Maxine and Harry Dine Out

(For non-Australian readers, Phillip Adams is a well known talk show host, Frank Moorehouse a fine prose writer, and Mussolini is alive and working as a pastrycook in Sydney)



At last! I managed the obstacle course to Maxine’s table and sat down. She’d already ordered, the food had arrived and by now, Lucky Dipp was no doubt surfing with shit at Bondi.

“Chicken Mussolini’, she announced, ‘you’ll love it. They remove the skin as well, for authenticity. And profit rolls for dessert. I understand they’ve got a new chef,
a dead ringer for Il Duce’.

Capable of random acts of good table manners, Maxine delicately bit through the end of a chicken bone and, with equal finesse, despatched the marrow in one silent suck. She then turned her big green eyes on me, blinked twice, and for no good reason announced that Philip Adams was a national treasure and belonged, suitably stuffed, in the museum of a Frank Moorehouse short story.

I was appalled. I had once read that only cannibals chew bones. Worse, the thought of a cannibal with Maxine’s appetite invited fantastic dreams of perverse cooking shows.

“Listening to Philip Adams releases endorphins,” she babbled on. “I read it in Women’s Day, and, what’s more, reading Frank Moorehouse is supposed to be good for the bowels!”

Sooner than later, there’d be an interview on Late Nite Live.  “Now dear eater, have I got a tasty treat for you tonight ...”

“Say! Adams would make a tasty morsel!”  Maxine enthused, rubbing her significant belly.

I sat bolt upright.

Ever the drama queen, she punctuated her speech by pointing a chicken bone at me, and for good measure, made a sound like a didgeridoo. Then, without warning she grabbed her fork, leaned over the table and skewered a piece of stuffing which I’d left on the corner of my plate. Holding her prey close to her prodigious mouth, with the speed of a frog, she licked it clean off the fork. But it didn’t end there. She tossed back her head, and at the same time flicked the foodstuff into the air with the help of her prehensile tongue. Then, with a forward extension of the neck, and at precisely the right moment, she clamped her teeth over her hapless victim, all in one fluid, graceful movement. She swallowed. I was impressed. Maxine’s tongue had unfathomable potential and she often remarked that her ancestors were frogs.

‘My ancestors were frogs.” she remarked.

‘Cannibals don’t read Women’s Day,’ I muttered to myself, surfing the crest of an alpha wave. I dayreamed an episode of Jungle Jim dancing with (stuffed) crocodiles, imagined our waitperson as Sheena Queen of the Jungle, then panicked at the thought of Magda Szubanska swinging on a vine through the trees to my rescue.

‘In cyberspace, everyone can hear you scream.” Maxine opined, puffing out her chest. She liked to think dangerously and became bellicose when challenged. ‘And evolution is an alien conspiracy. The only place that’s safe is under a lilypad.”

At that, she smiled, and her eyes began to oscillate in concentric circles. I knew that this was a portent. I could almost see the bubble of another amusing thought float in one ear, then out the other. Shit! She had entertained herself and was now preparing to share this with all innocent bystanders.


‘I am descended from amphibians!’ she shrieked hysterically, and for good effect fell face forward into her food. I continued to sip my Campari and tonic as I surveyed her lunch on my lapels. Undaunted, Maxine moved on to her plate of profiteroles.

‘Fuck I love profit rolls.” she said with conviction.

Profit rolls? Yes dear reader, that’s what she called them. Profiteroles, she once enlightened me were how Italians pronounced profit rolls in English. We were in bed at the time and later that night she asked me in English to make love to her in Italian, but having said that, all I could think of was Mussolini. Instead, we ended up debating the metaphysics of Near Death Experiences. Maxine informed me that after death, the soul loiters with intent in the corpse, just in case it was a false alarm. She cited an ABC documentary on NDE’s in which supposedly dead people
said they were turned back by God without reason or refund.

She further claimed that Il Duce’s enemies knew this, which is why they hacked his body to pieces. By 3.00am I had had enough and fell asleep, dreaming that Mussolini was still alive and how, as a boy, I had longed for Sheena Queen of the Jungle to sit on my face.

But back to Philip Adams. My mind strayed onto something from a Frank Moorehouse book called Lateshows. With due apologies to Mr Moorehouse, I told Maxine that the good Mr Adams is a fata-morgana project- non existent, yet floating around the world like a ghost.

Maxine looked bemused.

‘What does fata-morgana mean?’

‘Fucked if I know,’ I replied. ‘I read it in a Frank Moorehouse story.’

‘It sounds great,’ she said.

I then told her that she reminded me of a character from another Moorehouse story, Breasts. Her name was Delly, a table attendant at Frank’s club. The story informs us that Delly is post-punk and a mistress of the riposte. Maxine on the other hand, when post-coital, was a mistress of the repast. I related the plotline to her, imagining that if her breasts were any larger, she would fall face first into her plate of profiteroles, a clever inversion of the slapstick of profiterole throwing.

‘Delly-catessen!” Maxine responded, laughed, belched and with a stupid grin looked vacantly at the portrait of Samuel Johnson which hung above my head like the sword of Damocles.

‘She who makes a frog of herself gets rid of the pain of being human. Let’s have a joint and piss off.’

I signalled the table attendant for the bill.

Oblivious to circumstance, Maxine pulled out her stash, rolled up and lit a reefer, inhaling deeply. I looked into her eyes as they crossed and saw the back of her head. She always scored good shit, or bon merde, as Proust called it.

She passed the joint over looking around furtively like a ferret. I drew back the acrid smoke and held it in until my face went purple.

‘You like a lightbulb,’ she said.

I remembered to exhale.

Completely off my face, my eyes narrowed to slits as I noticed our table attendant
hopping in our direction. Wow! She looked green and slippery! Another frog was coming to talk to me! I nudged Maxine who was furiously trying to vivisect a profiterole, finding it hard to balance the knife between the toes of her webbed feet.

‘What is it Ratty?’

‘Maxine,” I hissed, ‘look! the table attendant! One of your relatives!

But before she could look up or croak, strange sounds stirred the possum in my brain. Hearing the thud and ring of boots and spurs, I spun round and saw, entering the saloon, two cowboys, guns drawn and looking mean. Fuck! it was Philip Adams and Frank Moorehouse.

‘Ribbit,’ said the waitress as she handed us the bill.



A close shave ....

Club Dub was packed. There were fat bald men everywhere and it didn’t take long for Adams and Moorehouse to score. Within minutes of entering they’d managed 2 interviews. Under clever questioning there were all sorts of startling admissions and confessions, enough to keep libel lawyers in new BMW’s for a lifetime. Adams kept looking for an opportunity to quote himself but Moorehouse got in first.

Looking for consolation, Adams surveyed the scene for a victim.

‘You look like Foucault’, Adams accused a bony bald man at the table next us.

‘Who are you calling a fur coat, you fat cunt!’ responded the Skull, a well known Sydney Nazi. He stood up and head-butted Moorehouse who had undone the invisible zipper on his forehead and made the mistake of pointing the penis at the Skull.

Moorehouse reeled backwards, slipped on a bit of an innocent bystander, and quoting Rimbaud crashed into our table, landing on Maxine’s ample lap.

‘Merde!’ exclaimed Moorehouse-Rimbaud.

‘Viva lap dancing!’ replied Maxine and began thrusting her hips wildly into Moorehouse’s face.

Meanwhile, I’d had enough, and wondered if I'll ever write the next chapter.

Probably not.