A Robust Game of Manball

Patrick Lenton

At the University of Wollongong, in the school of creative writing, as I learnt about particularly sick short stories, about the wildest of rhymed stanzas, about the loosest literary philosophers, I also learnt about other, just as important, things: friendship, the dangers of trying too hard, and the inherent stupidity of masculinity and men.

Creative Writing was a weird degree in both purpose and setup: a tight-knit collection of around twenty to thirty students who were just keen as shit about sentences. You know the old army maxim of ‘put ’em through hell together?’ Well, Creative Writing kind of worked on the opposite notion – put them through something truly absurd and useless and fun like studying creative writing, and they’ll bond through the shared realisation that they’ll never get a job or earn any money.

One weekend, it was announced that a bunch of the girls in our friendship circle would forgo the usual pleasure of smashing cheap jugs at the North Gong or drinking boxes of goon in someone’s sharehouse, or crashing one of the actors’ interminable house parties, to have a ‘no men’ night. I supported the notion in theory – men are pretty terrible, and it’s nice for everyone who doesn’t identify as a man to have some peace. However, this left me alone with the dudes. A lone wilting queer flower in a garden of boys who wouldn’t feel comfortable comparing themselves to flora. Admittedly, nobody in a creative writing degree was overtly masculine – more poetry-reading effetes than football-throwing bros – but it was still upsetting. I assumed I’d have to listen to jazz.

I used to see my inability to relate to men and their communities as a fault on my part, a deficit. I saw their scorn of me and my obvious queerness and nerdery and fluttery weirdness as something wrong with me. I used to attempt to think of ways to fit in, like the time I pretended to have a favourite type of truck.

So, on the ‘no men’ night, rather than simply enduring a nightmarish evening of high testosterone, of shouted arguments about the relative merits of lit bros like Hemingway or Bukowski, of cheap beer and posturing, I thought I’d try to lean in and experience a true boys’ night. I didn’t know exactly what a boys’ night was precisely, but I had grand dreams of using my organisational skills to foster a deep rapport, a raw emotional masculine truth, like when men go out into the woods and shoot things or rip copper out of the earth or round up cattle on a lonely mountain – I realised I was thinking of Brokeback Mountain. You never know: perhaps I was actually a man’s man, but I’d just never had any male friends to test the theory out on.

Consequently, with great excitement, I put together a party-planning team to organise the first ever Creative Writing boys’ night out. We called it ‘Mandate’. My friend Anna actually came up with most of the good ideas. Why was Anna there? Who knows. Why was Anna anywhere?

Mandate had everything – the slogan was ‘mandate, get it in ya’, which Anna printed on super cute buttons to give to all the participants. We created a signature cocktail for the event. We made canapés, we decorated the random sharehouse we were in with streamers and lights, we even made a playlist (‘It’s Raining Men’, sung by Geri Halliwell, twenty-three times in a row).

Strangely, despite getting a great turnout, the party first stuttered and then failed to launch. Our guests milled awkwardly in the immaculately decorated living room, seemingly too on-edge from my highly curated fun to sit down and relax. The more alcohol that got pumped into the room, the more somnolent and slow the conversation became. A cute boy I was trying to flirt with kept calling up girls at the other party and pleading to join them.

I was pissed off. Somehow, as the night progressed, my failing mandate morphed into a competition. I could only imagine what the non-men event was up to, but I was convinced that it was fun and frivolous and everything my shitty party was not. I gathered the party-planning committee, and tried to brainstorm ideas.

‘Drugs,’ said Lachie. ‘Pranks,’ said Anna. But then, in a flash of genius, I realised that what they needed was the opposite of what I wanted. All I had to do was think of my worst party scenario: men would be sure to love it.

‘Mandate,’ I announced loudly, interrupting literally no conversation. ‘It’s time to play sport. It’s time for . . . Manball.’

We traipsed to a local sports field (well, everyone except Anna, who decided to stay behind and organise an undetermined prank).

There was a Friday Night Lights aura to the evening now, the big lights filling us with vigour and patriotism, the hot night making us boisterous and rough. There was jostling and hooting and the loud hyena cackles of the young at night, and while normally I’d hate every part of that nonsense, now I was just thrilled, grinning in the darkness. Yes, my simple boys, I thought, we’re all in cahoots now, my stupid man-babies.

Having never played or watched a sport in my life, it took some time to develop the rules of Manball. As far as anyone can remember, there were two opposing sides, a sack of goon and a lot of running and pushing. If you’d told me before that night that a bunch of pretentious philosophy students and book nerds and power-Goths would spend their evening running and strategising and pouring goon over themselves while taking a victory lap, I would have spat in your face. But, against all odds, Manball worked. Even I was running, all hysterical and red-faced and boisterous, like a sugared-up toddler at the beach.

Maybe I had been missing out, I thought. Maybe my dislike and fear of men and their activities was something limiting, a fragment from another time. If we kept Mandate inclusive and open to everyone – not just men – maybe I’d grow to love things like physical activity and being interrupted when I talk. As I was thinking this, I watched a boy named Dane bounding along with the goon sack – like a newborn gazelle, all flying tongue and big hooves until he slipped and smacked his beautiful noggin against a tap, knocking himself out instantly.

Halfway to the hospital, with the poor concussed lad hoisted on our shoulders like a fallen king, Dane recovered enough to argue that he didn’t actually need to go. He was trembling and slurring, but at that point of the night, with the amount of fruity lexia coursing through our veins, who wasn’t? Instead, we went back to the house, babbling with excitement, sporting Dane and his smashed head like an emblem, a trophy.

*

I wish that this night was as ridiculous as my memory paints it – but the fact is that at the time I was lonely and closeted and scared. I was seriously attempting to discover who a secret queer boy could be friends with, testing whether there could be a treatise between me and straight men. I held my queerness inside tightly, like a gallstone, like a rapidly developing pearl in a disgusting oyster. In high school, straight males had beaten me up, locked me in a bathroom for eight hours, forced me to move from school to school. I was afraid of men. I didn’t just want their approval and friendship because I was a dumb closeted self-conscious weirdo; I wanted to find the trick to getting them to stop beating me up. This party was a test, which I was pretty sure I was doomed to fail.

Finally coming out years later was, for me, not so much about gaining the freedom to date men (I was in love with a woman at the time) but about tearing off the final remnants of the ragged cloak of masculinity I’d been wearing as an attempt to blend in. I don’t think it was a massively successful disguise, but it was heavy and burdensome. It felt so good to kick it off.

*

When we got back to the sharehouse, we had to kick down the front door. Anna had constructed an elaborate fortress by piling every piece of furniture in the middle of the room, for reasons that we never deciphered. In the kitchen sink, a fire raged. Every door to the house was barricaded against entry. Anna herself was passed out in the corner, wrapped in a curtain. Somehow, in its absurdity, in its elaborate frailness and lack of any utilitarian benefit, the entire night – and Anna’s prank in particular – seemed a fitting metaphor for masculinity, for manliness, for mandate.