The Family Law (12 page)

‘Dad's pretty angry. He said to tell you that if you don't take the ring out of your eye, he'll have to disown you as his son.'

‘It's my
eyebrow
,' I said. ‘Not my
eye
.'

‘Whatever. He just said he wants it out.'

It wasn't long before I removed the eyebrow ring altogether, not so much for my father's sake, but because it was starting to smell. After taking the hoop out one evening, when I tried to put it back the next morning the piercing had already closed, as though it had never been meant to be there.

But at that moment, as I finished speaking to Tammy and hung up the phone, I was irate that such a simple thing could come between us. If a metal ring was enough to make him this angry, how would he react when I told him I was gay, or that I had a boyfriend, or that I was studying for a university degree with the word ‘creative' in its title, which offered no discernible job prospects? What would happen
then
? The only thing I knew was that once we got to the restaurant, I'd have to work really, really hard to win him back. To have a hole in my face was one thing; to be unemployable and lazy was a shame beyond imagining.

Towards Manhood

There are some men in the world who are unambiguously male. Unquestionably, identifiably, inherently male. It's not uncommon for teenagers I encounter on public transport to be twice my size, and twice as physically developed, even though I'm twice their age. These creatures – who apparently share the same XY chromosome pairing as me – are tall and broad-shouldered. They have feet the size of concrete slabs, five o'clock shadows, legs like carved tree trunks, and they sport hair on their chests and arses. One assumes their genitals swing between their legs like anvils, and their shit stinks like the wet earth. They are, undeniably, men.

When it came to me, it was as though my mother's uterus had had several moments of hesitation in deciding what it'd produce. After coming up with Andrew, my giant of a brother, then having to endure the horrors of a miscarriage, Mum's womb was exhausted and indecisive throughout
1982
. ‘Well, the baby should definitely have a penis,' the uterus thought. ‘Yes: a penis. Slap one on. Should we put hair on its forearms? Maybe hold back on the forearm hair, I don't know. What about leg hair? Yes: leg hair. Actually, no: stop the leg hair. Oh no, wait:
put it back
.'

The result of this indecisiveness was me: an Asian hybrid man-child … thing. Someone with a
27
-inch waistline, hands like a well-manicured woman, unsightly and improvised leg-hair growth, and – inexplicably – a baritone voice that can sometimes sound like a gay James Earl Jones with a cold. Despite my skinny frame and Asiatic eyes, I also have sensual full-bodied lips, not unlike those of a female African-American blues singer.

For most of my life, I've worked against the outcome of this genetic lottery. I've tried bashing shit, listening to different music, gaining weight, building muscle, slouching, pretending to like girls – but nothing's really worked. Now, at the age of twenty-five, I've given up trying. Yes, I'll swear like a stevedore, but I refuse to heckle; I'll belch in public, but will refrain from farting; I grow hair on my abdomen, but not on my calves; I'll eat your meat pie, but not your vagina. I'm a compromised failure of a man.

 

*

 

My siblings are fond of reminding me that the signs were there from the start. There's one family video we sometimes bring out at Christmas that shows my four siblings and me, between the ages of two (Michelle) and fifteen (Candy), holding a fashion parade through the living room. My mother never got rid of clothes back then. Pantyhose, old bathrobes, hideous socks with ruined elastic – she kept them all. They went into a massive plastic tub, and voilà: Jenny's Bucket-of-Fun was ready. As a mother of five, she needed cheap entertainment.

A lot of the home video is just screaming and shrieking. At one point, Candy – dressed like a transvestite from a medieval fete – approaches the camera and crosses her eyes. ‘I'm a lesbian!' she declares. Delighted, six-year-old Tammy screams with laughter and starts calling after her: ‘Darling! Darling! Darling!'

Andrew and I refuse to be outdone. We know we can be more entertaining than a medieval dyke in rainbow glasses. We find old, saggy brown pantyhose and pull them tight over our genitals, past our navels and into our armpits. We strut down a makeshift catwalk made of sofa cushions and head-rests, hands on our arses, blowing kisses to the camera. Tammy laughs, scandalised and confused. Two-year-old Michelle, not really understanding what is going on, screams and screams and screams.

Things get out of hand and Andrew cruelly tries pulling off my shorts, laughing as I stumble over the cushions, still in pantyhose and high-heels. Siblings start running into each other like idiots. Costume changes behind the sliding doors become more violent and frenzied. Dad, who works hideously long nights at the restaurant, comes into the scene, looking disoriented.

‘Darling, darling!' Tammy screams at Dad.

‘I'm a lars-bian!' Candy says.

Weirdly, the video shows me dry-humping the cushioned catwalk and moaning, pretending I'm a woman orgasming. ‘Urgh, urgh, urgh!' I grunt. It is chaos. Then Andrew comes bursting out of the doors and—

Ugh!

—the video cuts to black.

When we return, Andrew is on the floor, bent over and howling in pain. Someone has kicked him in the balls. Actually, from what we gather watching the video, it mightn't have been a kick, but a punch. Apparently, Tammy had balled her fists, aimed, and – without reason – hammered them straight into his testicles.

Andrew crouches, keeled over, crying his guts out.

Behind the camera, Mum sighs. ‘Michelle, give your brother a tissue.'

Andrew continues crying, and Michelle waddles over and gives him a Kleenex. It's a touching moment. The mood has definitely shifted from unhinged madness, and we've sobered up. But watching the video now, I know that without a doubt, sitting somewhere out of frame, my ten-year-old self is happily oblivious, still wearing his dress and pantyhose, examining his nails in the sunlight.

 

*

 

Around the time of the fashion parade, I'd been having a successful run in childhood gymnastics, and was featured in the newspaper several times for my sporting prowess. After a while, though, the bars started hurting my hands. The exercises became excruciating:
180
-degree, full-circle rotations on the high bar called ‘giants'; supporting my entire body weight in a
90
-degree L-shape on the rings; spinning my legs around a pommel the size of a shetland pony. I was entering that painful transition period when male gymnastics becomes less about nimbleness and agility, and more about brute strength and courage. Lacking both of those qualities, I quit. People told me it was a girly pursuit anyway.

Andrew recruited me into the decidedly more manly sport he was pursuing: karate. None of this cartwheel, leg-splitting bull shit. Now I was moving on to a sport that involved bashing the living shit out of people, which was as manly as it got. During one of my first lessons, our sensei – a white dude called Eddie – told us how in shopping centres, he always kept an eye out for potential attackers by watching his reflection in glass store entrances and window displays. He always kept his hands balled in fists, just in case.

‘You just
never
know,' Eddie told us. ‘One of the main ways people get attacked is from behind. They never see what's coming. Sure, you might call those attackers “cowards.” You might say they're not even
men
. But calling them names won't make any difference when they've slit your throat and you've got blood all over your shirt. Newsflash, kids. You are now
dead
. No more pulse. Your parents are calling the cemetery to make funeral arrangements.

‘So do what I do: watch for people in reflective surfaces. Stay alert. And when those bastards attack, be ready to smash their faces in.' He punched the air in front of him. ‘Like
this
!' Everyone nodded sagely.

Eddie's presence made karate a more frightening prospect than it had to be. Even though I was fond of the
kata
routines, which seemed more like a choreographed dance than martial arts, I showed no aptitude for karate's actual bashing component. My gymnastics training gave me the flexibility to kick a fully grown man in the head, but there was no strength behind those blows. My frail little boy-bones meant that you could have probably broken my collarbone by tapping me on the shoulder. The freestyle sparring sessions were the worst. ‘Green-belt,' a stout orange-belted girl said to me one night, beckoning me with her finger. ‘You're with me.' One well-aimed kick to the gut later I was winded.

Even though Andrew and I walked to and from karate class together every week, I'm not convinced we bonded during that period. We were just too different. He was the boy of the family: a monosyllabic, grunting champion tennis player who smelled weird and punched holes in walls to vent his frustration. I was on the primary-school debating team, jumped skipping ropes during recess and had a defence mechanism that involved a combination of scratching and spitting.

‘What
are
you?' Andrew asked one night, withdrawing from a fight after I had repeatedly spat in his face and clawed at his eyes, squealing like a pig. He wiped away the soup of saliva and phlegm that marinated his face, and looked at me with utter disgust.

‘I mean, really, Ben: what
are
you? Fight back properly. Be a man.'

Our musical tastes were irreconcilable. It was
1993
, and Nirvana had just released
In Utero
. Andrew would listen to the fourth track, ‘Rape Me,' over and over again. He didn't have a personal stereo, so Kurt Cobain's ironic plea for someone to sexually abuse him droned from the living room into everyone's bedrooms and the kitchen where Mum was cooking dinner. Apparently, it was what guys listened to, but even as an eleven-year-old I thought the song was pretentious and embarrassing. Why would anyone want to rape Kurt Cobain? He was greasy, married to Courtney Love, wore flannel and clearly did not look after himself.

Instead, I immersed myself in another seminal album that was released the same year: Mariah Carey's
Music Box
, a serious and studied meditation on love (‘Dreamlover'), bravery (‘Hero'), loyalty (‘Any Time You Need a Friend') and profound loss (‘Without You'). I ordered it from the back of a
TV Week
catalogue, along with Bryan Adams's
So Far So Good
and Billy Joel's
River of Dreams
. I would listen to
Music Box
endlessly on my Sony Walkman, for which I'd saved the entire sixty-five dollars. Because I wasn't at the stage where I could discern what was cool or not, I tentatively asked my best friend James about Carey's album, and whether he loved it as much as I did.

‘Mariah fucking Carey?' There was pity in his eyes. ‘What are you, a homo?' I shuffled in my spot, unsure of the appropriate response. ‘And what are those shorts you're wearing, by the way?' James said. ‘Are they
Mango
?' I looked down at the imitation Mambo-brand shorts my mother had bought me from Best 'n' Less – the ones I reserved for special occasions, like the Fridays James and I went league tenpin bowling. What I had thought was cool – Mariah Carey, my imitation brand-label shorts – I now realised was a source of deep, deep shame. At least I was feeling it now.

‘You can't go on listening to that shit,' James said, spraying Brut-
33
deodorant into his eleven-year-old armpits. Driving to the bowling alley, James told his mother to put on several CDs for me: The Twelfth Man's
Wired World of Sports II
and Denis Leary's
I'm an Asshole
. Dennis Leary's song I could understand and enjoy, but as I'd been raised in a non-cricket household, The Twelfth Man went right over my head. He was boring. But because it was spoken word, all I needed to do was block it out, by privately looping Mariah Carey through my head.

 

*

 

Needless to say, there was an answer once I, as Mariah suggested, ‘reached into my soul.' All of these things – the fashion parade; the gymnastics lessons; Mariah Carey; my lack of body hair; my almost religious commitment to the mid-'
90
s gameshow
Man
O Man
, a male beauty pageant hosted by
Phantom of the Opera
's Rob Guest – pointed towards a particularly aggressive form of homosexuality.

When puberty hit, boys prowled the schoolyard – reeking of armpits, penis and locker-room Lynx – on the hunt for anyone remotely queer to exercise their knuckles on. God knows how, but I passed the test. I learned which girls were supposedly attractive; I perfected my man-walk; and I had that rich baritone voice to hide behind. People chose to look beyond my involvement in the all-female clarinet ensemble and my art-class creations of semi-naked muscled Christ figures. Being Asian helped. People never suspected you could be a racial minority
and
gay. Of course you're not gay; you're
foreign
.

Still, the anxiety was constant. The whole time, I was busy convincing myself that I was infatuated with Helen, a girl from my extracurricular acting class. She was misanthropic, liked Radiohead, was obsessed with Jonny Greenwood and smelled nice. She had lovely feet. I had severe scoliosis and a Tori Amos rarities collection. In our locality, this was as close as the youth got to cutting-edge. A few months into our friendship, I sent Helen an anonymous Valentine's Day card with Elliott Smith lyrics scrawled all over it. She called my bluff and asked me out on a date during an online chat. I became flustered, confused, and – somehow knowing in my gut that this would be wrong – typed something like ‘Uhmnothanksokaybye.' Then I made my online profile invisible. Knowing my teenage self, it's very likely I then spent the next few hours looking at homosexual pornography.