He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (8 page)

‘I go now.’

But it was interesting having her there. She freaked out one day, because a neighbour came to the window to ask for a kiss. God knows what she made of the chainsaw man. Some cops dragged her home once after they’d caught her riding a scooter through the city, unlicensed, doing 90 in a 60 zone the wrong way up a one-way street. They nearly shot out her tires before she stopped. They were furious and yelled at her until they realised she didn’t understand a word they were saying. Then they spoke very slowly and used lots of hand puppet gestures to explain that she could not do what she was doing. Satomi Tiger bowed and smiled some more.

‘Domo arrigato. Domo. Domo.’

Then she hops on the bike and blasts off in the same direction. 0 to 90 in three seconds. They ran her down again, brought her home and tore Neal a new arsehole for letting her ride his bike.

We liked Satomi Tiger’s quiet, rent-paying ways, so we ran a succession of foreign students through her old sleepout after she disappeared. It was a very small, naked room, the worst in the place. A major train line ran parallel with that side of the house, so none of us would bed down there, but it was perfect for clueless, rent-paying foreigners.

Jed

We got bored a lot. There were about six of us home one night, in this big old house with a fireplace, very bored, watching teev, nothing on. Someone tossed a match into the fireplace. Somebody else tossed a cigarette after it. Then somebody spat in there. Someone picked up a glass and threw it in. Then an iron went in. Then this frenzy took hold for about five minutes, everything went in there. Arms were being ripped off chairs, books, plates, random furniture. Then somebody made a move for the TV and we came back to earth, wrestled him away from it, then shrugged and threw him in too. I don’t know why that happened.

First we had Patrick, the boy from Hong Kong. He lasted a day, and spent that day in front of the mirror in his underpants grooming his hair. Loved that hair. He got it right and moved out. We had some Baptist black guy from Africa, a bible-bashing footwasher but he was okay. Really took to the basketball court. Then he took to the hallucinogenic fungus in the back yard and that was the end of him. Finally there came Krishna, an easily titillated Malay Indian guy. Loved the SBS Friday night porn. The merest flash of nipple would send him off like a retarded child on a nitrous binge. He was thirty-five. Whenever we passed the bong around Krishna felt duty-bound to point out that in Malaysia old Mahatir would have you swinging by your heels for this sort of thing. Neal finally convinced him to pull a cone for multiculturalism. He took a few smokes, started giggling and fled to his room. He legged it the following day. After Krishna, we decided it was all just too hard. The house voted to take a rent rise and let the sleepout lie fallow. Not surprising really. I’ve always tried to do the right thing by our multicultural brethren, but it just never seems work out. Like with this Chinese Chef who moved into another place I lived once. I came back from a road trip to find this Chinese guy had moved in. Someone said he liked cooking.

‘A Chinese chef,’ I said. ‘Outstanding.’

They could have been more specific. He liked to cook fried rice in a wok on a gas burner beside his chair in the lounge as he sat watching television. After a few weeks, the lino acquired a sticky, sooty complexion from the soy sauce and the TV screen was flecked with burned rice. He’d made a special deal with the fruit shop where he bought in bulk at discount rates and he was always dragging these 250kg sacks of potatoes or carrots up the back steps. Four weeks later, we had to sneak the soggy residue into a nearby industrial bin because the neighbours were coming over to complain about the smell. The same thing happened with the cabbages a month after that. We were working up the nerve to kick the Chinese chef out when by a strange twist of events he threw us out. He brought his mother over from China for a visit, had her staying in his room. The Chinese chef couldn’t admit to the filthy mess he was leaving around him – the kitchen was about an inch deep in chicken bones and cabbage leaves by this stage – so he blamed us. His mother stewed on it for a few days, then got the real estate heavies to turf us out.

Satomi Tiger’s neighbour in the bad side of the house was Jabba the Hutt. He was enrolled in civil engineering at Queensland Uni, but as far as I know, he never made it to class. Not once. Sat round all day watching TV. Even on golf days. He’d watch the kids’ shows in the morning. Then the soapies through the day. Then the news. Then the evening shows. Then the late night movies, the dire sitcoms and those obscure, undead fillers like
Mod Squad
and Chuck Connor’s
Thrillseekers
.
The thrillseeker
, said Chuck.
A special breed of cat
. And finally Jabba would stack some zzz’s, get up the next day and start all over again. Day after day. Week after week. For months without a break. Then one Saturday night, completely out of character, he got so drunk he wet himself. We threw him out the back yard, turned the hose on him. He stayed out there all night. I got up the next morning and there he was, cleaned up, lying in front of the teev again.

Across the hall from Jabba lived Mick, our racist in residence. Mick blew into town from Perth and knew someone who knew someone at the house. Nobody will fess up to it now, so I guess that link is going to have to stay lost. We should have known really. He didn’t like chilli, didn’t like curry, didn’t like anything Asian. Had these very strange views on Asia and food. We threw a party to introduce him to Brisbane, but he was comatose in a corner by nine o’clock. Completely pissed. Vomiting and sucking air through the mess with a thick, obscene snorkelling sound. Every so often he’d claw his way up, shuffle round and stare at you, nose to nose. It was very weird. After that party, he awoke in the dark screaming abuse at some imaginary old guy he saw at the foot of his bed. Said it was the guy on the cover of The Cure album.
Standing On A Beach
.

‘Freak show!’ said Magyver.

Mandy

I was hanging around Martin’s house over Christmas. There were heaps of guys hanging there too. They were getting into not wearing shirts. Then they started writing words on their chests. Slug. Loser. But that wasn’t cool enough so they started cutting it into themselves with razor blades. Then they were sticking pieces of broken mirror onto their bodies with glue.

Mick’s neighbours were Colin and Stepan, a pre-realised Xerox of Beavis and Butthead. Their rooms formed an L-shape around two sides of the lounge, but they had so much in common it suited them to kick out the fibro-slab divider and hang a curtain between their respective domains. They were friends of Neal’s and were attracted to Duke Street by the minimal rent and crack house ambience. They gave our bucket bong such a workout that if you somehow ingested the water you’d die. You’d have been the first reported dope casualty in history. There was a different type of smell around their part of the house. That was Stepan. He ate so much speed his body ran at white heat nine days out of ten and exuded a really foul, sour sort of amphetamine sweat. His thesis supervisor refused to see him unless he bathed immediately before their meetings.

Colin, with two failed attempts at adult education behind him, was trying to work up some enthusiasm for the world of employment. Seeing as Stepan managed to vacate the house by 9.30 most mornings – to get some quality time in at the campus video game parlour – Colin asked him to be sure and wake him up before leaving, so he could seize the day, get a job and a life. Stepan tried for a week, but he’d come back in the afternoon and Colin would still be getting out of bed. Then he’d abuse Stepan for not getting him up. Finally Stepan closed all of the windows and doors that could be shut, slapped Colin awake, put a lit candle on the floor, and said, ‘I’ve turned on every gas tap in the house. If you’re still asleep when the gas reaches this candle, the house is going to blow up and you are going to die. If you just get out of bed and snuff out the candle you are also going to die, because the gas will choke you to death.’ The house didn’t blow up, Colin slept through the whole thing, and the place smelt of gas for a month. But we were so impressed with Stepan’s
Man from UNCLE
ingenuity that we all made a point of rushing into Colin’s room each morning and kicking the shit out of him in a bid to make him change his ways. It did. He moved out.

Boredom is a terrible thing in a group like this. When you are living alone, you can get out of the house and deal with it. But when you get a lot of bored people in one place, it gets ugly. You’ll wind up putting bananas in your underpants and butt-walking across the lounge room. Or running around the block, naked, with a purple cape flapping behind you, singing
Nananana Nananana Nananana Batman
. It was boredom that drove Howie and Neal to smash the beer bottle pyramid to pieces. An orgiastic riot of boredom-inspired destruction. Magyver and I came home to find the kitchen table splintered to matchwood, the fridge door hanging by one twisted metal hinge and a month’s worth of meat patties and Sara Lee Poundcake splattered and smeared over the walls and ceiling. Woolworths had been running specials on both items and Magyver had insisted on buying in bulk for an even bigger discount. The store manager’s eyes must have bugged out of his skull when this fool rushed in waving crumpled banknotes in his face and demanding as much of the expired stock as he could carry. All for nothing now of course. Neal was in the lounge room watching
Wheel Of Fortune
and I said, ‘Hey Neal. What’s happening?’

‘Madness,’ he shrugged.

Launz

Boredom gets to be a really great motivator. Kevin and I were bored and decided to set up an interesting photograph. We got him to sit on the toilet and floated a little boat with some smoke mixture in it. The idea was that we’d shoot a sequence of him being enveloped in smoke and the last frame would be the smoke clearing and this hand coming out of the bowl. We had a mannequin hand. The problem with this smoke mixture is that when you burn it you have to make sure it’s in a long and thin, or thin and flat state. If you have it in a ball, it doesn’t lose heat quickly enough. It moves to this second stage burn which we didn’t know about. So Kev is sitting on the toilet, the smoke is coming then there is this almighty flash and Kev is leaping out of the bathroom clutching his flaming arse. That’s what boredom will do.

There were diversions. We saw the house next door get pulled off its stumps and taken away in the middle of the night. Happens all the time in Brisbane. Old Queenslanders get chopped in two, hauled up onto a flat-bed and driven off to some yuppie’s farm. Neal had his own theory about it.
The old house graveyard.
The movers came around and told us when they’d be doing it so everyone in the neighbourhood prepared meals and stayed up way past their bedtime, picnicking in the front garden or gathering in little knots under the lamp posts. It turned into a street festival. Howie offered to help cut the house up. Neal dragged the moontanning lounge out. Mick got drunk and had a sit-down in the back of a police car. Jabba watched television. The guys taking the house were hopeless. They’d get it half way up the steep front yard and it would slip back down again. Their wheels got bogged in the mud they churned up, windows exploded, chains broke and the outside toilet was accidentally destroyed.

Launz

There was a mouse in Chester Street which lived in the stove. It liked to come out and dance. We were getting real tired of this mouse. One night we were sitting up late, drinking and playing cards. Kevin said, ‘We’ve got to get rid of this mouse.’I said ‘Okay, how?’ Throw things at it. So we propped up in the kitchen and started throwing cutlery. We emptied our kitchen drawers trying to nail the little bastard – knives, forks, egg-beaters and everything. It would go away for three or four minutes then come back. Finally Kev said, ‘I’ve got a plan.’ He wandered over to the stove, put on all the gas taps, wandered back and sat down with a box of matches. I asked what he was doing. He said when the mouse came out he was going to throw a lighted match at it and blow it to pieces. I took them off him and went to the shop for a mouse trap. But all they had was this huge rat trap and rat traps don’t trigger when little field mice gnaw off the bait. So we filed it back to a hair trigger. Re-baited it and set it on the stove. About an hour later we were asleep when this huge snap came from the kitchen. We found the trap had got this poor little mouse but it had hit it so hard that both of its eyeballs had shot out of its head and bounced across the floor.

When the house disappeared we discovered the girl in the red panties. Our view had been blocked by the old place, but with the line of sight unobscured it wasn’t long before somebody spotted her dancing in her kitchen between 5.10 and 5.25 pm every day. She was a dancing fool. Never let us down. It was the only schedule the house stuck to, elbowing and shouldering each other out of the way for the best window seat.

I knew my time at Duke Street had passed when I came home and there was this guy lying on the ironing board. Flat on his back. Shivering. I asked Jabba, ‘Who the hell’s this?’ but he just shrugged. ‘Been there all day,’ and went back to the soaps. I edged over to the guy who suddenly turned his glazed eyes on me. He was on a really weird trip. Said something about being a ship in stormy seas. I couldn’t talk sense into him so I threw a blanket across the ironing board. But he freaked out, thought it was a shroud. He started yelling, ‘I’m dying. I can feel it. I’m going I’m going!’ Screamed that the only thing which could save him was mouth to mouth resuscitation.

I said, ‘Sorry pal, you’re a dead man.’