Pressure is building. My testicles are sore and my lizard is tired of handling. It dreams of entry, the imagined soft pleasures of all-encompassing wet flesh, internal flesh. And the Beast is killing me. I have tried to get used to her, to like her, at least to tolerate her, to no avail. I run tests on her, oil her, do all I can to ensure she is safe and happy. It doesn’t work. She gives me the shits, or nothing. I am beginning to loathe her. She embarrasses me. I write home but make no mention of work. As far as they are concerned I am happy as Larry. I want to be happy as Larry. I want to find Larry and live with him because if anyone can fix me up with the right girl, it must be Larry. Some of me is sometimes happy. I feel a kind of happiness when I beat Haines at table tennis but it isn’t real happiness. It smells a lot like the revenge of an angry man. And too often when I am alone in my room dark clouds roll in with the evening rain after yet another meal smothered in salt and laden with sweet potato, pork, and other vegetables I am still to learn the names of. Then I open the latest copy of Perth’s one and only and finest Monday morning newspaper, wondering how I messed up the second teller’s box down in the capital and why it matters to me because I am not intent on a career in banking, or anything else. I have a small salt shaker in my cupboard. I shake salt out of it most mornings when I get up and most nights before I go down.
Monday’s West Australian arrives every week, never on a Monday and never the same week as publication, so all the news is old but welcome. American Negroes are still marching for their rights, President Lyndon Johnson says he will not seek re-election for the presidency of the United States and John Gorton clings on as prime minister of Australia.
When I’m done with the paper I settle down with the great adventure writers Harold Robbins, Alistair MacLean and Leon Uris. Robbins, in particular, encourages me because his characters always seem to have such tough early times, then good times, followed by bad and finally good. Something always comes up. A new woman. Sudden outbreaks of riches. And his main men are real men; they know how to break another man’s leg with a quick flick of an arm or punch with a fist, twist a neck to kill instantly, and take a woman who doesn’t want to be taken and make her happy because of it. I will wait for it, the something to come up. It must. Eventually. There is no way I am leaving early, not before I have more of whatever it is that comes up, and sex, there must be sex. I cannot leave without sex, I have promised the lizard sex, real sex, the sex of man in woman. Even if there is a God and he doesn’t like it, I must have it. Marriage is out of the question. I’m with the revolting students on this, the free love, the freedom to fuck outside official sanction. The only difference between me and them is that they are getting it and I am not.