DIARY – LOVE AT CUMBERSOME CORNER – MORE SEX – PT 7

By Bruce Williams

Fred sits on his full schooner of cider until I’m a sip from finishing my schooner of beer. Then he drains his drink and lands his glass with a thump on his coaster ‘ an easy second before mine. Your shout.

‘How’s things with Betty” He asks because he knows.

When we were school mates at 16, on the Northern Beaches, Fed joined an amateur theatre group, which we ‘ meaning me, Jim, Grant and Carmellino (that is, everyone who mattered) ‘ thought was a pretty dumb thing to do. And we continued to think so all the way through his rehearsal stories, and especially upon seeing him on stage as Morrie in the Coastal Players Production of Dimboola.

Dimboola is the most produced play in Australia’s dramatic history: about a wedding that goes horribly wrong. It ran for two-and-a-half years at the Wisky au Go Go until it burned down. The Wisky is history. Dimboola lives on.

That was in Melbourne in the mid ’70s. In the late ’70s, on Sydney’s northern peninsula, came the Coastal Players Dimboola after-party. After which, a 16-year-old boy named Fred came to school with stories of 30-year-old sex. And we all joined (even Grant) the Coastal Players.

Fred settles another swiftly-drained cider onto its NRL-promotion coaster, and it seems things have come full circle.

He tells me he’s been seeing a girl just out of school.

‘She was behind the counter when I borrowed Videodrome and Fargo on DVD. She said she’d seen Videodrome but not Fargo. I took a punt, and asked her out,’ said Fred.

‘The next weekend, we each took the day off, and we had sex all day. We ate lunch and drank and showered and started again. All day. And it was fabulous ‘ seeing her surprised, occasionally horrified. Overall she seemed pretty pleased about the whole thing, but I thought – that’s it. That’s all I’ve got – the full repertoire done in a day. From now on, it’s variations on a theme.’

‘Then about two weeks later we were having sex again, and she was coming back at me with a few tricks of her own that she learnt off the internet. And she was happy and proud because she’d driven me wild. And I did my best to drive her just as wild.

And do you know what she says’ ‘that was the best fuck I have ever had’.

“Think about it,” said Fred. ‘Someone turns to you and says that’s the best ever. And she’s 18, right: so there’s the faintest chance that it might be true. Think about it!’

And I tried. But it was too horrible.

So I drained my beer, said thanks to Fed. Kissed his mouth. And walked out through the doors of Glebe’s Ancient Briton, 20 blocks back to my darling Betty, cranky as hell in Cumbersome. Cider on my lips, beer on my breath. Love in my heart.