The Mostly Unfabulous Homepage of Ethan Green

After my first year of adjusting, I enjoyed my Sydney childhood. From the Paddington house I would go over the Bridge to play for hours in my grandparents' pool, having painstakingly learned to swim. I had one aunt and uncle who had no children. They were not close to Shamash at that stage, he being a little too arty, I think, for his stockbroker brother-in-law. Rosie was two years older than Shamash, and somehow I don't think she thought it was right, him having a son. She wanted kids but was never able to have them. She was nice to me and looked after me sometimes, but I preferred to go to Thelly's in Homebush or David's in Elizabeth Bay. David always spoilt me, and he had a dog. Homebush reminded me more of where I came from, and I could smell the biscuit factory from Thel's house.

Shamash was affectionate, though cautiously at first. He would give me a kiss and a cuddle, he'd tousle my hair and sometimes pick me up by my feet and hang me upside down, saying "Vaslav the rascal wants hanging out to dry." We discovered wizzies, and there was just enough room in the back garden for him to do them without scattering the pots of geraniums.

He bought me ballet shoes so I could go into the front room, which was fully equipped with a mirror and barre, and try to copy his steps. I watched him each day like most boys watch their dads shave. Shamash could do the most extraordinary things with his legs. He'd show off. "C'mon Vas let's work on your demi-plie. Get those legs up to the barre." It was too high of course; apart from stints on nightclub podiums years later, none of that early training amounted to much. I'm sure the only reason I've been invited to dance in Mardi Gras shows is because I'm the son of "the great one;" everyone says its not what you know but who you know. I liked watching him; he was a sight to behold. My favourite thing was when he picked me up and twisted me around his head, just as he did with girls on stage.

When the movie Flashdance came out, he used to sneer at it but he could do the dance to "Maniac." I'd beg him to do it; I'd bring in water so he could flick it off his head like Jennifer Beals did in the movie. He used to tickle me and say, "You're just a little steel town girl on a Saturday night aren't you?" I'd squeal and say, "I'm not a girl, I'm not."

"A steel town Vas tickled half to death, that's what you'll be when I'm finished with you." He'd tickle and tickle, singing 'What a Feeling' until I was flushed and exhausted on the couch, feeling a little bit like heaven, feeling I was adored. Shamash would leap off down the hall on those legs of his, swollen musculature bulging out of the leotard every which way, singing the theme to Fame.

At night Shamash would read stories to me. Sometimes he'd take me to the ballet, often carrying me up to bed from the car, me, already asleep. I loved the luxury of the Opera House and the State Theatre. I decided I wanted to do something in the theatre, and Shamash bought me puppets and a toy theatre. I thought I was too shy to have ever acted or performed, and I imagined painting sets, doing lights or pulling the cords that opened the curtain. I was so disappointed when I discovered they were mechanised. The one in my puppet theatre would lift with one string and draw open with another.

The theatre breathed imagination into me, the colours, the sheer spectacle of it. I begged Shamash to take me to everything, even when he had a date. Of course they had performances to put on too. Their shows were much more sophisticated than mine.

Shamash would go out looking fantastic, dressed in fishnet singlets for nightclubs, torn jeans and cowboy boots. For the Opera House it would be an expensive linen suit, or sometimes a dinner suit. He was very vain, I suppose, but was also exceptionally beautiful.

The dates had their ultimate destinations, too. Often they would come back to our place, the babysitter (usually Thelly) would go home, and the dates, drinks in hand, would be led up to Shamash's room. He would put on some music in there - Yello was always a favourite, or Grace Jones - and they would do what dates do. Sounds of this sort were familiar. Somehow they represented safety to little Poucet. Shamash always closed the door, but he had an old-fashioned lock, without a key. Trembling, I would view his nighttime choreography, and I grew to love it as much as the morning workout. I liked the sudden, secret things the men in there said to each other, words like fuck, cock, arse. Rude words Shamash would never have said to me. In there he'd say them in a different voice, his special voice. Mum had one of those voices, too. She had only used it once in a while, but I remembered the tone; the whore's child's lullaby. The men with Shamash would whisper back, in even lower voices, and I pined for that hotness, that secretness, that nakedness. I wanted my body to grow quickly; I no longer wanted to be a child with toys and books and dumb old things. I, too, wanted to be a slave to the rhythm.

Those were hot times in Sydney, the early eighties, just before AIDS. People got carried away in bedrooms in Paddington and Darlinghurst, and Shamash was no puritan when it came to the nocturnal ballet of the flesh. Nor did he shy away from the powders that enhanced the dance. He snorted amyl, sometimes coke, and I learned, through the keyhole, that those smooth arses that I had early memories of could be pounded into just as easily as they pounded in. I also learned that drugs were not necessarily a staple diet, not necessarily addictive, now wholly undesirable. I knew that the "best people" did them as well as the "worst." Monkey see, monkey do. If it happens at the bottom you can be sure they're doing it at the top.

Copyright © l998, Neal Drinnan.

Sound interesting? Read some excerpts and an interview:

• Glove Puppet: Find out what people are saying about this exciting, sexualy-charged novel.
• From the Prologue: At seven, Johnny Smith's mother dies, and he lets a stranger carry him away.
• Cure: Johnny, newly rechristened "Vaslav," escapes with his new father to Australia.
• Melting Ice: After Shamash's parents die in a plane crash, things begin to change.
• An Interview with the Author: Find out what gets author Neal Drinnan pissed off in this candid conversation.

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