DIARY – LOVE AT CUMBERSOME CORNER -SEX – PT 6
By Bruce Williams
Love is equal parts longing and fear. Equal parts desire and disappointment. Equal parts ‘ unequal parts.
While this equation generally works for me, it doesn’t always hold true for Fred.
Having reminisced on a pleasant, intimate encounter in the showers of the local gym, Fred settles his pint of cider onto pub bench and tells me ‘ “Sometimes I think: right, I’m gay. I should just hook up with some guy. But I know that if I do, I’ll just ditch him for the first halfway decent chick who comes along.”
Betty and I have been fighting, so, by way of protest, I have fled the suburb of love, and journeyed to Glebe, the suburb of cider. So there!
Fred and I are drinking at the Ancient Briton, where the sign used to read “coldest beer in Sydney”. Then, it was a pub you stepped down into ‘ from the main entrance three steps descending to reach the public bar where English expats sat with local oldies and argued the relative merits of the various football codes on the various screens running Fox Sports 1 (above the bar) Fox Sports 2 (above the juke box) and Fox Sports 3 (above the door to women’s toilet).
The Ancient Briton of today is a different beast altogether. The cider is a nod to Bristol, piracy, and nostalgia for the slave trade. But the polished floorboards and the staircases that lead only up are one step down from Darling Harbour kitsch.
“The way I figure it, there’s only so many times you can have sex with a person.” Fred has changed the subject, but Glebe will do that to you.
He lives in a one-bedroom flat with his ex-girlfriend, Sally, who moved out when they broke up, then moved back in six months later with the addition of a small dog named Bruce. They love that dog in a way that is almost, but not quite, Cumbersomesque.
“When we first got together, we had sex six times a day. Six times a day for six months,” he said. “And do you know what I learned from that'”
I ventured: “You both like sex'”
“I learned it’s impossible to maintain a reasonable work history, and have sex six times a day.”
Neither of us has a good head for numbers, but I’ve since done the arithmetic: six times a day for six months is 1,080. If you take a weekly sex rate (which would probably be more earlier on, but less later) that’d about a 20 years’ marriage-equivalent sex-rate ratio. A year and a half of that, and he’d be getting a letter from the Queen.
Although by many definitions love doesn’t figure so much in Fred’s life, Fred has taught me more about love than anyone I have known. And part of this is that love must be a path to pleasure. That path doesn’t have to be direct (although direct is good), but if pleasure is not where it’s heading, it’s not love: it’s Hurstville.
