Get out! And do it before you crash into 40

I’ve got a problem. This year I turned 40. Well, I didn’t exactly turn 40. I hate that phrase … “I turned 40” feels like the same use of the word “turn” you reserve for dairy that’s been left out too long. I didn’t turn 40. I hit 40.

I hit it with the same speed, enthusiasm and texture of a glob of snot sneezed from the nostril of a toddler sliding down the window of a tram on a hot day. I did not approach it with grace or maturity, with calm or zen.

Reuben Kaye says that one winter in London his world and mind exploded. He was part of the world instead of viewing it from a distance.Credit: Dylan Coker

Unlike some people, who love getting older with the same rampant enthusiasm reserved for mad cultists or someone trying to explain to you at a party that drinking their own urine has done wonders for their health as their breath has a vague whiff of a party I once went to in Berlin, with a lot of glass coffee tables and rubber sheets.

I hit 40 with a slow groan, with the unstoppable, devastating force of a planetary collision. Knees and spine crackled, molars loosened, skin sagged and sneezing began to hurt. And suddenly I started shouting at kids to get off my lawn. I don’t even have a lawn, and I’m not even sure they are kids. I think they might be ibises and I need glasses. Glasses!

And I’m supposed to live another 40 years after this? How? To tell the truth, I never thought I’d live ’til 40. I thought for sure I’d die in some cartel shoot-out, or from back-alley Botox, or possibly a BDSM mishap … which is now my new drag name – “Please welcome to the stage: BDSM Mishap!” – taking over from my previous moniker Vaseline Dion or my back-up, Queef Wellington.

Reuben Kaye during a cabaret performance.Credit:

My issue is that at 40, looking back, I have a lot of summers to choose from. The summer I went to Amsterdam and realised, with the aid of a passing water polo team, that the body is a wonderful and at times capacious thing. The summer I went to one of the last Big Day Outs and realised that the nose isn’t meant to be a two-way street, but with a little help and a distracted sniffer dog at the entry you can have a hell of a time!

But if I had to pick a summer that changed it all, then it isn’t a summer at all. It was an unforgiving British winter that I charged headlong into after buying a one-way ticket to London in 2010. I wasn’t getting any work in Australia. The entertainment industry gave me the warm welcome usually reserved for war criminals and close talkers with cold sores.

I had been fired from every club, bar and restaurant that you care to name for a variety of transgressions that included in no particular order: being drunk on shift; having sex in the bathroom on shift (not worth it); having sex behind the bar whilst on shift (worth it); accidentally setting fire to myself and a patron (not a joke), to name a few.

I landed square in the middle of London bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and full of misguided optimism and trust. In one week I was robbed twice, bitten by a dog, pushed in front of a train and I won’t say hit by a car, but I was gently nudged by a Prius. (They’re so quiet.)

But within a week I had also bullshitted my way into a job as a butler in a members’ club in Pall Mall, serving sherry to the gin-blossomed aristocracy who were too rich, entitled and gout-ridden to get up and get a damn drink themselves.

And I had found promising accommodation … a bus outside a pub in Stepney Way. For 40 quid a week. A bargain. The bus had been gutted and had a mattress, a bench and table and a heater that only sometimes sparked. It was connected to mains power via an extension cord that ran out the window, over the sidewalk and into the pub that another butler was living in and dealing drugs out of. If only the club members knew or cared, but they were busy justifying marrying their first cousins to keep the money in the family and the vaguest idea of a definable chin out of the gene pool.

Snow, sleet and rain stabbed its way through the windows and cracks, and at night I would have to pile all my clothes on to keep warm. Real Dickensian stuff. Then I would go to work for the uber-rich and, as revenge, steal silverware. Sliding cutlery into my socks, cruet sets in my sleeves or, once, a full candelabra under a coat. I would skol port, stuff my face with pigeon and eat paté with a spoon when my manager wasn’t looking.

For almost half a year, while also auditioning and seeing some of the best theatre, art and music of my life, I lived in this bus that slowly started to look like Versailles as I purloined more and more silverware and ate more and more like a renaissance pope.

And because of that job, that bus and that drug-dealing butler squatting in a pub, I could live in London. I could audition for shows, I could travel, I could party. And in one winter my world and mind exploded. I was part of the world instead of viewing it from a distance.

And now, whenever someone says to me, “what should I do?” I say get out. Leave your home. Go on the adventure. You learn nothing from the comfort of the known. Just do it now … because I cannot imagine living in a bus at 40.

Singer, writer, drag artist and comedian Reuben Kaye will be performing his show, The Kaye Hole, as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras on February 21 at The Factory Theatre. Tickets at reubenkaye.com.

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