He Died with a Felafel in His Hand

by John Birmingham

  ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘Allergic reaction.’

  And she continues without missing a beat. Crazy Nina had lobbed into her place a few days ago. Said we had thrown her out. Tanya thought that was terrible, insisted that she move in with her. Nina agrees. There are a few adjustments to be made, of course, but they’re minor. Nina has to borrow Tanya’s keys. The pineapple chunks have to be moved to the third shelf. Tanya has been after this very well-known lawyer for ages and Nina is cramping her style. But otherwise, it’s cool. She’s doing her bit for the Sisterhood. But on this particular night, Tanya gets home and the house is dark and locked up. She’s given Nina her keys, and Nina has assured her that she’ll be home to let her in. But she isn’t. Tanya knocks on the door, sits on the front step for half an hour, and finally decides to break in. She ends up climbing the trellis under her window. Tanya is very much a silk scarf and Chanel girl, but she makes the climb, levers herself through the window and crashes to the floor. Then she freezes. There’s someone in her room. This house has been burgled three times in the last two months, and the panic response is rushing through her head like a train crashing off the rails. Then she realises the intruder is in her bed. There are two of them. She turns on the light. It’s crazy Nina and the lawyer. He’s wearing Tanya’s white cowboy boots. Madness. Tanya fled, came over to our place and went to pieces.

  We fled too, in the end. The house was mondo disgusto, humming with bad vibes and settling layers of toxic effect. Nina had come back briefly to liberate the kittens, her clothes and Em’s cooking pots. She put the pots into storage and sent a lawyer’s letter disputing ownership. She was like a twister tearing through a trailer park after an earthquake, so we found another house up in the mountains outside town, and prepared to withdraw to a quieter life. But our phased retreat became a panic stricken rout when Crazy Nina’s mother threatened to come around and sort out this cooking pot business once and for all. She had prepared a list. It would explain everything. I think I saw her car pull into the driveway as we disappeared over the hill.

  Our new place was the best house I’ve ever lived in – polished wood floors throughout, half-way up a mountain, surrounded by sub-tropical rain forest. Em hung all this coloured cloth and shit from the ceiling, turned the place into a bedouin tent. Very cool. We got this girl in to replace Crazy Nina but she was diagnosed schizo and moved out. I just couldn’t understand it. She was one of the sanest, most reasonable people I’ve ever met. Cooked a damn fine minestrone. Sadly when she left, domestic harmony left with her.

  Dirk had been partially rehabilitated by his feud with Crazy Nina. But when the war with her was resolved, we discovered a new Dirk living amongst us. An uptight, suspicious Dirk. Nothing like the fun-loving, oddly haired, dope-smoking Dirk we had previously known. This new Dirk was always alert and on guard, because he had discovered he was gay. He trawled for homophobic intent in all our conversations and domestic arrangements. He put posters of nude, grinning men all over the kitchen because it made him feel comfortable. We took them down because we were fascists. We asked him if he wanted dinner one night and he said no, he was going out. But when he found out we had made his favourite apricot chicken, he said we tricked him into saying no. Said we probably thought being straight was better than being gay. Said we were just like Fred Nile.

  * * *

  Monica

  I lived with two merchant bankers. One of them brought this Brazilian girl home and made her stay in the flat for four days. Kept her prisoner really. Tried to get into her pants every night. The girl only spoke French and Spanish and I had to translate. He’d get home about eleven most nights, close the lounge room door and launch another attempt on this poor girl. She came to me one night, absolutely desperate and said ‘Please help me.’ She didn’t want to stay but he was locking her in every day. He used to ring me during the day and say ‘Is that bitch still there’. I let her out and gave her twenty bucks to get to the consulate.

  * * *

  Yes I know. I’m being hard. But I tried, honest I did. While I was in Sydney for some work, Dirk wrote me a note, all cut up because his parents’ minds had imploded and they’d told him never to darken their doorstep again. I could see this was weighing heavily on him. His parents were a couple of Nazi pinheads, but they were his parents. Who else was going to do his laundry? So I write him a note in return, figuring it’s a chance to square the ledger, a chance to strut my credentials as a broadminded guy. You know, straight man–gay man, all brothers under the skin sort of thing. I write Dirk a letter suggesting that if his parents are unable to cope with his sexual orientation, it’s their problem, not his. I said if I was a gay guy, I wouldn’t be worrying about my parents. I’d be getting laid every night. I mean, you’re hitting on guys right? That’s what I wrote him. And it didn’t come easy. There was more empathy and understanding in that note than I’d ever needed in ten years of writing to girlfriends. Dirk broke down when he read it. But not from gratitude. He burst into tears, said it was typical really, and got stuck into my homophobia like a big hot meal.

  So I brought Taylor the taxi driver back into my life, into all of our lives really. He’d given up the booze again. Needed a place to stay, so I offered him the spare room. I explained the whole set-up to the house before Taylor moved in, but Dirk went to pieces anyway. Said he didn’t think Taylor would respect his homosexuality. Don’t know why. He’d ditched the camouflage pants after he got off the grog and his main source of happiness now came from baking bread. Hundreds of loaves. You’d get home and he’d be in the kitchen wearing an apron over his Blundstones and King Gees. Hell, Dirk should have taken him on as a role model. But it didn’t work out, and I’ve got to admit, that was kind of the plan. Relations soured and an exchange of notes began between Dirk and Taylor, culminating in Taylor plunging a huge hunting knife through a big piece of butcher’s paper and into the door of Dirk’s room. The message on the paper, finger-painted Charles Manson-style in pig’s blood, said simply, ‘You are dead meat on a hook, mate.’

  Game, set and match, Taylor.

  * * *

  Share House Artefacts : Number Three

  Bucket Bong

  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 alo
ng 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.