- There was this naked Colonel and me. I was naked too.
The shower room was clearly a prototype for army shower rooms in transit camps – pale grey where it was dry, right up near the iron roof where the beetles and the roaches gathered; black where it was wet round the cement tunnels where the slugs and snails grouped in the chill shade; fungus green in patches where the occasional hard broom never reached.
The naked Colonel and I shivered under the tepid water. The few remaining downlights revealed a tall, skinny, blue-white bloke, knobbly knees and elbows, a belly reaching earthward at the same angle as his small, flaccid penis. Awkward bumps made shadows where his collarbone jutted halfway through his skin. Narrow chested, thin shanked, assless. Droplets clung to yesterday’s stubble.
He was dressed and ready before me. Eagle spread across his chest of earthly green and heavy with medal. Bolt upright and eight feet high. Broad shouldered and flat backed, deep chested and firm in the legs. Every line and plane was either a perfect vertical or perfect lateral and they all conspired to widen and deepen him and to stretch down towards the immaculate gloss of enemy-crushing boots. Somewhere inside it all was the skinny, long streak I’d seen in the shower moments before. The trouble for me nowadays, ever since the war, is that every time I see a glorious soldier, adorned with gold and silver, every time I see a parade of them or watch a film of an army of them, what I am really seeing is that Colonel in the shower – limp, skinny cellulite between knobbly ends and all things receding.
Even the most decorated man in the regiment is still naked under the uniform.
I was watching the television my wife when a new commercial caught my attention. A shaggy old man wearily demonstrated the effects of a new perfume. I leaned forward in my chair. It was the Lieutenant Colonel!
“Provocation. Beat Them. The new anti-personal deodorant with built in cologne. Cleans as it protects. Strike now with Provocation. Detoxify the stagnant remains of your old life and begin anew.” The old man walked off into the distance joined by two men in trench coats who protected him from a ravaging horde of women.
My wife snickered as she buffed her fingernails. “See that’s what you need honey.”
By Armani Hollindale. Written using several excerpts from ‘Chance International,’ a men’s magazine founded in Sydney in 1969 and defunct in 1971.