Confessions of a Bondi Blonde

I once dated a man called penis.

Well, not actually penis. His name was John Thomas. I was living in London at the time, so he may as well have been called prick or Willie as John Thomas was as much an accepted slang term for penis as any other.

John was an American investment banker, rich and living it large on ex-pat terms with an international investment bank. For him, the streets of London were still paved with gold. I was a prize to be won, and he pursued me with a trader’s focus.

He liked me, he really liked me. Expensive dinners, weekends in Paris, hardcover books I coveted were all used to woo me.

When I said I liked cottage roses, two dozen pink and cream perfumed blooms were delivered to where I was working at the time. When my colleagues read the note that came with the flowers (opening the envelope before me as I was lunching long and hard that day) they smelled blood when they saw who it was from. Dick jokes a-plenty rained down relentlessly on me for the next 10 days. Every morning I was greeted with a cock-a-doodle-do. Hilarious. There was no way in hell they’d ever be meeting him for after work drinks. The guy would not survive.

In many ways, John was perfect long term boyfriend material. He was polite, plied me with alcohol and was always on time. He listened to me, I think. Well I talked a lot and he didn’t interrupt too often.

Politically it was a bit sticky. A potatoe eater from Quayle, Minnesota, he was slightly to the right of Genghis Khan on most issues. His blanket solution to rid the world of crime was to fry the criminals, no matter how slight the misdemeanour; excepting Wall Street white collar crims, of course.  I on the other hand was a working class girl from Gympie, trying to make it good, but being waylaid on my upward journey by having too much of a good thing. I was a cider socialist, saving the champagne for when someone else paid.

Still, all John’s lovely moolah beckoned. I was tired of living from paycheck to paycheck. London was prohibitively expensive and any savings I managed to salt away between litres of wine and late night curries was spent on my yearly return to Australia to dry out and seek the sun, friends and sometimes, family.

And he was a woman fearing American. Surely that helped negate the name? Middle class American women have trained their menfolk well in the art of marriage. They have a God given right to consume, and the guys better provide, or it’s onto Dr Phil’s sofa before the guy has a chance to remove his balls from the insinkerator.

If I let John put me into a wife-sized box, we’d soon relocate to New York where I could spend and moan with the finest at the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side or at Cafe des Artistes on West 67^th Street. We’d only have to visit the scary religious freak family in Minnesota at Thanksgiving to eat turkey and glutinous pumpkin pie.

After a whirlwind time, when poor John Thomas was SONAPed  (Sex Only, No Appearances in Public) to death, he asked to meet my friends.  He wanted to take our relationship to the next level. I thought it mightn’t do too much harm as he was nicer than all my friends and was handsome in that “hey sports fans” big-headed American way.

So I thought about it. The friends could be forewarned and I’d be forearmed with the threat of killing them if one little penis joke eventuated.

But if the relationship was getting this serious, where could it lead? Next he’d want to talk about moving in together, engagement and finally – marriage. He was a straight guy, following a straight path. If he could stand my ability to slug grog by the bucket, belch like a wharfie and quickly walk away from a farty spot in a shop, letting him catch the nasty stares from English roses, surely the marriage aisle was a likely route?

But then the sad truth dawned. His pure American-ness was the killer blow. Like many from that country, he followed the tradition of sons being named after their fathers. He, in fact was John Thomas Jr. There was no way in hell I was going to saddle a kid of mine with the moniker John Thomas III. It sounded too much like the latest in a long line of porn films.

So I had to kill it with poor cock robin.

It was a sad day, but John didn’t grieve for too long. He met a nice girl from Slovakia and they now live, with John Thomas III and his sister, in an eight room Upper West Side apartment. The lucky woman’s name?  Imeena Völva.

When I found out I cried a little for the life of luxury I’d lost. Then I went to the pub, told my mates and they laughed like drains.