One Australian Woman and One Hundred and Twenty-Five Southern Men

“Beautiful bitch, I could consider this a simple glitch,

yeah just a hopeless stitch in time, but then for your crimes,

please find yourself a little guilty with these lines…”

- Gomez, “Rosalita”, Liquid Skin

One day I threw out all of my possessions, packed my bags and left the country. At the ripe old age of twenty-five I abandoned Australia to seek unknown adventures in The United States of America. I had no master-plan, I just needed to be somewhere else, anywhere else. My only plan was to escape. I knee jerked and bought a one way ticket to leave my heavy heart behind and anything that would remind of it. I thought that I would be away for perhaps a full year, two at the most. Just enough time for me to rebuild my scarred heart and for local gossip to find something new to discuss.

It has now been eighteen years as I sit here writing this today.

I arrived in this new country in 1996 with the intention of adding some knotches to my very green career belt. I was consumed with purpose, I saw opportunities everywhere and I was passionate enough to stomp right through those career doors and announce myself to this new world. I was determined and confident in my introductions. I had the legs of a twenty-five year old and a suitcase of clothes to match. I was full of bravado and courage.

My concerned family and friends asked the question, why?

My responses were filled with “I am unsatisfied with my career options in Australia” and was “simply seeking better opportunities”. I had “out-grown Australia”, I was “better than this” and needed “more”. This is what I told my new curious American friends also, who knew nothing of my homeland, they knew no better so they nodded with acceptance. I was driven with purpose and that purpose was career. After all, I was a strong independent woman, just how my parents had raised me to be. I had no fear and I had no boundaries, I could do anything. My father had always told me that “you can do anything you set your mind too”. So I set my mind to re-create myself in a foreign land, without consequence and without much more thought than that. I was all woman and full of roar.

I was also full of bullshit.

In my private moments I reluctantly felt my truth trying to be heard above the noise of my own rhetoric. It was a quiet exhausted voice, a murmur really, that of a hurt lost child, so tired and weak that it gave up trying to be heard moments later until the next time it would be brave enough to try. The truth was that I had left my homeland to escape my heartbreak after a long five year relationship of great torture and greater passion. I was not sure where to go or what to do. I had grown from a twenty year girl to a twenty-five year old woman under the shadow of a very dominant personality. Now standing on my own amongst strangers I was not certain of what I was doing at all, let alone having any forward planning in mind. I was just hoping for the best and trying not to think about the weight of pain that I had left back in Melbourne. I did not like the person I had become there and I was desperate to be someone else. Anyone else.

The first great heartbreak of youth tears savagely. It wasn’t my first love but it was certainly my first great love as an adult and had sculptured my heart like soft clay in the hands of a well versed artist. I was too young to know what was possible and what was not. I was just too damn young to know anything. Our story was an embattled one of drug addictions and youthful violent passion set in the late night streets of club life and dirty afternoon sheets. I often battled to find my own voice standing beside him. He was a gracious, admiring and supportive man, yet his personality was a strong one and he thrived on attention. After all, he was stage trained for the theatre, a performer, he knew how to project his voice and find the spotlight in any room. I had none of these skills and just stumbled along hoping to find my own secure thoughts some day. Most of the time I just tried to look as pretty as I could and hid quietly in the shadows of his glow and hoped that someday I would have my own stance on things with my own voice to project.

After five years it had become a dead-end. I threw the first punch. I smashed the first window. I threw him out of the house. I threw my belongings away. I packed my bags.

I had felt that my life was on the line. To stay in Australia meant to remain the lifeless soul I felt I had become. I did not believe that I had the strength to stay. I was still under his shadow. I had put myself there. I did not know how to get out of it and breathe on my own. A foreign land with it’s beckoning anonymity allowed me to find air. Being a stranger offered personal reinvention in front of a brand new audience. In this new country I noticed that people actually laughed at my jokes. People smiled at me as I walked into a room. These things hadn’t happened to me in a long time. Granted I hadn’t told a joke or walked into a room smiling for what seemed like a much longer time, but at this point in my life I did not see that correlation. Instead I just gasped like a strung out junkie at the new life that I was pushing into my old veins and I liked how it felt. I was hooked. I did not look back.

I filled my mind with career ambition and allowed my words to convince myself of the wisdom and purpose flowing within me. I was driven with a professional cause that led me to explore a country that I truthfully had no prior interest in or attraction too. It all seemed a little boring to be honest, this America. It seemed all too familiar in many ways, quite bland and uniform in it’s architecture and day to day lifestyle; as opposed to images of Asia or Europe that floated out of magazines into my romantic head. However, the Americans welcomed me with great admiring attention and my young ego took to it willingly. My ego was stroked. I was addicted.

With a heavy determined footstep I began my new life in America. A path that would take me from the dirty winter slush of Detroit Motor City to the denim clad streets of Music City, Nashville Tennessee via the Caribbean Islands, Los Angeles, New York City and 72 cities in between. It would also bring 125 Southern Men into my life that would change me forever.

Time passes as life happens. Or is it that life happens as time passes? Either way, before I was aware of it the two year American stint had become four, then six and then ten. Time passes each day apparently at the same pace that it did the day before and at the same pace it will tomorrow. Yet there are years that have flown by in the embrace of a lover’s sigh and other years that have lingered leaving a solidified stain on my personal history. I realize that I have learnt and experienced a great deal, yet at the same time I cannot truly comprehend what exactly all of this time abroad has really been about. As I mentioned earlier, there has been no master-plan.

Life happens, time passes.

In Australia I was a young Indie city girl, with a fashionable hip and cultured just enough on Underground European fashion magazines and dusty Russian novels to convince myself that I was at least, slightly intriguing. I had celebrity friends and lovers, a job that had me at every inner city theatre, gallery or club opening. I lived off opening night ordearves and champagne. I knew how to smile and throw the rhetoric of world politics and events into the conversation, as Australians love to do. I knew just enough to appear like I actually knew something about the world. I also had the social sense to leave these conversations just in time not to be challenged on my words. To be challenged would only reveal that I truly had no idea what I was talking about.

My world was filled with impressionable encounters, city street culture, social anxiety, drugs, sexual discoveries and fiery public arguments fueled with property damage and neighbourhood disturbances. I was also fueled by old university library books and an overactive romantic mind loaded with the images of Dali and Francis Bacon and the words of Dostoyevsky and Bulgakov. I walked the streets seeing the world as my own black and white avante guarde film, and as my one and only reviewer it was clearly a masterpiece!

My life in America saw me float into a realistic world and also one of obscene fantasy and indulgence. I floated through worlds of extreme wealth and also of poverty. Yet I lived, married and divorced within the extreme middle ground. I dined with adored American celebrities all the while not having a clue who they were, nor particulary caring. I slept in tin cans with dozens of men, I travelled the country in a career that thousands only dream about. I stood in front of thousands more and smirked at the irrelevance of their mass presence, yet was warmed by their joint sentiment at the very same time.

I’ve been stubborn and proud, yet humbled and humiliated. I’ve held the hands of people burning in their own private hell and I’ve watched others bloom in unexpected grace. I’ve seen the character of Men as I’ve journeyed along this path.

This is the story of one Australian girl and the 125 Southern Men that changed her life.

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To Be Continued...

Copyright Helena Pigrum. 2020.