You know when your skin is too small for the ideas you have? Like you might split at the seams any minute? Yeah. So that\u2019s when the third less-hot Hemsworth came to me. He sat at my desk, rifled through my science homework then started talking to me. That\u2019s a complex hallucination when it goes across several senses, so I immediately knew it was a) not real and b) a product of my pubertal distress, not some sign of schizophrenia.<\/p>\n
Anyway, he said, \u201cSo, Mahesh, what\u2019s the plan?\u201d<\/p>\n
I said, \u201cWell, Mr Hemsworth\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFuck\u2019s sake. No one ever remembers. It\u2019s Luke. So, what\u2019s your plan for your life, mate?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou sound like my mum, Mr Hems\u2014Luke.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t mean like medical school and shit. I mean, how are you going to get laid?\u201d<\/p>\n
Up until that exact second, I don\u2019t think I had ever thought about getting laid. I knew about sex as a biological act obviously, but I never saw myself as being involved. My brother Madhan always had girls hovering around him, but he is on the school footy team.<\/p>\n
\u201cUm\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCome on, Mahesh, what are you, thirteen? You need to have worked a strategy out by now, bro. What\u2019s her name? Or his name – I\u2019m an ally, it\u2019s all good.\u201d<\/p>\n
I did one of those parabolas with my voice that means a shrug.<\/p>\n
\u201cMahesh, Mahesh, Mahesh. You can\u2019t not know, my friend. Life is a fucking roo and you\u2019ve got to punch it in the dick before it knocks you out, you get me?\u201d<\/p>\n
Madhan had his entire life mapped out. He was in the Hawthorn Development Squad. The edges of his life had been drawn for him by the painted lines on the footy oval. Me? I didn\u2019t even know where a kangaroo\u2019s dick was.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo?\u201d Luke raised his eyebrows, crossed his arms and leaned against my desk, waiting for my answer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, Luke, my issue is more how to be a man.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow to be a man? I mean you just be one. Go to work, shoot the shit, come home, crack open a tinny, watch the footy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to work for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRight. You got dreams and crap?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the other problem. All I know is that I want to do something big, but I don\u2019t know what I could achieve walking down the corridors of Nunawading High.\u201d Particularly when people\u2019s eyes slide over me because I\u2019m not Madhan.<\/p>\n
Luke nodded slowly, pursed his lips, then leaned against my desk. \u201cYou know, I think I needed someone like me to come chat to me when I was thirteen to figure this shit out.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah. At thirteen all I did was chuck a footy around, eat sausages and watch my brothers get laid.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, what would you have told your thirteen-year-old self?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know what, Mahesh. That\u2019s a fucking great question. I want you to scratch what I just said to you, mate. Giz a mo, and I\u2019ll work it out, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
I watched as Luke paced the meter-and-a-half of rug in front of my desk. He was messing the pile up, but I could see that it was important to him to move. His calves were like chicken drumsticks, bulging with muscle. Mine had just the amount of skin required to cover my tibia and fibula. I looked like a flamingo. I\u2019m not sure if a flamingo can really make anything of their life, even if it filled its notebook with math equations and chemical reactions looking for some magic formula.<\/p>\n
Luke stopped and spun around to face me, making pistol hands. \u201cI\u2019ve got it!\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know what I didn\u2019t know when I was thirteen? Who the actual fuck I was.\u201d<\/p>\n
Do I know who I am? \u201cI guess I know who I\u2019m not?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMate. Fucking word. I am not Chris or Liam, and that\u2019s defined me my whole life.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, who are you then, Luke?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMahesh, that is the juice, my friend. Who the fuck am I, and who the fuck are you?\u201d<\/p>\n
Another shrug.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, that\u2019s the issue, isn\u2019t it? It\u2019s not getting laid. If it was, I should have sorted my life several times over by now. So, we\u2019re going out into the world to find ourselves, mate. Get your travel card.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s when my complex hallucination of the third less-hot Hemsworth took me out into the suburbs of Melbourne to figure some shit out. We\u2019re still at it, but we\u2019re having a great time working it all out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Life is a fucking roo and you\u2019ve got to punch it in the dick before it knocks you out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":24109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","writer-sumitra-singam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23290"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24110,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23290\/revisions\/24110"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}