Sunday, October 07, 2007
The hot day snapped like an uptight flatmate with PMS into a cold and windy challenge to the senses. It had been an intense preview to summer in early spring, but the weather itself was moody and punished Sydney-siders with a wintry Saturday afternoon.
As my companion bent over the pool-table at the Coopers pub to take a shot, an old man with a white beard stopped behind her and air-slapped her behind with the kind of filthy grin on his face that you would only expect from your genuine run-of-the-mill Dirty Old Man. It pains me that using that word, often used in jest, no longer sufficiently describes what we encountered there at the pub.
I looked around. Ahead of me at the bar, was a man in his 60s sitting alone with a beer watching the sports on the big TV screen. To the back left, more men in their 60s were seated around round tables looking up to watch the TAB TV screen. I then came to the firm conclusion that it was us who did not belong there. How do you complain to the manager about one of his regular customers harassing your friend? You don't. You leave, and never go back there again.
It was Newtown. A suburb of young socialist feminist anarchist politically correct students and you feel hurt that you trusted such a population mix not to let you down in such a way. The newspaper said Newtown was a place for people from all walks of life. It was my mistake believing it was a student festival every day of the year. To my list of students, yuppies, lesbians and goths, I added the men in their 60s who inhabit Coopers and who I could only reluctantly describe as dirty old men. Breaking laws they perhaps were unaware existed, or perhaps didn't care to acknowledge, the bitterness of 40 years of women's rejection of them speaking through their behaviour towards the opposite sex right up until the last couple of decades before their death, when hope had already been dead for years. ¶ 08:14
As my companion bent over the pool-table at the Coopers pub to take a shot, an old man with a white beard stopped behind her and air-slapped her behind with the kind of filthy grin on his face that you would only expect from your genuine run-of-the-mill Dirty Old Man. It pains me that using that word, often used in jest, no longer sufficiently describes what we encountered there at the pub.
I looked around. Ahead of me at the bar, was a man in his 60s sitting alone with a beer watching the sports on the big TV screen. To the back left, more men in their 60s were seated around round tables looking up to watch the TAB TV screen. I then came to the firm conclusion that it was us who did not belong there. How do you complain to the manager about one of his regular customers harassing your friend? You don't. You leave, and never go back there again.
It was Newtown. A suburb of young socialist feminist anarchist politically correct students and you feel hurt that you trusted such a population mix not to let you down in such a way. The newspaper said Newtown was a place for people from all walks of life. It was my mistake believing it was a student festival every day of the year. To my list of students, yuppies, lesbians and goths, I added the men in their 60s who inhabit Coopers and who I could only reluctantly describe as dirty old men. Breaking laws they perhaps were unaware existed, or perhaps didn't care to acknowledge, the bitterness of 40 years of women's rejection of them speaking through their behaviour towards the opposite sex right up until the last couple of decades before their death, when hope had already been dead for years. ¶ 08:14
