He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (15 page)

UNDERSTAND THE TECHNOLOGY.

A joint is simple. Just like the rollies Grandad smoked while seeing off Rommel. Sort of. Some of the good gear, chopped up, rolled in between two fag papers and smoked like a cigarette.

NOTE: YOU MUST INHALE.

A bong is more complicated, usually a home-made device, often constructed from a plastic Orchy bottle, a small length of garden hose and a metallic or alfoil-based cone.

But a bucket bong is something else again. It relies on air pressure to shotgun a cooler, vaster, more powerful smoke straight into the lungs. As much more smoke can be pushed in and held for so much longer the Bucket has a reputation for turning the most bogus leaf into killer weed. It is to the simple bong as the cruise missile is to the snide remark.

CAN YOUR HOME AFFORD TO BE WITHOUT ONE?

8 THE YELLOW UNDERPANTS OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL

I had some lesbian trouble my first time in Sydney – nothing too serious, but worth putting down on the permanent record. I was on the run, visiting my friend Scarey Bill in the middle of winter. He’d set me up on a mattress in the lounge room of the Surry Hills terrace he shared with his girlfriend and three other fringe dwellers. We went out drinking the first night and I came home really looking forward to that mattress on the floor. Figured on crawling into my sleeping bag, maybe catching some bad late night teev in front of the little log fire. Not being much of a pool player, Scarey Bill left the pub early, beat me home by an hour and fluttered off to bed because he and his girlfriend couldn’t keep their hands off each other. When I finally got home, I found these two women – shaven-headed lesbians – writhing around in my sleeping bag in the 69 position. Feet sticking out of the sack and everything.

I figured they weren’t on for a threesome so I climbed up to Scarey Bill’s room but could hear the beast with two backs at work in there too. So I stood on the turn in the staircase for some time, reviewing the options. In the end I shrugged. There was a patch of carpet beneath my feet. I’d camp there. It was very late and I was very tired – I must have slept for all of four and a half minutes before I woke up freezing to death. I went down to the kitchen, collected all the tea towels I could find and tried making them into a sort of quilt. I woke up freezing again, five and a half minutes later.

I started prowling around the house, rubbing myself against anything that was even remotely warm. Being a Queenslander in the middle of a southern winter, I was desperate. It was getting on for four in the morning when I thought to run a hot bath and slip into that. Ahh yes. I remember it well. Gave me twenty minutes of blessed sleep before the water went cold and I had to top it up. I did that three or four times before the hot water ran out. Weak grey light was leaking in through the windows when I finally scratched on Scarey Bill’s door and pushed my way in, crying that the lesbians had stolen my bed. Scarey and his girlfriend sat bolt upright in horror. ‘That’s terrible,’ they said. Bill jumped up and pulled his action mackintosh off the clothes rack. A great big warm thing. Saliva actually squirted into my mouth when I saw it. I got the coat and a little patch of carpet at the foot of their bed. That coat was like heaven. If he’d only left it downstairs five hours ago, I’d have been a happy man.

Steven

Someone gave me this drug at our housewarming. It was a heavy downer which sent me to bed in the middle of the party. I was mostly asleep when this couple came into the room. They hopped onto the bed and started thrashing about. I rolled away and tried to sleep. My head was in the corner of the room because the bed was pushed in there. I had the small of this girl’s back against the side of my face. This guy’s thrusting is banging my head against the wall. I woke up and thought ‘What the fuck?’ Bang bang bang bang. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ I slid out from under them. But I’d woken up in this dream state, momentarily aroused. So I fucked her from the back while she was slurping on this boy. I participated for all of four minutes. Now that was a real share situation.

Sydney at least seemed better than Melbourne. I’d torched every Brisbane bridge I could get my lighter underneath – Telecom, L.J. Hooker, Social Security, my parents, my friends and this minor league businessman I’d defamed on public radio. The process server from his law firm found me on a hot summer’s day. I’d stripped back to my underwear and was sucking on a lime-green paddlepop. This guy roars up in his Porsche, bounds up the stairs and hits me with a writ. I get it into my head to be really rude to him and start mouthing off, telling him he’s an ugly man, a parasite, but the thing is, the paddlepop’s melting all over my hand as I give this guy a piece of my mind. My delivery is really brutal, really apt, but there’s paddlepop everywhere and I’m in my undies. The guy just grins, bounds back down the stairs, hops into his Porsche and drives off. I tear the writ into tiny pieces, leave two weeks rent and leg it out of Dodge City. Ironically, so does the businessman a little bit later.

Word of mouth got me out of Bill’s place and into a flat in a run-down block off Oxford Street, Darlinghurst. Real skid row. I moved in on a rainy Tuesday. Three different types of mould were vying for supremacy over the ground floor. It was like living in a huge laundry bag. Somebody had spray-painted a warning on the second floor landing – ‘
Don’t come any closer Geoffrey. We have a gun
.’

When I first got there, these two guys had passed out in a pool of old piss in the hallway downstairs. One of them had a brown paper bag clutched to his chest. I figured it was probably a smack pack. I spent all day moving my stuff into this place. These guys lay in the hallway for hours, completely unconscious. They could have been dead except they’d wheeze or cough every now and then. One of them woke up as I was taking the last load in, opened the brown bag and started eating a cheese sandwich. I closed the door on him but about ten minutes later I came running back out because this terrible banging and screaming had started up. The other guy had regained consciousness and discovered his mate had scarfed the whole sanger, hadn’t even left him a crust. They got into a terrible fight over it. Beat the living Bejesus out of each other. I learned not to open my door too much after that. The place was riddled with junkies and dealers and all sorts of lowlife. I complained to the caretaker about the lack of security and the scumbags wandering in day and night, but he didn’t give a shit. The cops came for him after he squeezed off two clips from an assault rifle inside his basement flat. Amphetamine psychosis, they said. Soon as he got bail, he came back and tried to set the apartment on fire.

Jane

I lived with a nice girl, Marina. She was a court reporter. We had a lease on a great terrace and just wanted a nice flatmate for the last room, but we had dreadful trouble getting one. One guy actually moved in but he ended up wanting to go out with Marina. She had to ditch him and look for another one. We then interviewed a succession of loonies. We had a Seventh Day Adventist space cadet, a vegetarian who stressed the fact that she didn’t like to see meat in the fridge. In fact she wanted to know had there ever been meat in this fridge and had we ever considered replacing it on the off-chance. She was standing on the patio ripping Marina’s geraniums to shreds as she was saying this. Marina stood glaring at the leaves as they were pulled to pieces. Then we interviewed some guy who checked the tide, a meteorologist or something. We put the trick question to him ‘What about parties?’ and he thought that was an invitation. He said ‘Oh I love parties, the bigger the better. I’m a party animal. I’m on for one any time.’ We interviewed this older guy who said he didn’t actually want to live there. He just needed an address to give his wife’s lawyers. A French backpacker who sat himself down in front of the television, asked for a TV guide and just would not leave. A hippy who was looking for somewhere to find himself.

Then Siimon arrived in his cheap Adidas sprint shoes, jeans and checked shirt. He hammered on the floor to check whether it would support his king-size water bed. When he’d ascertained his boudoir could make it he proceeded to tell us he went to the Sydney. We’re going the Sydney What? And he goes Sydney Uni. He was studying part-time to be an accountant. I asked him what he did with the rest of his time and he became a bit sheepish. He said he worked. We asked where and he knew the gig was up. He asked us if we’d ever heard of Studs Incorporated. I was scratching my head thinking, ‘God I know that name.’ And Marina’s going, ‘Is it a restaurant?’

I said, ‘Oh it’s a gay paper isn’t it? A magazine?’ And he was like, ‘No no no no no ... it’s uhm it’s ... strippers.’

I went, ‘ ... Oh. Male strippers?’ and he blathered on that they had women too. He was their manager and he’d taken them to new heights. It was a hands-on thing. You know. For the accounting degree. He stressed they were all heterosexual so there was nothing to be worried about. We had visions of them all coming home for coffee and trying their hands-on thing with us. Marina started writing down his name and he says, ‘That’s Siimon with two ‘i’s thanks’. And she goes, ‘Right Siimon with two ‘i’s we’ll give you a call’and threw the piece of paper over her shoulder into the bin.

I had two flatmates to begin with in this place, and they started a band soon after I moved in. Suddenly the place became a band house – roadies, groupies, sycophants, band managers, sound and lighting engineers, fellow musos and weirdoes would drop by at all hours. At first it had been just Hooper, Tammy and me. Then Jeremy moved in from this fibro cottage he’d been renting over in Redfern. Jeremy was running away from a psychotic housemate, a hyper-violent invalid pensioner. This guy was a real counter jumper. If the Powerful Ones even hinted at hassling him down at Darlinghurst DSS, he’d go sub-orbital, jump the counter and start screeching like a Gila monster with Tourette’s Syndrome. He was useful if you had your own hassles with the dole fascists, because you could take him along and when they saw you together they’d process the hell out of you in less than three minutes. But on balance, he just wasn’t worth it. So Jeremy packed a bag one night and slipped away. Refused to leave our house for three weeks in case this guy saw him on the street.

Jeremy was perennially three subjects short of a law degree and loved to sue people. In the short time I knew him he must have had about three lawsuits running. One with a former employer, another with some neighbour from Redfern, and one with a cabbie who refused to accept American dollars for a far. This Lebanese character had picked him up in the Cross late one night on the tail-end jag of a two month backpacking jaunt through the States. I remember waking to shouts in the street and the sound of Jeremy running into the flat and slamming the door. He’d tried to explain to the cabbie in his excitable Sydney Grammar way that because of the ‘i-n-t-e-r-n-a-shhh-nl eggschange rate’, the driver would actually be making a profit on the crumpled greenbacks he’d thrust into his face. But the cabbie chased Jeremy with a Club Lock, yelling abuse in his native tongue. In the cold, hard light of day, Jeremy decided the only course of action was to relentlessly pursue the poor bastard through the courts for assault.

Apart from his flourishing legal practice, Jeremy had a bass guitar and a lot of time on his hands. That was the catalyst for our house to form a band. Hooper and Jeremy put the band together with Keith, the polite drummer who moved in downstairs and practiced on icecream buckets and sheets of foolscap instead of his $7,000 Ludwig drum kit, because he was a quiet kind of guy and didn’t want to put anyone out. Keith was a locum at Prince of Wales Hospital and the house became a drop-in centre for tired-looking residents in the dead zone between shifts. These residents used to work incredibly long hours each day, and Keith and his friend Nobby used to take speed or a speed-like drug called Duromin, to keep themselves awake for work. Unfortunately, it soon spilled over into their private lives. I remember getting up for work at 7.30am just in time to see Keith and Nobby – who’s now a plastic surgeon or something – running around the house in yesterday’s clothes, biting and tearing at each other in an excited frenzy to get into the kitchen and eat the little cubes of frozen tomato paste they had put in the ice tray in the fridge.

There’s no privacy in a band house. No respect for boundaries or personal space. If you want privacy, you go out. If you want respect, you move out. I discovered this after making my first significant furniture purchase since the Foster-Lindburgh incident. I bought this wild 1920’s walnut veneer dining suite from an antique dealer. Moved it in the Wednesday the Bad Seeds played the Dark Coma. I wasn’t going to the concert – can’t stand Nick Cave – but I scammed my girlfriend Sweden and the house band onto the door list because I was writing for
Rolling Stone
at the time, and they’d kick me back some tickets when they didn’t have the cash to pay me up front. The night of the concert, I went to bed early. It was freezing cold, pissing down rain and everyone but me was on all sorts of weird drugs. The household got out of this concert ripped off their heads and came back to the flat. They didn’t care about anything, these people. One of the house band’s dopey roadies took off his big thick slopping wet cable-knit jumper, and sat down on one of my antique walnut-veneer dining suite chairs. His string singlet was wet, his body temperature was racing and he basically steamed my chair. He wandered off in the wee hours of the morning and I came out the next day to find the wreckage in my living room. What had been this lovely, nutty-brown, tiger-skin sheen was now a weird kind of misty grey lattice work maze. Like it had been spray-painted. I took it back to the shop and they couldn’t believe it. A week hadn’t passed and I had fucked this beautiful piece of furniture which had survived since the 1920’s.