Loulou Callister-Baker’s flatmate discovered some mysterious boxes in the attic, full of the possessions of a man who clearly experienced a textbook midlife crisis. Impressed by his adherence to Mills & Boon-level stereotypes, she tells the story of the man’s life.
Sometime last month, I walked into the kitchen and noticed my flatmate’s legs dangling from the attic. I didn’t think anything of it. My flatmate never can keep still – the handmade stilts on which his bed is propped up are evidence of that, as are the miscellaneous burnt objects around the flat and the kitchen stools that are suddenly missing their screws. However, when my flatmate emerged from the attic with a large cardboard box in his arms, my curiosity was piqued.
Four cardboard boxes sat on the kitchen bench, illuminated by the ceiling lights. All five of us deliberated whether to open them. I referred to the boxes as “chattels” to convey my rarefied third-year legal knowledge. The others ignored me. When I started using legal buzzwords like “finders,” “reversionary interest,” and “Residential Tenancies Act,” the majority voted to evict me from the deliberations. Without me, they decided to open the boxes.
When we first moved into our flat two years ago, the flat was filled with furniture and personal items, only a few of which belonged to previous tenants – the rest were our landlord’s. Intrigued by the flat’s sense of abandonment, I thoroughly explored the den underneath the house, but I ran away when I discovered the room’s secret fireplace. My discovery earned downstairs the name “Fritzl’s”. We considered hosting surprise S & M parties down there, but the plans got all tied up. However, until the discovery of the cardboard boxes in the attic, all we knew about our current landlords was that they lived in Hawaii and were desperate to sell the place.
In the first box we opened, underneath an opened package of soap and half a packet of sanitary pads was a stack of leaflets and booklets about properties in Napier, Wanaka, and Dunedin. The Napier property had photographs of each room in the house, revealing terrifying interior design – plush sofas, pink and brown paint combinations, fake pot plants, and sterile white Venetian blinds. From Napier, the couple appeared to have moved to Wanaka then Dunedin.
There was only one photo album to guide our speculation. All the photos were of either snow or people sitting around a table at a BBQ. The other photos were the distorted results of fingers accidently covering the lens. I titled the photo album “The Brief Wanaka Days – Mildly Fun Adventures Were Had”.
The photo album did provide one essential clue. There was a photo of a Japanese man with shoulder length brown hair. Next to him was a tall, blonde, curly-haired woman wearing a David Bain jumper. Both of them held dogs. No, Poirot, the dogs weren’t the clue – the jumper was. We found the same patterned jumper in the box (unfortunately the small Japanese man must have got away). I was now certain the blonde woman is the female half of our landlord pair. But who was her male counterpart? Was he the one taking the photos? Or the Japanese man?
This jumper tells us that David Bain jumpers were around before David Bain wore them. However, it took a rampant, murderous attack to make the style cool.
A stray card addressed to “Mom” revealed further information. Despite a noticeable lack of punctuation, the card was a heartfelt message from a daughter thanking her “mom” for her upbringing in the oldest Hawaiian island, Kauai.
Unfortunately, the card revealed little else – there was no mention of “Dad”, or a date, or who the daughter was. All we know is that the “mom” came to New Zealand from Hawaii, and to Hawaii she returned.
Despite uncertainty as to what the man in the relationship looks like, most of the remaining items pointed to a male enduring an outrageously clichéd mid-life crisis. It was emotional. It was messy. It was practically pornographic. We found a scattering of song lyrics scrawled on scrap paper, chords and all. One song, dated 10 April 2005, spoke of “A vision or a dream / Just over tahe horizon / Fulfillment of all my needs”. Another song, dated October 19, cunningly rhymed, “Every time I try to speak / I find my voice too weak.” James Blunt would be put to shame.
With the current explosion of D&B on the music scene, lyrics and guitar chords are relics from another age.
The strange collection of books only solidified my hypotheses. Titles included Why I Love Black Women, Gypsy Songman, and Cheiro’s Language of the Hand. The few stray Jodi Picoult novels spoke volumes.
The pičce de resistance of this mid-life crisis was obvious. When I picked up an art book from one box, a waterfall of sketched and painted nudes fell to the floor. The sketched nudes were so hastily drawn you could practically feel the artist’s on-the-verge-of-exploding boner. There were squatting nudes, nudes opening curtains, nudes with bowls of fruit. The faces of the nudes had no details, but the nipples on the breasts were noticeably emphasised – the artist was a “nipple” guy. Two things struck me most about the nudes. The main model was definitely pregnant, and she had long, dark hair, as opposed to blonde and curly! Who was this imposter? Whose baby was she about to have? Why was she running around naked?
Disturbingly, since we discovered them, the paintings have gone missing. I fear that one unnamed flatmate may have appropriated them for his own voyage of self-discovery.
Drawing nudes poorly is a classic sign of being middle-aged.
The most curious item of all threw our entire flat into a paranoid frenzy, and that was before we smoked it. Students watch the film Scarfies and laugh at the familiar shittiness of the flatting conditions – the coldness, the dirtiness, the drunkenness. Students do not watch Scarfies thinking that they’ll find huge amounts of weed growing in their flat’s basement – but my flat should have taken notes. Among the miscellaneous evidence of a mid-life crisis was an old pick’n’mix bag filled with marijuana, or, as one friend calls it, dank nugs. You might not think a tinny’s worth of weed is a big deal – every fourth student has that on them at all times. But why would someone up and leave for Hawaii before finishing off a couple of jays’ worth? So far I’ve posited several worrying conclusions: it’s a setup and if we are bad tenants they’re going to call the cops on us; it’s memorabilia of the landlords’ reigns as drug lords; or, in a gesture of ironic reverse-paranoia, they wanted us to find it. Bewildered, we did the only thing we could do. We smoked it.
As the pressure on my bulging eyeballs lessened, I began to form my own conclusions about the mysterious male half (I call him Bob, the female is Dineen) of our landlord couple. Dineen’s fling with a small Japanese man, which involved playing dress-up as sexy Hamtaro hamsters, ended abruptly when she won a Yu Gi Oh game by using the rare Blue-Eyes White Dragon card. As Dineen played her trump card, the dragon itself emerged from the card and proceeded to pierce the Japanese man with its thick, black talons, then carry his little body far away. Dineen was devastated. Luckily, the next week, during a particularly raging night at the Dunedin Casino, Dineen met Bob. As Dineen sipped moodily on her pińa colada, dwelling on her recent misfortunes, she locked eyes with a man wearing a yellow shirt tucked into high-waisted jeans. It was love at first sight.
Things moved quickly, and soon Bob moved in with Dineen. For a few months life was good. However, on one chilling Tuesday, a feverish case of midlife crisis suddenly descended on Bob. There was nothing Dineen could do. Bob began to dwell obsessively on painful topics, including things he hadn’t achieved, young women who weren’t attracted to him, repressed sexual tensions he felt towards his mother, and being a disappointment in the eyes of his father (who was also called Bob). Eventually, Bob began to attend live nude drawing classes. However, like his songwriting, Bob’s dabbling in the art world failed miserably. Bob was asked to stop attending the art classes when his hard-on accidentally slipped from behind his easel and hit the art teacher in her stomach.
The final straw for Dineen was when she discovered Bob in the bathroom reading the novel Why I Love Black Women. Bob mistakenly thought the door was locked. By then, Dineen knew it was over. As her time in the Bronx taught her, once you go black there’s no going back. After Dineen confronted Bob, he thanked her for helping him realise what he was truly looking for. Bob signed up to volunteer for an unnamed charity, and took the next plane to Ethiopia. Hopefully he never progressed from midlife crisis to colonialist genocide. After all her adventures down under, Dineen had also had enough of our country, and returned home to Hawaii. These days, rumour has it that Dineen has found a nice man and, after signing several contracts, the two plan to spend the rest of their days in the bedroom acting out Fifty Shades of Lil-blow and Stitch (up my gash you sadistic monkey).
The landlords’ collection of books reveal their interest in the historical lifestyle of the hippie and also their dislike of Republicans.
Despite the speculation, the cumulative effect of the objects left behind took the form of a big, black question mark. Did the owners want the objects to be discovered? Do they hope their paintings and songs will reach a wider audience? Were they planning on coming back?
On examining the objects, I realised that they all represented different burdens. When they left, the home’s owners chose what to take with them. The things they left behind have created their own histories, with gaps of unknown sizes and significance left for our own interpretation. As Julian Barnes put it in The Sense of an Ending, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
Last month the property was finally sold, and any connections we had with the past owners came to an end. We put the boxes (minus a few items of clothing and art supplies) back where we found them. As we forget about them, someone else will no doubt find them. Whoever it is, he or she will probably give away out the boxes’ contents immediately to various thrift shops. The unsaleable items, like the photographs in the cracked photo frames, will go to the dump.
