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Roxanne speaks: I had a similar experience with my lover from the police academy. He was a professional at wearing people down and he taught me how to do the same. I asked him, 'How do you do it?' He said, 'I hammer and hammer them and simply wear them down.' He said, 'I get tired of wearing people down.' It was as if even he got turned off his own way of doing things. In many ways he was going down with them to be hammered himself. Your personality eventually reflects your decisions, job choice and your handling of others. Throughout your short life, which is mainly taken up by your job, your personality is destroyed and restructured, as you are built into a new person over and over again. You are what you do today, so you better choose right. He supported the privatisation of Victorian prisons. He was a machine who used to hunt people and extract confessions. He patiently wore his targets down, in an attempt to split and rupture their psyches. His family hid from him and every time someone talked with him over the phone, either a relative or a flatmate, they started to scream. I could hear them on the other end of the receiver at breaking point, and him holding the receiver away from his face, with that blank little smile and eyes that said he was highly successful at doing his job tonight. He liked to watch them break and the more hysterical they became, the more he stood back and quietly observed the situation, allowing them to take over and finish the job on their own steam. 'Always finish the job,' he said, 'never leave it half done.' This guy was intelligent and within his area he offered protection. Outside that he was vapour, a weak little man in his forties. Yet within the system that created him, he was the primary monster. So you can only imagine what being in love with him must have been like.
My psyche was shot, clubbed into a pulp and then left to dry up on a deserted railway track. The angels awoke inside my dreams and looked around. There was nothing to keep them here any more. They left in their long white gowns. My hand reached weakly after them, as I lay dying along the iron tracks. My face held the same grey expression as the empty platform. When I was dead he came back to make sure that he had finished the job. He left nothing to chance. He stood above me smoking a cigarette. He nudged me with his black shoe and then kicked me a few times, so that my shoulders lolled. I tumbled from the station onto the track like a rag doll. I remained dead for a long time with my eyes open. I was so dead inside that nothing would have made me shut them. He could have stubbed a cigarette out in my pupils and I wouldn't have blinked. That was the beauty of two eyes that were dead. After he left, I stared at that space with no sense of loss. It was a miracle that no train came to completely finish me off. But I was already finished. I remained in this position for a long time to come. My eyes were turned up with the ants already in them. They were searching the sun and the burning clouds for the angels who had departed. When you do not blink, the sun enters your eyes and everything burns, everything. The empty sky signalled its emptiness back at me. It must have been a few years later when the train came in. My fingers felt the first vibrations. The track was moving where a blade of grass hadn't. Now it was simply a matter of moving my fingers, then wrists, then arms, then shoulders and lifting myself up out of the grass that remained the same height throughout this ordeal. The sun had hardened my body. There were vibrations of a train from a long way off. For the first time I wondered about its occupants. The heart is its own guard and it is strong, but vulnerable. He is luminous and sombre. He's an angel, but how to win his affection? I want you I want you I want you - I want what I think you have to offer, I want what I never had, I want to make up for lost time, I want to find the heart I lost, while he just offered me a beer.
Was I expecting too much? It was the first time the guy had betrayed his girlfriend and it wouldn't be the last. It was that easy for him. As they say, it just happened. Tonight I mounted a virgin with cerebral palsy. His withered legs and hairy arse climbing out of the spa, while I thought of my photography and longed for it. That hairy arse is worth a hundred brothel dollars to me, I thought. That hairy arse doesn't buy much film. Did you expect me to fall in love with him or even like him? I bet you did. Well, he's available if you want him. He had to extend because he took a long time showering and picking his clothes up off the floor. As he climbed out of the spa his long hairs stuck to his scrotum from behind and I thought of an animal, say a water buffalo. Or of something similar that would roam the grassy plains of Kakadu. I mentioned this to another worker who said, 'Sometimes I think we're sent here to help them.' 'Well,' said Roxanne, 'believe it or not, the guy did have a complaint about me. He didn't like my name. It wasn't 'hooker' enough for him, or so he said. Can you believe it? He couldn't get detached enough. Perhaps I should change it to Brandy, Candy, Bambi, or Randy and then he'd be happy.' |
