Me: And my UAI is…wow.

Mum: What is it?

Me: Almost ninety-five.

Mum: Well that can’t be right!

Dad: Maybe you should give the Board of Studies a call?

Not my work

By far, the worst job I ever had was during the summer when I was twenty-one. I’d returned from South Africa early after a failed attempt at voluntary work (I like money) and couldn’t resume my old job for another 4-5 months because there wasn’t yet any work for me to do there. For the first time in seven years, I was unemployed.

I played nintendo for a few weeks, drank a lot of beer, and sunbaked all day in my parents’ backyard before my mother told me I should think about contributing to society.

“I’m an organ donor,” I reminded her.

“No, I mean you should get a job,” Mum said. “Pay some taxes.”

“You don’t,” I argued.

“Not according to your father’s accountant.”

“Fine, I’ll get a job.”

And after a few interviews with recruiters, I eventually landed a temp-to-perm position doing accounts payable in North Sydney….for a funeral home.

“Is the nature of the business going to be a problem for you?” I was asked during the interview.

“Bills is bills,” I said nonchalantly. “Besides, I like the quiet.”

However, unlike an episode of Six Feet Under, this job proved to be less fascinating than you might think. I was primarily trained by a balding middle-aged man who smelled funny and breathed heavily, which meant I could never have any sort of meaningful professional relationship with him. The hours were 7:30am to 4:30pm, which meant I had to drive in because the buses didn’t start until 8am. And so, every day, I parked my car illegally, and every second day, I got a parking ticket. The residents in North Sydney were clearly sick of the parking situation, because they often abused me. One morning, a lady drove out of her driveway, then told me I had parked too close to it.

“You just drove out of it,” I pointed out.

“I hope you get a ticket!” she said.

“Okay, thanks.”

“Fuck you!” she said and drove off.

At work, I spent my days coding and entering invoices for flowers, catering, burial plots and children’s coffins. I could tell you how much it cost to cremate an adult, an adolescent or a baby; what flowers were most popular; and which funeral celebrants were well-respected. I spent all day looking at names of dead people, and every time I saw a surname I recognised, I had to stop and google them to make sure they weren’t related to somebody I knew.

My co-workers were mostly Asian mothers. Our boss was Cruella de Vil. On my first day, she showed me the depressingly small kitchen. I opened the fridge and noted a complete absence of alcohol.

“You can have a biscuit from the jar, if you like,” she offered. “It’s free.”

“Sure,” I said, knowing that I would eat as many biscuits as possible to compensate myself for working in such a soul-sucking hell hole.

I spent every lunch break chain-smoking in a park around the corner, calling everyone I’d ever met and asking them if they knew of any jobs going. Eventually I found a temporary position doing admin at a friend’s office. I went over for an interview and drank a beer with the CEO, who was wearing board shorts and thongs. We chatted casually for fifteen minutes and he asked me when I could start.

The next day, I quit the funeral home.

“This is awfully short notice,” Cruella protested, “I have no idea how we’ll cope with the workload.”

“Oh I didn’t really do much,” I said, comfortingly.

“This puts us in an awkward position,” she continued.

“Who cares,” I replied. “All your clients are already dead.”

I never got offered anymore work through that particular recruitment agency and I haven’t been to North Sydney since.

Richard was a member of a Contiki tour group my friend Keira and I belonged to during July 2007. When we caught a ferry from Athens to Mykonos, Richard bought a T-shirt with a giant penis on it that said “Give us a kiss!” and he waved to children. One night, he got really wasted and sang karaoke, emptying an entire bar of tourists in 4.5 seconds flat.

These are his stories:

I once lived with a guy who grew up in Kuwait and would talk about his childhood late at night when he was drunk.

One evening, a few of us gathered as he described a horrifying incident in which his father had beaten him severely for leaving a smudge on his black Mercedes.

“I don’t understand, why did he hit you?” I asked, shocked by the scale of such a beating.

“Well I had to clean his cars every week, and if they weren’t spotless by dinner, I got into big trouble,” he replied.

“That’s awful,” I commented.

“It’s okay, I got him back,” he said with a smile.

“What did you do?” my friend asked, “Did you scratch his car or something?”

“No,” he said, glancing around the room mischievously. “I killed his dog.”

Roughly eight seconds of complete silence passed, before I cleared my throat and asked, “How?”

“Well,” my housemate continued, “I waited until he went to work, and then I locked his dog inside the Merc. By the time my dad finished his shift, that dog was swollen up like a motherfucking beach ball!!”

Then he roared with laughter. My friend, an avid lover of animals, picked up her bag and left immediately, while I busied myself clearing away our empty glasses.

When I was younger I used to go to church with a family who had a son with autism. My memories of him are vague at best. He was obsessed with space ships, trains and video games, and would often sit alone repeating the same phrases over and over.

As he got older, he began exhibiting more unruly types of behaviour. They started out small enough – a tendency to break things or overeat. His parents locked all their cupboards and kept him away from the kitchen. Things obviously worsened, however, as he entered early adulthood, because the last thing I heard was that his family had put him into full-time professional care.

“Why did they do that?” I asked my physio, who was a reliable source of church gossip.

“Well, he was becoming a little difficult to handle,” she replied, digging her knuckles into my abdomen.

“But what did he do?” I pressed.

“Oh he would just get upset easily and then do inappropriate things,” she said.

“Can you give me an example?” I asked. I was dying from curiosity. What did this boy do when he got mad? I was imagining physical violence, tantrums, or perhaps even some public masturbation for shock value. The truth, however, was even more spectacular.

“Okay, here’s one,” the physio said. “Last month their whole family went to Perth for somebody’s birthday. When they were due to come home, their flight was delayed for four hours. The boy got upset, and when they tried to calm him down, he became angry. So he bit his own arm until it started bleeding, then he went around wiping the blood on other people and screaming into their faces.”

“That’s fucked up,” I marvelled.

“Please don’t swear in my house,” she replied. “Now, roll over.”

A few years ago, I played guitar in a band with my co-worker (a secretly talented singer) and her older brother (a drummer/psychopath).

We drank a lot of beer and pissed off a lot of neighbours, and we decided that a bass player was essential to our continued existence.

I offered to place an ad online and the drummer nodded.

“Yeah, that’s good,” he said. “Just make the ad really vague, but also specific. Say that they need to be cool, but not cooler than us. We’ll ask them to meet us at a bar, and then we’ll interview them. If they have a last name for a first name or a first name for a last name, they’re out. And if they use any faggy music words like “progressive euro-tech” that’s also cause for immediate disqualification.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t want anyone whose outfit costs more than mine, and if they order a Coopers red, we’ll know they’re a dickhead.”

We never found a bass player and the band broke up a month later.

My mother has tried and failed pretty much every diet ever conceived by man, and she feels better when one of her friends tries and fails with her. However, the day she decided to do Weight Watchers, all her friends were either already on other diets or content being fat. Mum still needed a wingman, so she asked me if I would join the program with her.

“Are you serious?” I asked, looking up from my grade ten homework.

“I think you could stand to lose a few pounds,” Mum said, nodding towards my belly. Then the clincher: “I’ll pay for you.”

“Fine, but I’m not giving up alcohol,” I conceded.

“Oh god, me neither,” Mum said, grimacing, “You should though, it’s illegal for you to drink.”

“Do you want me to do this or not?” I asked.

“Okay, okay,” Mum said, “I’ll sign us up tomorrow.”

And so, for the next four months, I attended weekly meetings in a community hall with a group of overweight house-mothers. I counted points and took my measurements and wrote down goals. I pumped my fist and yelled “Yeah! We can be thin!” I adopted the Weight Watchers argot, and used phrases such as removing weight (because when you “lose” something, that has connotations of regaining the lost item.) I made muffins using apple sauce instead of oil. They tasted like shit.

During the twelfth week, I reached the bottom of the healthy weight range set for my height by Weight Watchers (somewhere around 55kg.) After this, I lost an additional 5kg. Then another 3kg. At this point, I was weighing pieces of fruit and vegetables so that I could calculate their exact caloric content. I was also taking my coffee black and going to the gym 6 days a week. My hair began to come out in clumps in the shower and my fingernails were slightly blue. Meanwhile, my mother had lost roughly 3kg and was yet to graduate from Class I Obesity. I made sure that I sat next to her at every meeting so I could lean over and look at her progress chart. “Is that a plus sign?” I asked her loudly, “Did you count your points right?” I wore my pants low and let my shirt slide up so that my hip bones were visible. I turned my nose up at anything Mum cooked and began making my own dinners, which consisted primarily of edamame and salsa. I would not eat bread or rice or pasta or red meat or eggs or butter or sugar or bananas. I was perpetually cold.

At my next Weight Watchers meeting, one of the ladies pulled me off the scales and took me to the side of the room. “We don’t think you need to be here anymore,” she told me, “You’re looking a little…slim.”

“But I can lose more?” I suggested.

“No, you can’t,” she said. “Do you honestly think you need to remove more weight?

“Not really,” I replied, “But my mum’s a bitch and I want to piss her off.”

“I see,” she said, “I don’t think you should come back next week. We’ll refund any membership fees you’ve overpaid.”

“Fine,” I said and walked outside, embarrassed.

When I got home, I ate a piece of frozen banana cake in front of my mother. Then I ate another one.

“You’ll make yourself sick,” she warned.

“Good,” I said, and went to bed.

When I was fifteen, I worked in the créche at my parents’ church. This meant I had to look after other people’s whining children and sometimes take them to the toilet and wipe their bums, but at least I didn’t have to listen to the sermon.

One Sunday, there was a new kid in the créche who seemed to take a liking to me. We played for half an hour and read some books together, then she said she wanted to draw a picture of me. I was flattered and sat on a beanbag in front of her, posing for my portrait.

“Now you have blue eyes…” she said, selecting a sky-coloured crayon. “And then brown hair… and a yellow t-shirt… and a BIIIIIG belly!”

“Church is finished,” I told her, holding in a scowl. “I’ll mind your picture until your parents are leaving. You can come back and collect it then.”

After she left to find her mum and dad, I scrunched her picture into a ball and threw it in the bin. Then I walked down to the takeaway shop and bought a large tub of hot chips. I decided I would not have children if they all turned out to be such nasty little shits.

When I was in year nine, every weekend I told my parents, “I’m staying at <insert friend’s name>’s house tonight.” Then I got drunk in a park and passed out on somebody’s couch or in the backseat of a nearby car.

One week I made the error of including a movie in my lie. “Bye, Mum,” I said, walking out the door, “I’m going to see Panic Room with my bible study group.”

Then I went to a school friend’s boyfriend’s share house, smoked bongs with a bunch of uni students, and built a tower out of empty UDL cans.

When I got home, my parents asked me if I’d enjoyed the movie.

“It was okay,” I said, not wanting to rave about it too much in case they decided to see it. And then, on a roll, I proceeded to fabricate an entire synopsis of the film. My rationale behind this was that if I told my parents everything that happened in the movie, they wouldn’t bother going to see it. I hadn’t even seen the preview prior to this, so my account of the movie was inspired by the title alone and was about as accurate as a James Frey novel. I gave extensive descriptions of the characters and made sure to detail all the plot developments, and then I re-enacted several scenes, using a set of Babushka dolls my aunt had given us for Christmas.

“I heard there’s a big twist at the end,” my mother said, “What’s the twist?”

“Jodie Foster is a robot,” I answered confidently.

“Well, that sounds like quite a film,” my dad said when I had finished. “And if you didn’t smell like a grow house, I would probably believe you.”

“Am I grounded?” I asked, leaning against a book shelf to steady myself.

“No, that was entertaining enough to redeem you this time,” Dad said, “But if you come home this stoned ever again, I will enrol you in aqua aerobics classes with your mother.”

After I failed uni, I decided to give community college a go. So every Monday night, I left my mind-numbing accounting job and hiked over to Redfern to attend a creative writing class.

On the first night, the teacher introduced herself and informed us that she had written three books.

“How long did it take you to get published?” I asked.

“Oh I haven’t been published yet,” she said, “But I will.”

At the second class, we read a Roald Dahl short story and were told to write about a place that made us feel peaceful, then swap papers with the person sitting next to us. I wrote about a garbage dump and then passed my notepad to Austin, the British guy next to me, who I instinctively knew would be a massive wanker.

“This makes no sense,” he told me, “I can’t hear the protagonist’s voice properly. Just read mine so you know how to do it next time, innit?”

At the third class, we were given a handout that was literally titled The Formula for Writing a Story. This included ingredients such as a “seemingly insurmountable obstacle” and a “catalyst for change” as well as “external and internal conflict” and characters that “evolved” and achieved a “worthwhile goal” in the end.

“I dunno about this,” I whispered to Austin, “I just wanna write dick jokes and stuff, you know?”

“If you’re not serious about being a writer, then why are you here, innit?” he replied.

For our big project, we all had to write a short story and then email it to the rest of the class, who would each give personal feedback the following week.

One guy wrote a meandering, pointless tale about a journey to the centre of the earth that never ended and involved stunningly dull characters. He scored a 9 out of 10.

Another girl wrote about a GP who drugged and raped his patients, until one of them went crazy and cut off his penis with a pair of scissors, then proceeded to feed it to her dog. She received an 8.

Austin wrote some bullshit crime scene story featuring a feisty heroine and got an 8.5.

I wrote about this arsehole landscaper I dated during highschool, and how I would intentionally go for average-looking and unintelligent guys so that I could lord over them and bask in my superior looks and intellect. When the time came for the class to discuss my story, I was asked to read it aloud, despite nearly being drowned out by the other students’ laughing at my awesome jokes. When I finished, I received a standing ovation and Austin slapped me on the back.

“This is an excellent piece,” the teacher announced, “But there isn’t any inner conflict. The protagonist is completely at ease with herself. This is just meaningless fodder, and it needs more substance before any publisher would even look at it.”

“But the protagonist is me,” I argued, “And I don’t have any inner conflict. I feel great.”

“Well. I’ve given you a 4 out of 10, nonetheless,” the teacher said. “There just weren’t enough elements of the formula present for me to mark you any higher.”

“Tough luck, innit” Austin said sympathetically, as I returned to my seat.

“Fuck you,” I replied.

After class, I walked outside and threw my story in the bin. Then I went home and deleted Austin from Facebook. I never went back to community college and I didn’t write anything for two years. I held onto the teacher’s contact details though, just in case I ever do write a book. I want to send her a copy of the hardback edition and sign, “LICK MY BALLS, IN YOUR FACE” inside the front cover.