hadn't been changed in months while watching the movie White Chicks was pretty much it for me. I can’t recall what excuse I gave to leave but I’m fairly sure it was more polite than "Your dog is eating poo from the kitty litter and no, helping you install a stolen Audio4 stereo in your car after the movie does not sound... fuck this, I'm going." Before I left, Chris used my phone to order pizza because his was out of credit and, as I was leaving, asked for pizza money and didn't have change for a fifty.

I only heard from Christopher three times in the years following. Once to decline helping him torch his Ford Falcon on a quiet country road in the middle of the night to claim the insurance money, once to store a wooden boat in my shed, and once when he needed somewhere to stay due to Joylene discovering several terrabytes of teen art on his computer.

After living alone for several years, I was hesitant to let anyone stay in my apartment, let alone Christopher, but after being assured it would only be “for a few days at the most,” I reluctantly agreed.

Six weeks later, returning home from work early one afternoon, I walked into my kitchen to discover Christopher dressed in women's lingerie and a curly blonde wig, mounted on the handle of a toilet plunger suctioned securely to the floor. He looked like a huge albino frog lolipop.  A K-Mart brochure lay open between his knees advertising children's swimwear.

As Christopher leapt up in surprise, the plunger handle exited and, like a trebuchet, flung a combination of butter and faeces across the kitchen cabinets. My first reaction was to stand there in shock. Christopher’s first reaction was to grab a Wiltshire® steak knife from the kitchen counter top and plunge it four inches into my stomach. He then ran up the stairs as I slid slowly down the refrigerator door to the floor.

Descending a few minutes later, with his bags hurriedly packed, Christopher said "That will teach you not to give away people’s rowboats" and left. On the way out, he stole my wallet from the hallway table and scratched a deep groove down the side of my car with a key.

For some reason, I will put it down to shock, I edged my way up from the floor, with the knife handle still protruding from my abdomen, made it into the lounge area and watched a re-run of MASH. It was the episode where Klinger tried to eat a Jeep. Attempting several times to slowly remove the serated blade, and almost blacking out from the pain each time, I decided to drive to the hospital.

I was approximately two blocks from the hospital when a police car pulled me over for not wearing my seatbelt. Explaining to the officer that I was unable to secure the seatbelt due to the knife handle protruding from my stomach and stating “No, I don’t need an ambulance, the hospital is just around the corner,” I had my keys taken from me and was forced to wait almost an hour for an ambulance to arrive.

While we were waiting, the officer asked me what had happened and I told him that I had slipped on butter on the kitchen floor and fell onto the open dishwasher door which had a steak knife facing up in the thing that holds cutlery. I have no idea why I made up this story as I certainly felt no need to protect Chris but part of my brain seems hard-wired to always automatically lie to police and at the time it seemed a more viable scenario than the tuth.

‘Kitchen accident’ was listed on the hospital report and I was in surgery for less than hour, receiving only five stitches. Apparently the knife had missed my lung by two centimetres and no major organs had been damaged.

Returning home later that night, I cleaned both the kitchen and the room Chris had been staying in and found my son's Starwars® light-sabre, the missing rubber duck from the bathroom, and a pair of size 20 women's blue satin panties under the bed, coated in the same concoction as the plunger.

Not knowing what other items had been included in Christopher’s activities meant I had to throw out every item in the house that could theoretically fit inside a human bottom. I told my son that I'd given all his toys to a poor family and had to take him to Toys'R'Us to buy replacements.

Hello, my name is Chris and I have lots of girlfriends who I kiss

While it has been suggested that I never leave the house and spend my life playing World of Warcraft, these photos of me at the beach are evidence that I lead a healthy outdoor lifestyle and have a lot of girlfriends who I kiss. None of these photos are photoshopped.

My girlfriend Tammy and I swimming at the beach.

Sometimes we splash each other and laugh but most of the time we just kiss. I love the beach and was probably a jellyfish in a past life. Even though Tammy is scared of sharks, she knows that if a shark attacked us, I would fight it and win because I have arms and sharks don't.

Tammy tells me all the time that she would rather have her arms tied to two cars driving in opposite directions, both doing 60mph, and be ripped in half than live without me. I tell her that she would probably survive this and that it would just rip her arms off and they could stitch them back on at the hospital. There would probably be some permanent nerve damage though.

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My girlfriend Ping Ping and I relaxing on the beach.

Ping Ping and I get along very well as we both love Pokemon. Once, when I was attacked by the sword of unworldly fire, I counter attacked with a pond demon and Ping Ping said it was the bravest thing she had ever seen. She wants to get married but I have seen what Asian women look like when they get older.

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My girlfriend Susan and I riding floating motorbikes.

Susan and I share a love of all things fast and have watched the director’s cut of Days of Thunder together over six hundred times. It is the greatest movie ever made and Susan says that I look a lot like Tom Cruise, who is the best actor in the world and was also in the second greatest movie of all time, Top Gun. I have the Karaoke soundtrack from Top Gun on cassette and often sing Danger Zone for Susan when we are not kissing. Kenny Loggins is without doubt the greatest musician of all time. One day, I want to drive Nascars. If I was a bartender like Tom Cruise in the movie Cocktail, the third best movie ever, I would spend a lot more time throwing bottles in the air as customers prefer this to being served.