# 92

'It was on the day of my twenty-first birthday that dad introduced me to The Tony Clifton Experience. I remember being really anxious then, although I'm unsure now exactly why that was. Mum was infatuated with alternative cooking ingredients and techniques. She was slightly koo-koo, if you know the meaning of koo-koo. She used beetroots, ornamental cabbages and lotus roots in everything we ate. I hated her food so much. Maybe my selective long-term memory loss and hearing impairment stems from chronic diarrhea at the hands of mum's Lucky Dip Stews. I don't rightly know.

'I remember dad held me by the hand and said: "Son, this will change your life. As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is my witness - oh, what a stunning sky-hook - you mark my words dear fellow, this experience will change your life. And you will look back on this moment," he said to me, "and forever remember the exact nature of your business on the day you first laid eyes on The Tony Clifton Experience."

'Dad was a big fan of American sports like basketball and frisbee. To this day, I don't find anything attractive about basketball: even the seats on the floor near the players. There's so much body odour that I would rather be at home playing frisbee by myself.

'It was at that moment that I realised that dad's attraction to men didn't include his own man-children like me and my brothers. Family bath time between the ages of six to sixteen was just as innocent as a snowflake landing on a breast. I now know this for a fact because I have seen it with my own eyes and felt it with my own penis. When I learned that I had no reason to feel ashamed of my punctual erections when dad added hot water to the tub, I felt saddened by the revelation. It was not the guilt of a man-child whose mind had regressed to when it was eight years old and finally made sense of its stimuli: it was the guilt that only a Catholic man-child can understand. There is no quantifiable number to raise it to a deserved place of abominable significance.

'Dad and I spent the rest of that glorious night behind the 8cm computer monitor in the attic. We were glued to the evolving story lines without a clue where each bend in the plot would take us. We were like two peas cast into a blender as the writers' index fingers gathered sweat on the on/off switch. Holding each other's hand, dad scrolled down the page with his right hand as I read each word in between laughing convulsions and tears of unadulterated joy. My stomach and pancreas were on fire from the deft wit of those five crazy wordsmiths.

'It was the last time I saw dad alive. Mum said that he died peacefully in his sleep from a massive brain embolism, though none of us, his four proud man-boys, heard his screams. I blamed Ludo, Erik and Hansel for many years. I was further from admitting the truth than I would ever remember.

'The Tony Clifton Experience got me through the good times and the bad.'


- An excerpt from From the Da Vinci Code to my S-bend in One Fell Swoop by Latrelle Hallenbrumby-Werderberg, 46, Professor of Biomechanics, the University of Oslo.