Minimum Trips
Bruce Greenhalgh
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Bruce Greenhalgh
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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****
Temptation. Give me temptation.
Give me something other than yesterday’s news, today’s hassles and tomorrow’s disappointments. The entertainments, the compensations, the contrived distractions and manufactured diversions don’t do it for me anymore. I’m not excited by football matches, rock and roll, one day cricket or some stupid fucking car race. I don’t want to see a band or film or go shopping or fishing or walk a dog or mow lawns or raise kids or have a barbeque or get pissed or go on a holiday to a resort or anywhere.
Temptation. Lead me to temptation.
I mean real temptation, not the lure of having whiter teeth through using striped toothpaste or a great phone deal or low fat milk with all the taste and half the calories or the prospect of a comfortable retirement through astute investment in superannuation.
Temptation. Please.
I have had a gutful of the latest, traditional, quality, interest free, no deposit, value packed, world class, exclusive, guaranteed, internationally renowned, endorsed, coloured, flavoured, homogenised, certified, lauded and applauded thing.
Temptation. Is it so much to ask? Too much to ask? To be tempted, attracted, enticed, lured. To experience the pull of good and evil, the fundamental, monumental dialectic. I want temptation, redemption, indulgence, abstention, absolution and deliverance. Something.
Let me explain. I want to explain. I can’t explain.
****
And he said, ‘I don’t think it is such a terrible thing. I really don’t. It doesn’t hurt anybody else, and even if it hurts me - isn’t good for me - I mean, it does give me ... pleasure’.
He hesitated with that last word, embarrassed, like, and me a good mate, his best mate and eminently qualified, versed, experienced and capable of supplying understanding and empathy and sympathy and sharing. ‘Let it rip’ I thought, ‘Tell me about it, everything, detail upon detail, make my juices flow. Tell me about the pleasure.’
‘It’s a weakness that’s all. We all have our weaknesses.’ A silence followed. Andy looked around the room as if searching for an escape hatch and settled on the television, his gaze suggesting we should turn it on and retreat from the conversation.
‘It’s broken.’ I lied.
‘Broken?’
‘Yep.’ And I looked at him in a way that said: ‘So tell me about your weakness. Tell me about your failing. Tell me about this thing that casts you down.’
He continued, ‘I should be able to control myself, Kerry is right. But on the other hand, well, it is my life.’
‘Tell me what you want’ I cajoled.
‘Oh you know...’
‘Well, y’know, you come ‘round here and start talking about it, you wanna talk about it. TALK!’
‘Nah, nah. It’ll only make me want it.’
‘Do you want a hit now?’
‘No. Nah, not really. Maybe a bit. I mean, I guess, y’know, you always kinda want it.’
‘I need it. I really need it, and I know a place near here. I tell you it’s good stuff, bloody good.’
‘Near here? I didn’t know there was anything near here.’
‘The genuine article, those tassle things hang in the doorway, lino floor, dago owner, big refrigeration display with stuff all in it, laminex counter and great fish and chips.’
Andy looked a bit guilty as we walked to the chippy, ill at ease, like a schoolkid going to the headmaster for a caning. Once inside, though, his mood lifted. Actually, it soared.
His face lit up. ‘Look’ he said They’ve spelt chicken with two ‘i’s, C-H-I-C-K-I-N.’ Ever since Andy had worked out that ‘Always we sell the freshest and best and fish and chips and chicken and chips in the Elizabeth’ wasn’t the epitome of the Queen’s English, he had been fascinated with fish and chip shop menus. He scoured them for mistakes and was rarely disappointed. Usually it was a very minor mistake he found, an apostrophe where it wasn’t needed, or maybe a mix up with the spelling of ‘Hawaiian’ in Hawaiian Burger (completely understandable). Occasionally, though, he would come across one that even to the disinterested eye screamed ‘The illegal immigrant who runs this shop never went to school in his own country let alone Australia, and is proud of the fact.’
We both ordered two fish and minimum chips. There was a bench seat. Andy sat down and watched. He watched as the fish were dipped into the batter, wiped on the side of the batter bowl and then lowered into the dark liquid gold which reacted in greedy greasy effervescence. The chips were then scooped into a mesh basket and lowered into the same bubbling cholesterol.
I paced up and down. I could hear myself breathing. I made a quick mental inventory of the drinks in the shop’s cooler. I checked out the pinball machine, considered the salads in the refrigerated display, and then just waited.
‘Salt?’
‘Yes’ in chorus. We fumbled out the money, grabbed the precious paper parcels, power walked to the car, raced back to my place, burst in.
‘Vinegar. Get the vinegar!’ barked Andy as he unwrapped his fish and chips. Splashing on the vinegar he leant back, then he rocked forward and inhaled the aroma of vinegar evaporating from the hot slivers of ambrosia and with watering eyes he attacked them. I followed suit. Conversation ceased apart from Andy exclaiming, ‘Fuck these are good. Fuck.’ Olfactory, palatal, visceral, greasy pleasure (that word again) ran through us. Andy’s eyes fixed on his chips, his nostrils flared, and small beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. The fish and chips kept disappearing, disappearing, going, going, gone...
When we had finished, after we had chased the last morsel of deep fried crispy fat around the rough white paper, we were silent. I screwed up the paper into balls and put them in the kitchen bin. The aroma hung in the air. Andy sighed, a deep complete satisfied sigh.
‘Has it been long?’ I asked.
‘A week or so.’
‘Pretty good then?’
‘Yes.’
****
I switched on the television and there was a current affair show with a panel poised to discuss what the compere described as the chipping ‘epidemic’.
‘It’s an epidemic in which young people consume excessive amounts of fish and chips, day in, day out without any regard to their well-being, in search of some elusive high. A convenience food has become a narcotic. Tonight with the help of our panel of experts and audience we will try to unpack the problem and, perhaps, even find a way forward.’ The compere then introduced a dietician, a social worker and a psychiatrist to the audience. The dietician opened with a spiel about the importance of a balanced diet and explained how the diets of chippers are so out of balance. She added a few lines about the particular dangers of fat and salt. She spoke of cholesterol and high blood pressure and arteries and expressed concern that young people are establishing eating patterns – habits – that will be hard to break, that will lead to lasting damage. Then the social worker is asked her opinion of the magnitude of the problem. She first outlined the work she does with disadvantaged youth and then stated that she has become alarmed at the increase in chipping. A few years ago, as far as she could tell, there was no chipping and then a few, a very few individuals, presented with the problems associated with chipping. But today, she claimed, the problem was not only widespread but growing every day. There was a big hairy hint about the need to increase funding for programs such as the one she runs.
The shrink is asked, ‘Why?’ He qualified his remarks by saying that chipping is a phenomenon with only a small history on which little research has been carried out and one that he cannot pretend to fully understand. He suggested that addiction to chips may result from a combination of factors, perhaps different factors for each and every individual. ‘But’, he said, ‘the essence of addiction, all addiction, is the pursuit of pleasure, a quest for a ‘high’ that is difficult, if not impossible to attain in everyday life. Somehow consuming chips must give a heightened pleasure to the ‘chipper’’.
‘But Doctor’, asked the compere, ‘what pleasure can be had from gorging on greasy old fish and chips?’
‘Well... there is the obvious pleasure which virtually all of us derive from eating.... Beyond that I do not know for sure. Personally I find the food difficult to digest and given its unhealthy aspects, as just described, I avoid it.’
‘You don’t deny it is a problem though do you?’ joined a slightly worried social worker.
‘No, no, not at all. Indeed I have treated several people for the addiction.’
‘Successfully?’ asked the compere.
‘So far, treatment is ongoing.’
The dietician popped up with ‘Does the treatment involve working with their diets? By that I mean not just specifically cutting out chips, but dealing with their whole diet.’
‘I have only referred them onto dieticians and written to their GPs asking that they consider the question of their patient’s diet with due diligence. Programs for treatment are still in the early stages of development but they do include education on diets. It needs to be understood, however, that it is not ignorance of the nature of healthy diets that is at the core of the problem. Programmes which address simply dietary issues will not be efficacious.’
‘I’d like to return to treatments later in the program, but first, I’m hoping, for the benefit of viewers who are still grappling with the very idea of this problem that the panel might give us some anecdotal insight into the problem.’
‘I think this is a great place to start’ said the social worker. ‘There are many people out there who can’t come to terms, can’t even believe in the existence of chipping as a problem. Already, tonight, by questioning whether chippers do get a high we are admitting that we are still sceptical about the truth of this affliction. But believe me, it does exist, it is a problem, and it is a sad, sad thing.’
The compere nodded in agreement and said, ‘Okay, good, but for viewers who haven’t come into contact with a ‘chip-head’ could you describe a person as well as a problem?’
‘Of course’, replied the social worker. ‘There is considerable stigma attached to being a chipper. In preparing for this show I discussed it with some of my clients and asked if I could, if appropriate, discuss their stories and circumstances. Some agreed, some didn’t. One young man was quite keen for his story to be told, as a warning - his words - to others. When I first met him it was through his having been caught shoplifting. The shoplifting was just an isolated incident, a small aberration from an otherwise well-adjusted and healthy young man. Fortunately, I was able to arrange things so that this one rash act would not come to haunt him in later life. As we were working through this we built up a certain rapport. I believe that’s why he came to me for help some months later. In that time he had put on considerable weight and broken out in pimples quite severely. His hair was greasy and he was generally unkempt. I was quite shocked. He said he was chipping, that since I had seen him he had got into chips in a big way, an uncontrollable way. We talked. He told me that he had lost friends, and lost something about himself he valued. We’ve been working through it since then. I really can’t devote the time I would like to him, but we are working through it. There’s hope.’
The compere then takes up there with ‘In that story there seems to be an element of self loathing. There are parallels here, aren’t there, with eating disorders, anorexia and bulimia?’
‘Particularly bulimia,’ remarked the shrink.
‘Yes; are they one and the same? Can they be the same? Is chipping another eating disorder?’
‘Not in my opinion. There seems to be a certain, shall we say, intersection between chipping and bulimia with some bulimics bingeing on chips and some chip addicts exhibiting the feast and fast behaviour typical of those with eating disorders. But I think we are dealing with two essentially different behaviours and motivations.’
All this talk got me hungry and interested though I was, I just had to dip out and get a serve. When I returned and settled into the couch and unwrapped a rather soggy and anaemic serve of chips they were still at it. The compere was up questioning the audience and a fish and chip shop owner grabbed the microphone and accused the dietician of trying to put him out of business.
‘Nothing wrong with chips lady! You wanna turn everbody into rabbits? Alaways we sell good chips, good food. Come to my shop, and you will see.’
Some sad sack mum was asked about her daughter. She struggled to her feet and then struggled with the microphone. Slowly and softly she related how her suspicions led her to following her daughter when she left the house. One night she saw her in the local park eating chips, and the next, and the next.
‘I cooked her good meals,’ she pleaded. ‘I hated spying on her but what are you supposed to do?’
‘Have you talked to your daughter about her problem?’ asked the compere. Through barely stifled sobs she whispered yes and sat down waving the microphone away.
‘I put it to the chip shop owner that he should monitor his customers, ration the sale of chips,’ declared the compere, all well rehearsed righteousness.
The chippy just shrugged.
‘It’s not his fault,’ offered the mother. ‘She went to different shops. She didn’t want them to work out she was a, a, a ...’ Mum collapsed into tears.
‘A terrible thing, and while we have only touched on the problem here, tonight, I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. I’d like to thank Doctor....’
I’d heard it all before, of course, being a chiphead sensitises you to any and all mention of chipping and I’ve noticed how increasingly it has become a favoured topic of the media. Pretty soon chipping will be described as a ‘crisis’ along with all those other crises, in education, in health, in the environment, in obesity and so on and so forth. But all the media coverage in the world wasn’t about to change what I did. I want something and I know I’m not going to get it following advice given out on television.
****
Television, what bullshit. And I should know I’ve watched enough of it; Gilligan’s Island, The Man from Uncle, Get Smart, Number 96, the Brady Bunch, Mod Squad, Please Sir, Homicide, Hawaii Five-O, Lost in Space, The Fugitive…. You name it, I’ve seen it. I’m not alone. I’m one of many who sat too near the TV, watched too much, watched when I should have been outside getting some fresh air and sunshine, watched the wrong programmes, got swayed by advertisements, bewitched by cartoons, puppets and animated plasticine, entertained by people in animal suits. There were plenty of us who whinged when we couldn’t stay up to watch more TV and who were compensated by being able to get up early to watch cartoons before school.
I watched sport. I watched football, tennis, cricket, swimming, running, car races. I watched direct telecasts, replays, slow motions, edited highlights, magic moments, classic catches and goals of the day. I listened to experts, commentators, ring-ins, players, ex players, coaches, ex coaches, anybody who summarised, opinionated, pontificated, awarded best-on-grounds, explained cracks, seams, tactics, rules, scores, anybody who declared losers were gallant, winners deserving, decisions questionable and the weather perfect, appalling, scorching, wet, cold and with a wind favouring the river end. I even watched golf. That’s right, golf.
I can only remember a handful of televised sporting events. A poor return for all the watching I’ve done. Occasionally I was inspired and encouraged to go out and sport around but just as often I was made to feel inadequate. There is something masochistic about watching people do admirable things that you find physically impossible. People reckon they enjoy watching the best of something (especially the world’s best) but I dunno. I get a bit bored with perfection and superlative after superlative.
And let’s not forget the music shows. Let’s not forget Countdown and Music Express and Top of the Pops and, erm, all those other shows that I have forgotten. The one hit wonders miming badly, and the latest clips, and the chat and the charts, the charts! That tabulated nonsense which I studied with such ardour and without any questioning of its veracity.
I’m just another member of the television generation. Just somebody else who knows that the youngest Brady Bunch girl has curls but isn’t too sure about their own blood group type. I slip into a thousand television shows like a foot into an old sneaker. Television is so familiar and yet, y’know, so foreign. It has little connection to my life. I’ll explain by telling you that once I saw a short film - a short as they say - a low budget, no hype, vanish without a trace film. It was set and filmed in South Australia, in Adelaide, in suburban Adelaide and it was full of things that I knew and was familiar with and could actually go and touch; The Advertiser, a certain style of kitchen cupboard, West End beer bottles, a front fence, the clothes people wore, the way they looked. It was so Adelaide, and it was such a shock. It hit me with genuine force, it stilled me and confounded me. I had never seen these things on the TV screen (or the cinema screen) before. So what had I been watching? Something different. And I wondered just what that meant. I wondered.
****
I arrive at the fnc shop and find it crowded. People, people, people. Shit, shit, shit. Okay, it’s not as if you get physical cold turkey type reactions when you’re in a chip grip. No cold sweats, no itchy scratchy eyes, no fever, no stomach cramps, no nausea, and the room is still. And yet, I am an addict. Why shouldn’t I have a bad reaction when I can’t get my fix. It’s my right, my fucking right!
So, understand, the frustration, the sheer frustration of waiting and queuing, and wanting, wanting bad. My life, so much frustration, so much time wasted, so much disappointment. I can’t bear it any longer because this simple request - to have an empty fnc shop and the proprietors hanging out to serve me - is denied. It’s not much to ask! I’m not asking anybody to contribute any of the social welfare budget to my rehabilitation. I’m not asking you to fix up the mess I am making of my life and other people’s lives. I’m not stealing your video or breaking into your house or mugging your grandmother for loose change. I’m just asking that you steer clear of the chippy when I want a fix.
Don’t laugh. Don’t scoff. Don’t ask me to be reasonable, fuck you. No talk about this is how society works, no ‘community’, no ‘respect for others’. Get this lard arse asexual mother outa my way. Send her packing in her tracky dacks and K-Mart top and sloppy shoes. Forget her, forget her order, forget that kid 3 doesn’t want lettuce on his hamburger and kid 4 wants extra sauce. Stuff ‘em!
I’m not in the mood for waiting. I’m really not. No, I didn’t have a bad day. I just don’t want to wait. Do you want to wait? Ever want to wait? I never want to wait. Everything I want, I want now. In particular I want two dollars worth of chips and two butterfish.
Two hamburgers with the lot (except no lettuce on one and extra sauce on another), two dim sims, a chicken yiros, six butterfish, a chiko roll and ten dollars worth of chips later I get my order. And d’y’know what? The urge has almost gone. Whatever it was that electrified me five orders ago has dissipated. Withered, I am withered. I eat the fnc with scant pleasure. A need is met, an itch is scratched, night follows day, day follows night, salt and vinegar, minimum trips.
****
At twenty seven. At twenty seven Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose. Jimi Hendrix also died at twenty seven of a drug overdose, ditto Jim Morrison. At twenty seven if you die, you die young, after that I’m not so sure.
And I’m not so sure about death. Of course I know it happens. Every night the television news reports on deaths. These deaths are facts and I don’t dispute them. But I really don’t understand death either. Is it really going to happen to me? It happens to other people but apart from Uncle Bill and Rob Prestwood (who was in my grade five class and died in a car accident) they seem to be people somehow outside of my life. And, look, I have to tell you this, I didn’t like Rob Prestwood. In fact I was rather pleased to learn that Rob was ‘not with us any more’. Rob used to punch me when we played footy, was merciless in his mirth over my failure to perform a decent drop kick and, y’know, other stuff like that. We had all these school assemblies and silences and everything after he died and everybody was supposed to be sad and, I suppose, understand about death. Well I wasn’t sad and I didn’t understand.
****
I slept in the next day, Saturday. It’s not what I normally do. I’m usually up and about pretty early doing stuff, something. I dunno. But Michelle, one of my two house mates, was moving out and I didn’t want to get involved. She would want a hand and I didn’t want to lend one. It wasn’t so much that Michelle had never helped me in any way. It wasn’t because she was so bad at coughing up money for rent or whatever. It wasn’t because she caused so much hassle and stress and crap. It wasn’t because she was always after you for some assistance or money or consideration. Nah. It was because she did all that believing it was okay because she was beautiful. It helped. I gotta admit it helped. Boy, did it fucking help. But, hell, you got sick of it. I don’t want to go into it.
At about eleven I gave up hiding. I got up, dressed and made a coffee. As I sat in the kitchen Michelle wandered in from the shower. She was wrapped in one of those bathrobe thingys and she flicked her long wet hair.
‘Did you sleep well?’ She asked. Don’t start, please don’t start.
‘Okay.’
‘I had a lousy night’s sleep.’ She sighed and continued ‘And I’ve got such a busy day. Y’know moving out and everything.’
I know, and I also know you moving out to live with some stud with brains and money (whatever). So why do you even think I’m going to bother?
‘I haven’t even started packing yet. Can you believe that?’
Yes.
‘I wish it wasn’t such a long trip to my new place.’
I don’t want to help you Michelle, don’t my manifestations of total indifference mean anything to you?
‘I reckon moving’s not that bad.’
‘Well, maybe for you. You’re a pretty together sort of guy. I guess it would be easy for you.’ I knew I shouldn’t have said anything.
‘Perhaps you could organise the stuff that’s mine in the kitchen?’ Perhaps. ‘Oh, make me a coffee would you please? I’ll be dressed in a minute.’ Yeah, yeah.
I made the coffee, and later I collected together her kitchen things. And I went to the shops for boxes for packing. And I packed things. And took them to her car. Michelle made phone calls, had fruit salad for lunch, things like that. Eventually, somehow, she was gone. Her room was empty apart from a couple of bags of rubbish. It looked real empty. I stood in her room for a while. I just stood there. Kinda strange. I dunno.
Later, it rained. It was a good Adelaide late spring rain, falling out of the sky with real gravity behind it. The air chilled enough that I had to put on a windcheater and as I was doing so the phone rang.
It was Andy and Andy was asking what I was doing and had I eaten and telling me that Kerry was away for a few days at her sister’s and she had left him with no groceries in the flat, well, nothing to speak of, nothing he could do anything with, and how about chicken and chips?
‘Yes.’
I waited, contemplated, anticipated, and masticated imaginary chicken ‘n’ chips. I watched the rain and forgot about things.
Andy bustled out of his car clutching a white plastic bag in which I could discern two packages. The first was a foil backed paper bag containing the chook. The bird was rather small but plumpish and unhealthily greasy. The second parcel held the chips, and there were mountains of them.
‘How many chips did you get?’
‘Three bucks worth.’
‘Bloody hell, generous’ I muttered as I lashed the chips with lines of vinegar and powdered them with salt. Andy tore the chicken apart and shovelled meat and skin into his mouth. He compressed the stuffing in his hand and swallowed it after a few manic jaw movements. I slid down a couple of rips of chook flesh and then began on the chips. They were dark gold in colour, really a little too cooked and there were too many crackly fatty bits and not enough decent sized potato rich chips. But I hadn’t had lunch and I didn’t care. I went at them like a mad thing.
Michelle came into the kitchen as we ate. She was saying something about boxes or something but I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t listen. Andy was smiling benevolently at her saying things in an apologetic tone.
‘Sorry, I can’t help you, sorry, you’ll have to talk to Alec. Alec?’
‘Wha’ I said with a mouthful of chips.
‘Michelle is missing something.’
‘Michelle Michelle’. Go away Michelle, I thought you’d left Michelle. What do you want Michelle? Don’t tell me Michelle. I don’t want to know Michelle. And then she was screaming at me.
‘You’re weird! You’re sick! Stop eating you pig!’ I looked at her with vinegar vapour smarted eyes and belched.
Michelle left again.
****
Waking up and thinking, ‘This can’t go on’. At twenty seven. In the morning, a working week morning when life, my life seems pathetic, prosaic, a bum note in a bad tune. When there is thick dew on the car windows and the motor doesn’t want to run, then, now, I think things have to change, should change, I hope they’ll change. I’m not going to chip again. I’m going to kick the habit. I’ll focus my energies on something worthwhile. I shall eat from the major food groups with an emphasis on fruit and vegetables, fresh fruit and vegetables. I’ll progress at work, my career, through effort and talent. I’ll have a car that starts without an argument, things that work. I want a decent television.
And there is hope, like a spark amongst damp wood and lots of smoke. But the day passes and my self improvement designs weaken. I pretend to fight it, tell myself I’m not going home this way because there is a good fix to be had at the fnc shop on the corner. I’ll just buy a drink and, maybe, just look at the chips. But it ends up ‘One fish and minimum chips, and the Coke thanks’. And so it goes. Stealing out of the shop with guilt and excitement and desire humming through me and the ripping of paper and the ripping of fish flesh. And the hit!
Waking up and thinking, ‘This can’t go on’. At twenty seven.
****
I told Andy, ‘I’m quitting’. I explained that I had come ‘round to thinking that chipping was a pretty dumb thing to do, maybe outright stupid. I pointed out, not that he needed it, that chipping was harming his marriage. I reasoned that hanging around grotty fish and chip shops was bad for your image, your self image, and, who knows, maybe your soul? I said, ‘There are restaurants, you know, places to eat that are civilised and held in esteem where you are treated well and which you’re not embarrassed to be seen in. It’s a decision. It’s time I made a few decisions. I’m not a teenager anymore.’
It fair gushed out of me, word after word, reasons and justifications, explanations and plans. Everything I’d ever thought was bad about chipping and everything I’d ever heard. I don’t know if it was, in the end, comprehensible, but it must have been convincing because Andy came out with
‘So that’s it eh?’
‘I want it to be’ I said with as much conviction as I have ever breathed.
‘I’ll give it a go too.’
‘Great. That’s great. We can help each other and all that.’
‘Yeah. Y’know I’ve been wanting to kick it for a while now. I guess I needed something to get me started...right?
‘It’ll be okay. No! It’ll be good! Just wait’
‘I know. Dead right.’
It’s easy for a day or two. I mean, my resolve was strong and was novel, and really, everything just seemed great. Andy would ring and say that he’d not chipped, again, another day. We’d say one day at a time, but count the days since our last chip and congratulate ourselves. About a week passed and Andy told Kerry, which was a big step since it meant admitting to a lot of previously kept secret chipping, and Kerry was ‘over the moon’ about it he reported. Swimmingly, it went swimmingly.
I felt better, or thought I felt better. Andy felt better, or thought he felt better and isn’t it the same difference? Another week passed. I was starting to think of myself as an ex-chipper. Not like those ‘ex’ types who appear on telly in silhouette telling their tales as a warning to others but just as somebody who had put something behind them. I told Andy this and he agreed and said, ‘I think we’ve come a long way’ and I didn’t even cringe, not so much as a wince.
It was like arriving at a new place, like another country or something; and thinking that it was alright and just being pleasurably overwhelmed by the possibilities. Yes, the possibilities, because being freed from the grip of the chip I could now do something with my life.
Or so it seemed. The only thing was what? Join a club, play sport, educate myself, take up pottery? Nothing grabbed me. No beacon in the darkness, no inspiration or even ideas. The new place started to feel pretty much like the old place. Whether I was a chipper or an ex-chipper I was still me. Y’know I’ve never quite understood when I’ve heard, or read or whatever of people whose life has changed because of something they’ve done. They may have seen the light, or converted to Buddhism, or shed 109 kilograms or given up smoking to take up jogging. They report that their lives have changed, for the better, in so many different and wonderful ways. They’ve won promotions at work, improved their sex life, they get along better with friends and family, they cope better with problems and crises and emergencies and so on and so forth. Their lives have changed. They are new people. New people.
I would like to do that. Sort of. I’d like a better sex life (okay, a sex life), a promotion at work, and, yes, I’d like to be a success. A great screaming, rub your face in it, steal your woman, house on the hill, exotic automotive excellence in the driveway, letters after your name, people after your time, girls after your butt SUCCESS.
But it’s not me. I’m not really cut out for promotions and an enviable sex life. Sad, but true. So if I became a success (as defined) I would no longer be me. I’d be somebody else, I guess. ‘Me’ would no longer exist. Sad if that happened, at least in my opinion. And therefore and ergo and all that I can’t believe, or maybe just not understand when people report they have changed.
And it seemed, after the weeks of abstinence, when my car finally stopped stinking of fish and chips and my weight dropped and I’d become overly familiar with fruit and vegetables, it seemed as if chipping was part of me, an intrinsic, vital, necessary part of me. I could no more quit than top myself. Sure it was unhealthy, but what could be more unhealthy than to deny your own identity?
Anyway, that was how I intellectualised it, if you can call that intellectualising. Of course intellect never got much done by itself. What actually got me was the pain in my gut. That’s the best way I can describe it. It kinda goes beyond words. As those chipless weeks dragged on I developed this vacuum in my gut. A great greedy vacuum that sucked and sucked and couldn’t get enough, couldn’t get anything. It was so powerful, it ran off all the nervous, electric, potential energy that kept me tense and agitated and irritable and empty.
It wasn’t a physical thing, it’s not like I was starving or malnourished or whatever. I stuffed myself with pasta and rice and veggies, cake, chocolate, pizza until I was bloated. Still it was there, still the need. I knew I wouldn’t last and that I would wind up chipping again. I knew it when I’d catch the aroma of a fish and chip shop or even McDonald’s or KFC. I knew it when there was nothing in the house to eat and I had to work my butt off to steer clear of the chippy. I knew it whenever I read or heard anything about chipping. I was a junk food junkie and not having my fix simply heightened the need for it. Part of me tried to pull away but part of me pulled me back and so I was tense and full of energy and strung out.
And when I went back, I just went back, no drama. I went to the chippy got one and a minimum and consumed. It felt good, not great, just good. I didn’t feel any regret or remorse or anything like that. Previously when I’d tried to quit and failed I felt bad when I failed. I remember resolution breaking chips sitting like hot bricks in my stomach. But not this time. It was like I had come home after a long journey and knew and liked all that was familiar to me.
It was tough on Andy, though, when I told him. I think he had become the genuine article, a reformed addict. He said, and I believed him, that he wasn’t going back. He said he’d miss my help, that it had made the difference. He said he felt let down.
What he didn’t say was that we were through as mates. He knew, we knew, that he couldn’t hang around with a chipper because the temptation would be too great. And we had been mates since primary school.
Andy came to our primary school as ‘new boy’, that is, as somebody who had moved to our area and transferred to the school. Miss White introduced him to the class as Andrew Cooke but we called him ‘the fat new kid’. He was slow at chasey, afraid of cricket balls (‘why do they have to be so hard?’), and the last kid to be picked for sides in games of soccer or footy. For a good while (and for him it must have been an eternity) he was friendless. Then he tried buying friends. He received quite a bit of lunch money and bought kids things in an effort to win their favour. He tried it with the more popular kids who held sway through force of their personalities or sometimes just force. Of course it didn’t work. They took the sweets and cakes from him and then treated him just as badly, if not worse.
So he gave up on that idea. He kept his lunch money to himself and spent lunch time munching through pies and cakes slowly and deliberately.
One day I lost my lunch money. I realised it at lunch time and was in despair. The actual want of food wasn’t the problem it was the loss of the money. It was as if I had, through carelessness, committed some crime. I had a drink of water and sat in the lunch shed while other kids ate their lunches. It was a fine autumn day so after the lunches were eaten, the shed emptied. Andy and I ended up as its only occupants. He must have been watching me for some time because he asked, ‘Didn’t you have any lunch?’
‘I lost my lunch money.’
‘Oh’ he said and then got up and walked over to me and stood in front of me.
‘Do you want these chips?’ he asked showing me a brown paper bag full of the local fish and chip shop’s finest.
‘Don’t you want them?’
‘Not really. Go on you have them.’
‘Okay’ but I wasn’t that hungry what with the crime of lunch money carelessness carrying a sentence of reduced hunger, so we ended up sharing them.
‘Do you like vinegar on ‘em?’ he asked all happy like. Happy, happy, happy.
‘Yes. At home I always put vinegar on my chips. Mum says I put too much on. She says ‘flavour them don’t float them’’. He giggled. He was happy. We were friends.
And we had been friends ever since, so for a while the friendship was strained by my returning to chipping and Andy remaining reformed. But only for a while because before too long his Cortina was pulling into my drive with Andy emerging with plastic bags full of white paper parcels holding our undoing.
I came up with this wave theory. As we ate, I explained to Andy that during our cold turkey time I had thought long and hard about chipping, not just chips, but the big picture. I said the need came in waves, for a time, on the crest of a wave (or the trough, take your pick) you had to chip but at the opposite point of the wave cycle there was no need and then the need built up and dissipated in a way that could be represented in a wave like manner, on a graph or whatever. I explained that what we had been through was a complete wave and that just as we were chipping now (again) so there would come a time when we wouldn’t be chipping and so it went. So it wasn’t that bad. We weren’t sentenced to some mad, non-stop escalation in chipping that would lead to a terrible end. No, what we had was a manageable case of recreational chip use.
A lot of shit really, one of my less convincing performances, if Andy believed me it didn’t show. He finished his chips, bundled up the greasy paper and tossed it in the bin.
‘Whatever’ was all he said.
****
Lemme tell you about Adelaide. Improbable.
In the middle of not much there’s this city of a million people. There is nothing about the surrounding towns; the Murray Bridges, the Tailem Bends, the Truros, the Port Wakefields that even hints at this aberration in settlement.
In the middle is the square mile of Adelaide, the CBD, surrounded by parklands and then the suburbs. That’s it. Of course there are airports and shopping centres, hospitals and factories but Adelaide is a square mile of urban surrounded by a lot of suburban.
And don’t we get excited about the suburbs? The right suburbs with the right people and their late model cars and two point five snotty privately educated offspring versus the wrong suburbs with the people you don’t want as neighbours and the slowly declining real estate values. A fate worse than death that, to have the value of your property decline.
****
I remember I arrived at the bus stop ridiculously early. My first day at work, at permanent full time work. The bus was late, and even though I had more than ample time to get from the bus to my new job I was anxious. I worried about my shoes, were they, were they …right? And I worried about my pants, and my shirt too. Oh and that tie, it felt so uncomfortable how could it possibly look right?
I took a deep breath when I arrived at the office. ‘Here goes’ I thought. Naturally I had to wait and naturally it was an uncomfortable sort of wait. I was anxious and excited and apprehensive and sweating like a pig. Suddenly I was shaking somebody’s hand and being told their name, and their position. We were walking around the office. More people were introduced. There was a Gary (or was it Grant?) and a chick called Sue. I remember Sue (young women like Sue were ‘chicks’ back then). I met my immediate supervisor, a rather distracted woman who looked at me as if I were a problem, which I suppose I was. My supervisor, Gayle Bagadonas was her name, showed me to my desk. Apparently a smoker had been the previous occupant because fine drifts of cigarette ash covered forms and folders and other office paraphernalia. In one of the drawers there was a near full jar of coffee and some loose change. This office inheritance I took to be a good sign.
My first job was to process a stack of form 23BA91 or whatever it was. ‘Call me Gayle’ (I was over polite and addressed her as Mrs Bagadonas) explained the processing. If they were completed in a particular way I stamped them and placed them in a basket. The others I put aside ‘at least for a couple of days’ until I had the ‘hang of things’. I approached the pile of forms as only a brand new, fresh from school employee could. I was thorough to a fault. I concentrated hard on every form and every question. It seemed important that I get this right, if nothing else, to make up for my shoes and my shirt. Not to mention my pants. And the tie.
At lunch time I brought my lunch from the sandwich bar opposite the office block. People from the office recognised me and were nice toward me. I took my lunch back to the tea room which was empty. I ate my lunch in silence until Grant (Gary?) came in, made himself a cup of coffee and launched into a monologue about ‘head office’ and how they had done him wrong. At the conclusion of the harangue he told me ‘the one bit of info I had to know’. Whatever it was it can’t have been that profound because I haven’t a clue what it was.
After lunch it was more forms until Gayle told me to go and help so-and-so shift some files. I helped so-and-so, a monastic creature who even to my untrained eye was patently inept and who resented my help. I went back to my forms. Gayle explained what I had done wrong. I was shattered. I didn’t know whether to cry or to commit hari kari or what. I processed all the forms again which saw out the day. I had a long wait at the bus stop having just missed the bus.
****
With some drugs, I believe, the side effects can include paranoia, very unpleasant. It’s all to do with chemicals and reactions and effects and such happening in the body and brain, that is, actual physical events but only actual in the body and the brain, nowhere else. There aren’t reds under the bed or menacing aliens around the next corner or whatever. It’s just an effect without substance caused by a substance.
But with speeding, well, the paranoia has a real dimension to it. People work it out, people know about speeding. They know the term is a play on the word ‘fasting’, fast - speed, get it? People know that chippers go without meals, starve themselves even, to enhance the high of chipping. So people, especially people who suspect you of chipping, take note of what you’re eating, or rather what you’re not eating. In the tea room at lunch time you know that they know that you have only had a coffee for lunch. The real bastards offer you things to eat; biscuits, cake, fruit, to test you, to see where you’re at.
At times I speed, but, I dunno, I guess I’ve got a good metabolism or something because I don’t need to speed to get a fry high. So I don’t do it that often. I have to admit, though, that the high can be tremendous. As well as the need to chip there is simply the need to eat. One need amplifies the other. You end up anticipating and waiting for the hit so much that even the act of going and getting the fnc and positioning yourself to chip gives feelings of narcotic proportions.
Yeah, so I know why chippers can wind up speeding on virtually a permanent basis. But it is a real roller coaster ride, real highs and real lows. Low when you know that people are sussing you out maybe all day long, all food-less day. Low when you get it wrong and you speed too long and the chips, on too empty a stomach, bring on just the worst nausea. Sick as a dog. And, let’s face it, even I concede it’s not a healthy or even half viable diet. You have to get crook on a diet of nothing but fish and chips.
****
Nick’s Fish and Chip Shop Main North East Road
It is a singular shop. It stands alone festooned with signs that blare ‘NICK’S FISH AND CHIPS’ and ‘Coca Cola’ and such out at the main road. There are two doors, rather unusual, but as usual they have the plastic strips hanging from the doorways. Inside the shop you find that it is wider than it is deep. On the floor are beige coloured lino tiles. On one wall is the ‘Refreshment Centre’ a large drink cooler that chills a full range of drinks and cup cake desserts and, yes, jars of mussels! The other side wall carries an assortment of goods for sale: cigarettes and lighters, chewies, a few packets of sweets and an odd and limited array of grocery items including tomato sauce, coffee, sugar and biscuits. On the same side of the shop lives the chicken rotisserie alongside stands for potato crisps and loaves of bread - white fibreless stuff in colourful plastic wrappers. Along the back of the shop is, naturally, the main counter, comparatively high for most of its length and covered in laminex of an uninspired mottled brown. The top of this counter is a glassed display, but apart from a stash of tomato sauce sachets nothing is displayed. Behind the counter are the deep fry cookers filled with molten fat, a separate hot top for the ‘burgers, a sink complete with dripping tap, and a small amount of bench area. Above this hangs the range on which the ‘menu’ has been painted. The items on the menu are organised in the usual fashion, namely in the groupings of fish, hamburgers, steak sandwiches, chicken, and special items like Dim Sims and Chiko Rolls. The popular practice of adding to the menu by sticking paper notes to the display has been followed. Cigarette ‘Point of Sale’ promotional rubbish, a display and entry forms for a dubious competition, charity sweets and a cheapskate calendar provide decoration. As ever the calendar’s picture is at odds with its environment. Decoration is also provided by tiles with fishes on them being interspersed with the plain white tiles that sit on the back wall behind the cooking apparatus. The entrance to the back room has the plastic strip fly screen through which can be seen a few odd and aging items of furniture press-ganged into service in the fast food industry.
The guy working there, I presume the owner, is on the shortish side with a wide but not remarkable girth. His thinning dark hair is cut in a way that it must have been cut for decades and slicked back. His olive complexion suggests he might be ‘Nick’ but his features suggest a more Northern European lineage. He performs his tasks with the very minimum of energy seemingly long practised and long past being interested in what he does. He offers a ‘How’s it going’ but nothing else in the way of customer relations. He asks the usual questions about salt and sauce and counts back the change and murmurs a ‘Seeya’ as you leave.
****
A couple of nights later when I got home Dave, my house mate, was there.
‘Somebody rang for you. Jason somebody. A mate. I think he’s interested in the room.’
Jason! No! No! No! Not Jason!
‘How did he know about the room? Did you tell him about the room?’
‘Well, he sorta asked about Michelle, and I told him that she’d left and he asked if the room was free and I said it was and he asked if we were looking for somebody and I said that, yeah we will be and’
I cut him short, ‘You didn’t say he could have it did you?’ I don’t know how desperate I sounded but Dave got the drift.
‘I thought he was your friend?’
‘You didn’t say he could have the room did you?’
‘No, he just said he’d catch up with you - ‘cop ya later’’
‘Okay, good.’
‘If he’s not cool, he’s your friend , so it’s your problem.’
‘Okay, fine, thanks.’
Later that night Jason rang and asked me about the room.
‘Aw sorry mate, it’s just that when Dave said that the room was vacant he didn’t know Michelle had lined somebody up. And there’s this guy at work who asked a few weeks back and I sorta said... I s’pose that puts you third on the list?’
‘Yeah, shit yeah, great!’
Oh no. It was a good try. I thought being put ‘third on the list’ would finish him off; no luck, no interest, no worries. But Jason sounded as keen as if I’d offered it to him rent free. Never mind.
Later on I said to Dave, ‘Y’know, about Jason, I just think we have to be careful or whatever about who we share the house with. I don’t know about Jase.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Well, y’know,’ I say launching into my best matey mate, we’re all blokes here, salesman type routine. ‘Y’know, he’s just too much. Jason. Mate!’ The mate is shorthand for something like: ‘Dave we are friends – mates. You can trust my judgment on this, because your judgment, were you armed with all the facts, would be exactly the same. And we are Aussie mates so we don’t talk about our friendships and relationships. It’s just not done. Hell, there are better things to do, like drinking beer and watching footy and working on our cars and so on and so forth.’ It wasn’t good, but it was good enough. I continued, ‘Remember we said we’d try and get another girl. I think it’d be better. Sort of a balance thing.’
‘Yeah, yeah I see whatcha mean.’
He was thinking about what I was alluding to, namely that it was conventional wisdom that living with girls improved your chances. Not necessarily with the female house mates, in fact, according to theory, almost definitely not with them. Rather it was with their friends, and their friends’ friends, and maybe even their relations. Who knows? The wisdom/theory was a little short on details. Anyway what I meant, what I really meant to do, was just take him as far as possible from the idea of renting the room to Jason. I didn’t want to share a house with Jason.
A few facts about Jason; Jason is a bullshit artist, Jason lives at home with his mum and dad, Jason talks endlessly about sex, cars and drinking. Jason has no other interests. Jason spends a lot of time driving or working on cars, a lot of time drinking and, as far as I can tell, absolutely no time engaged in sex (I discount meetings with Mrs Palm and her five daughters).
So what happens with Jason’s sex drive? It goes driving. If you take an afternoon spin with Jason you’re likely to end up in Melbourne. He drives aggressively, lead feet, lead head. And while he drives he talks endlessly about sex and getting smashed. There is a constant stream of scenarios, anecdotes and hypotheticals on the subjects of sex and drinking.
‘What if you were banging away with some chick, really pumping her - and she yawned! What a bummer! ‘Course it’s never happened to me, but just imagine...’
‘I was so pissed I didn’t know what I was doing so I slammed down a few more Jim Beams, woulda killed most people, but it fixed me up, sober as, sober as...’
‘A judge?’
‘’At’s it. Sober as. Anyway…’
‘If I could just get my mind off of fucking her, y’know, I reckon I could get somewhere. Thing is, soon as I see her it’s all I can think about. She is so hot!’
‘Now take Andy’s wife, Kerry, I mean would yer? Okay for Andy, but I reckon you’re like me, y’know. You’d kick her outa bed. The fish John West rejects, know what I mean? Still, paper bag...eh?’
‘I lost her phone number. She was practically begging me for it. But I was so pissed. Sooo pissed. She writes out her phone number - and she’s not bad, not fucking bad - gives it to me says “Ring me.” I lose the number! Unreal!’
‘All night. I mean all night long! I bet she couldn’t walk the next day. I nearly wore the old feller out! Jesus!’
And so on and so forth. The auto anecdotes, well, I don’t even want to think about them.
On one level I guess it’s okay. Jason has this energy, he’s constantly on edge and in a strange way it’s not a bad thing. It seems to get you going, like it charges you up and even though sometimes all it means is that you get annoyed with Jason, well, it’s something.
But, I dunno, aren’t we supposed to grow up? It’s okay believing in the validity of the Holden versus Ford debate, and that the letters in Playboy are sent in by readers, but only for so long. And while Jason is a sort of a mate, well, I just want to be rid of him now. I certainly don’t want to share a house with him.
But whadya do? I owe Jason in a way, because once when we were all just a mess of pimples and bum fluff Jason had the only car. And Jason was happy to drive endlessly around the suburbs and into town, and out to the beach, and down to the south coast and up the river; just anywhere where we could make noise, buy chiko rolls and think something exciting might be happening. Later, too, when more of us had cars Jason was happy to work on them, to advise us on oils and settings and pressures. He knew how to fit radios and tachometers. He was an expert on whip aerials and surf racks.
Did we use him? Did I use him? Yes, I suppose I did. Do I want to analyse this? Do I want to weigh up the pros and cons, the justice, morality and fairness of all this? No bloody way!
****
In my second year of High School, in my class, was a girl every boy wanted. Let me repeat that, for emphasis and to assure you that I mean what I say; every boy wanted her. Her name was Jan Johnson. While every boy wanted her there were only a few who had any idea about how you went about ‘getting’ a girl and even less who knew what to do once you ‘got’ one. Naturally there were boys who were making giant strides toward such vital knowledge but I was not amongst them. I remained firmly in the group defined by its almost immaculate ignorance. So like a lot of other boys I spent a fair amount of time wanting Jan Johnson without any perceptible effect.
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