He Died with a Felafel in His Hand

by John Birmingham

  These people had never seen anything like it. Michael had to be brought to. I think we succeeded without the help of the ambulance. After he comes to we partied for ages. The next morning my thespian friend put his head round the door and politely says ‘Uhm Mark, I think uhm ...’ I put my hand up, ‘Don’t worry mate. I’ve got a new place. I’ll be gone by lunch time.’ He was very relieved.

  That’s how I ended up with these two gay guys. The problem was that I was a bit boofy, you know. I’m sort of blokey and I like to spend the weekends in front of the telly watching the footy and I think it got to the guys. That was an aspect of my blokiness that just wasn’t going to work in a gay house. So I was asked to leave under the pretext that I spent too much time there. I said, ‘But while I’m spending time here I’m doing the cooking and the cleaning up.’ Didn’t matter.

  I ended up on a friend’s couch after that. I was there for a while but he was a bed smoker. He set his futon on fire one night. I was pinned so I slept through most of the emergency but when he woke me up the place was pretty much wrecked by futon smoke and water damage. My friend was packing shit so we borrowed a ute, this is at three in the morning, threw everything in the back and fled. I was getting pretty tired of this by now. I was a man on the run. So I went the whole hog. Sold my guitars and bought a ticket to London.

  7 NORTHERN GOTHIC

  The house sat on the edge of a monstrous freeway development, just outside the city. An overpass had been rammed through the front yard, so the owner didn’t really care what happened to the place. He just wanted whatever rent he could get, which wasn’t that much because the house was full of Goths. Being out of contact with reality, Goths tend to neglect the mundane things in life like paying the rent, and when the estate agents got serious and sent the strong arm boys around, the little vampire colony was $4200 in arrears.

  I’m not sure how many people lived there. There were three regulars and lots of drop-ins. Kevin the carpenter – plying his trade in a completely dark room lit by candles – had a great cordless drill. When I asked if it was powerful enough, he said ‘Fuck yes!’ turned around and started drilling holes in the wall. The teev was turned on all the time but only half tuned so that the picture could distort in time to the beat of Front 242 and Revolting Cocks which screamed out of the stereo pretty much incessantly. I met an apprentice printer from the front room who was totally hung up on Laibach, this Yugoslavian band. They were a blood and soil act. Played a lot of new Nazi anthem stuff, wore big deer antlers and crap on stage. They were not actually fascist themselves, you understand, it’s just an art thing, called New Slovenian Art. Of course you can’t say New Slovenian Art in English. You have to say it in the original language because that’s all part of the art. There was a bald guy who lived out the back. Totally serious about his image, shaved his head, wore black eyeliner everywhere. He rarely ever paid for anything, denounced property as unimportant. Very snobbish and elitist. Hardly saw him speak a word to anyone. And there was another guy called Luke who was said to be into creating music, but the only thing that he’d really done was drill off-centre holes in his collection of old 45s. He’d whack them on the record player and sit there all night, thrilled with the discovery that the music speeds up and slows down and speeds up and slows down and speeds up and slows down. Infinitely. Actually the whole household was pretty excited about that.

  But the strong arm boys came down heavy and they all skipped on me one night – took off like a swarm of bats flying out from Indooroopilly Island. My name wasn’t on the lease and I more or less took the frighteners in my stride – strong arm men don’t bother me anymore, you just look blank and dead and disinterested at them long enough, and they eventually realise that beating you up would be very, very boring – so I wound up with the house to myself. Good deal. I set up camp. Found a table to put my typewriter on. Bought some groceries. Thought about life for a while. Then the extended family that is Brisbane sent some people along to keep me company, and for my sins, I took them in.

  * * *

  Sam

  Goths have a great hide-and-seek party game. You put on really loud music, so loud you can barely hear yourself think. Everyone has two or three bongs. You extinguish all candles. The house is blacked out, like jet black, then one person hides. Everyone goes looking for the hider. But when they find the hider they don’t say anything. They quickly crawl into the hiding place with them. This goes on until one person is left, stoned as hell, careening around the dark, empty house.

  * * *

  Dirk was a funny little dude. I told you about him earlier. Remember? Thought cleaning the bathroom was a heterofascist plot? Well Dirk had this strange hair. Sort of a mutant afro. He told me once that he really wanted hair like the guy from Eraserhead but that rather than growing up in a curly high rise, it grew out. A tragedy. He came with two women – Em, a banker and still one of my best friends, and Crazy Nina, a complete disaster, one of the most deranged people I have ever lived with in my whole life.

  We had a great housewarming party. One of those parties that came in human waves – bingeing crims, yuppie yobboes, professional crashers, hopeful punters, crazy ferals, angry punks, hairy freaks, girly swots, naive schoolies, cynical journos, screaming fags and sweaty dykes, bent cops, backdoor specialists, conquering heroes and hopeless jokes, great pretenders, pale imitators, smooth operators, and even some of the vampire bats who did a runner on this house in the first place. People got drunk and scaled the hall. Feet on one side, arses on the other. There were a dozen of us, leg to leg up there, weeping drunk, bottles in our laps, girls over our knees. We didn’t come down for some time and the walls were permanently bowed afterwards. People went tripping, naked in the bath, just lying there, with a little water dripping on their heads. A couple of chemists made up a half kilo block of potassium nitrate and sugar smoke mix. A chunk the size of your thumb will fill an ordinary room. There were nitrous tanks and hydrogen balloons. Tied them off, attached a fuse, lit them up and let them go. Boom! The front stairs collapsed, but some builders made temporary stairs out of stolen milk crates. Meanwhile there’s this exercise machine, this gut buster, sitting out there in the lounge room. It had a belt you put round your waist which vibrates really quickly. Breaks up the fat cells. A drunken wideboy locks himself in and cranks it up to full power – smoke starts billowing out of the thing and it sucks the wideboy closer and closer, into its maw. He’s screaming because his arse is being torn to pieces, everyone’s panicking, no one knows how to turn it off or disconnect the belt, and suddenly it vibrates itself to pieces and starts snapping and slapping like a crazed rubber snake. Somebody set fire to all the posters around the room, and while we’re trying to beat out the flames, one of the Goths jumped into the next door neighbours’ pool, slicing through a carpet of thick green algae on the surface. He was stark naked, white as a magician’s rabbit, and had jumped from the roof. A dozen people were up there, fucked on alcohol, acid and nitrous oxide. Every now and then, you’d hear someone slide off and crash to the ground. I woke up the next morning buried in furniture.

  * * *

  Sarah

  I lived with a cop who was also a homophobic Nazi. It was in Paddington and he was always complaining about ‘filthy’gays and how they brought down the neighbourhood. The thing was, one of our other flatmates was openly gay. The cop would carry on like this around him but he never actually attacked him personally. A couple of years after I’d moved on I met the gay guy who told me that the cop and he were having an affair at the time. They used to wear his gun and police hat to bed.

  * * *

  The domestic tensions kicked into second gear pretty much the following day. I don’t recall the specifics of the incident, but I think the girls had just come home from a shit day in hell when Dirk waltzed in and demanded to know where his dinner was. Jesus, I shudder to think of it. He obviously hadn’t had much to do with women because I don’t know a single straight guy who’d dare pull a stunt like that. No
t one, out of all of the arse-scratching, beer-guzzling yahoos I’ve lived with. Your cock would be on the chopping block before you could scream. We were still scraping bits of Dirk off the wall three days later. Crazy Nina was particularly harsh. It was a bad moon rising. Nina and Dirk were simply programmed contra to each other. She must have spotted him as the weak link in the house, because she bore down on him without mercy. They’d have furious arguments over whose turn it was to hold the TV remote, whether or not the pineapple chunks went on the third shelf or the fourth shelf in the cupboard, whether it was Tiny Teddies or Iced Vo-Vo’s in the shopping trolley this week. Really bitter gouging encounters which sent Em and me into hiding to laugh ourselves sick.

  There’s a club out there for Crazy Nina’s ex-flatmates. There must be dozens of us now. We get together occasionally, rent a hotel for speeches, dinner and drinks. Sometimes we go to the opera together. We’re all bonded by having lived with her. Other people just don’t understand. Nina looked normal. She was a beautiful girl, raven-haired, with striking green eyes. She knew how to present. She seemed like a competent human being. But at her core? A heart of Darkness. You didn’t get to know this until you had lived with her for a while. She had a very good act. Fooled us for weeks. As I said, it’s difficult to recall the details now. Only the texture and echoes remain.

  Sometimes you can tell straight off that a lunatic is bearing down upon you. During the interview, when black leathery wings burst from their back and their head does the three-sixty, hosing the room down with thick, green pea soup, it’s a pretty easy thing to grab the biro and scratch their name from the list. Most often, however, it takes about a week. You’ll wake up at two or three in the morning to the sound of your new flatmate, the quiet librarian, ranting and screaming at her boyfriend as she stoves in the windscreen of his Volvo with a Club Lock in an attempt to stop him driving away. Or maybe you’ll be rooting around in the freezer, trying to figure out how to get to the Vodka or that last fish finger, or the legendary Lost Tab of Acid, and you’ll notice that the ice cube tray has been filled full of tomato paste. Or you’ll catch the new girl sandpapering her books. For that fresh, just brought home look. Or you’ll come home late one night and trip over a new hat stand. I’ve noticed that neurotic young women all own hat stands. And hats. Lots of them.

  Worst-case scenario was this mad hatter called Lucy. No connection to Lucinda the Loon. She used the hat stand to keep her partner in place. He was three times her size but she bent him to her will by picking the hat stand up and bashing him with it, hats and all. You’d come home to an incredibly clean house and know there’d been a domestic, because the hats all had dents in them. She was nice before she moved in. But she turned. If she didn’t get what she wanted, she’d storm around the house slamming doors, waiting for her poor boyfriend to get home. Then she’d scream like a banshee and bash him with the hat stand, the second he walked in through the door.

  But on the big scale of things, Lucy the mad hatter was a rank amateur. Had her tagged as nutter within two days.

  With Crazy Nina, it took time. It was a constant chafing which rubbed on your nerves, rubbed them raw in the end – little oddities and quirks gathering into a tsunami of obsessions and strangeness. She was a list fascist. It was her first law of share house dynamics. For every action, there had to be a long list of activity, drawn up by Nina. The upshot of it all was generally that everybody got jobs to do and bills to pay, except Nina, who was hard at work drafting the next list. She also experimented on kittens. Raised them inside a locked, airtight, explosively hot house on a diet of soy extract and vegetable gruel. She never cleaned up after them. They crawled inside the pile of clothes I slept under and relieved themselves at least two times a day.

  I though about killing them. I’ve done it before. I lived with this girl, Laura. She had a pet guinea pig, called it Chester. It was a surrogate love interest. She let it sleep in a rolled-up jumper on the pillow next to her. Talked to it all of the time. While she was watching television, reading a book, playing the stereo. She even had guinea pig music on CD for Christ’s sake. Debussy, I think. Anyway Laura had a real date one night. Some desperado from the office. Probably the new guy. She was clued in enough to realise the pig was a no-show for the date, and tied herself in knots over whether to go or pike out. She drove me crazy, asking what she should do. I said I’d look after it if she’d just get out of the house, and she reluctantly agreed. Left me two typed pages of instructions. Soon as she was gone, I locked Chester in the bathroom and luxuriated in my first night alone in the house. I fell asleep in front of the teev, woke up about ten o’clock. I figured I’d better let the pig out or it might go a bit shack wacky. She’d notice, believe me. So I opened the door, expecting it to bolt out between my legs, but there’s no activity inside the bathroom. I called out its name. ‘Chester!’ Nothing. My stomach began a slow forward roll. There weren’t too many places for it to hide. Only one really. My heart was really starting to hammer as I walked over and peered in. The toilet bowl. Yep. There he was. Poor little sucker. Probably kept his head above water for a couple of hours. I threw all my shit in an overnight bag and ran for it. Sorry about that Laura.

  * * *

  Bill

  I went to a red house-warming party where there was going to be some blackjack played. I was curious because I like to play cards and the people throwing the party knew nothing about cooking. So we all turn up wearing red. We sit down. They had red plates. They brought out this big pot of boiling water with hot dogs in it. Dumped them on a plate with a lot of tomato sauce. Then they slopped out all this beetroot. Then all this red cabbage crap. Three or four of these red horrors, then some crook red wine and red jelly. Then they started playing blackjack. There was a really weird feeling in the air so I left. I found out it had turned into strip blackjack and they all ended up fucking each other. A nightmare. It must have been all the preservatives and red shit they were eating. Drove them crazy and the genitals came out. They were probably red too.

  * * *

  Now where was I? Ah yes, the other loony.

  Nina enmeshed the house in this fantastically complicated series of lies and abstractions by which she ordered her daily affairs. She was avoiding an ex-boyfriend who’d lent her a tape recorder and wanted it back, somebody else who’d loaned her some lecture notes and wanted them back, the Hilton Hotel where she worked when she felt like it, and her mother from whom she had inherited her personality. We had different stories for each of them. We had to tell the Hilton that she’d been in a car accident. We had to tell the people from Uni she was in Sydney. We had to tell her mother that she was at her sister’s place. And of course we got it all hopelessly wrong. We told work she was in Sydney and her mother that she was in a car accident and her boyfriend that she was gay. So then we got a list explaining where we had let her down. She pinned photocopies of that one to our bedroom doors. Or the TV set in my case. It started getting way out of hand. Our neighbours, old Ted and Mavis, called Em over to their back verandah one afternoon, and whispered ‘Isn’t it terrible about Nina?’

  ‘Beg pardon?’ said Em.

  ‘John, getting her pregnant, forcing her to get an abortion. She’s been crying all day.’

  We made one last effort before Crazy Nina crashed and burned us completely. Told her we were going to the beach for a few days, asked her if she wanted to come. She said that sounded like a great idea. Dirk was in the bad books for some reason, so we organised the holiday behind his back. The morning of the trip, everyone had packed and was bouncing off the walls like kids dosed up on red cordial. But Nina was sitting around in her tracksuit, eating buttered toast and looking like she wouldn’t be escaping from the gravitational pull of the bean bag for three months. She has a problem. Doesn’t think it’s a very good idea for people who live together to spend too much time together.

  She wouldn’t look at us. Just stared at the TV, really drilled into Fat Cat and Friends. We kept at her for a while, bu
t she said the weather would be bad, she had laundry to do, assignments to write. We had to strong-arm her into the car. After all, this was partly for her benefit. To help her chill out. And it wasn’t even a total disaster – there was even one moment when she morphed back into human form for about two hours. We had a picnic up on a headland near a lighthouse. Sat on blankets in the dunes to keep out of the wind. Had beers and fried chicken, fruit, cheese and fresh bread. We were totally disconnected. It seemed to calm Nina right down. A really nice moment. But when we packed up and went back to the car, the wings burst from her back all over again. The following week, we were back at the house and she appeared in the living room, said, ‘I’m just going round the shop,’ walked out, and never came back. We didn’t bother calling the cops. Word eventually filtered down that she had moved in with a girlfriend called Tanya.

  At this stage, I’d been pulling a lot of cones with a girl called Joanne. That’s my courtship ritual. Pull so many cones with a girl that we become brain dead and decide to go out together. I pulled so many with Joanne that I damaged my lungs and caught some horrible kind of chest infection. A doctor at the 24hr clinic gave me some tablets for it. I don’t know whether I was allergic to the tablets or whether they reacted against the massive quantities of dope in my bloodstream, but I broke out in these amazing red welts. They were like little mesas and canyons. They started on the insides of my elbows and climbed symmetrically all over my body. Covered my face and lips. I looked like The Thing from The Fantastic Four. I was stripped down to my jocks, standing in front of a full length mirror to check out this freak show when there’s a knock at the door and Tanya bursts in, babbling about Nina. Saying she’s crazed, she’s insane. I go yeah, for sure. Then Tanya notices my appearance.