Waygookin, Chapter One (Story)

September 13th, 2006

That was the day that I came to the sobering realization that I was unremarkable. And I don’t mean that in a ‘life is pain’, Trent Reznor kind of way. Obviously, we’re all unique and special in our own way, but at the end of the day – very few of us are as brilliant, charming, or fated as we’d like to believe.

I came to this realization while manning my check-out at the corporate owned supermarket that had been my preferred ‘treading water’ location since I’d graduated college at the end of 2004. It was in the same town of 6000 in which I’d finished high school. The same sleepy town where Cindy Grant had given me my first sloppy blowjob in her father’s Barina while we were parked behind the indoor sports centre. The same town where I’d retreated when I’d graduated and realized that a Bachelor of Arts qualified me for little more than providing snooty commentary on films while my friends rolled their eyes.

Glen Innes was ‘nice’. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. ‘Nice’ is good when you’re getting on in years and you want a quiet place to rest your head. ‘Nice’ is perfect if you’ve got a few kids and you want them growing up away from the temptations of the big, evil city. But ‘nice’ doesn’t do much for you when you’re 23 and coming to the gradual, terrifying realization that you’re not actually the hero of some reality TV show. This is reality, alright, and it’s boring.

I hadn’t wanted ‘nice’ when I’d gone off to University with a head full of stupid dreams, and I sure as shit hadn’t wanted to come back to it after three years of borderline alcoholism, promiscuity, and good times. It’s a bit of a slap in the face to go from that to 1am curfews at the bars and lunch at the Bowling Club being the epitome of fine dining.

But seriously, those guys do a mean Chinese buffet.

So, there I was: a 23 year old graduate standing behind a dusty checkout in non-descript black slacks and a creased white business shirt with a hole in the arm where I’d dropped a cigarette while pissed out of my mind. It had been almost two years to the day since I’d submitted that last essay and looked forward with something like idealism at the future that was sprawled out before me.

In my mind’s eye I would walk straight into a high paying job, have a gorgeous blonde broad tonguing my shaft every morning, and my biggest worry would be deciding between a Ferrari and a Lamborghini from my Christmas bonus. How I intended to translate what I’d learned studying minority theatre and feminist interpretation of film into this kind of lifestyle didn’t ever come up.

Two years since I’d graduated, and it was only then that I began to realize that maybe this was as good as it was going to get for me. I think it’s a testament to the human power to delude that I’d spent two years asking for point cards and double bagging eggs before this nugget of wisdom managed to force its way through the haze of weed, inappropriately sexual fantasies about the seventeen year old in fruit and veg, and general disdain for everybody who shuffled mindlessly through my checkout.

It’s sobering, I found, to realize that – in all actuality – you’re no more important than the customers at whom you’d sneer with contempt when they turned their backs.

Now, I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that I became aware of my own mediocrity. I couldn’t say it came in between scanning a six pack of budget brand frozen meat pies and scanning a bag of frozen peas. Couldn’t even tell you who I was serving or whether or not it was raining that afternoon.

I only ever worked afternoons. Waking up before midday is for senior citizens and religious fanatics.

You see, this wasn’t some life defining moment. I mean, it did help to define my life – but only because the realization forced me to make some changes. Nobody wants to work behind a checkout for $16 an hour.

No, the moment itself was unspectacular. A random thought sandwiched in between the countless other random thoughts that stopped me from vaulting my register and going postal on the next old lady to insist on using her bags from home despite them being coated in more cat hair than a single cat could possibly possess.

Let’s face it, unless they’ve got terrible parents, I think it’s reasonable to say that nobody spends their formative years daydreaming about being checkout attendants or garbage collectors. I’m relatively certain that my friend-of-circumstance/desperation, Ronnie never answered the question: “Now, young man, what do you want to do when you grow up?” with: “Well, ma’am, I’d like to deliver catalogues”.

I haven’t asked him, but I think it’s a safe bet that he aspired to something a little greater than cramming glossy, unsolicited catalogues into mail-boxes in a dreary, sleepy town.

I won’t lie and say that my whole world came crashing down around me as that rogue thought intruded on my otherwise mundane day. Years of self assurance and ego stroking from a too nice mother were not torn down by a stray thought.

Think of it not as a gaping hole in the foundation of my psyche, but as a tiny, almost imperceptible crack. Barely noticeable, but the vast weight of reality was finally beginning to take its toll on my delusions of greatness.

The thought came and went in the same amount of time it took me to unceremoniously dump a can of condensed milk on top of a packet of ripe tomatoes. And then it was replaced with a forced pleasantry and forgotten about until hours later.

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“Not special? I’m a fuckin’ Adonis. What do you mean, ‘not special’?”

How do I put it politely? Ronnie is… well… Ronnie’s dumb as fuck at the best of times, let alone when he’s three cones in and giggling at the way the blurry shapes amidst the static on TV might be people having sex.

My attempts to impart the significance of my work inspired revelation were not at all helped by the fact that I too had been pulling cones since I’d walked in the door. I kept losing my train of thought and then, when I found it again, wasting time thinking to myself: Wow! I lost my train of thought again. In the time it took to complete that thought, I’d lost the train again.

“I don’t mean you specifically,” I spoke around the thick, syrup of smoke I exhaled, “I mean… none of us are as special as we think, y’know? None of us are as important as we’ve been lead to believe”.

I guess it sounds like run of the mill pot philosophy. Maybe it is. But sometimes being stoned does provide more than just a case of the munchies and a healthy dose of paranoia. Sometimes, just sometimes, being stoned can change your life.

And the pro legalization lobbyists can use that one free of charge.

I could tell Ronnie wasn’t really with me. His ideal way to spend his ‘down-time’ was watching porn on my big screen with the volume turned up so loud that the wet SLURP SLURP of penetration could be heard at the end of the block. Toddlers would weep and parents would know what it was and pretend they didn’t.

“Just the sprinkler, kids”.

Never mind that lady screaming, “I’m a dirty whore!” There’s nothing to see here.

“What I mean,” ever the optimist, I pressed on, “Is that we all get told how special we are when we’re kids. We’re lead to believe we’ll be movie stars or firefighters or musicians and, really, none of us get that”.

“Jervis is a musician,” he informed me gravely. Jervis was a douche bag with a guitar, dreads, and an occasional gig at the local pub. He was a musician like my one brush with webcamming a sexual encounter made me a porn-star.

“You’re missin’ the poi…”

I gave up right about there. Really, it had been stupidly ambitious to try and have that conversation with Ronnie. He was deep like Britney Spears’ lyrics.

But while he rifled through my CD wallet for porn to scar the neighbors with, I indulged that thought that had re-emerged. It whispered to me about wanting more from life. It informed me with the kind of frank honesty only a true friend can get away with that working casual at a supermarket, spending my pay on weed and DVDs, and masturbating twice a day was not what I’d been put on this earth for.

I was not a consumer whore. I was not just another cog in the vast engine of supply and demand. I was meant for more than this. God wanted me to do more with my life. God wanted me to bang hotter chicks and buy cooler DVDs. He wanted me to do it in a bigger city, and he wanted me to start doing it soon.

And that, of course, is just the kind of idle day-dreaming that had me foolishly convinced that I was special in the first place.

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Changes weren’t made immediately, I’m afraid to say. In fact, after I passed out watching Letterman that night, my quarter life crisis went on hold. Mostly because my friend loaned me GTA: San Andreas and that consumed what little time I usually devoted to intellectual pursuits such as reading comics or thinking.

I’m a procrastinator.

Ask my friends to describe me in one word and you’d get a whole bunch of answers. Wanker, drunk, stoner, over-dramatic, shit-head, fag, cock-gobbler… Not the best of friends, really. But, yeah, one of them would eventually say I was a procrastinator.

And if they didn’t, my mother or any one of my University lecturers would gladly offer it up.

I’m no prodigy. If you drop a box of matches on the ground I’ll say: “Fuck, you dropped matches everywhere”. Ask me the square root of 133 and I’ll giggle because you said ‘root’.

Genius I’m not, but I think it’s fair to say that I’m certainly above average in that respect. But maybe that’s just more of that false confidence that society instills on us. After all, good marks might feel good when you get them – but in the long run, what do they really mean? I’ve got friends who didn’t even graduate high school earning more than me and sleeping with more attractive women.

Nobody cares if I can discuss the use of persuasive language in The Crucible or recite Lysistrata word for word.

Nobody that matters, anyway.

Still, I think it was a fair assumption for me to make that I could probably be doing more with my life.

What does my intelligence have to do with procrastinating? Oh yeah, laziness.

I know it’s lazy to blame my laziness on external factors, but I’m going to do it anyway. You see, being ‘ahead of the curve’ meant that school always seemed just that little bit easier for me. While friends slaved late into the night studying for their HSC I was re-reading The Stand and trying to woo girls on Yahoo Messenger.

That sounds arrogant. I’m well aware that I have my weaknesses. Sure, I can write a killer essay on most anything – but ask me to do a few algorithms or conduct a biodiversity study and I’m just as likely to draw two stick figures fellating one another. That’s just how I roll.

What I’m trying to say is that being able to take it a little easy in school lead to me taking things a little easy in college and that, in turn, lead to me taking things a little easy in life. And while it flew in college – it wasn’t really flying in life. ‘Good enough’ doesn’t really translate into a great deal in the real world. ‘Good enough’ got me girls with spotty faces and a job in a building that reeked of B.O. and broken dreams.

So, there I was with a life altering realization nestled away in my brain, and what was I doing? Guiding ‘Carl’ through another robbery and eating my second packet of fun size Violet Crumbles.

Procrastinating.

But if life wants you to go someplace, I’ve found you’ll end up there whether you’re being pro-active or you’re knuckle deep with your thumb up your own butt. And while that thought gnawed away at me until my mild dissatisfaction was full on wanderlust with a hard-on: ‘fate’ or whatever you want to call it was working on getting me off of my lazy ass and someplace a little better.

Or, at least, that’s how I tell it when I’m trying to impress girls with my tale of self discovery.

I was in the process of another productive evening of YouTube and MSN when an old friend of mine messaged me out of the blue. If I’m being honest, I rarely even talk to my ‘friends’ online anymore outside of pleasantries. You know the kind. “Yeah, life is good! You?”

Silence generally follows their answer. Maybe you throw a ‘lol’ or an ‘ok’ out there for good measure.

Anyway, this ‘friend’ (more of a high school acquaintance, really) goes through the usual rigmarole. “I’m good”. “Yeah? Awesome”. ‘lol!’ ‘rofl!’

While we chatted he added me on MySpace, and I was browsing through his pictures when I noticed the minor detail that he wasn’t in Australia anymore. Far from it. Judging by the number of Asian women in his photos and the horrific selection of neon signs that seemed to backdrop it all – he was definitely not across town like I’d initially assumed.

“Korea, mate,” he informed me as gravely as Comic Sans MS in bright red can look, “It’s been awesome. Good pay, non-stop partying, and gorgeous girls”.

I don’t really recall where the conversation went after that. Truth be told, I was splitting my attention between that and watching this Latina girl stripping to some generic hip-hop track on YouTube.

Ok, it was PornoTube. And she wasn’t just ‘stripping’, if you get my drift.

After I was done ‘viewing’, I was closing down FireFox when I saw the chat window still flashing uselessly at me. My friend had since logged off, but his last words were staring back at me like a shape in mashed potato.

“This means something”, it whispered.

And that, my friends, is a reference well before my time.

At that point in the evening I could have gone and found something to eat or turned on the TV and watched music videos until I fell asleep. I should have been submitting my taxes, actually, and maybe it was that deep seeded need to procrastinate instead of doing dull paperwork that meant I re-opened FireFox, loaded up Google, and did a brief search for working in South Korea.

I made the bold assumption that when he’d said ‘Korea’, he hadn’t meant the third world dictatorship. He didn’t strike me as the type.

It all seemed too good to be true. There was a job out there where I basically lived the college lifestyle in a foreign country, and all I had to do was speak my own language and show up to work on time. They’d pay for me to get there and back, they’d give me an apartment, and the only requirements seemed to be that I wasn’t a junkie, a pedophile, or an idiot. Not good news for Ronnie – but excellent news for me.

And so, with little else to do, I opened up the first website that Google sent my way and I began to fill out an application. How many life altering moments begin with filling out paperwork? Sperm donation, a will being signed, a marriage certificate, an adoption certificate… it’s funny how something as seemingly innocuous as a piece of paper and a pen can have such a dramatic effect on our lives.

I filled it out, hit ‘Send’, and went off in search of pizza shapes and some decent late night television to rock me to sleep in its loving arms. And that application slipped to the back of my mind, out a cunningly hidden door, and out of my life as if it had never happened.