Читать книгу The Odd Amorous Adventures of the Gay Gingerbread Man - Alex Roth - Страница 2

Was it because he was the Gingerbread Man that one couldn’t catch him- But why would anyone want to catch him? Was he handsome? Was he sexy? Not exactly. Sometimes he had a beard, sometimes not. He said that he had a beard when he wanted to hide. From whom? From all those women that were running after him. How about the men? It seems that he was only a Gingerbread can’t catch me man for women. He liked being caught by men, so this story is about his adventures with the opposite sex. We know very little about that part of his life that dealt with his own sex, so we have not written very much about that here.

The Gingerbread Man had kept up the long hair fashion of the 70’s, when he was young and his running days began. His hair was long all round with a small bald patch on top. Most unfortunate, especially that as the years went on, his hair style did not change but the bald patch grew, it grew larger and larger but did not make him look any less attractive because his charm made his faults invisible. Once he was conscious of the tremendous advantages of his charm, he began using it quite early in his career. His early years are a bit misty, he never talked much about them. Besides waiting at tables, he went to university and worked at KFC.

I forgot to mention his twinkly blue eyes. All those he charmed mention the twinkly blue eyes that accompanied his smile. No one mentions his shapely legs. These days shapely legs are not in fashion. It’s bottoms all round. Bottoms are often mentioned and are regarded as the most important part of a man’s anatomy. This is unfortunate, because once upon a time legs were IN. What about Betty Grable and the Second World War? Would we have won the war without her legs in every soldier’s locker room, to encourage him to fight and not only for liberty? What about Henry V111 and his famous jousting legs. No one looked at Henry’s bottom then. In any case looking at someone’s bottom when jousting on a horse would have required considerable effort. Henry was regarded as a handsome figure of a man, not because of his bottom, but because of his legs. Unfortunately, our Gingerbread Man was born four hundred years too late. So, he must rely on his charm and his twinkly eyes, every day of the week except Sundays. As will be noted later, Sundays he reserved for his special person of the moment. Then he would put on his shorts (he was not unaware of his shapely legs) and go tramping around the countryside with his legs and special person. I hope this is enough to bowl you over, if it did, you are by no means alone.

That is all mundane and uninteresting stuff, but what about sex? Great legs and twinkly eyes, no matter how blue do not make up for the real thing – surely, he was not always chaste? The story of his early sex life is more or less as follows. The reason it is less rather than more is because the information was obtained during a conversation about something else, namely could a man be raped? The rather innocent university girl with a limited imagination (obviously only recently come out from a convent boarding school) said a man could definitely not be raped. Well, said our Gingerbread man, I once had to run away from a man in a car and you are wrong. That was all he said so did something happen or did the fiddling about in the car fail? There was also another girl during his years at university who had not gone to a convent and was rather more conversant with sex than the first one. This was his first experience and he remarked once it was all over, he went and sat on the roof of the university residence and thought to himself, that was easy, I can do this anytime I want to. An odd comment. Why would he doubt that he could do this any time he wanted to? This is the first indication that all is not what it seems. That is all we know of his early encounters with sex. Although the above information is not a part of his later adventures and can hardly be regarded as “racy” (unless you had just left a convent boarding school) it had to be included because in this tale, chaste at no time meant impotent.

His first conquest was the daughter of a wealthy Italian building contractor in Perth. He himself came from a lower class of gingerbread whose origins he kept to himself, all we do know is his parents did not think it necessary for a Gingerbread man to be given a watch so how they thought he could tell what the time was we can’t imagine. Sometimes he would boast of his lonely French godmother, smelling as she did, of Chanel No.5, whom he visited in Paris. The size of the Eiffel Tower he found impress but does not enlighten his listeners with additional information. What about the Louvre? What about Versailles? What about telling us how he got such an upper crust godmother when his parents couldn’t even buy him a watch? On his father’s side he came from good convict stock, of course – did I mention this story is set in Australia? Well, it is and in Australia coming from convict stock adds a touch of not exactly class, but interesting antecedents. An additional touch was the great-grandfather who bravely fought at Gallipoli. He had neither convict, Gallipoli nor French connections. But his stories still stirred the heart, he was so adroit at telling them, which he did, now and then, when his charm needed a bit of a hands-up, so to speak.