THE LOWDOWN – This is just what we do

LIKE CHARLENE?AND and Al Gilkes, I’ve been to Paradise.
Unlike Al I’ve never been stranded while peeing in the Paradise ladies’ toilet. Al had to emerge with plunger held in front of him to the cheers of the many white women there assembled.
However, I recently visited Vaucluse on a similar mission. Vaucluse is my Emmerton. I could show you the room I was born in, where my navel string is most likely buried, the window my mother was closing the night she died, the junction where a Hopewell cane truck nearly totalled me and a donkey . . . .
We used to race donkeys where the motor track now is (and I have no objection to it if Bizzy says it will bring in foreign exchange). If the rain caught me riding, I would put my shirt and pants in a rock hole, drip dry my naked body and carry on smartly.
Maybe if Bizzy and Mr Cozier took part in some naked donkey races, many more thousands would come to watch.
Maybe even Senator Maxine McClean. She is the bane of the peeing man, blowing her horn if any dares to seek relief in public.
That’s why I found myself in a secluded Vaucluse cart road overlooking the Valley Of The Attempted Rape. Only, in those days it wasn’t rape. Rape was forcing your way with a strange girl. This was “getting through”.
“Getting through” involved using physical restraint with a girl you were “trying at”.
Girls preferred it that way.
If caught they could claim, like: “He Baby Hoad hold me!” Since none but the strong could “manage” a girl, only the finest males got to procreate, ensuring a healthier progeny.
I never succeeded.
On the day of the “rape”, a Shop Hill fellow and I conspired to manage a Forty Acre girl when she came to fetch her sheep from the valley. I was watchman perched on high. He wanted to go it alone. Bad mistake!
His anguished cry echoed through the hills as he fled with wrist pouring blood. That girl could bite!
Why do we go to such lengths for a little female fondue? And, how to answer Sanka Price’s Saturday Sheila who is “sick of men who just want s*x”?
Here’s how the American sailors in “South Pacific” put it: “We got sunlight on the sand, we got moonlight on the sea; we got mangoes and bananas, you can pick right off the tree.
“We get letters doused with perfume, we get dizzy from the smell, what don’t we get? You know damn well! There is nothing like a dame . . . .”
Lady, be reasonable. You say your fellow wanted every evening to end with s*x; can you suggest a better ending?
I mean, hell, we take you to Drive-In, spend maybe $20 on ticket, hamburger, large French fries, drink. Don’t we deserve some satisfaction?
You say you’re not in the mood. Do you think we’re ever in the mood to dress up and take you out? Do you think we like bathing?
Think of the lies we tell to make you feel good. We go “wow” at those shapeless empire line monstrosities when all the while we’re wondering: “My God, is she pregnant?”
We rave at your ridiculous hairdos while praying the donkey doesn’t show up to reclaim its tail.
And you grudge us a little something?
No, lady, I don’t know about you but thing is what we do. It’s our only way to health and happiness.
You have the lock, we have the key. And there’s nothing quite as forlorn as a key which has no lock to open. Or which is rusty from lack of use.
However, the choice should be all yours.
Let no man do that which you find distasteful.
As the lady told Kitch: “I feed her, mind her, raise her from small, man, take off yuh hand from she, don’t touch me . . . .”
Kitch also predicted: “Sixty-nine goin’ be great, don’t forget we have an important date.”
If alive, today I will be 69. Men think this the greatest age of all.
For when our wives go: “Why don’t you act your age?” we can happily reply: “O-kay! Yessss!”
Wishful thinking, alas.
 
Richard Hoad is a farmer and social commentator. Email porkhoad@gmail.com