Metrosexuality Gone Berserk- an excerpt

Jack Quinn

Metrosexuality Gone Berserk
By Jack Quinn
(This is a work of fiction...right;) )
This piece may cause offence to some readers

Party Jack sees himself as a bit of a primping American psycho. He puts a hair band in his fringe to hold it back and grabs his platinum plated tweezers. He goes to work on his eyebrows. Party Jack comes from a long line of uni-brows. They used to call him Das Wulf in secondary school; in a cool way, right. Then a girl took him in hand one night not long after they had started seeing each other, and waxed his bushy caterpillars- man what a revelation! Like he never though he could improve on his looks, but she actually did. Now she is way dodo, but her legacy lives on. He doesn’t wax though; that would just be a bit Guido or something, not to mention gay, but he does pluck regularly. He quite enjoys it. The tweezing calms him; like he is bringing cosmos to his face and thus the universe. He also gets a Zen kick out of trimming the cultivated scrub on his cheeks. Oh he’ll spend the guts of an hour at it; worse than a girl, listening to classical music, usually Arvo Part, sipping a coffee, taking his time- he hates rushing out of the house and gets up hours before estimated time of departure- it’s a ritual really.
Trimming and plucking done, he takes his obscenely expensive anti-wrinkle moisturiser that supposedly contains extract of cow placenta and then with the delicacy of an orchestra conductor, applies it to his face; working it gracefully into the fine lines and wrinkles that no one can see but him.
Okay, bonts time: he tenderly removes the hair band and grabs his Indian scalp massage hair brush. It’s wet but not too tangled ‘cause he used hardcore penetrating conditioner. He doesn’t brush his hair; more caresses it, right down to the roots, increasing blood flow to the follicles. There is no way in hell he is going bald; he treats his hair like a princess.
Next for his heat defence styling spray, which he puts in being careful not to get any on his face in case it reacts with the chemicals in his moisturiser and gives him even more wrinkles- it could happen! He lets the spray soak in for a minute or two.
In the mean time he checks his teeth- not too bad; they’re big and Irish-looking. He’s still pissed off with his parents for only taking him to the dentist once when he was a kid- once! Luckily, they were too old school to give him sweets or any pocket money to buy them, so by the time he realised it was the normal civilised adult thing to do, he was told he only needed two fillings. A miracle really, considering their neglect. It was such a backward poverty pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland thing to do; when we were part of the second world. The state of grown-ups’ teeth! Party Jack shudders. He is reminded of the slight crowding he has in his bottom incisors and resolves to put his parents into a crap retirement home when the time comes.
He looks a little closer. He goes to the magnifying mirror on his dresser. Mmm, they are a little discoloured; maybe it’s time for another bleaching. He goes through compulsive phases of being an aesthetic hypochondriac: one month he might obsess over hair loss; counting the hairs on his pillow, ogerishly examining his hairline and parting, investing small fortunes in hair retention products on The Internet that arrive from the strangest exotic locations. Next it might be his teeth: getting addicted to dentist cleanings, cowering from coffee, cigarettes and heartbreakingly- red wine. Brushing like a thousand times a day, having myriad brands of floss, feeling cavities in parts of his mouth where he didn’t even have teeth, massaging his gums with cotton buds and making his own organic mouthwash from fresh mint and strawberries ‘cause he heard Catherine Zeta Jones say in Cosmo that there was a natural enzyme in them that breaks down plaque.
And of course there was the wrinkle phase: which involved microderm-exfoliation, pore-shrinking face masks, eye-cooling night gel blind folds, sonar pulse massaging, not smiling or frowning like some kind of ex-Communist, feeling terrible if he squinted or laughed, being afraid of the sun and the rain, literally running away from the wind, only sleeping on his back and beating himself up if he woke up on his face, dunking his head in ice-cold water every morning like Paul Newman, getting drunk and shouting at people smoking cigars, checking out everyone’s wrinkles, and I mean everyone: from guys his own age and girls his own age to young fellas he reckons are kinda like he used to be, thirty-year-olds, middle-aged men, old folks, virgins, nymphos, dorks, smokers, non-smokers, moderate smokers, potheads, cokeheads, pillheads, drinkers, tea-totalers, priests, Hare Krishnas, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, different nationalities, different races, resenting black people for not aging and so on. These phases sort of rotate like the seasons.
The hair serum has soaked in by now, so he picks up his customised hairdryer. Yes, I did say a customised hairdryer. He found a site on The Net where you can construct your very own hairdryer to suit your needs. There was a four page questionnaire to fill in and what they eventually sent him out was just, well, you can imagine: eighteen sub-speeds, five temperatures, nine attachments, a hands-free kit, it’s wireless, it uses a complex rotatory system so that the air comes out ionised and softer; like the difference between hard and soft water, it uses a patented revolutionary heating mechanism; not like your garden variety hairdryers, oh no, it’s like the difference between an electric oven and a fan oven- perfect results every time. He’s a wizard with that thing and in under three minutes Party Jack is like some kind of full-bodied footballer and ready to chose his outfit.
He opens his tri-mirror wardrobe; it’s a boho explosion and well out of control. Now Party Jack considered himself quite the fashionista, but never a slave to the seasons. The simple reason for this is that very often when a new style comes in, it is quickly hijacked by the hairdressing working classes and heavily vulgarised. His answer to this was to create his very own lines, his own styles, eternal and uncopyable.
Left-of-centre bohemian is the name of the game for him; the chavs usually avoid that hippie vibe and he thinks it somehow reflects his soul. He loves nothing more than to fop around the second-hand shops, though he always refers to them as vintage boutiques. Having said that, he is not averse to snapping up designer pieces on Ebay; one item in his ensemble generally costs like twenty times more than the whole outfit- not to mention what it is actually worth if you look at the store price.
He has had more unique looks than he cares to remember over the years; some zanier than others, but everyone says that only Party Jack could pull off get-ups like that. There was ‘Five Leaves Left’: which was basically what Nick what’s his name wore on the cover of that album: a pair of slim fit blue jeans, a grandfather shirt and a 70’s cut suit jacket with just the suggestion of pin stripes. But this, as with the others, wasn’t just a look; it was a way of life. Busting ‘Five Leaves’ meant having slightly longer hair, walking around with a pensive look on his face, chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, making profound observations.
Then there was ‘Ché Chic’, which involved wearing a lot of military green fatiguish hats and unwieldy scrub on his cheeks like Che Guevara. He’d smoke cigars and talk politics and revolution at parties, making it abundantly clear that the topic of conversation was to go with his clothes- everyone found the gag hilarious and anxiously anticipated his next look and all the theatre that would go with it. Then there was ‘Fighting With Feathers’. This look went hand in hand with one of Party Jack’s periodic dark periods. It involved being so fabulous that he dressed down completely and was utterly nonchalant all the time. This one didn’t last long because girls stop paying attention to him; in fairness, he was dressed like a bum.
Other short-lived styles were ‘Proho Chic’ and ‘Prerbury’. ‘Proho Chic’ came about when he found an inordinately baggy pair of brown trousers. The woman in the boutique said that were called Boston bags and were worn by swingers in the nineteen twenties. So Jack bought loads of flowing oversized Johhny Depp shirts and a pair of teacher shoes and a fat brown tie. He was excessively fond of this style and loved the ironic name he came up with for it- ‘Prohibition Chic.’ ‘Prerbury’ was more of an outrage (pronounced in French) outfit. It was basically a really awful professor’s jacket in micro-tartan with patches and all, hence ‘Prerbury: pre-urban-Burbury.’ The chavs didn’t know what to make of it; it didn’t stop them openly taking the piss out of him though…very little room for eccentrics who aren’t dressed in drag these days. What would Oscar say?
But this season it is ‘Yoho Chic’. He is just sooo excited that tweed is finally back in. He has had about nine tweed jackets hanging in his wardrobe for years; every time he saw one, he’d have to buy it, then he played the waiting game and lo and behold, it paid off. He knows exactly which one he’s going to wear- the most unique of the collection, the one that is a mingling of beiges and fawns and browns and creams and black, with the coolest academic looking stitching and thick, old-school, wooden buttons and the clincher- subtle leather seems. Man, it is just so fab for a tenner!
When he busted the look for the first time Boswell announced to the whole room that Jack was going to sing a few bars of ‘Adel Weiss’ ‘cause he reckoned the jacket looked like something an Alpine yodeller would wear and that was it- not ‘Boho Chic’, but ‘Yoho Chic’!
He pulls it on over a tight-fitting grandfather shirt (€7.50), leaves the first two buttons open; luckily he’s completely devoid of body hair or it would look silly, he is wearing a Colin Farrellish leather choker mind you- never jewellery though; jewellery, like tattoos, is for yobs. Then he slides into his €350 Armani jeans- you can tell right; like the difference between glass and a diamond. They’re full of bo-holes, but they are in all the right places and it enhances the way they hang on his slim body.
He is in great shape for someone who has never seen the inside of a gym and has the eternal love of what probably shouldn’t speak its name- kebabs. You can never be too rich or too thin- Party Jack even had a set of mugs with the adage on it. He does watch his weight though, after all, he is careering towards thirty and his metabolism is slowing down. Running into old school chums who look like Gollum stuffed into a fat suit kept him well on his toes.
He never snacks anymore- like the French; no chockies, no crisps, no bickies, no Cornish pasties, pizza slices, no hamburgers from McDonalds that actually do count no matter how small they are, no deep-fried food, no olive oil on his salads which he eats quite a lot, a healthy amount of expensive lean steak- bison and beef, zebra and skinless free range chicken, sometimes ostrich, steamed veggies, real easy on the dairy, lots of soy stuff and white bread and pasta are the devil, no eating after six ‘cept maybe a live bio-yoghurt and as much alcohol as he likes ‘cause he reckons has actually grown an extra liver so it can deal with it and never put a pound on him; the only explanation he can think of.
He pulls up his socks, on with the brown teacher shoes, sprays some Dolce ‘n’ Gabana into the air and steps into it - he’s such a fag - does a twirl and stops and stares: he’s a capering catalogue of ponce. God, you could bounce a baby off that hair, as full-bodied as a heady glass of St Emillion. Eww, that red-eye will have to go, though it does look kinda cool and dramatic, but it won’t fly with the crowd tonight, maybe with Trenton and Sibyl and Fariner- his writer/theatre crew, but definitely not tonight with the model/actor brigade. He takes some eye drops from the desk, on with the Kenneth Cole watch- perfect. He’s going to knock ‘em dead.

Zillah

I'm a little disjointed in my opinion. Some of the writing was done very well, such as the detailed descriptions of the ritual and ingredients, but then there were elements that completely threw it off. For one, the innapropriate use of "like" distracts from the rest: "Brushing like a thousand times a day" or "his ensemble generally costs like twenty times more than the whole outfit". I'd certainly rephrase that. The overall tone is a bit confusing, I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. The line "- he’s such a fag -" made me smile, it gives some personality to the author, but the rest doesn't seem to.

A couple other things:
Black people don't get old...?
French people don't snack...?
Gollum as a reference for fat people...?
Olive oil is very good for you.

Jack Quinn

It's interesting that the way so many people speak in Dublin irks you so. What I was getting at is the mid-Atlantic features some (some say a lot) of young people have adopted- such as 'like' as a 'linguistic filler' in the American sense as well as our use in Hiberno at the end of sentences. I agree that this doesn't make for the most 'respectable' or conventional prose, but for me it's more important to reflect the way we speak, or are starting to speak, than the way we are supposed to speak. So, I'm not sure inappropriate is the appropriate adjective when describing the excerpt Admittedly, the tone is a little confused; the narrator's voice intentionally vacillates between standard British English and valley girl/D4, it may take a little getting used to, but I feel it works. (Please let me know if you wanna read more)
A couple of other things:
Black people don't get old...? The character in his neurosis thinks this (because of Eddie Murphy)
French people don't snack...? Have you ever been in a bureau de tabac and seen their poor selection of snacks?! I am not saying they never snack, they just don’t have a snack culture like us.
Gollum as a reference for fat people...? Gollum is bald and ugly, add fat to that and you have the ravages of time
Olive oil is very good for you...ask an Italian
Just remember it is fiction- it's what the character thinks and it's supposed to be ridiculous/funny etc; I want people to laugh at the character, what he thinks and says.

Dylan_James

LOL

Good to read the next part Jack, I am glad you are still working away there. I seen your bebo (or myspace?) page and your picture and when i read this, all i can see is you getting ready for a night out on the town! Semi-autobiographical?

The character is very offensive but I would keep going with that. He is highly annoying to me anyway. It does remind me of the scene in American Psycho with Christian Bale getting up in the morning, however you seem to have added your own little quirks. This part of the story is told by a narrator in the third person. Last bit i read was in Jacks first person narration style. Was this deliberate? I think that is way the last poster there was confused by some of the lines in it.

How does this tie in with the last part you posted? I hope you will illuminate us all soon.

Dam that character is annoying.

Zillah

Jack Quinn wrote:

It's interesting that the way so many people speak in Dublin irks you so.

Hearing it spoken is fine. I'd reccomend using a comma to iply the tempo of how "like" is use in this sense. Its like, totally better this way.

Jack Quinn

Dylan_James wrote:

LOL

Good to read the next part Jack, I am glad you are still working away there. I seen your bebo (or myspace?) page and your picture and when i read this, all i can see is you getting ready for a night out on the town! Semi-autobiographical? chortle chortle...not quite:rolleyes:

This part of the story is told by a narrator in the third person. Last bit i read was in Jacks first person narration style. Was this deliberate? I think that is way the last poster there was confused by some of the lines in it.
Ammmm, i was playing around with the narrative. was thinking about using the first person. the book is written, i just need to tweek it a bit. think i am going to use the shifting third person narrative i went with in the first place.



Dam that character is annoying.

the only thing worse than annoying people is not annoying people...or somat;)
I will post some of the darker scenes this weekend.

Jack Quinn

Zillah wrote:

Hearing it spoken is fine. I'd reccomend using a comma to iply the tempo of how "like" is use in this sense. Its like, totally better this way.

Like i'm like, totally like, do you know what i mean like?

shiv

Brilliant. Hilarious. Almost...genius.

is_that_so

I skimmed through it and I think it does have potential but it needs lot more work. The guy is unattractive which is fine. I thought paragraphs one and the last couple work well enough but for the rest tbh I think the word rambling springs to mind. You have included an awful lot of ideas which are not developed and there is a bit too much over-reference to other works -e.g. American Psycho and Cosmo. The text would benefit from taking some of the ideas out and using them somewhere else.

There are also some odd terms like "hippie vibe" and "fop".
"hippie vibe" evokes the beatniks - and the word "fop" is Hugh Grant.
It means that you can end up with a very confusing style.

Overall it is something that could work providing you get a distinctive style and a narrative that supports it. Sometimes less is more. I would suggest using just paragraph one and say two others to do the introduction and see how it looks then.
Trust the reader to fill in the gaps on the character. Can I also suggest that you look at the title and make it something snappier? Good luck with it.

Jack Quinn

What and take all the fun out of it? Not on your life Surely then it'd be in grave danger of becoming a serious work of fiction
Sorry it wasn't for you. Thanks for the comments and suggestions. You're right about the title.

Jack Quinn

shiv wrote:

Brilliant. Hilarious. Almost...genius.

Aww tnx! You make me feel all warm and fuzzy. It's always nice to me a fellow fan of my work

shiv

Jack Quinn wrote:

Aww tnx! You make me feel all warm and fuzzy. It's always nice to me a fellow fan of my work

It appears you are already President of your own fan club. In that case, I'm happy to be VP

Jack Quinn

you've only yourself to blame:D

Jack Quinn

shiv wrote:

It appears you are already President of your own fan club. In that case, I'm happy to be VP

Welcome to the club VP Shiv. Now all we need is a sadist to be chief whip...oh and it's customary to have a couple of genuine fan members too:D