THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

NOTHING, LIKE SOMETHING, HAPPENS ANYWHERE (PHILIP LARKIN)
The man in the pizza store the other day asked me what I did. “you know for a living.” I told him I was a gigolo. It was an instinctive answer that Freud would have been proud of. Completely unfazed he said “so you won’t be wanting any garlic bread then.”
The truth is of course somewhat more prosaic, which is perhaps why I’m not even going to go into it here. Sometimes it’s just so much more interesting to lie. When asked “what do you do?” my standard rely is “fish”, not because I don’t my job but I refuse to be defined in sole terms of my employment. I'm much more three dimensional than that.
On the way home I saw Ron, the man from next door, in the shared driveway. He was sitting in his charcoal suit camouflaged on the bonnet of his metallic- grey commodore seemingly trying to blend in unnoticed. His black shirt and tie were making a statement. Unfortunately the statement was that everything this man touches turns to dark neutral. The white of his face reflected enough moonlight to read by. Never, never, ever, say “how’s it going.” because one day some bugger is going to tell you.
That afternoon Ron’s boss had called him into his office day and said, “Ron,” because he had just read his name on a personnel file. “Ron, you know the company has been undergoing a series of reorganisations.”
“Yeah, well that’s only because you keep sacking people…..Oh !”
And so Ron had been retrenched and couldn’t face his beautiful Italian wife, the Magnificent Gelatti.
I told him it would be all right, after all it wasn’t as if anyone had died.
“True.” Ron agreed, “the bastard was still breathing when I left.”
I asked him how he was off for money. I don’t know why it isn’t as if we were mates, and even if we were I haven’t any spare lying around anyway.
“Well I’ve been given all my holiday pay as a lump sum so with my wages I’ve got enough for a couple of months. With that and my wife’s job we’ll be OK thanks.”
I breathed a sigh of relief for both of us.
“I mean if I went to the casino and put it all on lucky seven,” He said. “..and won. Well I’d have enough money to last about eight years.”
It was good to see him being so constructive.
After half an hour I took the cold pizzas inside.
The next day I saw Ron drive off early as if to work. A journey he repeated the following day as well. I bumped into him that afternoon in a coffee shop.
“You’ll have to tell her sometime mate,” I reasoned. He told me that he would just as soon as prevailing climatic conditions in the underworld took a turn for the worse. Thus reassured I decided to mind my own business.
At the weekend Ron and Gelatti had a barbecue, and kindly invited us round. My initial reaction was to decline, my wife’s to accept - so we went.
I didn’t know any of the people there except Ron, Gelatti and Penni, one of the lesbians from next door. Penni was in the same boat, her partner Venus had gone off for a week to meditate. To Penni meditation is what you do in Safeway’s' when you’re trying to choose which soap power to buy. Rather than spend the afternoon discussing home brand laundry products my wife had, like a raspberry stain left in a bucket overnight with a really good pre-wash, completely disappeared. Penni does however have one redeeming quality, she laughs at my jokes. Actually she has two, the other being that she’s a top mechanic, but this was a skill she had been unable to demonstrate all afternoon while cooking meat over burning charcoal.
Ron and Gelatti, in the process of circulating, both arrived together. Penni asked Ron what he did, “you know for a living.” Ron told her he was a gigolo. He was still wearing black but in other areas my influence has been profound. Penni explained that she used to do a bit of that as well, “in St Kilda mostly.” There followed an awkward silence.
At about eleven that night there was an almighty slamming of doors, and screeching of tyres from next door. Ron had just told the Magnificent Gelatti and she had taken it all rather well, having first packed it into a set of executive suitcase to protect it on the journey.
A short while later Ron appeared at the door with a bottle of scotch in one hand and a wedding photo in the other. I could quickly tell that he’d drunk a lot, it wasn’t even his own wedding photo. I gathered that she had left. In fact she had even refused to even tell him where she was going. Between swigs from his bottle he murmured “cut him off dead” over and over. We retired to his living room and had what can only be described as “a quiet drink” if your usual drinking partners are Richard Harris and Robbie Williams. Before I left we’d made rough plans to go off on a road trip together, and one day we might, but at the time I guess merely planning ahead was a start.
While Venus is away Penni has a houseguest, Miranda. Miranda until a week ago was called Michael and is staying there while “she” recovers from some fairly drastic surgery. Apparently Miranda’s wife had originally agreed to the operation, but her support had, like the Magnificent Gelatti, since rather melted away. I learned all this from Penni as she was fixing my clutch. I also learned how to get engine oil off concrete, (Free Tip - with cloudy ammonia.) Anyway in exchange I told her about Ron and the Magnificent Gelatti.
“So he’s not a gigolo then ?”
“No,” I explained. “that was just a joke.”
“Well if you’d said it I would have known it was a joke.”
Compliments can be tricky things.
As we were cleaning up Ron came round to help. He looked terrible but we could tell that he meant business because he was wearing grey overalls. I made us all tea and a square meal, a cheese sandwich.
As I played mum, having first joked that I should invite Miranda round to do so, Penni asked Ron, “So what are you going to do now then ?”
“Get another job.”
“but why ?”
Ron was knocked backwards. Fifteen years in management had left him unable to challenge his own paradigms. By instinct or intuition Penni had seemingly realised this.
I fetched a sheet of paper and we started to play "What Colour is my Parachute", mapping out Ron’s future. Soon we had four lists, what Ron felt he was good at, and bad at, what he liked or wanted and finally what didn’t want or hated. Within fifteen minutes he knew his boss had made a good decision to eliminate him from the team. But above everything he also realised the most important thing to him in his life was Gelatti, wherever she had gone to. Nothing else was as important, she was "The Catch of his Life."  Priority one then - Pursue her and win her back. After all that was what would make him happy not what he did “you know for a living.”