ROSALEEN LOVE
Rosaleen Love is one of Australia’s best short story writers, and her deliciously wry, funny, and ironic stories have recently gained her the international attention she deserves. She has worked as a university lecturer in both the history and philosophy of science and professional writing. Her writing career began in 1983 when she won the Fellowship of Australian Writers, State of Victoria Short Story Award with “The Laws of Life”. She has published two brilliant short story collections: The Total Devotion Machine and Other Stories and Evolution Annie; and her stories are widely anthologised in Australia and overseas.
The late George Turner wrote: “Here is a writer who takes joy in absurdity, laughing not at life but with it. To Rosaleen Love the extraordinary is what we do all the time.” Rosaleen says that she has “a deep and abiding interest in the history of wrong ideas”.
Now one might say that Rosaleen’s story is about real men ... and wrong ideas ... and virtual reality, which it is ... sort of.
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Who spread the diesel fuel on the Grand Prix track?
One side says it was the do-gooder, bleeding-hearted, soft-headed, gut-reacting, dipshit scumbag Greenies who think any swathe of tired dirt with tufts of green stuff sprouting from it is sacred parkland, and never under any circumstances to be appropriated to racing car ends.
The protesters in their turn protest it wasn’t them. Their weapon of choice is the yellow ribbon, tied to the trees that must go to make way for the cars, or the fences that are erected to keep the protesters out. They come in soulful peace, bearing yellow-ribboned witness. Sabotage is not their style.
Who did it? The way it looked, someone had driven round the Grand Prix track in the dead of night, fuel tank open, pump and nozzle attached, and sprayed the track. Made a perfect circuit, the way the Formula One cars do. Then the diesel was shut off and the perpetrators departed. They weren’t mugs enough to leave the stuff flowing out behind them all the way home.
The Grand Prix officials went into a spin. “It’s not a fair go” they said, “Not the Australian way. It’s positively un-Australian.”
The un-Australians, they’re responsible.
I know who spread the diesel on the Grand Prix track, and it’s not the story they’re telling. You have to look between the cracks in the grass, between the chinks in the trees, through the lines in the pavement in the park, the park they’ve turned into a Grand Prix race track, only for three days of the year, they say, only three days, then it can be a park again for the rest of the year, and they know it is perfectly reasonable, they say, what could be more reasonable than that? We have it three days, the ducks get it the rest of the time.
Try explaining that to a duck, especially when all the whhrrrmmrmring is on.
The way they see it, the officials, you have to look for where the real men are, and who are their opponents. A real man will squeeze himself into a cockpit and lie encased, bearing with true grit the ferocious itch of his flameproof underwear. When the gun goes bang, he’ll whiz around in circles burning up fossil fuel at the rate of yowoweewweyikes! There goes another ton of unrenewable energy vaporised to aerial pollution.
There was this one driver who said the Melbourne track was not all it was cracked up to be. What a fuss he caused! There had to be something wrong with him, they said. It must be because he’s shit-scared. He’s not a real man. Real men drive real cars. Deep down, they reckoned, he was a girl.
You’re either a real man or you’re a girl.
No, that’s not the right distinction. That’s not where the real difference lies. You have to learn to think of it this way.
If real men drive real cars, what do unreal men drive?
I want to find me a real unreal man. I’ll know my unreal man when I find him. He’ll hate life in the fast lane.
Sometimes, in the park, I think I can see some unreal men, lurking between the cracks in the trees. There’s one guy I can’t quite see. I think he’s got an unreal duck on a string and it’s flying up there in the sky. I think that must be a factor in the unreal man equation. Real men site chemical factories in the wetlands protected by international wading bird agreements. Real men shoot ducks. Unreal men let ducks fly like kites in the wind.
There’s a further question. When is a park not a park?
Real men don’t want piss-weak, tree-growing, grass-blowing, worms-churning, ducks grubbing out worms versions of parks, but a real park, economically sustainable, with pit stops, and fuel nozzles, and the men machines that change tyres in a flash and the wild dwrrrrrhmmmm of the cars, which, when I hear it from miles off, I know it’s a man’s noise, this noise, it’s a real man’s noise.
The men in the pits, the crew that inject the fuel, whip off the tyres, they’re like a well-oiled machine themselves, they’re like robot clones. Imagine if the robots on car assembly lines were to turn towards higher things, and they’re crafty, those robots. Welding car forms takes up only part of all their brain up-time. Secretly they’ve been taking the skin that flakes off the human workers, the specks that fly through the air like aerial human plankton. They’ve been taking these flakes of skin, and deep under the car factory, late at night, for they know their robot days are numbered, that car manufacture will go off-shore, to the countries where they do it cheaper and dirtier, so late at night when the machinery whirrs more softly, and just one night watchman patrols the shop floor, the car robots manufacture androids, which they send out into the world to man the pits at Grand Prix time.
That’s why they wear all that protective gear, the androids in the pits, so we can’t see the spot-welded seams down their android backs. They’re unreal men, but not the way I want. They’re unreal real men. I want something more.
I want a real woman’s unreal man.
“To be a leader”, says the leader of our country, “You’ve got to be a man’s man.” This guy counts himself a member of that mob.
But that’s not the way the song goes. “He will be a fisher of men.” When you think of it, a fisher of men is some kind of unreal real man, someone casting out a net into the world, and to this net cling all those who are weary and heavy laden, but not the men’s men, who are off standing independently, leading the world’s financial markets, oiling the world’s war machines, sliding deep down into Formula One racing cars. It was one really totally unreal, real man who was this fisher of men. But that was another time and place, and there was Golgotha and all.
They didn’t have a Grand Prix in Bethlehem, but I bet they’ve got one now. They’ve got a Grand Prix helicopter track over there, hovering over the warring tribes.
It’s so unfair. When the unreal men come right out and fight the real men, it’s the real men who always win.
There was this Arrows-Ninja driver, Streganzi. It seemed he just ran out of fuel in the Grand Prix, just kept going, taking the 130-R corner absolutely flat and just kept flying, as if fuel was an immaterial entity, as if his Formula One ran on the quinta-essentia, the fifth essence of matter, spiritus mundi, fuel of light and air. They tried to flag him down, they knew, the robots in the pits, because their machines know everything, wheel speed, throttle position, roll, pitch and yaw rate, and to the very last drop, just how much fuel he had left. Zero, at the stand-still.
Afterwards they said Streganzi was hyped up on the adrenalin rush and didn’t see the signs. His teammates dumped him in their fury.
But listen to it my way. With Streganzi, his eyes saw the gauges. His brain registered the frantic waving from the pits. His highly-toned muscles reacted the way they should, but that was his body. What he was, in himself, his essential being floated detached, for the duration, just above the car, hovered the way they say the soul hovers above, at the moment of death, before it takes flight for the beyond. There was a ghost driver, doppelgänger, and while the body went through the motions, the unreal man within detached from the base matter of his body and floated, controlling from on high, absorbed in wonder.
Streganzi touched the unreal. He’ll never drive again, not Grand Prix, but you could say he wasn’t driving then either. It was an unreal man’s real car, for the duration.
There are Grand Prix everywhere you look. Prizes for concreting parks, and laying down bitumen over gravel, for the machines to get there faster. There is a prize, and there is a price, and no prizes for guessing who pays and who collects.
The cars come here once a year, to this park, and you can see the changes in them. The cars are evolving and we are their servants. We are the robots that come out and pander to their needs. The cars learn how to breathe and grow and drive themselves beyond the here and now. The humans are left behind. The cars are changing us.
The park is not innocent in this deal. The park is shaping itself around the race. Each year you see it, bits of it are lopped off here and reappear over there. The air is bending more slowly and it’s growing thicker with the fumes. The sounds of wrrooroomm! travel more sluggishly to human ears. Petrol particles take root in human brains and send their shoots down deep. It seems right and only natural, that the earth should shift under our feet, that there should be outgrowing, upswelling from deep within the earth, of the forces that got Streganzi. The wheel-changing androids, the doppelgänger driver, the elemental forces of the earth, they’re all in this together.
Satan now, that’s an unreal man for you. He’s what you’d call a real man’s unreal man.
Then it hit me. The clue lies in the bitumen. They say that someone spread diesel fuel on the Grand Prix track, but they don’t know the half of it. Straight from the bituminous pits of hell, that’s where it’s from. It didn’t fall down from above. It rose from underneath. Elemental forces seep upwards from beneath, oozing through the track from below, bubbling through the realms of invertebrate microfauna, sizzling the good worms of the earth, converting what’s left of them to a layer of sulphur enriched humus.
In the twinkling of an eye.
The road shall be changed, and the dead shall rise up and take over the pits, and Streganzi will drive on and on and on, and not notice his car is out of fuel, his body is out of the chassis.
The dead, the elementals, the ultimately unreal are converging on this place.
Too many real men have got together here. Action and reaction, Newton’s third law swings into motion. The earth reacts, the forces of nature take off on a lightning leap to a wholly new point of equilibrium. The skies bow down to the victors. The whole world breathes a soft collective sigh. The earth’s fragile equilibrium is punctuated, its status quo upset. Unreal men erupt from the earth, and the city sinks into the abyss.
Satan and the legions of hell, now that’s a bunch of unreal men all right and I don’t want to have dealings with any of them, none whatsoever. The meek shall inherit the earth, what’s left of it, and now it looks like a whole bunch of other stuff is going to happen before the meek get their look in.
When I saw that other unreal man that day with his duck on a string, and I saw him slip behind the trees, I saw another part of the problem. The kind of unreal man any real woman might fancy just isn’t there. Not a man’s man, but a real woman’s unreal man. Now you see him, now you don’t, and that’s the way of it.
This brings me back to where I started, with the question, if real men drive real cars, what do unreal men drive? Answer: now they drive the earth.
I think I’ve gone off unreal men.
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AFTERWORD
“Real Men” was written in response to some events at the 1997 Melbourne Grand Prix. Someone did pour diesel on the Grand Prix track, and a local politician told us that “real men drive real cars”. Next comes the obvious question. If real men drive real cars, what do unreal men drive?
— Rosaleen Love