‘I love you Matthew.’
‘I love you Fiona.’
‘I really love you Matthew.’
‘Oh, I really love you Fiona.’
So I threw him out. My old school friend and everything. There is no sentiment in share housing, only mercenary self interest. And if only my self interest had been running a little stronger we might never have taken in our next flatmate. Jeffrey the junkie.
* * *
Share House Artefacts : Number Four
Milk Crate
HAVING TROUBLE WITH CUPBOARD SPACE?
Bottom fallen out of your shopping bag? Stairs fallen off the back of your house? Annoying isn’t it.
YOU NEED TO STEAL SOME PLASTIC MILK CRATES.
These Versatile by-products of the Space Program convert easily to a Bookshelf, Laundry Hamper, Futon Base, Coffee Table, Bong Stand, Foot Rest or Filing Cabinet.
PLASTIC MILK CRATES. A THOUSAND PRACTICAL USES.
COMING FROM A FOOTPATH NEAR YOU.
10 MOVING ON
It’s funny how everyone seems to work in the sex industry these days. A couple of years ago you could guarantee that anyone in a share house was scamming social security or working a restaurant or both. But now it's the sex trade. My friend Brett has lived with two table-top dancers, a prostitute and a guy who drives prostitutes to their clients. All in the last eighteen months. Reckons it'll cost you a hundred bucks just to have a girl driven to your front door, but I don’t know about that. Sounds a bit much to me.
It could be a Melbourne thing. My friend Roscoe shared a house with a B&D mistress while he was living in Melbourne. Said she and her driver Stan came home one day, weeping with laughter. They’d been doing a job at the home of a very prominent MP. The guy’s bag was to get down to handcuffs and rubber nappies and be locked in a cupboard. No sex, no contact. Just that dark, musty cupboard. He always booked for Sunday morning when the family were at church. Anyway on this particular morning one of the kids takes sick and they come home early. When Miss Donna raps on the cupboard door and tells this guy, he starts bouncing around inside, desperate to get out. They’re yelling at him to calm down, they can’t get the key in the lock with him thrashing about and shaking the cupboard, but that just makes it worse and after three massive thuds the cupboard rocks and teeters on the edge of balance, then falls forward, crashing face down on the carpet. Uh oh. Stan thinks quickly, stomps an air hole in the back and then flees with Miss Donna, passing the stunned family members on the front steps.
You can see this guy every now and then making a speech about the importance of supporting the traditional family.
I guess it’s got something to do with Melbourne being a very English sort of town, a lot of private boarding schools inculcating a fondness for cold showers and birch-bark floggings amongst the ruling classes. It’s an uptight place, incredibly constipated on issues of form. As a general rule in any city you wouldn’t want to move in with somebody who actually owns the house. Chances are they won’t appreciate you playing corridor golf or stripping down your hog in the lounge room. But that general injunction becomes an iron law in Melbourne.
Always be wary of phrases like, ‘My house is your house. Feel comfortable. Feel free to use all the facilities. Just treat it like your home.’ If you hear those phrases, run, don’t look back, don’t stop or turn, just run. What happens is that people buy these houses and can’t make the payments so they get someone in. This woman I know, this older woman, let’s call her Celine, went through a very exclusive agency and found this nice place in East Melbourne. The owner was an older guy doing the place up, needed someone to share.
If she’d sussed the garage when she first moved in she might have had an idea of what was in store. It was all there. His whole personality. Screws, nails, hammers, chisels, saws, everything hanging up or put away in little containers, all carefully graded and marked and arranged. Everything labelled and in its place and if you moved anything out of its place the fragile, crystalline lattice-work of his personality would shatter under the stress, spraying a wide area with a million shards of razor glass.
The first warning sign came with the newspapers. This guy had them delivered in the morning. Celine was up before him so she’d collect them to read over breakfast. After a fortnight he presented her with a bill for half the newspapers. Said she’d been reading them, she’d be paying for them. Now Celine didn’t care whether they had papers or not. They were there and he wasn’t reading them so she had. It degenerated to the point where he’d set his alarm five minutes before hers, run down, grab the newspapers and run back up into his room with them. When he’d finished he’d tie them up in bags and put them in the garbage.
Madness. When she’d invite people over he’d get her out of the room and ask, ‘Who are these people in my house? Why are they sitting on my lounge? Why are they watching my television?’ He’d go ballistic if she had people over for dinner and he wasn’t notified well before. He liked a good five weeks notice. In the depths of winter she’d turn the heater on. He’d turn it off. She’d leave a light on in the hallway. He’d turn it off. These things would eat away at him. The relationship deteriorated. She started leaving on the lights, moving things around, inviting people over. On purpose. Finally, she realised she was becoming as mad as him and she moved out.
There are common elements to share housing everywhere. Like the shopping basket overburdened by detergent, rice and pasta. But the detergent never gets used. And the rice and pasta never get eaten because nobody remembers to get anything to go with them and if you do buy some good food for a dinner party and you turn your back on it for five minutes it will disappear and you will serve up the only stuff left, the rotting week-old salad refuse at the bottom of the fridge.
I have trawled through three states and a swarm of human strangeness and I have to say, I’ve seen some weird things: flatmates who like to put trips in your beer; flatmates who only ever eat expired stocks of packet pasta; flatmates who like to hide in the bathroom and watch you take a piss. Actually one guy did all of these things. Kelvin. Liked to lie in the bath in the dark late at night. I’m in there one night, tackle out, taking care of business when I look to my left and seize up in horror because Kelvin is lying in the bath with a big lurid grin on his dial. Been in there for ages. Lets out this really sick giggle. I had to piss outside after that.
This is the sort of thing I think of when I think of Brisbane. Not sunshine, or the beach, or a beer off the wood at the Breakfast Creek. Nuh.
I think of a place where anything can happen, or nothing. Disintegration, entropy, the long mid-afternoon of wanton unemployment. Wallowing in cider and children’s television. I think of coming home to find some anorexic Goth woman sitting in the bathroom with her wrists open to the world explaining that she wasn’t serious. ‘I just wanted to see what it would be like.’ Or the house which broke up over the issue of who owned the plastic dinosaurs. I lived with these two intense young girls. Painfully thin, pallid, humourless, small-breasted Smiths fans, they were. But mad house-nazis. We had a kitty for buying muesli and tea bags which the girls enforced with fists of iron. The trouble started when one of them discovered that if you saved up seven box labels and sent them to Uncle Toby, he would send you a plastic dinosaur egg in the mail, which you could pop open and transform into a baby dinosaur. The house broke up because Maud the blond Goth saw Danielle the black-haired Goth walking around with this egg dinosaur going, ‘It’s mine, all mine’, and Maud exploded because the box tops were purchased with the kitty money. The dinosaur, she said, belonged to the house. But Danielle insisted that it was she who had saved up the box tops, and she who had filled out the coupon, and she who had posted the whole lot off to Uncle Toby, who owned the dinosaur. The dinosaur was hers. It got really ugly. There was a lot of slamming doors, a lot of note-writing, a lot of sulking, and the whole place just went down like a huge ship, bow up, slowly disappearing into the arctic sea.
When I think of B
risbane I see a lot of these wasted spider people dressed in black. It was like the lost Valley of the Goths. Still is. These people don’t seem to realise that when Robert Smith minces about in his black clothes, he’s performing on stage, under a lighting set-up that’s much more amenable to the streamlined form than some blocky boy in the hot sun of a Brisbane afternoon, wearing black stretch Lee jeans with that slight shininess around the arse and that creasing of the crotch which comes from a lot of wear without a wash. These guys, they’re strictly public service nowadays – Social Security, Veterans Affairs, Valuer General, that sort of thing. But their lifestyle hasn’t changed. Smoke before work. Beers at lunch. Buckets after dinner.
We all smoked way too much. If you took all the shit we smoked in just one year and rolled it into one big joint, it would be so much bigger than the biggest joint you have ever seen that you would need to smoke two really big joints just to deal with the concept of its incredible bigness.
Marijuana culture is developing regional styles. Elements of the culture, the language, the implements and the product itself, are readily transferable. You can get good and bad smoke everywhere (except for Melbourne where you only get the bad stuff). The poorest smoke will encourage you to watch daytime TV and wish that your flatmate would walk to the corner shop for another packet of Tim Tams. The best smoke will peel your head like a fat Bondi orange, pour rainbows through your eyes, punch out the seven veils of consciousness separating this world from the next, and make you wish your flatmate would walk to the corner shop for another packet of Tim Tams. Joints, cones and bucket bongs are found in all cities. But at the level of attitude and rituals, cultural differences are manifesting themselves as different signature themes in the cities of Australia. Consider the bucket bong. It’s very popular in Queensland, much less so south of the Tweed. Every house I’ve lived in and visited in Brisbane had a bucket bong stowed away beside the brown couch or sitting in the laundry out the back.
The thing is, the bucket bong is a complicated arrangement, not lending itself to quiet reflective smoking, and not easily dismantled in times of crisis (Open up Birmingham. We have a warrant.) Worse still, it’s not very dignified. You sit in a circle on the floor taking turns at plunging your head into a bucket of water while sucking on a very large plastic bottle. After my first encounter with the bucket, where I had eight cones by mistake, I fell into a plastic wading pool and remained there until late in the evening.
Perth and Brisbane have taken to the bucket bong as though the desire for it had lain within them like a disease. Sydney and Melbourne have not. The tyranny of distance can’t explain this failure, because its popularity has leapt directly across the continent and into the lounge rooms of the West Coast. Why would such a difficult technology, one not at all amenable to subterfuge and the fast getaway, find ready acceptance in the repressive environment of Queensland but not with our bohemian cousins down south? I think this is style fascism again. The important thing in Sydney and Melbourne is not to be seen to be stoned. It robs you of your cred, and cred is the only thing people understand in these two cities. This would explain why my attempts to introduce Sydney to the bucket have been greeted with polite bemusement, and why nitrous oxide is the accessory of choice for the serious young dope smoker in Brisbane. Nitrous is a really short, really intense high, a little bit like amyl nitrate which has the potential to kill off millions of your brain cells in a big hurry. When you consume a bulb of nitrous, your head buzzes and the ceiling breaks up into a mosaic of coloured squares and triangles of light. It wears off quickly, however, usually after about 30 seconds. But if you pull a cone beforehand, the high lasts about three times longer and is a bit more intense. A man in the grip of a nitrous binge is an ugly sight – a vision of helplessness, laughing hysterically at nothing, slobbering and thrashing around on the floor. But nobody cares about your cred in Brisbane, because nobody has any of their own. It’s just that big extended family thing where everyone knows everybody else’s secrets.
It took me two or three months on the Sydney share house circuit before I realised the drug of choice in this town was heroin. Everybody had smack in their past. It wasn’t cool to be shooting the stuff up at the moment, but a long ride on the Horse was an absolute must for the fully rounded hipster’s CV. People just couldn’t tear their eyes away from the fabulous anti-glamour veneer of it, even in the Cross and Darlinghurst where you could see the real smack fiends – the drop-lidded, floppy-jointed, spastic horror street junkies with their pinned eyes and terrible skin – junkies who imbued blasting up with all the fashionable cachet of eating a cold, half chewed Big Mac from an unguarded industrial bin. Madness disguised as style fascism. A big worry.
While Melissa was living at Kippax Street, I came home a couple of times to find these smack fiends draped around the living room, whacked off their nuts. Came home and discovered a couple of them in there by themselves once, with Melissa nowhere to be found. It felt good toeing them in the ribs and telling them to get the fuck out of my house, knowing they were incapable of dealing with the world outside. They left uncomplaining, shuffling out the front door in slow motion, squinting up at the fierce December sun.
There was something in it though, the addiction to anti-glamour. As much as they inspired contempt, the junkies weren’t all that far removed from me. When Jeffrey went belly-up in front of the television, I’d been living in share houses for ten years. I’d been ripped off, done wrong, burned out and scammed in every one of those years. I’d lived in one or two nice places, but mostly they were pokey, airless flats or houses on the verge of some major structural failure. My beds were foam slabs on the floor, my cupboards stacks of stolen milk crates. Even when I began to write for glossy, well-paying porno mags and the average balance on my keycard crawled into three figures, I needed that continual injection of bizarre and unexpected strangeness you can only get by living with a random series of complete strangers. Tent-dwelling bank clerks, albino moontanners, nitrous suckers, decoys, wonderbabes, gay blades, vampires, mental cases, acid eaters, mushroom farmers, brothel crawlers, fridge pissers and obscurely tiger-suited Japanese girls. I had become the chaos around me – I’d wake up sometimes, stumble into the bathroom and just stare at the palid, hairy, red-eyed horror looking back at me in the mirror. I realised that I too was a rider on the endless highway ribboning through the madness of it all.
The cops did a quick search of Jeffrey’s room while the ambulance guys tagged and bagged his sorry carcass downstairs. They found some old fits and foils and left it at that. Told us to stay out of the place until they sent a science guy around to do the job properly, but I pulled his room apart when they left, and as I explained, struck gold the third place I looked, the battery compartment of his ghetto blaster. Found the money. Close to a grand. He was a dealer, then. Probably would have worked out of home. No great loss.
But as I stood there in the living room, Jeffrey’s money in my hand, staring at the green bean bag and the yellow police tape on the floor, I felt my own mortality for the first time. I looked at the crumpled bank notes and thought if ever there was a moment to get out, to dive head-first through the window of opportunity, this was it. I made a promise to myself to do something. Anything. To seize the day and get a life.
But in the end I bought the house beers and pizza and that weekend we had a fantastic party. Hired a band and everything.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First off, I have to thank all of my friends and former flatmates who spilled their guts. Jim Anderson (Seen the milk, Jim?), Luke Berry (You sure about this job?), Launz Birch (It’s easy Launz. All you need is a word processor and $5000), Samantha Boucher (Who loved you babe?), Brett Cheney (Splitter!), Granger Cooley (Gentleman farmer), Toby Creswell (Don’t come any closer Geoffrey), Amanda Curties (You picked it up?!!!?), Anna Deykin and Anna’s cool flatmate Margi (It’ll be fine. She’s between boyfriends), Jon Dwyer (See you in alt.sex.badger), Helen Field (I’m telling you, it’s all true), Robbie Grehan (
Hey there! Beautiful day), Bob Heather (Is she little, Bob?), James Hine (Did I listen? You’ll never know), Shelly Horton (The Romans had the right idea. Throw ’em to the lions), Brett Kunkel (Has anyone seen Kunkel or Birmingham. Anyone? You Evans? Or Moriarty?), Brett’s mate Robin (Hey, there’s a girl called Jenny looking for you), Chris Linton (Come on. Who was it?), Jillian Lye (Did you just hear something?), Jane Lye (I’ll chase away the burglars for you anytime), Peter McAllister (Gonna eat those veggies Pete?), Rudolph Hess McAllister (He vass never in der Ukraine), Des McCawley (It made sense. Honestly), Corina Mackay (If she calls the lawyers, let me know), Jed McNamara (You done much defamation law, Jed?), John Manion (You gotta lock ’em in the first few nights), Susan Mansfield (What is that smell?), Adrian Matthews (I never thought of doing that with a scooter), Sarah Mulveney (The rich are soooo much weirder), Andrew O’Dempsey (It took me two bottles to finish this), Scotty O’Keefe (Send in the Decoy), Craig Roach (I’ll bet you’re still eating that shit), Peter Rohen (Then, fuck me dead, he showed us his arse!), Howard Stringer (Actual teeth marks?), Perri Timmins (Actually, I sprayed some on them on purpose), Heather Vaile (Who’s my special girl?), Clinton Walker (I ever tell you how I crashed Mason Stewart’s computers?) and Danielle Wilde (Allo Allo). ¶ From the final frontier; Tom Milledge, Wayne Sowry and Dave Kinsella-Holmes. ¶ For that crucial last minute technical assistance; Zoe Chan and Paul Fraser. ¶ For all the whiskey and money; Michael Duffy. ¶ And for devotion to the cause above and beyond the call of duty; The angry, Macintosh-punching Peter Rohen, the relentless, red pen-wielding Howard Stringer and the poor old long suffering Heather Vaile.
THE TASMANIAN BABES FIASCO
He Died with a Felafel in His Hand Page 14
