The Full Catastrophe Read online

  No one got the joke back in Slough, though. Mum seemed to be getting angrier and angrier, if anything. She’d taken to frisking me every time I left the house, so that I’d have to hurl bottles onto the hedge below my bedroom window and then go downstairs to assume the frisk position before picking up the bounty outside. She was constantly having to use the PA at our local venue to see if I was in attendance – embarrassing for both of us, quite frankly – or scrape me off the pavement after a night of underage revelry.

  While this was all fun and japes, I was deadly serious about writing and was an obsessive collector of underground press and counter-culture books. I admired the usual gonzo writers like Hunter S. Thompson and Anthony Burgess (whose Clockwork Orange style I’d nicked for Slapper), and your classic sexists like Bukowski and Roth. And then there were the heroes of the New Musical Express.

  Steven Wells was an NME anarcho-journo who’d branched out into the national papers, and was fond of amphetamine-fuelled alliteration. He was famed for crucifying sweet young bands, mercilessly interrogating twee indie-popsters on their lack of political knowledge, and seamlessly segueing his hatred of Margaret Thatcher into most of his reviews. So I wrote to him. The letter was cute, funny and fawning – I thought – designed to emphasise our age gap and my relative naivety. Again, with hindsight, I was following that terrible tradition of the young female writer looking for a male ambassador.

  Six months after writing to Steven (correspondence moved slowly pre-Twitter), the letter came. He was crafting a piece on young female fanzine writers for a weighty national periodical, the Sunday Observer. Where did I live? It didn’t matter – he was prepared to come. I read it and read it again. I was insanely flattered he thought my work was up to the job and galloped downstairs to tell my mother, even as I mentally planned the author photo on the back of my first memoir.

  When the big day came, I pulled my grooviest books to the front of my bookcases and hid the Enid Blyton. There was a fair bit of frantic vinyl arranging and some artful flinging around of clothes. A joss-stick might have been lit. Framed by our front door, Steven was gonzo personified – a rudely shaved head, glinting eyes, chest hair poking through his shirt, bad tattoos and a chemical energy. Mum came up to offer him a cup of tea and some biscuits. I pulled forth a wooden chair in my bedroom.

  ‘So, you’re quite posh, aren’t you?’ he said in bracing northern tones.

  There was a silence while my brow furrowed. ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, you are – I’ve seen your mother.’ He scraped his chair nearer and glowered. ‘You’re a child of Thatcher!’

  He delivered a confusing rant about the poll tax, Tories and class war, punctuated with, ‘You’re a product of the ’80s!’ I’m not sure how he’d deduced my middle-classness from my letter – maybe I’d used Mum’s Basildon Bond writing paper – but he clearly had his agenda all set out. Even so, I was desperate to deliver, so I mentioned the one unsatisfactory fumble with a musician I’d genuinely had, which had been more by accident than by design. He wasn’t happy with just this. ‘But what sort of bloke do you fancy?’ he asked impatiently.

  I looked him up and down before answering. ‘Huge, hulking, hairy-chested, scowling, tattooed monsters,’ I said. Somewhere, a death knell tolled.

  If it had been the Slough Observer, it’d probably have been all right. As it was, Steven’s piece took up most of page three of the national Sunday Observer. ‘More sex please, we’re groupies – and proud of it!’ screamed the headline. The crux of the piece – in well-formed quotes that simply couldn’t have come out of my mouth – was that I thought groupies were a maligned sort, and people who thought groupies were degrading themselves were just ignorant. There was a pull-quote under my picture: ‘I’m not after plastic hunks. I’m after real rock’n’roll men. Huge, hulking, hairy-chested, scowling, tattooed monsters. Phwoarr!’

  As if I’d have said, ‘Phwoarr.’

  Steven had done what all journalists aspire to do – coined a new movement. I was now spearheading the new breed of middle-class groupie – a SWAT team of crack stage-door botherers. And Britain’s first ‘sexzine’, Slapper, was their bible. I noticed his other case studies, Philippa (who greeted Slapper as ‘a real breath of fresh air’) and Jill (‘working-class boys know how to handle women!’), hadn’t been stupid enough to have their pictures taken.

  Oh, because the picture was equally damning. I’d recently shorn my hair and my fringe had coincidentally peaked into devil horns, while at my feet was a splayed arrangement of Slappers. I’d quite clearly posed for this.

  ‘Why’s Mum crying in the rose bushes?’ my brother asked on his visit home from uni. He stood perplexed at the door of my bedroom as I continued to scour the mash-up, my initial hilarity gradually being overtaken by something more anxious. The bad feeling intensified as I read the pull-quote one more time.

  Poor Mum. Over the last few years her features had been drawn into an arrangement of furious anticipation, like a Greek tragedy mask. And there was more heartache to come, my brother informed me, when he’d stopped laughing long enough. Our grandparents read the paper. Then there was Mum’s art class, her classics class, her book group … okay, we were quite middle-class, come to think of it.

  Dad paid my bedroom a rare visit and cleared his throat. ‘You’ve really shafted your mother this time,’ he said in his most businesslike voice. We left it at that.

  Two hours later, Mum opened the boot of her car like a Louis Vuitton handbag hawker and turfed out eighty copies of the Sunday Observer, hauled in over a four-mile radius.

  When driving me anywhere over the next few weeks, Mum throttled the handbrake like she was wringing the neck of a chicken and didn’t observe speed limits. At home she banged cupboard doors, one by one. Steven’s revelation that I’d been writing the fanzine for years launched a new paranoia that she’d lose her job at Social Services due to my teenage sexiness.

  Luckily I was about to move out. Unluckily, everyone at uni had already seen the article, right down to my new flatmates.

  Over the next few months I received endless requests for interviews from newspapers and TV shows. When I declined to answer I was used in braying beat-ups all the same, and one magazine invited debate on my sluttiness. Sometimes a journalist would lift text from Steven’s masterpiece, or they’d get more imaginative. A highbrow paper pitted me against the singer of Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson, by asking the hoary rocker what he thought of girls who said things like: ‘I’m not after plastic hunks. I’m after real rock’n’roll men. Huge, hulking, hairy-chested, scowling, tattooed monsters. Phwoarr!’ Bruce was scathing.

  The Sunday Times jumped enthusiastically onto Steven’s new breed of middle-class groupie idea and swiped it for the cover of their ‘Style’ supplement. ‘Spot the groupie: vice girl or nice girl?’ it said, over a photograph of a demure young lady in a tunic.

  In an attempt at damage control, a music PR company, for which I’d become something of a mascot, cherry-picked some more sympathetic music mags for me so I could tell my non-story again. But as Princess Di might have told you back then, you can’t control the press. Interviews seemed to go well enough. The phrase ‘A labour of love, then?’ would get tossed up in an admiring tone, and the finished copy would say something like: ‘In person, Jenny doesn’t look like butter, let alone a guitarist’s tricep, would melt in her mouth.’

  By now I was getting self-pitying. While I wasn’t leading a dignified life, I was way too drunk to be doing all the things people implied, and any PR chick worth her salt would be getting more sexy band action than I was. The media was obsessed with new genres of women, and I’d fallen foul of this race to slap on a fresh label, whether it be riot grrrls, Sloane Rangers or ladettes.

  ‘Why don’t you capitalise on it?’ one journalist demanded once in a West London cafe after I’d told her my sorry predicament. ‘Run with it!’ she urged in exasperation. ‘Become Jenny Slapper.’

  But Slapper was fast becoming ridic
ulously out of step with my belief system. By this time I was sending off for copies of Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto and Andrea Dworkin texts. And so I dyed my hair a no-room-for-misunderstandings black and aborted Slapper. It was a sad time.

  These days I’m a newspaper journalist myself, and while I’ve occasionally incurred the irritation of an interviewee, my own moment of infamy has shaped my desire to handle people’s stories with great care. You could say it’s even become a mission – I’m a member of AOD (Alcohol and Other Drugs) Media Watch, which has a team of researchers and clinicians that responds to stigmatising, inaccurate and salacious stories about drug use.

  Incidentally, I wrote about this story a while back and I gave Steven Wells the right of reply. A sense of propriety prevents me from then having the last word, so I will bid you adieu here.

  ‘What a superbly deranged (if over-long) rant,’ he answered. ‘Having created an amusing alter ego – following in the footsteps of Poly Styrene and Johnny Rotten – you cried foul the first time anyone outside a tight little circle of fanzine buyers took Jenny Slapper at face value. I thought you were punk, turned out you were indie. Basically, you bottled it. Shame on you, Jenny.’

  Catastrophically Stupid

  Susan Carland

  I HAVE MANY CATASTROPHES I can draw on. My life seems to contain an inordinate number of embarrassing events. I just seem to specialise in humiliating myself. It’s a gift. For this reason, it’s hard to know which story to share with you.

  But the one I’ve decided to share is particularly humiliating because it was a time when I was trying to act my cleverest. It was a time when I desperately wanted to prove how smart I was, but ended up looking my most moronic. And the universe seems to have that very Australian sense of humour in demolishing anyone who’s getting a bit too big for their boots, doesn’t it?

  I give you: exhibit A.

  So, come with me now. Let us all climb aboard the SS Mortification Memory for a jolly boatride into the sea of my embarrassment. It was many years ago. I was in my twenties and looking for validation in all the wrong places. Namely, the ABC.

  I got a call from a producer at a now defunct show called The Einstein Factor. Possibly the nerdiest show on the nerdiest channel, it was a quiz show that tested contestants on both general knowledge and their field of expertise. Pitted against the contestants was the Brains Trust, a collection of ‘personalities’. The producer wanted me as a guest on the Brains Trust. It was my big moment! My chance to show myself as Officially Smart, as endorsed by the national public broadcaster.

  I picked out a darling hijab to wear – stylish, yet serious. It gave a touch of excitement but still conveyed the message, ‘I conceal a massive brain.’ I was going to be on with Jennifer Byrne! We’d probably become best friends.

  I was desperately hoping I would do a stellar job and be brought on as a regular panellist for the Brains Trust. I imagined myself as a contracted employee of the ABC, laughing and getting coffee with the other members of the Brains Trust. We’d be a whatever the collective noun was for a group of geniuses. A factorial? An elite?

  My first task was to tell my father. I wanted to impress him. His TV was permanently tuned to the ABC, so I figured he’d be thrilled.

  ‘Dad, guess what? Einstein Factor want me to be on their Brains Trust!’

  Silence.

  ‘You? Really?’ my stunned dad finally said. ‘Are you sure they didn’t want Waleed? That’s what I would have assumed.’

  Cheers, Dad.

  Determined to prove myself to my father in a way that would make a psychoanalyst giggle, I invited him to come to the taping. This would prove to him unequivocally just how clever I was. I picked up my skeptical father and we drove off to Ripponlea, the old home of the ABC in Melbourne. I was nervous. I felt I had a lot to prove. There was a lot riding on this.

  We finally arrived at the studio and had to negotiate a complicated series of boom gates to enter the carpark. The building was old, the carpark narrow, packed and winding. I finally found a spot and started to ease my way in. My dad started to protest but I was determined to at least park before I listened to any more of his complaints, thank you very much.

  For God’s sake, Dad, I can at least park a car without you telling me I can’t do that either!

  Crunch.

  I’d backed into a car behind me that I hadn’t noticed.

  At the very moment when I was trying to prove to my father that I was smart and capable, I had hit a parked car. In one awkward manoeuvre in my manual blue Hyundai hatch, I had shown myself to my dad as being everything I was trying not to be: clumsy, foolish, incapable.

  I may have, through clenched teeth, muttered some words most unbefitting of a practising Muslim woman.

  ‘I was trying to tell you —’ my father started.

  Yes, cheers, Dad.

  Now I had to go in and alert whoever owned the car I had smashed. Leaving my dad alone so he could really focus on my ineptitude uninterrupted, I ran into the ABC building to find the car’s owner.

  ‘Please let it be someone irrelevant to the show. Please let it be some guy from HR, or a woman from accounts. Let it be the security guard. Please just don’t let it be someone connected to a show called The Einstein Factor whom I am trying to suitably impress with my intellect so they make me a regular on the Brains Trust,’ I was saying to myself.

  The owner of the car was located. It was none other than the executive producer of the show. I introduced myself and explained that I had managed to smash her safely parked car.

  ‘Which is funny, isn’t it?’ I said meekly. ‘Given I’m here to be a smart person on a smart show, ha, ha, ha …’ I trailed off.

  It was the most humiliated I had ever felt. It was one of those moments that you fervently hope is just a bad dream. But this was none other than a colossal moment of shame.

  As the newest member of the Brains Trust I distinguished myself as a comprehensive idiot who could not even manage to enter the building without causing major destruction and my own humiliation. I don’t really remember much about how the show went after that. I do know that I received the bill for the car repairs from the EP and did not receive an invitation back to the Brains Trust.

  Two Eyeballs. One Job. No Brain

  Marc Fennell

  MARC FENNELL IS my name, but for many years I had another name. It was heard by millions; it was yelled at me from passing cars. If I was at a music festival or a bar, at some point someone would be sure to come up to me and say, ‘Hey, are you that movie guy?’

  There was the time I was standing in a toilet queue, facing a quizzical look from a woman who stood there for a good forty-five seconds before she went, ‘Oh, that movie guy.’

  I said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Omigod, I’m so relieved,’ she audibly exhaled. ‘I thought I’d slept with you.’

  For fourteen years I was a film critic at FBI and then Triple J, known as ‘That movie guy’. Perhaps it is the only thing I’ll ever be known for. I lucked into being a film reviewer when I was seventeen, and it was a hobby that just stuck and became a career.

  I feel it’s important to point out that I have no actual qualifications. My greatest achievements are taking two and a half months of a Media Communications Degree and the fact that I have watched every single episode of Star Trek: Voyager. If you don’t think that’s an achievement, then you have not struggled through season two.

  I’m going to tell you something: you don’t need a lot of skill to be Australia’s leading film critic for eighteen to twenty-four year-olds. I could describe a plot in under fifteen seconds, I was highly proficient in low-key snark and I could dole out them three and half star ratings like it was nobody’s business. But there is one thing you do need in this job. You need eyes. This is the story of the time I comprehensively fucked one of the very few prerequisites for my career.

  The year was 2009, I think. I woke up and my long-suffering girlfriend, now extremely long-suffering wif
e, had gone to work, because she had a proper job. I opened my eyes and almost the moment I could feel the sun peering through the window I knew something was wrong. Any light passing into my eyes sent a searing pain right through my head. I had never felt anything like it before. I went through the house, closing all of the blinds and sat in darkness. What the fuck had I done?

  I started timing how long I could open my eyes before they would spasm shut. I tried to have a closer look at them in a mirror, but I’m incredibly short-sighted. Without being able to put my contact lenses in I would have to climb onto the sink and go right up to the bathroom mirror – actually, I’d have to hold onto the bathroom mirror – to find the depth of field to make out what was happening with my eyes. And so I did exactly that. Straddled on either side of the basin, I hugged the mirror, and as I opened my eyes I feared the worse. Would my corneas be that opaque white you see in movies when people go blind? Three, two, one … open.

  What I saw shocked me. There was no white left. There was no pink. There was blood red surrounding my corneas. That was when I decided to call Terry.

  Let me tell you about Terry. I like to say Elton John introduced me to Terry, because when I was in year 3 my dad took me to my very first concert – Elton John. (Because I am incredibly cool.) There in the nosebleeds, Dad asked me halfway through ‘Benny and the Jets’, ‘Hey, whaddya think?’

  I said, ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘But like whaddya think about the concert?’ He gestured to what I assume was a vast and elaborate stage extravaganza, which to me, ‘undiagnosed short-sighted child’, was a gigantic multicoloured blur.

  Again I said, ‘Sounds good!’

  And so Dad took me to my new optometrist, Terry. Terry was this no-bullshit kind of guy in Burwood, who gave me my first glasses and contact lenses.