The Big Whatever (21 page)

Detailsville: hazy. I guess I just sat there for a while. I
do
know that a little while later I was in a car, which I guess I'd stolen, because I can't remember how I came by it. A green Morris 1100. I was on the highway, driving towards Melbourne, coming up on cop cars and a roadblock.

Except it wasn't a roadblock any more. They were waving us through. Past police and men in dustcoats photographing a smashed up police car, and bits of splintered barrier. Like everyone else, I slowed down to get a better look. A cop gestured impatiently for me to move on.

A massive Hiroshima-like cloud of evil brown smoke rose beyond the next rise. Traffic not going anywhere. Then sirens. A minute later, two fire engines and an ambulance drove around the backed-up cars and trucks.

People were getting out of their cars. Me too. I walked
up to the rise ahead, got to the crest. At the bottom of the slope in front of me, maybe four hundred yards away, was a wooden bridge. Just this side of it, at a ninety-degree angle to the road, surrounded by a huge black circle, a still-blazing oil tanker. And a car, right up against the truck.

The bridge was fucked. And that car wreck was my HD. The remains thereof. I walked further down the hill. The uniformed cops were keeping people well back from the scene. I stopped at the barrier and stared. Bloke next to me shook his head. “My God,” he said, “Holy fucking shit.”

I kept staring. It was hard to make out what had been what. Best I could figure, the whole top of the HD had been sheared off. I read later that was correct – first the neat shearing off of the top of the car, then the explosion. Nothing left but twisted and melted metal.

Firehoses played on the burning truck. Cops everywhere. Parked haphazardly around the scene, but well away from the blaze, were three fire engines. An ambulance. Five or six police cars. Two tow trucks. And at the back, already hooked up to a tow truck, a car with a smashed-in side door. A yellow Charger.

Across the creek, on the opposite slope, a bunch of five or six grim-faced men in suits, not doing anything, just watching. The Armed Robbery boys. And right there in the middle of them, Barry. From half a mile away I could feel him, probing. He looked in my direction, and I moved behind the gawker next to me. Even at that distance, he sensed my presence as much as I felt his.

I turned the Morris around and drove away. Pulled off the road a little further on, shot up a cocktail. Kept driving north.

I stayed that night in a motel across the border, moved on the next day, stopped at Cootamundra. The day after that I drove to Forbes. From there to Young, then Condobolin.

I never planned it that way, it just happened. Each morning, I'd consider what to do that day. No point hanging
around, too risky. So I'd drive off. Couldn't go to Sydney or Melbourne, so I went to whatever bush town was a half day's drive from where I was.

Each day shoot some dope. Drive. Stop. Check in. Shoot more dope. Next morning, drive again. It went like that for a while, a few weeks. Maybe longer. Actually, longer. Much longer.

I got another car, a Valiant, went from central New South Wales out to the north west and back to the north coast. One-night stands. Then into Queensland, criss-crossing the state. Left Queensland, went even further afield. Anonymous motels suited me. When there was no motel I slept rough. Kept away from hotels and small-town stickybeaks.

My money was holding out well enough. So was the dope. I'd run out of speed up in Bourke and that had been a bit rough, but not too bad. Got some pills from a bush doctor to help with that.

The number four was my mainstay. I'd scrape a little bit off the brick every so often, but it was so densely compacted my scratchings didn't seem to make any great difference to the size or weight of the block. I knew I couldn't just keeping banging the shit up forever. Not good for one's health, obviously (though not as bad as you might think). Plus, of course, that brick was my superannuation, my nest egg. My future. Whatever, I tried to keep it under control. I'd have a taste in the morning, a top-up mid-afternoon, and one for beddy-byes. No between-meal snacks.

That was my life. Smack. Road. Sleep. Simple really. Not much fun. But that wasn't the idea anyway. I was David Janssen, the fugitive. Down every road there's always one more city, and so on. A fugitive must be a rolling stone.

Except that no one was looking for me, on account of I'd died in the crash at Violet Town. Too bad about old Mel, but he'd always been a bit of a wrong'un.

THE THREE CHORDS OF WISDOM

I saw enough newspapers and magazines to keep up. The story of the Hippie Gang's demise was told and retold. How the cops had picked up the chase somewhere around Benalla. How the robbers crashed through a road block ten miles south of there. How the car lost control on a bend and hit a petrol tanker. How all its occupants were incinerated. Party girl and former stripper Cathy, socialite Denise, jail escapee Stan, long-time professional crim ‘Jimmy the Thug.' And legendary hipster Mel Parker.

A couple of days later it was reported that contrary to earlier reports, one of the outlaws had dodged the fiery Hume inferno. “Heiress revolutionary” Denise had apparently bailed out before the crash and was helping the police with their enquiries. They were understood to be investigating the possibility that she had been kidnapped by the outlaws, or was operating under some form of compulsion. Well, good luck to her, I thought. She'd always been good with a yarn.

A Vietnam Moratorium Committee spokesman was quoted in the
Age
saying the so-called ‘Hippie Gang' was not affiliated with them, and that the Committee in no way endorsed the violent and lawless actions they had allegedly perpetrated.

A note in the
Sun
a little later: the detective sergeant from the armed robbery squad was making a slow recovery from gunshot wounds sustained in his heroic shootout with the Hippie Gang. A week after that, a story about him receiving the Queen's Medal for valour.

In Brewarrina I read a Sunday newspaper that claimed the now legendary Hippie Gang had become one of the most sensational news stories in Australian history, up there with Ned Kelly, the death of Pharlap, Harold Holt's big swim.

Over the next few months the events of that day were much retold in magazine articles, and in television
documentaries I watched in crappy motel rooms. Discussed, debated, analysed, autopsied. Much talk about Australia's very own branch of the Weather Underground Baader-Meinhof Black September NLF Che Guevara Ned Kelly-type whatever the fuck. Networks of Maoists, Trots, Stalinists, nihilists, terrorists, criminals, anarchists, highwaymen and women.

Denise's film footage was at the heart of it all. Replayed over and over. Shown around the world. Statements from revolutionary groups elsewhere denouncing, applauding or simply acknowledging the actions. Malcolm Muggeridge commented on them. The big etcetera.

As time went by, there was less and less in the papers about the other jobs – the bombing, the Sunshine payroll – but no let up on the Hippie Gang. Clive the Fop wrote pieces in the
Age
, no less, emphasising how close he had got to the robbers. Then, many months later, a small report in the
Sun
that the police now thought it was pure coincidence that armed robbers had hit three separate spots at the same time on the same day – as far as they could tell, the robbers had acted independently of one another, all taking advantage of the disruption and mood of lawlessness fostered by the Vietnam Moratorium campaign, renarda, renarda, renarda.

So the cops were playing down the story, when you'd expect the opposite. Which likely meant they had something going on. An interest. They were on the inside.

The obvious question arose: Did this mean someone had turned dog, thrown in their lot with the peelers? The two robbers pinched back at the building society rip? Or maybe the crew who did the Sunshine Pipefitters. But they had got away clean, and why would the other two talk now, after so long? And how much did any of them know about the whole plan anyway? Sorry my eager young sherlocks, but that just didn't make sense. Apart from yours truly, Bikey Vic was the only one still free who had known the whole deal.
Could Vic have turned bow-wow? I mulled that over for a while. Maybe he'd paid off the Armed Rob boys. If he'd been pressed – maybe under threat of a jail sentence – the Vic I knew would have spun a yarn, minimised the risk, while sounding plausible. That's what I hoped. But you've got to be realistic.

Not that I cared all that much. I was going through the motions. Waiting for Godot. Had time on my hands. Nowhere to be, nowhere to go. I've laid around and played around this ol' town too long, so now I gotta travel on. Have gun, will travel. I was the yodelling bagman. A knight without armour in a savage land. From now on, all my friends are gonna be strangers. Got to keep moving, 'cause blues falling down like hail. Had the key to the highway, booked and bound to go. Looking for me? Then meet me at no particular place and I'll be there at no particular time. Make that the twelfth of never. Beyond the reef. Across the great divide. East of the sun, west of the moon. Relaxing at Camarillo. Cruising around in my automobile.

Oh yes, I was drifting and drifting, like a ship out on the sea. With a low-down aching chill. Another guy on the lost highway. A rolling stone. All alone and lost. With mean things on my mind. A complete unknown. The iceman. The iceman who goeth. On the road. Start spreadin' the news, I'm leaving today. 'Cause I'm the next of kin to the wayward wind. I've been everywhere, man. Crossed the deserts bare, man. Don't bother to write. Don't call. No correspondence will be entered into. No hawkers or canvassers. I was walking with a zombie. I
was
the zombie. Dig, dear friends, I was
shut down
.

The weather got cold, then got warm again. I kept drifting all through the hot inland summer. I scarcely noticed. Town to town. Time passing. Saw some things here and there. Nothing I want to talk about.

Along the way I looked up some folks from the old Sydney days. I saw the Cat, proprietor of a chemist shop,
a picture of respectability. The Multi-Grip Kid was running a big garage down south. Molly had a motel. Mr Bones, Brylcreem, Steptoe, the Reverend, the Sexational Gypsy Woman. Yeah, Johnny, you know them, our people – they send their regards. The old crew. They're all out there. There was no “let's reminisce about the grand old days over a glass of port,” just a bit of help when needed, usually paid for. Or no more than a sly nod of mutual recognition. Thanks very much. See ya later, like, maybe never. No offence meant. None taken.

That's how it was for me. Apart from them, never saw a friend I knew. They were all rank strangers to me.

Then one day, nothing special about it, I saw a sign in a music shop window: a fifty-fifty dance band needed a guitar player. I bought an old Maton semi-acoustic and a little Moody amp in a junk shop, rang the number. Doris, an older girl with a forty-cigarette-a-day voice. She played the organ, she said, and booked the jobs.

“Can you play fifty-fifty?” she said. I told her yeah.

“Do you know ‘I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen'?”

“Yeah.”

“How about ‘Giant Steps'?”

I said nothing. She said, “Just kidding you. You'd better come along to the RSL this Friday night, eight o'clock, and we'll see how you go.”

I told her okay, and thought, All right then, here we go. How bad could they be?

Oh, my sensitive young music lovers, they were worse than bad. Starts were messy, finishes worse. Middles horrible. Doris pummelled away at a rinky-dink organ like she bore it a grudge. There was an Abo bloke named Dougie on steel guitar who was so faraway he was hardly there at all. The drummer was a middle-aged bloke with a pencil mo and a permanent vacant grin, obviously a wet brain, who insisted on calling me Noel. A younger bloke named Kev on bass stared off into the distance the whole time. Doris's niece
Elaine got up and sang a song with a certain gusto, but with enough dud notes to undo the good. The crowd danced like they were doped. Which in a way they were.

No one in the band listened to anyone else; each of them just ploughed ahead regardless, doing what they did. Which to me summed up the whole life out there – everyone in their own narrow, joyless little world.

The night ground on. The crowd got drunker, the jokes got stupider. My mood sank lower. Not that I minded that much. Dig, this was the fate of the drifting Mel, to wander endlessly between the winds, and so forth, and in a way, the purgatorial bleakness of it all suited me perfectly. To a T. So at the end of the night, when Doris invited me to turn up the following Thursday at some arsehole-of-the-earth bowling club in the next town along the way, I told her sure, I'd be there.

I dutifully turned up at the Arseholeville Bowlo. Strummed the guitar. Same result. Another job the following weekend, a wedding party out on a bush property – I did that one too. So it went. I became part of the group.

They were terrible in every way. “Modern” to them meant a bit of stodgily played forties boogie-woogie. The nearest they got to rock'n'roll was 'Running Bear' and ‘Mountain of Love,' which they managed to play with no swing at all. They ritually murdered ‘Fly Me to the Moon' and committed nameless atrocities on ‘The Girl from Ipanema.' No one seemed to notice.