AN OPEN LETTER TO MY PARENTS

Thanks for the upbringing Mum and Dad. All that schooling and university has come in handy. Education I think they call it. Good stuff it is too. And good work on the whole social and cultural rounding thing you always insisted on. You know, teaching me that it’s not okay to eat soup with my hands or take my pants off in a supermarket. Making sure I could throw a ball and swing a golf club was good. So was teaching me about stuff like Bob Dylan and giving me the tools to recognise Dan Brown as an author of such scrotum tearing mediocrity that he should have all his fingers removed by a government agency in order to make it more difficult for him to type. All those art gallery visits and the swimming coaching and the music lessons and the theatre nights and the three hour round trips to Eudunda for cricket and that whole not taking a hard line view of under-aged drinking - provided I didn’t get black-out pissed or behind the wheel of a car - all of that was good stuff. And thanks for taking me to dinner at nice restaurants and for teaching me how to light a fire and make a decent potato salad. And massive props for taking me to Footy Park and flying me to Europe when I was 13 to see the Sistine Chapel and eat fondue. I was a lucky boy to get a taste of all those different flavours. If nothing else it gave me a little piece of common ground with a wide variety of people from a wide variety of different backgrounds and from that developed a bit of social confidence born from the feeling that I could cope in pretty much any social situation that might be packaged up and thrown at me. In fact, up until last week, if you’d been able to catch me at the right point during one of those sometimes Saturday nights when my taste is up, just before the five pint surge of invincibility peters out into sleep, shouting or white boy dancing, and asked me who I was, I’m pretty sure I’d have described myself as the bastard love child of Clive James and James Bond.

So there I am, wrapped in a cotton towel in the steam room of a Turkish bath with four of the hottest women I’ve seen in weeks. They’re tanned. They’re topless. Their toned young bodies are glistening with sweat and condensation, damp hair falling over delicate feminine shoulders. One of them has soapsuds dripping from her perky naked breasts. A middle aged Turkish man sporting one of the most extravagant moustaches the world has ever seen is giving another a tummy rub. Nipples surround me like snipers – really poorly concealed snipers – and they’ve all got me fixed in their sights. Everywhere I turn I’m shot down by a perky little pink nub. It’s like I’ve wandered into the shower scene in Porky’s and I go into sensory overload, my mind stuck like a record needle in a scratch. All I can think is; “thisisgreatthisisgreatthisisgreatthisisgreatthisisgreatthisisgreatthisisgreat”.
Over and over in my mind it goes. And then everything goes black.

That last bit didn’t actually happen but that was only because my roulette ball eyes bounced from a sudsy nipple onto The Amateur Dentist’s bare naked arse which snapped me back into coherence like a shot of smelling salts. It was a pretty close run thing though.

Fortunately the first stage of any Turkish bath is a swift cold shower. Smart people these Turks. I stepped into the shower cubicle and, in accordance with widely accepted Western shower etiquette, removed my towel. Faux pas. The Moustache responded with a bucket of icy water and a disapproving clucking noise, which seemed entirely disproportionate considering the filthy old bastard was giving the breasts of a nubile young college student a sudsy fondle at the time. I recovered my towel and walked to the heated marble plinth located in the middle of the domed room, lay down on my tummy and started to perspire. I’m sure some of that sweat was the result of the heated tiles beneath me but I’m also sure some of it had something to do with the three semi-naked girls arranged around the pentagon slab. There we lay, sheepishly facing each other; Joe, Graham Dixon, Phil, topless college girl, topless college girl, topless college girl and me. “This is great,” I though to myself, “now say something smooth and winning”.

So there I lay, leafing through the files of my mind – my head whirring and my ocular muscles aching from the effort of keeping my eyes fixed above the plimsoll line – searching the archives for something to say to these achingly beautiful, half naked girls. Back through the years of schooling I went, around University parties, into locker room banter and over dinner party repartee. I scanned the dialogue from the movies I’ve seen and the books I’ve read and scrambled after zephyrs of drunken conversations which even when fresh were clouded in the fog of alcoholic haze. Saturday afternoons playing cricket, the nights at the Festival theatre, the concerts at the Thebie Theatre and the student union, the Wednesday nights in the Planet Nightclub drinking 50 cent beers and the rainy Saturdays at the Occidental Hotel – I searched them all. They produced nothing. Five years of living in London were assessed and evaluated but to no avail. All that bloody schooling and university, the thousands of dollars and hours invested in my upbringing and the decade of experience since I left home were all for naught. I felt lost. In desperation I reached down one last time, rummaging around for a piece of stolen wit. James Bond would be good, Clive James better, even a recycled quip from my ex housemate James Greenwood would do. Nothing. The only James I could conjure up was bloody Sid.

So there I lay, with Sid James’ lascivious little chuckle tap, tap, tapping at the walls of my nipple-dazed perception like a bee at a car window. And there they lay, all topless and attractive looking. And all I could manage was a shy little “hi” and a weak joke about my rapidly fading tan lines.

Mum, Dad, I went to the wrong school.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson