Shooting from the Lip

“Can I shoot you?” asked a beautiful young woman towering above me in her floral summer dress. Her face was obscured by the heavy light of a hot sun beaming at me from behind her head, as I looked up in surprise at the question.

“Excuse me?” I asked. She sat next to me on the park bench and pulled up an impressive DSLR camera with a not insignificant zoom and said: “you’re photogenic, can I take a picture of you?” People who want to shoot me don’t usually ask my permission, and this tends to involve militants at checkpoints, but I remind myself that the war is over and I’m not there anymore. I’m not feeling particularly photogenic either, I hadn’t brushed my hair or washed my face, I had stayed up all night writing a final paper on Richard the Third, that jerk!

“So, I guess you saw High Art at the movies recently?” I said, I was being a little mean, secretly I was flattered. She caught my drift right away, it was the movie playing in theatres at the time, starring Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchel, and all of a sudden our campus was overrun with women-loving-women sporting hefty sized cameras, looking to re-enact the sexual tension of an ultimately tragic relationship. 


“No,” she protested, “I’ve been doing this for a very long time.”

“Oh, yeah, since when?”

“Since I was thirteen. My father bought me my first camera. It was a ---” I couldn’t for the life of me pronounce let alone spell the German manufacturer’s name. “My name is Elizabeth, what’s yours?”

I gave her my name and I said that if she wanted to shoot something, it should be interesting. “Do you want to come to my indoor rock climbing gym? I’ll be there all day Saturday.”

“I can’t,” she said, “I have a date with Destiny.”

“Ok, well, now you’re being cryptic.”

“No, seriously. I have a date with a girl, her name is Destiny.”

“Dating is for amateurs,” I said.

“What the hell does that even mean?”  I didn’t reply. I looked meaningfully at my Richard the Third paper and then up at the summer horizon from the park bench. I guess I knew what I meant, but it would take me years to be able to articulate those feelings and thoughts clearly, and by then it was too late to answer her question.

I submit my paper at the English Department office and shuffle off to get some day time sleep. I get to the dorm room and my roommate, Dareen, who hasn’t seen me since I left on Friday afternoon to visit family, rejoices ecstatically at the sight of me.

“Oh my God, thank God, you’re here,” she says, “Karen, Karen, wake up, the homo’s back! We’re starving man, we ran out of food yesterday and we don’t have any money.”

“Oh, yeah, my dad says ‘hi,’ he sent you some bananas, there’s enough calories in those to fuel a walk to the moon,” I said, producing a 500g bag of “banana” lollies that every kid growing up in Sydney of the 1980s and 90s would remember seeing at the local convenience store.

My parents put their life savings together to run this store because by the time they came to Australia no one would hire a highly experience Arabic teacher or public health inspector, both in their fifties. Sometimes I think to myself, maybe if someone was around to help them with their resumes, maybe they could have become employees again somewhere. Instead, they worked 15 hour days, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Like a good Arab kid, I’d go back on the weekends and work there; in high school I’d give them one hour of my time a day in which they could have lunch. At the time it felt like a lot, too much even. I must admit now I could have done much more to help.  

Karen emerged from her stupor to rejoice at the “bananas” being thrown her way.  “We don’t have to go to the Student Union meeting any more, I was going for the sandwiches,” Karen said honestly, in what were to become the final years of Australia’s involuntary student unionism.

I woke up after the sun had set, around 9 p.m. and found myself going for a walk to clear my head for thoughts on what to write for another final paper on the Death of Arthur.  I ran into Elizabeth again, this time she seemed in a hurry. She said they were having an end of semester dress up party in her parents’ home; that I should come, but I shouldn’t judge her because her parents lived in a virtual palace. She said she’d read the communist manifesto in German when she was thirteen. I told her she must have been very busy at that age. Destiny was with her, I scratched my head and I said I wouldn’t know what to come dressed as, looking at the two of them trying really hard to get out of being in a room full of strangers. Destiny fired out “come dressed as an Israelite,” I looked at her in disbelief, I didn’t see the humor in it.

Karen and Dareen convinced me that we should all go together in Karen’s rusty, unregistered comby van, which ran on sheer miracle. I guess I was already a little in love with Elizabeth, it was hard not to be. Her politics turned out to be more Irish Catholic than Australian in a city where genuine understanding was next to impossible to find. Besides, her taste in music was just the introduction to the indie queer rock I’d been missing from my life. I agreed to go to the party but I didn’t dress up as anything. My hair was tied back in a little pony tail, and I announced that I was going as Steven Segal, but I got to be more creative with it as the night went on.

“Who are you supposed to be?” Elizabeth’s unconsciously homophobic mother asked. Someone had told her that there was a Palestinian in the house and she came to make sure I would know that she was a sympathetic Greens voter.

“Well, since horror is relative, I’m supposed to be straight.” She didn’t think that was funny. She blinked a couple of times, looked away and walked off.

Elizabeth’s younger sister, Louise, zoomed in on their father’s face with her camera and we were amusing ourselves with the specks of white fungus under his nose, that she had blown up to a substantial size in the view finder when he caught us laughing at him. A little later in the night he would exact his revenge on me, since he was in no position to admonish Louise, the apple of her mother’s ball-busting eye. “I don’t know whether I should hug and kiss you or shake your hand,” he said to me virtually out of nowhere, pointing at my arms in a sleeveless shirt. I gathered that he meant he wasn’t sure whether he should greet me as he would do a woman or a man. I said we could do both but we would have to review the case once I’d clocked the number of truck driving hours needed for the issuance of a full license. He seemed surprised. I told him I had always wanted to drive a really, really big truck. “Into what? Centerpoint Tower?”