The Prince Who Tried to Grow a Goatee

Chaff, sometime in 1995

Once upon a time, a long long time ago in 1995, there lived a handsome prince named Julius. He was a happy and well-adjusted young man, who came from a secure and loving family and had had all his material needs lavishly fulfilled throughout his life. The castle he lived in was wonderful and huge and stocked with every imaginable leisure activity that can be purchased on the free market. Julius was a thoughtful and pleasant prince, who liked to play the clarinet and watch Jean Claude Van Damme movies.

One day Julius was flipping through some magazines that were lying around the dining room, as he idly completed another level of Doom II singing loudly along with Offspring. Something about the moody photos in the glossy zines caught his attention.

"Hmmm," he pondered, "all the young men in these pictures have a very similar pattern of facial hair. They're all growing small amounts around their chins and lips. It looks quite.. different. Sort of... dangerous, yet... sensitive."

He got up off the couch and strolled to the mirror.

"How do you think I would look with facial hair, Mum?" he enquired of the queen, who was just then passing through on her way out. He peered at his reflection in the mirror and stroked his chin thoughtfully.

"A goatee?" his mother responded. "They're very in right now... I think they look rather attractive, if done properly. You'd definitely suit it, darling. Now don't forget to get dinner out of the freezer at 6 because there's no way in hell I'll get out of the office and back through that traffic before half past."

Julius murmured absently as she left, still stroking his chin.

Three weeks later Julius strolled proudly out of the castle, on his way into the nearby city of Monopolis to hang out. He had a small satchel full of twenty cent coins and a high score to beat. As he strutted past the corner dairy he noticed the local papergirl on her afternoon round. She whistled salaciously at him as she cycled past.

Julius grinned to himself and twiddled the small tuft of whiskery fluff protruding gleefully from his lower face.

"Woohoo!" Julius crowed as he destroyed the evil army and rescued the villagers. "O Legend, thy name is Prince J!"

"Wow," said a strange creature who had just materialized beside him. "You wasted those military motherfuckers."

Julius appraised the being next to him. It was short and covered in black tatters. Most of its head sported brightly coloured ropey dangly things and its face was pale, with odd black lines accentuating its features. On careful examination he decided it was female.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Er... Julius." He gazed at her, trying to figure out if that was her hair or something else.

"I'm Solar," she said. "You're really good at Militia Of Carnage. Must have taken you ages."

"Nnnnyer, um, mmm," said Julius, overcome with a strange new feeling.

Solar pressed an orange piece of paper into his clammy hand. "Are you into live music?"

"Oh yes," said Julius, who almost went to see Pearl Jam once but couldn't get a ticket.

"There're some excellent bands on tonight down at the Last Resort. You should come along. Sonic Fuck Death are playing, and Acid Attack."

She smiled and disappeared behind the racing car games. Julius gaped. What crazy new world was this?

Thoroughly confused, Julius leaned against a wall and surveyed his surroundings. They were very very loud. There were some people on a stage making really strange noise, lots of smoke and crowds of black-clad detached-looking punters. Many of them had goatees, Julius noticed.

Just then the luminous creature from the video parlour cruised past. Julius stuttered at her to attract her attention, and much to his complete surprise, he was soon engaged in a conversation with her. He learnt that she was a first year BA at Monopolis University, she had just split up with her boyfriend who she met at Orientation, she liked Fear Factory and the Young Gods and she was drinking bourbon and ginger ale.

"You're growing a goatee, Joolz" she said, pulling gently at his chin hair.

"Do you like it?" he asked with enthusiasm that would have been pathetic if the music hadn't been so loud.

She pulled a face. "They're kind of cool looking, but... I don't know. My boyfriend had one since ages ago and now they've really taken off. Just about everyone's got one now. And you know 90 percent of them just do it because they think it'll make them look cool. It sucks really. People are so unoriginal."

Her words struck terror into the prince's heart. He was speechless, which didn't really matter because just then Solar spied a friend at the bar and took off. Julius looked about him in utter bewilderment, emitted a small moan and ran for the door.

A resounding thwack to the head made Julius look up from his position of apathetic stupor on the front porch of the castle. The paper girl was grinning at him from her bicycle and a copy of the Monopolis Soundbite had just landed beside him.

"You've shaved," she said.

Julius shrugged. "Well, you know, goatees are so common now... I mean they've just become too trendy. I don't follow the crowd you know. I'm not a sheep."

The paper girl laughed and got off her bike. "It's the eternal dilemma, isn't it. When non-conformity is in fashion, self-presentation becomes a total nightmare."

She sat down on the porch and lit a cigarette.

Julius crumpled. "I just don't know what to do! I can't understand it! I only want to look cool and seem like I've got a mind of my own, but it's all so complicated... How can I represent my opposition to mainstream culture when all the commonly-understood means of doing so are being co-opted?"

"Well," said the papergirl, "postmodernity has this unsettling effect on everyone I'm afraid. You just have to learn to be happy existing in a constantly-shifting bricolage of images with no stable point of reference. Lose your linear fixation, princey, there is no real you to represent. You're just a bunch of meaningless signifiers like all the rest of us."

"What a bummer," Julius sighed. "Not only am I a sheltered white middleclass brat with no PC cred at all, but my attempts to be cool are doomed to inherent failure by the paradoxical nature of late twentieth-century consumer culture. And now you tell me I don't even actually exist. Shit."

"But the best part," the papergirl confided, "is that once you've got your head round all that, you can do whatever the hell you want."

Julius frowned. "Well... I guess if there really is no single great truth or any meaning in binary distinctions, it must be impossible to make moral judgements."

"Exactly," said the papergirl. "So it doesn't actually matter anyway."

"You're right!" Julius declared. "Or rather... I choose to appropriate your subjective construction of reality on this particular issue."

"You've got the hang of it. Now let's go indulge our craving for control over the immediate environment by destroying imaginary enemies with extreme graphic violence."

Julius and the papergirl ran off to play video games and went on to fall in what they decided was love, until he got a job marketing soft drinks to pre-teens and she gave up ironic nihilism for a little permaculture site in the Coromandel. The moral of the story is that you never can tell.