Friday, March 2, 2007

The day my life imploded, so completely did things head south that I later reasoned it must have been a horrific thing of beauty to behold. Like a fire in a fireworks factory. Or Britney Spears.
From where I stood, however, caught in the crossfire of my own personal shitfight, it struck me as a tad less than amusing.
Another thing that struck me was a pair of flippers, followed by my unused guitar, although I managed to sidestep the suitcase that followed close behind and thereby avoid serious brain injury. I watched as the case hit the concrete beside me and burst, spraying a geyser of underwear and dirty shirts across the carpark.
At the window two stories above me, was my (former) live-in girlfriend and trainee banshee. Live-in girlfriend, or was I now a live-out boyfriend? While she was frisbeeing my crockery out into the carpark, I’d walked upstairs and tried my front door. Locked. Possibly barricaded. So you could say she currently held the position of power in the relationship.
We’ll call the banshee Karen, because that’s her name.
Her head bobbed out of the livingroom window. “The beauty of this is you’ll get a nice taste of sleeping around too – in your fucking car! Shitwit!” That Karen. A real way with words.
That bright Friday morning began with me capering around like the fifth Wiggle, scraping semi-soiled sporting gear into a bag.
My name is Ashley Lawrence Gibson, but everybody calls me Curly, given that I’ve been semi-bald since my mid-twenties. As nicknames go, it’s a million miles from hilarious, but you don’t get a choice in these things, it seems.
At 35, I still call myself a professional cricketer, although, if asked the same question three weeks ago, the phrase “trainee hobo” may have figured in my reply.
My career had been reduced to club cricket on the weekends interspersed by serious sessions of thumbing through the Saturday job ads and wondering why I’d used my high school careers guidebook as kindling on camping trips.
Financially, things were looking dire. My saving were just about kaput, with the few hundred my club slung me every week hardly enough to finance the lifestyle I was after, like one that included living in a room. And eating.