Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Uncategorized Obit Fiona Wright He had good ideas in the shower, he was sitting upright heroically typing away on his computer – he improvised the filthiest, bawdiest limericks you can possibly imagine. A magazine had commissioned me to write thumbnail sketches of every war going on in the world — ‘unequivocally the most disgusting article I have ever read,’ he later said. But provocation was fun like the unbuttoning of a stripper’s overcoat, promising delights to come. I made a circumcision joke about snipping his name, and he remembered the old Fascist slogan – many enemies, much honour but my heart is far too reptilian for that. ‘Hello, comrade,’ he said, his glass already gratefully extended, ‘This is a real revo.’ He could be a real shit if you fell on the wrong side of his favour. ‘I don’t usually start this early, but holding yourself to a drinking schedule is always the first sign of alcoholism.’ I offered him a welcome-to-the-war shot of ‘Listerine’, just to be hospitable, or for that jumpstart he could administer so well. ‘Fuck off!’ he replied – he later wrote a paean to the expression — and then ‘I see you were feeling eeyorish about Macedonia last week.’ By 1 a.m. I was speechless with drink and he was in spate. He and I embraced each other on a street corner like parting lovers dressed in preposterous hot pants and high heeled suede boots: two cheese sandwiches, a couple of bananas. ‘Brunch? Sunday? Smooch.’ I think of it as Manhattan teatime. Fiona Wright Fiona Wright’s new essay collection is The World Was Whole (Giramondo, 2018). Her first book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for nonfiction, and her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior. More by Fiona Wright › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 19 April 2024 · Friday Fiction Stilted J.E “Mahal” Cuya One hour after midnight. Everyone in rooms. Living room – dark. Table look like monsters. Like death. TV on stand. Netflix Logo. No one watching. Residents asleep. They have dementia. 18 April 202418 April 2024 · Education A Jellyfish government in NSW: public education’s privatisation-by-neglect Dan Hogan A private school that receives public money is not a private school: it is a fee-paying public school. The overfunding of private schools using public money is a symptom of a public service that has been rotted for a quarter of century by a political class with no vision beyond producing dubious, misleading statistics to deploy at the next election.