‘Curtis and Ahmed are married,’ I explain. ‘This is their house. And they have two boarders – me, and a FIFO dude, who works on the mines.’
‘Rex,’ Ahmed says. ‘He’ll be back next week.’
Once we’ve all gotten to know each other, Zeke and I stumble to my room.
‘Like I said, no spooning,’ I say, as he kicks his sneakers off beside the bed.
Zeke smiles. ‘Charlie, we’ve shared a bed before, remember? In the hostel, years ago?’
‘That was a bunk bed. I was on the top bunk and you were on the bottom.’
‘Only time you’ve ever been a top, ha!’ Zeke quips, then giggles at his own humour.
I smile. ‘I like when you get drunk, dude. You’re funnier. Like you’re not scared.’
Zeke smiles and looks vaguely flattered.
We decide to top and tail in my double bed: Zeke puts his pillow at the foot of the bed with his socked feet near my face. I turn the lights off and we both go silent so quickly I wonder if the cocktails have made him fall asleep already.
Then, as my eyes adjust to the cobalt gloom, I notice Zeke’s silhouetted hands are covering his face, the tips of his crumpled elbows meeting over his chest.
‘You okay, dude?’
Zeke’s hands remain over his face. ‘Uh, honestly, no. This isn’t what I thought would happen after graduation. My parents are threatening to move to Perth, I just lost my closest friend – and I’m homeless, too.’
‘Brutal, dude,’ I say slowly. ‘I’m sorry. Dunno what else to say.’
‘Can I ask you a question? It’s deep.’
‘Meaning of life? Shoot. I can totally answer that.’
Zeke clears his throat. ‘Why are we gay? No moral judgements. Just scientific curiosity. Why are we like this?’
I realise I don’t know, either. ‘You shouldn’t overthink it. You are who you are.’
‘But that’s what everyone always says. I don’t want to change it. I love it now. But I’d love to know what made this happen. Why aren’t we allowed to wonder why?’
‘Cos Lady Gaga said we were born this way, and if you question her authority, the little monsters will cancel you,’ I offer. I’m only half-joking.
‘I sometimes feel like I was born this way, a genetic quirk, but what if I wasn’t? I remember learning at uni about the MAOA gene that predisposes human beings to violence. Except, if you’re raised by loving parents, the gene doesn’t kick in, and if you’re raised in neglect, it does, and you go violent. What if it’s like that? What if a bunch of us are born bisexual, nature loading the gun, and how we’re raised pulls the trigger on whether we skew gay or not? Nurture pulls the trigger.’
‘I dunno. I guess that kinda checks out.’
Zeke keeps talking about his overbearing mother and his hard-arse father. I make the right noises to show I’m half-listening, but my brain has spiralled out, thinking about my own parents, which I usually don’t do because TRAUMA. My mum was a checked-out couch potato who barely noticed if I came home or not. My deadshit stepdad Fitzy probably threw a party when I ran away.
But my dad, I loved. He died when I was a teenager. He’s the reason I love music: his playlist became mine. I used to watch music videos onRagewith him and he helped me learn guitar. He was a drinker, but he loved me, until life got too much for him, and he ended it.
I sometimes daydream what could have happened if he had stayed. I have visions of us performing together as a father-and-son duo. In my dreams, we’re best mates, me and Dad: jamming in pubs, drinking and smoking and talking shit about life on the road as touring musos. We go all over the country, a real-life version of those old larrikin Dad and Dave stories.
If that had happened, would I have grown up straight? Or would I still be a big mo? I don’t think I care either way. My sexuality never plagued me the way it plagues Zeke, and confounded Hammer, and destroyed Matt.
In fact, it was Dad who made me feel okay about it, before I even knew. One day when I was little, we were at the Wintersun for a feed and there was a Savage Garden music video on TV. Two deros made comments about Darren Hayes being a poof, and Dad snapped, ‘So what if he is?’ The deros made sour faces and skulked off.
I asked Dad what a poofter was: the word had fallen out of schoolyard use in my generation.
‘He likes men,’ Dad explained simply. ‘Instead of having a girlfriend, he’d have a boyfriend. It doesn’t make him less of a man, and he’s still one of the most successful musicians in Australia. Don’t you ever look down on guys like that, will you, Charlie?’
So, I never had a drop of angst about it. Dad was fine with it, so I was fine with it.
