The Helen 100 Read online

  . . . is just the sort of thing Brynlee enjoyed receiving from me twelve times a day.

  Fun!

  As it turned out, you can’t write this shit at speed in uncomfortable pants. And you can’t write this shit every day and not begin to loathe yourself and the lies that you’ve been selling.

  Each morning, in my elasticised pants, I downloaded the job orders for tooth-whitening or fat-reducing or hairstraightening deals, and each afternoon I would be almost dead with hate. I could hardly bear to sell this stuff and I lived by not buying it at all. I didn’t just renounce the particular products and services I was selling but, gradually, the entire idea of personal grooming.

  I found that I had to keep on giving up something to maintain productivity. Committing such a sin seemed to demand regular sacrifice. I’d renounced the company of others. I’d renounced my ambition to write anything of value ever again—not that I ever had produced words of value, but the conceit I was wasting my gifts had previously brought me pleasure. I’d even, in visiting a priest, momentarily renounced my aversion to religion; an aversion which, as is the case with many atheists, had itself become a bit religious. This was my Lent in reverse.

  I had renounced nearly everything in the attempt to remain alive. I was in danger of renouncing the means to live altogether, and the day I got an order to sell something called ‘frizz ensmoothenation’ was the day I knew I could either tell this work, and all work, to go and fuck itself or give up on brushing my hair.

  And now the hair whose care was one of the last things I had left to renounce was stuck with chicken grease to the grooves between my floorboards.

  That morning, before the ex left, I had been assigned a job for a Thai breast enlargement treatment. I always found Asian-themed jobs particularly trying because it took forever to think my way out of the obvious orientalism. My colleagues would quickly write things like ‘exotic’ and ‘mystical’ and ‘spicy’, and even though we were all working together in the service of cut-rate vanity, this didn’t mean I had to give up all my hopes for decent society. Markdown manipulation of women who hated their bodies by clumsy theft of the most beautiful verse in English was bad enough, but I didn’t have to be a colonial arsehole with it.

  I had been struggling for an hour to not be a racist with the natural Thai breast enlargement: a procedure that apparently involved being hit in the tits with a stick. But the production of advertising copy, even this low-rent kind, was something I usually found difficult. Every word has a commercial weight and I had to almost feel it in the palm of my hand before I set it on the page.

  It was then, between these breasts, that the ex slapped me with the news that she was leaving me.

  When she had left, I sat at my computer, with the breast enlargement on it, and suddenly it became easy to violate developing nations. I promised vain, small-breasted white women sexy oriental secrets. I may have used the terms ‘concubine’ and ‘geisha’ in my One Size Fits Most approach to the great continent of Asia. I don’t recall exactly what memsaab shit I upchucked that day and I do not care at all to remember. But I do know that I wrote twenty to one hundred Brynlee coupons, each freer from ethics than the last.

  Who wants to be fat? Who wants to look old? Who wants to pay full price to Asians for a gel polish manicure?

  It’s quite easy for your ethics not to matter when nothing matters at all. Of course I now feel terrible about using the phrase ‘mystic East’, but I was eventually grateful for this rush as it turned out to be my last act of money-making in months. My time would not be spent in service to productivity but to grief and to dating and my dolphin.

  I ordered my first barbecue chicken. I lay miserable and godless on the floor. I dispatched one last discount beauty coupon, and when I did that I gave in utterly to the flash of chaos that always comes when we know that love is gone.

  At about ten that night, I emailed:

  Dear Brynlee,

  I am slashing my services to your organisation by 100%. This is due in part to the recent departure of all my childlike wonder, which pulled out of the driveway in a Toyota sedan at 4 p.m.

  It is also due to my revulsion for exclamation points! I know it is the view of the company that these signify fun to consumers, but I believe they suggest evidence of a dangerous personality disorder. And the risk of death by torture! In a basement! Do you know any functionally sane person who uses more than one exclamation point per correspondence per year? No! You don’t! There is a reason that we moved only three units of frizz ensmoothenation last month and it’s not because straight hair has lost its cultural appeal in this horrid, racist nation that valorises the flat and the white. It is because you compel me to produce terrifying schizotypal copy that serves more as a warning of murder than it does an inducement to buy.

  These things we write are not mere advertisements. These are ugly ransom notes that threaten their recipient with the slaughter of the soul. We kidnap and confine their confidence. They agree to pay half-price for its partial return.

  Only a MilleniGal who has had the dignity fucked out of her by a concrete dildo could continue to do this work of Satan, Brynlee. I have never been sadder nor more distressed in any professional environment, and I once sold sub-prime mortgages to impoverished persons from a building that smelled like a cage of sick mice. That your bleak and often evil work is done with lashings of team spirit has truly eaten my guts. ‘Fun’ office environments such as yours perpetually promise freedom, but perpetually deliver its very opposite.

  Don’t pretend to promise freedom, Brynlee. Better for me, and for all of us, the diabolic manager who rages ‘Schnell! Schnell!’ than your false, empowered prophet. Every time you told me I was free, or that our customers were, it hurt me.

  It is too late for me, Brynlee. My insides are dead. But, you are young and can still redeem yourself. If you do not run from them now, Daily Deals will steal the stuff of you, too.

  Please find my terminal invoice herewith.

  I wrote the note, fed little Eleven again and thought for one to four hours that night about brushing and cleaning my hair, if only in readiness for death. Which was the only kind of plan that had formed thus far from a mean and greasy floor.

  3

  Nine hours and no libidinal relief since she left

  Like many who find themselves wearing elasticised pants in front of their spouses, I had not had sex in some time. I hadn’t wanted sex in some time. By 9 p.m. that night, though, I absolutely did. I wanted sex. I just wanted sex. I mean, really wanted it, like older men report their teenaged selves having wanted it.

  I felt like a delivery truck packed with full-fat yoghurt that would crash if not unloaded. And I apologise for the inelegance of this image. But, as I have said, this is an account intended chiefly for use by the newly dumped and they are, for good reason, terribly sensitive about the use of cliché. So, I’m hardly going to say in front of them, ‘I was forcefully seized by desire’, am I?

  Wanting sex, I have since learned, is a fairly standard middle-class female response to the shock of separation. I believe it comes a close second to going to Italy and Finding Oneself. I know this, because I texted my friend Celine, who is the only person I could count on to say something absurd instead of something sentimental.

  Helen: So, very serious dispatch. 1. I’ve just been properly dumped and she’s gone for good and I don’t know why and I’m devastated. 2. I am totally gagging for sex, but also crying. What even is that?

  Celine: First, I never liked the bint and if I were lez, I would totes do you, you have great tits, so fuck her. Second, this post-dump state is so common, it even has a name: Divorce Horn.

  I tried to honk it that night.

  If you are neither biologically old enough to be my parent nor young enough to be my issue, I cordially invite you to my muff.

  I wrote this on a smutty corner of the internet and was not, unsurprisingly, inundated with responses until I added a picture of my tits, which are, as Celin
e will confirm, quite good, even in stressful conditions.

  But even post-tit picture, finding sex by internet wasn’t as easy as ordering a chicken. It was difficult for several reasons, some of which may be fairly universal, one of which is specific to those with a particular character flaw: some of us just don’t have the faculty for daydreams. I shall review this problem, which actually has no solution, first. You may find it, to employ a dreadful term our Brynlee overused, ‘relatable’.

  There are some folks like me who don’t dare to dream because we really can’t. Our imaginations suffer from practical interference. If we try to enjoy, say, thoughts of lottery winnings, we can’t go straight to fantasy spending on penthouses or, say, artisanal cheese.

  Before we get to the make-believe money, we perform tedious accounting. Answering the question ‘What would YOU do if you won the Powerball?’ is not relaxing for me but a pain in my arse. I feel obliged to calculate how much of this imaginary $3.5M sum I must use for taxation, charitable donation, and behavioural therapy, all of which I imagine are outlays urgently needed upon receipt of an unusually large cheque.

  So, I don’t buy lottery tickets. I don’t imagine becoming friends with famous people I am unlikely to meet. I also find it difficult to enjoy fantasy stories in general, especially those about sexy vampires. I once heard that vampires, in which I do not believe, are averse to running water, which means they would find it nearly impossible to bathe. As I did for some days following this shock separation.

  As I sat with my phone, working up a sour summertime dolphin, I began to think of all the things that were just as unlikely as me getting sex. I thought about the impossibility of world peace when I saw a XXX profile that included some of the lyrics to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. I wrote to its author:

  MuffDiva: To imagine all the people living life in peace and in no countries is to assume a utopian position ignorant of the birth of the nation-state. It is to forget that we remain aggressors in an ongoing war outside our borders. It is to overlook the thousands of brown bodies that were burned in the desert last week. And these are memories I cannot erase, as I had a high school history teacher called Mr Dean who made me learn about the importance of remembering history.

  She is yet to reply.

  I should say that Mr Dean gave me an F for history as I was, at the time, smoking a lot of weed and submitting essays rich in idiocy. But he was a very decent teacher who provided, despite my opposition, good grounding in international relations. I learned from him that one cannot simply wish history away. I learned that crying ‘I don’t understand how this evil could possibly happen’ in response to a tragedy of war is lazy bullshit. You can understand how it happened, if only you look to the past.

  So now when I hear ‘Imagine’, I always think, Fuck you, John Lennon. You were eating cheese in your penthouse when you wrote that oblivious dirge.

  If you are, like me, the sort of person who cannot think of world peace without considering the problem of history, or of the lottery without therapists, or of vampires without soap, then you are the sort of person who cannot easily think that sex will unfold at 2 a.m. And I know there are certain Brynlees who recommend ‘visualising’ one’s future. But, as we know, these people have had their brains fucked out by concrete dildos.

  In short, I thought too much, and I imagine that even for the competent daydreamer, this is a fairly usual just-dumped problem.

  Public Service Announcement: Try not to think when seeking sex by internet. If you must think, don’t let on.

  Thought is bad enough, but the incapacity to keep such thought out of conversation is a real vaginal adversary. So, even if I could have found sex—and the chap from the next suburb who went by the name hard_4_ewe would have uncritically provided it that night, and probably often in the future if I had dressed, as he requested, in wool, to which I am mildly allergic—I did a marvellous job of talking my way out of it.

  I could not do sexy chat that night any more than I could visit Tuscany. I was terrible at this business. And rude and terribly impatient.

  I have retained copies of some of the messages exchanged in the hours after the ex left. They are embarrassing to read and may as well be a reverse playbook in How to Get Laid in a Hurry. I reproduce a selection of these for the purposes of instruction. Horny just-dumped persons who cannot afford a ticket to Italy: that which follows is how not to find sex by app.

  I had promoted my genitals that night to both men and women. Nonetheless, correspondents were exclusively male and many of these, noting my ‘bisexual’ category, asked, ‘Are you a Lesbian?’ or, more commonly, ‘r u Lesbian?’

  For me, internet abbreviations and poor spelling were unsexy problems. If you are similarly troubled, you will likely remain so. Don’t bother trying to repair your irreparable aversion. But there is another habit you and I might do well to break when we find ourselves in sex chat. Argue about apostrophes by all means, but do not argue with people over fine points of morality, such as international relations, or, say, the offside rule. Or, as in my case, queer politics.

  What you should not do, for example, when somebody asks you ‘Are you a Lesbian?’ is answer:

  MuffDiva: No. And why are you capitalising ‘Lesbian’? In the course of our communications, you have shunned capital letters where they are needed—and don’t even get me started on your other style crimes that start but hardly end in a confusion of ‘your’ with ‘you’re’ or ‘ur’. But a word that does not demand capitalisation is the one to which it is perversely applied. Where is the capital H for Helen? The capital M for Melbourne? Nowhere. And yet you enlist their close neighbour ‘L’ for ‘Lesbian’. If you can’t observe the basic rules of usage, then I can’t see how you could find my muff with both hands and Google Maps.

  I took a screenshot of that answer to the question ‘Are you a Lesbian?’ and sent it to Celine for assessment. She replied, ‘Total boner-killer, you fucking idiot, Razer.’ As, I imagine, is:

  MuffDiva: No. It is true that I am female and it is true that I was, until this afternoon, in a relationship with a female with whom I had sex of diminishing quality and frequency over a period of fifteen years. But, no. I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Lesbian Party. Rather than join that union, I’d eat devilled ham every day for a month. I am not fond of manufactured meat and I am even less fond of the query, ‘Are you a Lesbian?’ Do not ask again. This sort of questioning diminishes us both and I will have none of your venereal McCarthyism.

  Just don’t do this. Confess to being a capital L Lesbian without correcting usage. Prefer simple speech over extravagant style. And please do not mention Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, except in the unusual case you are talking to a horny history buff with a particular interest in dissident-themed sex games. Who is possibly Mr Dean. Send him my best.

  *

  Although I am attempting, wherever possible, to universalise my experience for the sake of the broader dumped population, I should admit that my sensitivity to the whole ‘Lesbian’ issue is probably pretty specific to me. Please forgive this indulgence. (And all those many to follow.)

  That my particular desertion happened to be of a homosexual flavour intensified my shame and my impatience with views on sexuality generally. ‘Lesbians’ are really not supposed to break up, these days. They are supposed to stay together forever and provide an inspiring liberal example to others. And, this, notwithstanding my actual intention to stay together forever, was an attitude that really ticked me off.

  Regularly washing the socks, or licking the vagina of another woman are largely seen as acts of moral leadership in the West. If there is one thing now more socially shameful than being part of a homosexual relationship, it is being expelled from a homosexual relationship. Almost no one, save for parents and preachers, hopes for the end of a homosexual relationship any more.

  So many people expect us to be so damn good, as evidenced when I changed my Facebook re
lationship status to ‘Single’—I did wait an entire half hour following the ex’s departure to do this—and someone messaged me to say, ‘That is a shame! You two were so inspiring.’ (I un-friended them, and so did Celine at my request.)

  I have never been comfortable with or tolerant of the belief that anyone, especially me, can serve to genuinely inspire others. Like my history teacher Mr Dean, I do not think that good or bad things spring from good or bad people. I believe they are produced by the mechanism of history.

  And I believe that, historically, it’s an awful time to be a homosexual.

  At some point, gay became the new beige and we are today the class doomed to revive the discarded dream of marriage. We are the people charged with conspicuous carriage of rainbow babies in expensive baby slings. Ours are the animal libidos that must now be concealed behind a whopping great flag that reads ‘family’ and ‘love’. We can no longer really cry for any rights, other than those that would see us domesticated and neutered and compelled to give our desire a single name. Or possibly sent to the army.

  Anyhow. People like to see us freaks in pairs. This has always got on my tits but, for obvious reasons, never quite so much as it did that first night.

  *

  This ‘lesbian’ thing makes plain another problem internet sex ladies face. This problem, however, has a solution. Girls, whether you’re Divorce Horn honkers or more wholesomely engorged, pretend that you are not interested in penises. Even if you are directly asked ‘Are you a horny bitch?’, answer NO. (Unless, of course, you are talking with hard_4_ewe, who really doesn’t mind either way. Just so long as you have agreed to dress as livestock.) My advice to all women speaking with internet sex men is: in general, appear unmotivated, a bit stupid and very hard-to-get.

  Challenges are sought by most men on XXX dating apps. Which is peculiar if one bothers to think about it. Within these apps we are required to geolocate our genitals and check a series of boxes indicating tolerance of things like ‘anal’, ‘edgeplay’ and ‘adult nursing’. In this, any pretence of challenge is a great hypocrisy. I mean, we’re obviously up for it and, in many cases, eager to accessorise it, vandalise it and slather it in baby lotion.