THE
MOMENT I REALISED I WAS AN ADULT
Edited version published: Frankie #21 (Jan/Feb 2008)
Now this assumes there was a moment where I became bone fide “adult”.
Yes, I recently turned 25, but I’m not convinced I’m quite
there. At my age, my mother had already shot two children out of her loins;
my sister had been engaged for marriage; my brother was on a mortgage
and planning to gravel the driveway.
Where am I? Stuck in the seventh year of a university degree that refuses
to end, buying cheap toilet paper which seems to have the added function
of “sanding” my anus, and convincing myself that mattress
stains don’t constitute a reason to throw the thing out. The closest
thing I have to a child is a boyfriend who looks sullen after dinner,
complains about feeling bloated, and points towards his stomach, insisting
I rub it better.
If you’re the type of person who thinks you can pinpoint a moment
where you suddenly emerged from your pube-spouting, cone-smoking, moot-banging
chrysalis of puberty to magically emerge an adult butterfly of maturity,
monogamy and credit-card repayments, you’re probably deluded.
I’m convinced most coming-of-age moments are, for the most part,
profoundly hideous and immature in hindsight. Your 21st birthday, where
you vomited all over your lover’s face and proceeded to swim naked
in front of your extended family! Your graduation, where you poured kerosene
over your blazer and proclaimed that your home room teacher was a whore!
Another example: Benjamin’s First Sexual Encounter. (That’s
right. Close this magazine right now if the thought of reading about this
either makes you pulsate with unguarded, involuntary arousal, or conversely,
coerces your genitals to spontaneously curl up and die.)
When we were 17, my friends were seemingly all having sex. Or at least,
everyone around me was becoming universally adept at manipulating combinations
of fingers, mouths and genitals. At the time, it seemed very—as
one would say—“adult”. Ah, those were the days. I’ll
never forget the moment my best friend told me she’d ingested her
first burst of ejaculate the night before. It was a tender, Wonder Years-type
moment, and I was very proud.
But as a burgeoning, garden variety homosexual, I felt distinctly left
out. A year later, and I was still decidedly chaste. So I insisted that
my friends join me on a night of revolting debauchery, one where we’d
down all types of alcohol and lose our inhibitions, to facilitate an environment
in which I could find some goddamned man-loving.
We went to a particularly infamous and iconic gay nightclub in Brisbane—a
place where my friend Romy claims she once exited, only to find an inexplicable
slug of semen on her shoulder. It is a dirty, dirty hellhole with strobe
lights and obese drag queens.
It horrifies me to describe what I was wearing that night: some hippie
beads, a shirt with an obnoxious play on the Nike logo, and orthodontic
braces that had been stained by eating Indian food earlier that month.
I was the walking, talking opposite of sex.
I was immediately hit on. Greg (not his real name) looked like a skinny
indie-version of Rove McManus. He had very straight teeth, I remember
that much. Though I don’t remember much of what followed, I do remember
that despite his protests that he wanted to “take it slow”,
I more or less dragged him back to his place and proceeded to sprawl myself
on his futon, unflinchingly nude.
After that, it’s just one big tumbleweed of memory. The night is
pretty much a blank—primarily because I was so rottenly drunk that
I passed out before reaching climax. But one thing I do remember: an acute
sensation of being “adult”. And if you, like me, had woken
up the next day with a head like an anvil, breath like a bin, and proceeded
to walk home crusted over in a complete stranger's bodily fluids, wouldn’t
you? My god, I was so adult, you wouldn’t believe.
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Updated :: 28 December 2007
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Benjamin Law 2007