He Died with a Felafel in His Hand

by John Birmingham

  PJ and I met her at a B&S Ball. To be fair, he beat me to her. I spied him putting the moves on two girls in the dark recesses of the lobby and decided to ruin his chances. It was a little game we played, popping up at each other’s elbow at the worst possible moment to raise the subject of girlfriends, boyfriends, AIDS tests, whatever. But when I cut in, I found one of these girls was a stunning Italian babe with thick dark hair, white skin, eyes you could drown in. A woman to inspire murder. PJ and I circled each other like caged wolves all night.

  PJ asked me what I thought of the Italian girl over chocolate milk and cheeseburgers at the traditional post-ball Hungry Jacks breakfast. I said I loved her. He said I loved the girl he was going to marry. A coyote howled somewhere in the distance. We turned one of the paper puzzle mats upside down and drew up the rules of engagement. Total sharing of intelligence. No holding back. No lying. No back stabbing. No chicanery. Guy who gets the first date gets a clear run. The loser retires from the field and runs around the house three times with his underpants on his head. No problemo.

  * * *

  Milo

  One morning I heard yelling at the door and dragged myself out of bed. By the time I got to the front door you were closing it and standing there in your dirty stained Y-fronts. Nothing else. You hadn’t shaved for three or four days. Your hair was everywhere, you hadn’t had it cut for months. These Mormons knocked long enough to disturb your sleep but you didn’t bother to put anything else on. And you’d sent them on their way with a prolonged blast of unChristian language. It’s one of the great disappointments of my life I didn’t get up in time to see their faces. JB: I don’t remember that.

  * * *

  I signed off on this program and immediately set about cheating. My younger brother had helped organise the Ball and possessed the only ticket list, which I quickly obtained and destroyed after a quick scan for Mediterranean female names. PJ and I had both been so drunk we had no idea who we were hunting, but when I saw ‘Sophia Gennaro’ on the list, it all came flooding back to me. I found her home number in the white pages but her mother answered. After twenty-five minutes of cross-cultural diplomacy I found out that Sophia had gone to work. When this happened three or four times I started to panic. I knew PJ would have his finders out in the field.

  In fact, he came at me two days later and asked flatly if I had Sophia’s phone number. I lied, said no. He smiled. ‘Well I guess I win mate because I got her number and I called her up and I sent her a dozen roses and we’re going on a date this Friday.’I kicked the cat twelve, maybe thirteen feet across the room when he left. Went into a black funk for two days. Friday afternoon, I couldn’t take it anymore. I borrowed twenty dollars off Milo and trundled off to the pub to mooch about in the Happy Hour. When I got to the bar, PJ was sitting there, and my heart contracted. I was thinking she had to be there but the joint was empty and I went over and fronted him. ‘What’s the problem,’ I asked. ‘What happened to the big date?’ He looked at me blankly for a second. ‘Oh right. Sorry, JB. That was just bullshit to throw you off. I only spoke to her today. She’s got an Italian boyfriend. Mario.’ He rolled the name ‘Mario’ out around a mouthful of cheap scotch and party ice. There was nothing for it but to get pissed together and bitch about poofters. I only saw Sophia once again after that. Sprawled over the bonnet of a Jaguar wearing a sash which read Miss Motor Show.

  Shortly afterwards, PJ got engaged at the student Rec Club and moved out. He stood on the bar to make the announce-ment and, since he was up there, flopped out his chopper for everyone to admire. We had a succession of dud flatmates through PJ’s old room. First up, we had the closeted, colour-blind, seven foot male nurse who’d eat a kilo of chips and Twisties while dinner was cooking. He’d have a few bites of Milo’s Home Brand meat pie and throw the rest away. But if you didn’t cook he’d get shitty. We replaced him with a council worker called Ray who lived on lentils and boiled offal and shed his hair in huge, fist-sized clumps. He built model tanks and little soldiers. He was a fool for the things, would spend months painting each little figure. Visitors would be introduced to his little men before being treated to the matted clots of his hair in the sanitary areas. Ray made way for Malcolm, who couldn’t get it together to rinse the sugary bran crap out of his personal set of Charlie Brown breakfast bowls. God, that really bugged me for some reason. Don’t know why. I tried everything –returning the bowls to the cupboard unwashed, leaving them in his bed under the doona – he moved on after I brainsnapped and smashed one on the road in front of the house.

  The next freak in this carnival side show was Victor the Rasta. I have no idea what possessed us to take him in, some misguided liberal sympathies most likely. Victor liked to carry these big joints of meat round the house, ripping the flesh from the bone with his teeth and leaning into visitors’ faces with gobbets of ham trailing out of his mouth. He had no respect for the already tenuous grip of our all-male household on domestic order and hygiene. You’d wake up in the morning to find the house littered with empty pizza trays, old spare ribs, chicken carcasses, beer bottles and salami rind. You could clean them away, but they’d be back the next morning. He’d play the stereo all night and bring friends around for nitrous oxide binges. They were dentists. They once bought a tank of the stuff, figuring that at a hundred bucks for the tank and fifty for a refill it was a bargain. They got this thing at midday and had sucked it dry by four o’clock. They’d fight over who got the hose, punching each other to get at it then sucking on the tube till they passed out. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll get into a binge as quickly as the next man, but there is such a thing as dignity. And flaking out under a blanket of old pizza boxes isn’t even close.

  * * *

  Wayne

  The Decoy lived in this West End house that was pretty rank. They were always smoking cones and getting the munchies. They loved the Decoy because he’d make popcorn to a special American recipe with heaps of salt and butter. A friend stayed over one night, smoking cones and stuffing his face with this popcorn. He crashed on the couch with this big moustache of butter all round his mouth. When Decoy came down in the morning this guy was still asleep but clustered in a big black beard around his mouth were all these cockroaches, eating the butter.

  * * *

  After tossing Victor out and passing his details on to Immigration, we interviewed an angry woman, who fled upon finding the Champion Pube Board hidden behind the shower curtain, a Haitian girl on the run from a mad flatmate – she kept her used toilet paper in a bucket. Said the sewer people wanted it to control her thoughts – and a muscular Christian, who assured us that knuckle push-ups were an excellent way of avoiding temptation.

  We still thought of the empty room as PJ’s at this point. Nobody had stayed long enough, or lodged in our affections firmly enough to displace him as its spiritual owner. Share house veterans will be familiar with this, but the rest of you can think of it as the Dead Beagle Syndrome – the tendency for subsequent pets to suffer in comparison with the original and best. Outstanding flatmates can place a spiritual lock on a bedroom for up to a year after everyone who knew them has moved out.

  ‘Oh I don’t know about putting your Liberty print chair in there. That used to be Damien’s room … No, I never met him but … you know … he dabbled in the black arts.’

  We finally offered PJ’s room to McGann, a travelling American in his mid-forties. He was one of the fittest men I’ve ever lived with, in much better shape than Milo and I, who were at least twenty years his junior. He canoed three hundred miles every week. We wondered what possible excuse he had at his age for living with the likes of us. I took him for one of those guys you meet in share housing, one of those guys who’s a bit older, done far too many drugs, very untrustworthy, kind of dangerous around naive young women, able to project a certain mystique and play within his limitations, the ageing rock star of the share house circuit. He claimed to be on the run from a bad divorce in the US. Said he’d come to Australia to com
plete his education while doing some travel. His story moved about a bit under fire. Some days he’d be studying English Lit, on others a PhD in American History. He was studying something and getting all sort of grants for it, but you could never pin him down on the details. Suspicious? We thought so. But who cares? It was plausible, we’d had enough interviewing for one year, so we took him on spec. We wanted the bills paid. McGann wanted a place that was ‘cool’, and didn’t come with any ‘hassles’. He hinted that his last house had been very ‘uncool’ and the flatmates were very fond of ‘hassling’ him. We shrugged, not realising that he was coding a message for us. If you’re seriously looking at doing the share housing thing, you’ve got to learn to decipher the codes. In Sydney for instance, a ‘broad-minded’ house is either gay or gay friendly. In Brisbane, houses located in ‘green, leafy suburbs’ will have a bucket bong pretty much continually fired up in the living room. For McGann, a cool house with no hassles was one that didn’t look sideways at his huge appetite for commercial sex, and didn’t mention it around his fat girlfriend, Amanda.

  McGann had done the figures at the end of a twelve month period when he’d had no sex at all. He went out on a lot of dates, bought a lot of dinners and flowers, sat through plays and gallery openings, expressed his feelings, told all the right lies, but at the end of the year, there’d been no action down south. After the final unsuccessful date went home in a taxi, he sat down and worked out that he’d spent $4300 on these women. He caught a cab into the red light district, walked into a brothel, pulled out $120 and a girl had sex with him. From that moment on, he was a convert. A believer.

  What did we care? As long as people pay the rent and stay out of your room, you can’t be too sniffy about their private lives. We’d come home every now and then, there’d be a strange car parked in front of the house and the driver would nod to us as we walked in. Letting us know he was there. Ten, fifteen minutes later, a woman would emerge from McGann’s room and pick her way through the piles of sports equipment blocking our hallway. Later, McGann would emerge in his sarong, looking very relaxed. That was kind of horrible actually – the idea that he’d just been having sex and now he was wearing this loose sarong, his wet wedding tackle liable to spill out at any moment – but otherwise, we didn’t care. We’d have a drink with the drivers on hot afternoons, invite them in to watch the cricket. Sometimes if McGann finished early, we’d fix the girl and her pimp a cup of tea and some biscuits. We didn’t want the girl to assume we thought any less of her for having sex with our flatmate.

  A few months after McGann had settled in, we hosted a party for some babes who were taking off on a round-the-world trip to avoid looming career decisions. Things went downhill fast after the ceremonial spearing of the keg in the back yard. As it got dark, my furniture went into the maw of a huge burning pit beside the Hills Hoist. We had excavated this thing as a barbecue. The furniture was Milo’s decision alone. He wasn’t into the share house consultancy thing. People were cold, so in went the brown couch. I was kind of down on him for that, but he forgot to remove his stash from one of the cushions, so it evened out. The way these things always seem to.

  * * *

  Terry

  A bunch of us were at King Street one night. There was a plate of green stuff festering on the coffee table. It may have been bacon at one time - but that’s just a guess, nobody could really tell. Sandra made her usual remarks about ‘you boys’living in a pigsty. She had asked for a cup of coffee but been made a bowl of one because of the clean cup shortage. Meanwhile, I was sitting in the single lounge chair. I let my left hand drop onto the carpet looking for my beer but fumbled upon something I thought was a shoelace. When I picked it up to have a closer look at it I realised it was the major portion of a rat’s tail.

  * * *

  Milo and I sat in the living room later that night, surrounded by the debris, sunburned and hopelessly drunk, knowing in our hearts that we would not clean up for at least three months. McGann, however, was bouncing off the walls. A long day of drinking with pneumatic wonderbabes had touched off some elemental drive within him, jacked his soul into some giant black generator and cranked it up to critical mass. He was raving about his student grant, $6000 which had just gone into his account. We found him on the phone working his way through the Yellow Pages. E for Escort. We started ringing them back, cancelling orders. But we weren’t dealing with drunken bravado here, we had a case of rutting madness in the house. While Milo and I consulted in the kitchen, McGann tried to place an order for a dozen Asian girls and a gram of speed from some dodgey escort agency. We could see him getting bilked out of every cent he had. The house did not need the hassle. It would very definitely not be cool. We cancelled the girls and put the soothers on McGann by telling him he could take us to a strip club for a drink, and if there were any hookers about, we’d sit around and watch him get laid. But he’d be paying for everything. We stressed that, shouted it at him as he called us a taxi. Milo had five bucks to his name and I had $1.38 in phone jar change. We planned to drive McGann into town, get him so drunk he passed out, or in the final extreme, knock him unconscious. Total cost: about $150, all down to him.

  We cabbed it to the Valley, to this pre-Fitzgerald strip club which had a brothel attached to it. Risky, but we had to string him along. Two hours later, McGann was still conscious and a big whack of his student grant had been poured down our throats in the form of tequila laybacks administered by topless barmaids. Our table had become the centre of attention, the terminal point for an unceasing stream of bouncers, hookers and waitresses. There was shouting and singing and the sound of smashing glass. At other tables, businessmen hunkered down sullenly over their drinks. A well-known Marxist university lecturer, a politically correct hatchet man who’d been trapped at his table when we came in, tried to sneak out during a round of laybacks. Milo spotted him and started a commotion, scrambling towards the guy with a cigarette lighter, mumbling something about marking him ‘as of the Beast.’ McGann chose that exact moment to make his move on The Fabulous Tina. He launched himself from a paralytic stupor into full flight across the top of our table, sending beer bottles and shot glasses everywhere as he dived. He didn’t make it, drastically misjudging the distance and his ability to take it in a blur of fluid action. His chin hit the stage and he managed to get out a scream before the bouncers descended for the last time and threw us out.

  We were hoping that McGann might have folded by this stage, but he picked himself up from the footpath and said this was the best night he’d had in ages. That black wave of despair, unknown outside the desperate wee hours, swept down on me. We tried to get into an illegal casino, where the alcohol is free as long as you’re losing – the economics seem feasible when you’re drunk –but they wouldn’t have us because we weren’t wearing ties. The casino people referred us to an address up the street, a white stucco palace with a lot of friendly women hanging out of the windows. We thundered up the stairs, ran past the receptionist and settled in at the bar. Two hours later, the bar was dry and nobody had made any bookings. Men in tuxedos began to block the exits. Our plan was falling to pieces. We had to throw McGann to them or they would have executed us out on the footpath. I woke up on the floor next to Milo with the sun slanting in on me, mouth like a dry turd and heavy peak-hour traffic roaring by outside. McGann had taken four girls, spent all of his grant, lifted Milo’s Bankcard and whacked another grand’s worth of whoopee on the plastic before the sun came up.

  McGann left a few weeks later. He didn’t have any trouble paying Milo back. Got the money to him within a couple of days. But like I said, we never really got round to cleaning up after that party. The disorder which had been lurking at the edge of things took dominion and McGann couldn’t handle it. As the piles of dishes and scraps of food took root in the kitchen, the KFC and Hungry Jacks flotsam which had been quiescent since Victor the Rasta’s departure reappeared through the house. Most of the containers were empty, crumpled and spent, but her
e and there, a half eaten Whopper or Chicken Speciality perched on the arm of a chair, slowly melting and growing into the fabric. Beer cans and stubbies sprouted from within the shifting dunes of discarded junk food artefacts –only one or two to begin with, establishing a tentative hold, testing the atmosphere, then erupting in fantastic promiscuous discharges of lagers and ales and dark malty stouts, torn cardboard cartons and unknowable numbers of plastic six pack rings. Porn mags, junk mail, newspapers, sports supplements, comic books, text books, lecture notes, tissues, paper plates, napkins, pizza boxes, plastic bags, pie tins, flavoured milks, tee shirts, socks and rotting vegetable matter were churned, shredded, ground down, chewed up, digested, crushed, pulped, torpedoed, bombed, burned and eviscerated into layers and hillocks of generic land fill. We chose to ignore the sounds of rummaging rats and skittering roaches, to cope with the blue-green algal bloom spreading out of the kitchen sink and to shrug when the black oily toxins began leaking from the vegetable crisper. However, the trails of fat white maggots, headed from the kitchen to our bedrooms like ships of the line, brought a response. Milo and I bought a couple of silly hats, some high-powered water pistols, filled them with kerosene and went hunting. McGann, on the other hand, had been cooking in the back yard for a week, heating Milo’s Army Reserve surplus ration packs over the fire pit by the Hills Hoist. When he finished the last of those and was faced with coming down to our level – sucking the jelly directly out of the green tubes of army jam for sustenance – he moved out.