Schadenfreude

At the risk of sounding like someone who’s just missed their last few psychotherapy appointments, I had a vaguely erotic dream about Sam the Photographer last night. We were lazing like happy lizards by a sun-drenched pool when some random aspirational supermodel fell face first into the chlorinated depths after she catwalked too close to the tiled edge. Laugh? We nearly snored.
I’ll spare you the erotic ephemera except to say that schadenfreude has always been an odd fetish of mine, something I’m confident I can trace back to languid teenage hours spent watching Allen Funt make an enjoyable misery of people’s lives for Candid Camera.
Oh, really? You just opened the door to the men’s bathroom and it’s actually a closet? Ha bloody ha. Your show kills me, Mister Funt.














Sam the Photographer is a new friend who I met at a cocktail party a few weeks ago. We bonded over merlot and stolen cigarettes and swapped stories about Oliver Sacks’ facial blindness and where one might go fishing with a hand reel if the Sydney tides were favourable.
We must have spoken for at least an hour before he stopped me mid-sentence with an awkward smile on his face and revealed that we’d actually met ten years before.
“We have?”
“Yes,” Sam assured me, “do you remember being at the Courthouse Hotel on the night of September 11?”
I paused for a moment and thought back to that cold spring evening a decade ago. I had just closed the doors of the Bookshop Darlinghurst when I heard over the radio some strange report about a building in New York exploding with flames. I was tired and hungry and didn’t think much about it, but when I wandered across to the pub for a cleansing ale it became clear that something was terribly wrong.
Every patron was glued to the bank of televisions and was watching in perplexed silence as the second plane hit its target over and over again. No one was speaking much except to explain to each newcomer what had occurred so far.
I bought a beer and sat by myself but I remember a young man sidling up to me and asking what I thought it all meant. I don’t know I mumbled, and we both watched as images of a smoking Pentagon flashed onto the screens.
Sam recalls that I bought him a beer, but looking back now I wished I’d asked him to come home with me, even if it was just to have a warm body to lie next to until the September 12 sun peeked over the horizon.