Fame, Sex And Other Types Of Criminality

By R Frederick Finlayson

A failed poet and single parent in Perth, Western Australia decides to try and become famous by writing a script for television with his Russian engineer girlfriend. His former wife's brother knows a producer who might be persuaded to take on the script by blackmail, or extortion, whichever is the right word. Approximatey 60,000 words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Room editions
• Release date: Oct 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215789834

R Frederick Finlayson

R Frederick Finlayson lives on a mountain near a forest.

Book preview

Richard awakes and writes poems

All unaccomplished artists are alike: they think fame would be as good as sex, but it would last forever, not just fifteen minutes. Most artists daydream about living beyond their last breath through their works but this does not stop them from lying around or fiddling half-heartedly with their brilliant ideas, waiting until Fame sits in their lap.

A poet known as Richard stood on a small balcony on the eighth floor of a block of flats, christened Manhattan West, by a starry-eyed developer in the 1960s, in a suburb called Monument Beach in the city of Perth, Western Australia. He had been awake since the small hours of the morning and it was now dawn. Neither the hidden life of the night nor the 9-to-5 sobriety of the day was fully his. He stood against a waist-high brick wall, on a piece of still-warm concrete hanging in space, between the glowing towers of the city to his right and the vast blue of the Indian Ocean on his left. He was naked and hungry. Despite the gurgling in his stomach, a noble thought was uppermost in his mind: How to find Fame and sustain it? And the benefits it would bring, such as money, joy, love and ... well ... Fame? Surely Fame was the chief of all gods to whom the minor deities bowed?

Richard, who had a fondness for the classics and an enthusiasm for irony, raised his arms to the sky. He was lean but muscular and not too bad-looking, as he sometimes flattered himself, with the pointy version of the Anglo-nose, pink skin and blue eyes.

He looked out across the suburb and pronounced in a stentorian voice, nevertheless well-modulated: Even I, who is nameless, only known by association, I, too, can thus speak: to remain cheerful during a drear but responsible task is no insignificant art. What is more necessary than being funny?

A man appeared to Richard's left, three balconies along.

Richard continued, gesturing for emphasis in the neighbour's direction: Nothing is successful in which great levity plays no role.

The man, in his pyjamas, waved back limply, then walked back inside.

High above, another kind of artist was orbiting the Earth in a spacelab and, having mown his experimental grass and become bored with the television, floated across to the window. He gazed at that exquisite globe several thousand kilometres away and thought it was surely the best of all possible worlds and he the luckiest of all its citizens. After all, the space technician’s every move was being watched on television by an audience equally bored and fascinated by the 24-hour reality-TV show played out above their heads. This artist, who called himself a scientist, thought in similar ways as other artists and faced the same kinds of challenges. The dreamy scientist was especially lucky to glimpse a pinpoint of light on the edge of a coastline. It was Perth, Western Australia, the most isolated city in the world.

The Sun at that moment rounded the corner of the planet and stretched its aureate fingers from the land’s far east, winking out the gaudy lights of Sydney on its way. An hour or so later it suddenly appeared in the rear-view mirror of a road-train, hopping over kangaroos dozing on the cool bitumen of the Earth’s longest straight road. After another hour it flicked briefly against a small clump of capitalism’s glass cathedrals and the red-tiled roofs of the spinifex-like suburbs of Perth before leaping into the Indian Ocean, eager for somewhere else. In its wake stood Richard, making his speech, undeterred by the neighbouring public’s lack of enthusiasm.

A restructure of alI values: this dark question mark, so enormously enormous it throws a deep shadow over he who erects it.

The word ‘erect’ in his speech had drawn his mind to a certain part of his anatomy and, at this timely break in his speech, he ran his right hand lightly over its increasing length before taking a sharp intake of breath and continuing: Such a destiny of a task insists that one must every instant run out into the brilliant sunshine and cast off a seriousness that has grown fatly oppressive.

He looked around, thinking that this would be an explanation to offer to his neighbour but the man in the pyjamas had not re-emerged.

And so, he went on with his reasoning, in a tone slightly tinged with bitterness, to a magpie in a nearby ghost-gum tree: Every cause for doing so is perfectly justified and every show must be an hilarious show. Above all: television! Television has always been the grand wisdom of every modem spirit which has grown too introspective and too deep; its ability to heal lies even in the bad shows one sees, which cause festering and fearful wounds.

He paused again. Another magpie on a light pole was warbling and the one in the tree responding. The usual territorial or copulatory song. Or perhaps they were just warbling for fun? Or Fame? A car was moving along Stirling Highway, a block away. A dog sniffed at a bin in the little park down below. Otherwise, the world was still.

Richard finished his speech in a determined tone with his hands wide apart on the top of the balcony wall: "An epigram whose roots I hold back from learned curiosity has for aeons been my motto: increscunt animi, virescit voinere virtus."

Presumably for the magpie’s benefit, he translated, in a matter-of-fact voice, The spirit grows, its strength restored through wounding, and inclined his head towards his chest, his arms straight by his sides.

You'll get sunburnt. Doesn't matter if it’s just morning. You know what Grandma said, boomed a voice from inside the flat. Then you'll be whinging without stop.

Richard’s daughter, Eva, had just emerged from her bedroom and flopped with a spume of dust motes and bouncing cushions onto the sofa in the lounge-room behind him. Seconds after her speech, the murmur of the morning cartoons permeated the room and Richard’s mind. Richard knew he wasn’t the best of parents. He felt that allowing the child to watch television first thing in the morning was perhaps an unforgivable weakness. His hidden sin was his occasional resentment at being a parent at all. It wasn’t his doing, apart from the necessary sex, which turned out to be of the procreative kind rather than purely recreational as he’d intended, and he could hardly be blamed for that since it was in the nature of all beings to pursue pleasure. He grabbed a sarong from a chair and wrapped it around his hips. Perhaps his bare bottom was not the first thing the child should see in the morning.

His ex-wife was an avant-garde potter (Ceramicist extremis) at the time they met at a seminar on Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer (sounded sexy), during his youthful years in Sydney. She had used him to produce a child, after which he had insisted on marrying and living in Perth: one might as well do both if one was going to be so conventional as to bear offspring. Soon after the nuptials she refused to participate in sex again, declaring that she found him repulsive sexually. When he’d gone out and had sex — necessary for his psychic and physical health — with an emaciated poetess, his wife had taken it as a chance to divorce him, remarry and flee the country with her new husband, an American who played the harpsichord and ran an adventure travel business based in New York. She left Richard with their offspring who was a mere three years-old. Of course, he loved his daughter; he wasn't a psychopath or autistic. It was just that he was, by nature, a creative and ambitious spirit who now found himself bound to the daily necessities of another’s life, one who had just reached the age of 11.

With two poems already written in the pre-dawn, Richard was out on the balcony, wondering if inspiration could be found in Nature for a third. Sure enough, in the middle distance a thin plume of smoke rode up the sky and fanned a greasy cloud that leaned lopsidedly towards the west. Between the serried ranks of neat suburban lawns, which were watered tenaciously from natural underground reservoirs, there were occasional small, dry and prickly plots of remnant bushland. These plots, somehow overlooked by the city’s forefathers, occasionally burst into flame, perhaps ignited by some concerned citizen whose tolerance for these leaf-dropping and snake-harbouring messes had reached its limit. Richard did some quick calculations and realised the bush that was burning was close to his place of employment, perhaps even the building itself. It would be impossible to go to work today.

At the tender age of 40, disappointed that his fitful plans for literary fame had resulted only in a wildly creative curriculum vitae, Richard had given in and, after considerable delay, finally joined the ranks of the rats in the race and found a permanent job. But it wasn’t easy. He had to wear a tie and comb his thinning hair. He had to arrive on time and stay for the requisite 7.6 hours (not including time off for lunch). His time was not his own. He had exchanged it for money, and not enough of it, either. He needed more money, something that he hoped Fame would provide, because he had a child to support. The third poem was stillborn. The distant fire and Eva’s arrival had short-circuited his creative energy.

How do you become famous? Eva suddenly asked.

She had not yet left behind the early stage of development in which every utterance was a question. Eva thought that the world was presented plausibly enough on television, at least in cartoons and certain movies, but she had increasingly become aware that there was a gap between that real world and the world as she lived it every day. It was obvious to her that the life shown on TV was the real, exciting life and that people who appeared on TV were not only living life as it should be lived, they were also famous by virtue of being on TV. It was obvious that one should desire it for one’s self.

Richard, still struggling with the third poem’s non-appearance, was offended by Eva's question. He said to himself that the cruelty of children and their abuse of adults with their appalling innocence went unrecognised by all of academe, the arts, the judicial system and government. Her question cut to the quick. Should he add, And rich?, just to bring the picture into sharper focus? No, the parent in him overrode the artist. Almost.

What kind of famous? Murderer or drug-dealer kind of famous? Politician kind of famous? Scientist kind of famous? Actor kind of famous? he asked.

Actor, replied Eva, looking over her shoulder at him from her stretched-out position on the sofa.

Richard supposed she was asking out of genuine self-interest and so he replied accordingly: First. you need some talent; second, lots of hard work and single-mindedness; third, social skills; and fourth, luck.

Eva said nothing and turned her head back to the television; the cartoon had resumed. She had decided that if she really wanted to live, she would have to become famous.

Gavin wakes up and thinks of real estate

On the other side of Perth, in an outer-eastern industrial suburb supine at the feet of the Darling Scarp, Gavin was lying in his single bed in the back room of a house he shared with two other men. He was thinking about real estate while the small radio next to his bed intoned the latest stock-market report.

Thinking about real estate is one of the great preoccupations of Western Australians. When a visitor looks at the city and suburbs spread along one hundred kilometres of coastal plain, with the unbroken vastness (save for the former prison turned holiday isle, Rottnest) of the sluggish Indian Ocean to the west and, to the east, the blinding millions of hectares of wheat and then spinifex-and-saltbush desert, they could be forgiven for thinking that this property was surely the most valuable in the world, since the rest of the world was such a long way away. But they would be wrong. For property in Perth is affordable to all except the poorest. People such as Gavin.

Gavin was Richard’s ex-brother-in-law; an inheritance from his short marriage. Richard had his reservations about taking family loyalty beyond the grave, so to speak, but for unknown reasons Gavin had decided that Richard was one of his closest friends. Richard had responded coolly, hoping Gavin would fade away, but he hadn't. What Gavin thought connected them was anarchism. This doctrine and practice was a common phase of their impetuous youth but Richard had forgotten his devotion while Gavin still clung tenaciously to fragments of it. Gavin, who had become a kind of ideological bowerbird, kept adding what he thought were compatible pieces of other theories. He was a rather typical case of arrested ideological development. Being a self-confessed social revolutionary (of no fixed political address) meant he mostly avoided any kind of paid work other than the occasional labouring job. After all, he had principles. Many.

His earliest years saw him watching the continual workers’ strikes that almost fully occupied the television news, along with footage of what he later accepted was an imperialist war in Viet Nam. About the same time, the welfare state was ushered in by a Labor government and everyone was either a socialist or a capitalist running-dog. A few years later, a subsequent federal Labor government set about rewriting the rules and globalising the Australian economy. Perhaps helping the Berlin Wall to crumble into tiny bits of concrete shortly after. Gavin was slow to pick up the significance of the crumble, preferring to rest on the shards of doctrine he carried with him from adolescence. He hadn’t yet worked out how to make all the pieces fit together into a pleasing whole but his resistance to the dominant culture, in whatever form it appeared, continued. Besides, would someone as smart as Gavin thought himself to be give in to the Freemasonry–Zionist–Marxist–CIA–unions–industro-capitalist machine by becoming a wage slave? Gavin had been adamant he would not. But recently he’d begun to note with some envy the small amount of comfort that Richard had managed to jam into the tiny flat he’d started buying thanks to his regular job. Perhaps it was time to make a bit of money himself? But who would employ him? He was getting on a bit: 35. How long would it take to get together a deposit for a flat? Years. Just so the capitalist property investors could buy another gold hubcap for their luxury Range Rovers at the expense of a working man. There had to be another, quicker, way. Gavin decided to go and have a word with Richard. After all, Richard was a writer and would become famous eventually. And Fame meant money.

Nastasia watches TV and thinks of Russia, sex and language

Nastasia was an unusual engineer, not because she was a woman, which was perfectly usual in her native Russia, but because she was interested in words. She’d rather read a book — even fiction — than watch television, even though in doing so right now she felt a little guilty. Her television was switched on to the Real TV channel with the 24-hour feed of the Slovenian space technician — Žižek was his name, like her old political science teacher when she studied in Ljubljana for a semester — orbiting the Earth in the spacelab. But she wasn’t watching. She thought she should be interested. For professional reasons. But she had to admit that it was boring, especially now, when he was sleeping. The cameras switched in automatic progression from him floating effortlessly in his harness, with accompanying slight snoring, to a view out the window to the Earth, then a shot of the work area of the spacelab with its patch of lawn, a fox terrier named Jack (also floatingly asleep) in its little doghouse, a workbench strewn with strapped-down carpentry tools and a half-finished wooden coffee table and, finally, to rest out-of-focus on the spacelab’s TV, which was switched to one of the big American networks.

The most interesting thing about this ‘spacelab show’ were the ads which came up relentlessly on the spacelab’s TV. One in particular had caught her attention earlier. It was for a human tamagochi, an electronic lover shaped like a portable CD player who beeped his or her (you could choose the gender) demands for kisses, cuddles or types of sex and then you had to respond by pressing some buttons, otherwise your lover would ‘dump’ you and, presumably, run off with another of your species. It was an even more bizarre example of late capitalism’s perverse flowering than the ads for pet funerals and home