The heart of the matter

Ten out of every ten people die. On this cheery note, Dan Rookwood was forced to consider his own mortality I hit it pretty hard in my early twenties; the way you’re supposed to when you’re arrogantly indestructible and consequences and responsibilities are irrelevant. To paraphrase someone famous (WC Fields or Lindsay Lohan, I always forget which) I drank with impunity and whoever else invited me. It was bloody brilliant.

Then one morning after a particularly epic night before, I had a suspected heart attack. Age 26. Fuck.

I remember it now only too well, in the present tense. I wake up in bed with a searing pain on the left side my chest – the home where the heart is. The sensation is shocking, terrifying, all consuming. It takes my breath away. It leaves a metallic taste in my mouth. And then it eases off slightly, but it’s still there, it’s still hard to breathe. So I lie perfectly still, trying to be calm. Tying myself up in unpickable knots, trying to be calm. Trying not to think about the triple heart by-pass my dad had earlier that year, trying to be calm. Then the pain comes back and I clasp a hand desperately to my chest, convinced that yes, I’m having a fucking heart attack.

Go, they always tell you. Go and see a doctor. But we are men; we are strong and proud. We can’t go and see the doctor every time we want to wag school or be excused from a Powerpoint presentation.

I learned my lesson early on that score. When I was nine, I hated school and the sick days mounted suspiciously, Ferris Bueller-style. One morning my father called my bluff and took me and my ‘stomach ache’ to our local GP. I saw the doctor exchange a wink with my father as he concluded there was nothing wrong with me. But just to rule out appendicitis, would I piss in a jar and drop it into the surgery on my way to school? I did. A couple of hours’ later, my father came into class to whisk me off to hospital quick-snippety. They’d found an unusually high amount of sugar in my urine that indicated diabetes and they needed to run some urgent tests. Twenty-four hours of panic later, the verdict came back: no diabetes. It was only then that they returned to the original piss sample. The one in a jam jar. That hadn’t been rinsed of jam properly. True story.

Ever since then, I’ve been a lot more reticent about going to see my GP. I couldn’t even tell you his name. Dr who? As men we are all bitterly ashamed of the weakness of our flesh. According to a BBC survey, me are five times less likely to visit their GP than women. We suck it up and butch it out until there’s an emergency…

Go, they say. Find out what’s wrong. But what if it is my heart? Just like it was for my grandfather. Just like it is for my dad. What if the doctor confirms all my worst fears? Then, of course, that’s all the more reason to go.

So I don’t go. And neither does the pain. It subsides, but I can feel it there, just below the surface. It’s a dull ache that every so often jolts my body like a Taser gun and scares seven shades of shit out of me. I try to be brave, I try to man up by telling myself to Man The Fuck Up. But on the train one day, the pain is so visceral, I almost pass out. I start to cry out of sheer panic over a situation I cannot control. I don’t want to die. The more you have of life, the more you want of it. I’m scared. If you are not scared when you have a pain in the chest then you are suffering from two things. One is a lack of imagination, and the other is chest pain.

Something is wrong with me. Sooner or later something is wrong with all of us – it just feels like my turn has come sooner rather than later. I’ve been pushed to the front of the queue. So I go to the doctor, massaging my left tit like a sexual deviant. I babble my own diagnosis straight from TV medical dramas and the Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary and Wikipedia. “It’s probably just severe indigestion or a mild heart palpitation. I doubt it’s a heart attack, right?” But say the words “chest” and “pain” in the same sentence to a doctor and they’ll have you on a hospital gurney covered in jump leads quicker than you can say “Oh shit!” Which is pretty quick.

A technician takes a disposable orange Bic razor from its wrapper and starts shaving crop circles into my chest thatch so that she can get the sensors in place. Then she rubs freezing cold gel over my left pec and runs a probe over the area to show an ultrasound of my heart. It doesn’t look too healthy on the screen: an indistinct grainy mass of lub-dubbing muscle. The upshot? An enlarged left ventricle. Which is ironic as that’s always been my favourite one. I have a suspected cardiomyopathy – which literally means “heart muscle disease”. Which even more literally means I could drop dead at any min…

Just joking.

Cardiomyopathy is increasingly common in blokes my age who work hard and play even harder. I’m told never to take any drugs ever, to drastically cut down on booze and to adopt a healthier lifestyle incorporating such things as sleep and vegetables.

That was four years ago. In that time, I’ve had more checks than a Prague prostitute and I’ve tried to be a good boy. The fear of death is quite motivating, it turns out. Four weeks ago, I got another letter with the usual hospital stamp and the latest test results. More of the same… until the last entirely unexpected line: “I have discussed Mr Rookwood’s case in the post-clinic meeting and it was decided to discharge him from our clinic in view of the stability of his studies on consecutive follow up visits.” Eh? I tried to read it again, but it was a bit blurry through my tears.

Life has never seemed more beautiful, more fleeting, more precious. My health reprieve has left me deliriously happy but strangely fatalistic. After all, ten out of every ten people die and I now know how I’m probably going to go. It’s true what they say: you don’t appreciate what you’ve got till it’s gone. And now that I’ve got my health back, I’m a bit more careful about keeping it. It’s not like I skip down the street smelling the roses, smiling beatifically and telling waifs and strays I love them. I’m just grateful, that’s all. And life is the richer for it.

Let’s drink to that.
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Get out of my Facebook

I am not what the marketeers would term an “early adopter”. I still struggle to send text messages successfully and have to get someone else to stick songs onto my ipod because I am too much of a Luddite to upload or download or whatever the hell it is. But Facebook, I can do. And if I can, anyone can.

At first it was fun. Then it wasn’t.

As you will doubtless know by now, joining Facebook involves submitting yourself to constant surveillance by the following forms of sub-life:
- The social retard from your school days whose leftfield offer of friendship you agreed to accept in a fleeting moment of “I wonder how much of a cock they’ve turned into” curiosity. You know, the moronic bell-end who cannot get enough of all the tedious extra Facebook applications and seems to think it the highest form of wit to simultaneously bitch-slap you, poke you with a goat and rate your mum’s shagability. Every day.
- Sinister marketing companies who expressly create the aforementioned tedious Facebook applications in order to harvest your personal details for the purposes of strangulated death by creepily targeted spam.
- Employers who want to vet the bitch-slapping, goat-poking side of your life that you artfully left off your CV.
- And – most insidious of all – ex-girlfiends. Sorry that was a Freudian typo. Ex-girlfriends.

Accepting friendship on Facebook gives people a panoptical window on your life – to see how many friends you’ve got compared to them, who those friends are, and what fascinating activity everyone is doing at any given minute. Random “status update” examples? “Natasha is never drinking absinthe again. Urgh!” “Matt is excited about going skiing to New Zealand tomorrow!” “Dan is surfing the net for pictures of Luba when he should be writing his GQ column.” See, it’s endless F.U.N.

And then recently it all went a bit wrong when a girl I used to love but ouch-that-ended-painfully sent me a friendship invitation. Presented with the tantalising option to lift the lid on this Pandora’s inbox, the voyeuristic itch proved irresistible: “Confirm”. Soon I found myself enslaved to a compelling up-to-the-minute news feed of her new life complete with sickeningly saccharine pictures of her and the bloke she dumped me for. Who is now her husband I couldn’t help but notice.

Like a P-plate pile-up or Australian Idol, her profile was hard to look at, but even harder not to look at. Facebook doesn’t yet treat me to an automated update each time hubby enters Pandora’s box, although I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before this application is created.

Before all this online social networking malarkey was foisted upon us (i.e. pre-2005) we could leave skeletons in the closet without fear that they might one day come back to life and start challenging us to games of Scrabulous and showing us umpteen pictures of themselves striking pretentious catalogue poses and getting riotously pissed.

Facebook reopens closure. It rips the scab off old wounds by innocently popping up with a “friend request” message, torturing you with mental angst about whether to “confirm”, “ignore”, “send message” or “launch the effing laptop out the effing window”.

Yes, we all know that the likes of Facebook and MySpace serve a very useful purpose in facilitating easy communication in a time-poor world. (Just when you thought interaction couldn’t get more superficial than texting, along comes the frankly hateful and offensively lazy Facebook ‘poke’.) More importantly, it is genuinely fascinating to play a competitive game of one-upmanship with one’s schoolmates without ever having to go to the trouble of attending the ten-year reunion – who’s got married, kids, bald, fat… or all four in the case of Natasha. (She should definitely give up the Absinthe.) But for those of us who are masochistically curious, who cannot help but check out how much fun our exes are having without us, Facebook has robbed us of one of the pleasures of a technologically simpler life: blissful ignorance.

Discovering that the woman I once wanted to marry was now married to my replacement came as a rude shock – a shock that shook me from my escalating addiction and forced me to prune back my Facebook garden into something more manageable and less full of thorns and ex-girlfriends hiding under rocks.

Facebook, if used properly, tells you in one quick glance what your friends are doing, whose birthday you’re about to miss, who’s a champion Scrabulous player and so on. But at what point does documenting every detail of your life leave you no time to actually live it? It’s like people who spend their entire holiday looking through their digital camera viewfinder.

So recently I have given my profile an overdue Facial, cleansed and squeezed out the desperate dickheads (get out of my Facebook!) who were taking up too much of my time demanding I buy them back a virtual Jågerbomb and map my personality through movies. I’ve limited my friends to those who are in my phone book and have rediscovered that yes, Facebook is a rather efficient way of staying in touch.

I did make one exception. Just so at least I still get to poke my ex once in a while.
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"Quarter Life Crisis" featured in GQ Magazine

I guess it’s inevitable after five faithful years in an exclusive relationship with the same woman. Or maybe it’s inevitable because I have recently become a man in his 30s and am thus in the vice-like grip of a quarter-life crisis. But just lately I’ve begun to have impure thoughts. I’m chasing after an older model – and the dirtier, the better. I want a racy temptress that has been around the block a few times and knows how to give a man a hell of a ride.

I’m not proud of it but I’ve developed an unhealthy habit of staying up late at night when the missus has fallen asleep, hunched over my laptop, furtively searching all the best pawn sites. I know that I have to click on “clear history” at the end of a session to cover my guilty tracks. My mobile is now full of mysterious phone numbers from chance pick-ups that never quite work out. I’ve sent a few bold texts, I’ve even called up a few for a chat. So far I haven’t had the guts to follow through with my fantasies, but it’s eating away at me and I know I’m going to give in soon. Yes, I’ll admit it: I desperately want a classic car.

Why this sudden lust for rust? Up until quite recently, I was never fussed. Couldn’t understand the mentality of revheads who talk the torque of ludicrous three-letter acronyms (TLAs) and Top Trumps stats about comparative cylinder configurations and engine sizes and 0-60 times. I mean, WTF? Who really GAS? Then a couple of years ago, I started writing the odd woefully under-informed car review for a style magazine and I saw the full beam. All of a sudden, I was driving round Audis and Mercs and Beemers every other weekend. Then on one unfortunate occasion, I loaned an unruly Caterham Seven that shot off like a champagne cork into a clumsily placed wall – and that was the end of that: the car, the wall, the gig. But too late: those first hits were free and I was duly hooked.

I need to ’fess up at this point: I have been driving for 13 years without ever actually owning a car. I have somehow got through life being insured on other people’s: my mum’s estate (which was fine), my girlfriend’s Ford KA (which was not) and Caterham’s Seven (which was a bloody good job). But now I have reached a new nadir: the missus and I currently drive around one of those tiny Smart cars with advertising all over them because a) they are nearly free to rent, b) they are a doddle to park in the city and c) my girlfriend has no shame. But I do. I fight her for the passenger seat so that at least I can keep my head down and shield my crimson face. People actually stop stock-still in the street, point and laugh when they see us coming. I dread pulling up at the lights next to some hoon in his souped-up neon ute. They look at me with a mixture of incredulity, derision and pity before grunting off in a cloud of testosterone. Like a man who is lumbered with Sharon from Kath & Kim when he has slept with Lara Bingle, I know I could do better.

And that is why I have the perma-horn for a trophy car. I don’t care how efficient it is, how easy it is to park, how practical the boot space is. I want something that turns heads for the right reasons: because it looks amazing.

I could, I suppose, buy an anonymously anodyne second-hand Toyota or perhaps even splash out on a late 90s Mazda convertible. But I’m a terrible label snob, which is almost a prerequisite of accepting employment at this magazine, and I’m unlikely ever to be satisfied with a middle-of-the-road marque. Like all well-adjusted men with a high GQ, I like timeless classics. I see a vintage Merc, an old school Fiat Spider or – my personal favourite – a Citroen DS in the street and I come over all Pepé Le Pew, salivating with the lasciviousness of a priapic skunk. A friend of mine keeps posting Facebook pictures of his livid yellow Jaguar E-type with its ludicrous frontage on display and big almond eyes flashing at me and it’s turning me livid green with envy. Got. To. Have. One.

Up until recently, this was nothing but an exhaust pipe dream, but for the first time in my life, it is a fantasy I could now afford to realise. I’ve saved up $17K in the last six months. A quick check of www.autotrader.com.au tells me that’s enough to get me a 1963 pillar box red MG, or a black 1975 Alfa Romeo coupe, or a 1972 champagne gold convertible Mercedes 350 SL. There’s just one small problem: I’ve actually been saving that money for an engagement ring.

My beloved doesn’t yet know about the money burning holes in my bank account and my conscience. And both my secret and my balls are safe for now as she never reads GQ – too busy with her stash of Bride magazine that she’s always leaving strewn about the house for some reason.

Soft-top Merc or soft-cock ring? (Sorry, that came out wrong – I don’t mean a cock-ring.) I cannot afford both. It’s like having a little devil revving in one ear and an angel chiming wedding bells in the other. On the one hand I could have a great lump that belches and farts, takes a while to get going in the morning, and will undoubtedly cost me a fortune in running repairs. On the other hand, I could get the car.

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