by Kathy Lette
‘C’mon Deb, don’t be pissed off.’ She followed me up the stairs and put her arm around me. ‘How’d you like to be an emotional cripple? I was adopted, don’t forget. I’m a Neglected Welfare Minor. I need some love in my life … He’s a hot spunk, huh?’
I glared back down into the living room. Aussie was strutting around, as territorial as a tomcat. His gelled hair bristled like a toilet brush. I wanted to upend him and clean out the dunny bowl. He burped loudly.
‘Oops. Must be someone I ate on the way,’ he smirked. I looked at Mouche in disbelief. ‘Oh, he’s sensitive underneath,’ she explained.
‘Yeah. About as sensitive as a dog turd.’
‘He just acts animal ’cause he’s shy. He told me.’
Why is it that everyone reckons they’re shy? On every talk show on every television station, the Fabulously Famous were revealing before zillions of viewers how basically shy and retiring they really are. ‘Mouche, if he really was shy, he’d be too shy to tell you how shy he really is.’
It was when she asked me to help her turn over the sheets that I suspected she may be serious about him. But I knew for sure when she mentioned she might wash them. ‘I’d be more inclined to boil the whole bedroom,’ I snapped, doing a Scarlett O’Hara flounce from the room.
For the next three days they stayed in bed. What with no busking and three unfinished songs, we were pretty well broke. He was eating us out of house – what there was of it – and home. And he was always tapping. Out of time. Just to endear myself to him, I inquired if he knew what sort of people like to hang out with musicians. I told him – drummers.
‘Think it’s a snackoid situation,’ Mouche announced one evening, rummaging in the cupboard and shaking cans up and down near her earhole. None of the cans had labels. In an effort to win a P&O cruise, Max kept peeling them off and sending away thousand-word essays on the gastronomic delights of Golden Circle pineapple and Heinz tomato sauce. So we ended up with some pretty extraordinary culinary concoctions. One night we found ourselves eating anchovies and steamed pudding.
‘K’niver cuppa with me pud? No food for you, Mouche,’ Aussie missed a beat in his drumming solo. ‘You could lose a bit. Round the thighs.’
It hadn’t stopped him from parting them, I noted bitterly. ‘Women carry more body fat than men. It’s well known.’ My hand darted towards the teapot before his, and I drained the brown dregs into my own cup. ‘All women have those cones of tissue at the tops of their thighs.’
‘Jeez. It looks like she’s wearing flesh-coloured jodhpurs.’ He lifted his dirty Doc Marten onto the table, yanked it off and began to dig the gunge out from under his toenails. It was a regular compost under there. One foot finished, he began excavation on the other.
‘Well, I guess you’ll be working all weekend,’ I hinted hopefully, passing Mouche a large slice of bread and butter pudding.
‘Work? I’m a victim of the eighties recession,’ he almost boasted. This guy was a phenomenon – he could talk without moving his brain.
‘Oh. You’re unemployed.’ I watched him wipe some of his toe jam on the side of the lounge chair then prod at the meat pie Mouche had placed in front of him.
‘I mean that I am a technological refugee. A child of the Unlucky Country.’ He wielded his knife with a pretence of fury. I watched him devour his pie. The grub gave himself a full meat facial.
We ate on in silence. I saved my cherry, marooned in a sea of custard, till last. Suddenly his fork darted towards me, skewered my cherry and rammed it into his gaping mouth.
‘What about your band?’ I bristled. ‘Shouldn’t you be rehearsing?’
‘Bit of a down time for us.’ He burped and slouched over to the couch with his packet of Drum. ‘We’re not commercial enough. Ahead of our time. Takes a while to get the buzz happening.’
What could Mouche possibly see in a creep like this? He even smelled his own farts. No kidding, I watched him. Surreptitiously, he’d lower a finger near his arse, tense, relax, then act as if his nose was itchy.
‘Anyone in the dunny?’ he asked me.
‘Loo paper doesn’t grow on trees you know. Well, okay, it does. But we’re rationing. Two squares per crap,’ I said through set lips.
‘Youse two should sing topless. Then you’d make some moolah. I would. Deadset. If I was a chick.’ For a hideous moment, I saw our little fried-egg breasts sizzling in the spotlight of some sleaze joint. I looked at him with loathing. Aussie obviously had expertise in one field – High Tack.
‘Arms!’ I snapped my fingers, gesturing for him to surrender. He reached for the sky half-heartedly. I buried my nose in his pits and sniffed. ‘You sweated in it!’
‘Fuck your T-shirt, you suburban bozo.’ Aussie wrenched the Eurythmics T-shirt over his head to reveal a golden brown, muscular torso. Suddenly I saw what she saw in him. He was the complete two-legged Australian male cliché – bronzed, blond, blue-eyed, biceps rippling. That kind of spunkiness doesn’t come naturally. He must have been taking handsome lessons. He drummed angrily on the fruit crates. He paused to stub out his cigarette in the debris on his plate.
I grabbed his hand and examined it before crowing at him. ‘Mouche is a sexual kleptomaniac. Did you know you can tell a man’s penis size by the length of his index finger? You won’t last long, you know.’
He curled his fingers inside his palms. ‘That’s the trouble with you surfie chicks. You’re so fuckin’ crass.’ He leaned into my face. ‘Little earlobes,’ he snarled dismissively, ‘Little clit.’
It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Mouche emerged from the kitchen to retrieve the plates. Max was hanging off her arm like a toddler, pleading with her to make her special salted-caramel popcorn. ‘It’s a palate-fuck,’ he assured Aussie and me. ‘She’s invented a new taste sensation.’
‘How would you survive without me?’ Mouche laughed.
Aussie ambushed her en route back to the kitchen. He kissed her. His tongue flickered like a lizard’s up into her nostril. The sight wasn’t that sensational. It was pornographic, to tell you the truth.
‘Fuck the kiddies’ popcorn.’ In the half-light, he looked satanic. Mouche must have spent all night rubbing the 666 off his forehead. ‘Come on. We’re crashing at my place.’
From then on, Aussie was the only man on Mouche’s menu. And she didn’t eat in like she always used to. She now ate takeaway.
With Mouche ensconced at Aussie’s place, I sat for days in front of the mirror stretching my earlobes, then watching them shrink back into place. The only things I liked about my body were my feet. And even then I preferred them in shoes. What was so radical about celibacy? I had no trouble achieving it. In fact, since breaking up with Garry, my only erogenous zone was the second shelf of the cupboard where we kept the Mars Bars. Rejuvenated, I stretched out on the mattress and mucked around with a new song for the Sushis.
Why bother with men – they’re all married and/or gay.
And if they’re not, something else is in the way.
He’s bound to be celibate, or macrobiotic …
Or under hypnotherapy ’cause he’s neurotic.
It’s the 1980s social disease.
More contagious than dreaded herpes.
Everyone’s contracting it.
Right now you could be catching it.
Skepticemia!!
When we got to New York I would eat a mountain of pastrami on rye and get my ears pierced in a place Roxanne went to in the village, which advertised, ‘Ears pierced here, with or without pain.’ This was my plan.
‘Have you ever been in love?’ I asked Max as he breezed into my room to borrow some mascara.
‘Don’t wish that on me,’ he shrieked. ‘I don’t want AIDS.’
‘Max, you do use condoms, don’t you?’ I tried not to sound overly earnest.
‘I won’t get it now. If you don’t love them,’ he elaborated, ‘you just suck and kiss and stuff. It’s when you’re in love th
at you fuck.’ He grimaced at his denimed reflection in the mirror. ‘Do these jeans make me look fat?’
‘Max, couldn’t you … don’t you like me a little …’
‘Deb, I kick for the other team!’
‘But I’m like a boy. Look!’ I leaped up next to him at the mirror. ‘Small-breasted, skinny, and look how hairy my arms are … Couldn’t you sort of … pretend?’
He wrapped his arm around my shoulder. ‘She’ll be back, mate,’ he said.
‘I make pretty mean popcorn too. Come on. We can survive quite well without her, ya know.’
Later that night I heard knocking. No one knocked in the squats. There were no locks. That’s how we all got in there in the first place. So I should’ve guessed who it was.
‘G’day, Dad.’ My dad was wearing his work-issued steel-capped boots and his best suit. Mum had a newspaper clipping from the Mirror in her hand. In it was a paragraph on the Sushi Sisters, some sentimental crap about ‘teenage troubadours busking the world’s troubles away’.
‘This is the sort of hovel you’ll still be living in when you’re an old lady.’ Mum hadn’t shaved her legs. The stubble poked through her beige stockings. ‘With no one to look after you … Don’t you want to save up a little nest egg? Be somebody?’
Now, personally, I like black sheep. If I were a parent, I’d be able to handle a punked-out poet, or an anarchist graffitist. The last thing I’d want in the family flock is a Pink Batts Insulation salesman or a Commonwealth Bank clerk.
‘Are you part of the lunatic fringe?’ my father asked me. In an effort to make him more modern, Mum had recently bought him a gold ingot and, for the first time in forty years, he’d taken off his singlet. He’d worn the ingot nestling in his chest hair up to the Tradies – and had immediately caught the worst cold of his life. Since then he’d worn the ingot over his singlet. I addressed it now.
‘No, Dad. Fringe Cabaret.’
‘Well. Hell’s bells,’ he said.
We faced each other in squeamish silence on the doorstep. Mum presented me with a packet of new cotton underpants and a bag of oranges, then hooked her cardiganed arm through his. She nudged him. He grunted. She nudged him again, then spoke in his place. ‘Your father’s decided that if you come home you can take over the rumpus room and have your mattress on the floor.’
When they’d left I ran all the way up William Street and down to the public toilets in the park opposite the hospital. I didn’t know much about Max’s nightlife. I knew he cracked it along the big stone wall of East Sydney Tech near the police station, charging older blokes for sex. I also knew that there was some secret carnal code involving red hankies sticking out of right and left pockets. And that Max sometimes put a Kool Mint up his arse. The same effect as putting one in your mouth, he assured me, ‘A cool, slow delicious fizz. And no calories!’
‘Max?’ I hissed. His ‘office’, he’d told me, was in the disabled cubicle of the toilets in Green Park. More elbow room. The light bulbs were smashed so it was pitch dark in there. Feeling like the ghost of Helen Keller, I groped my way along the stucco walls. ‘Max?’
He was in there alright, slumped in the corner of a filthy cubicle.
‘What?!’ He was suddenly manic, squirming and wriggling as I tried to mop blood off his face.
‘Sit still.’
‘I can’t. I’m fucking wired.’
The sweat was oozing from him. ‘Are you speeding?’
‘’Course I fucking am,’ he snapped uncharacteristically.
I felt paralysed. ‘Has Mouche been getting into it too?’
‘Isn’t everybody? It’s all the rage,’ he said sarcastically and vomited. ‘God, I’m fucked.’
‘Come on.’ There was blood on his jeans. I gently led him home. ‘If only they’d make Mozart illegal. Then you’d be addicted to that.’
‘I put the snip on my dealer for a loan. I owe him untolds. So he beat me up.’
‘Couldn’t you have asked him just to give you a good talking-to? You can sleep with me.’ In full Nurse Nightingale mode I arranged his ridiculous legs underneath my blankets – that way I could make sure he didn’t choke on his own spew. ‘But I don’t want you going off the gay and narrow,’ I joked, fishing through his clothing. He could’ve opened a chemist shop in each pocket. ‘Why couldn’t you be addicted to something less dangerous? Like a religion. Hare Krishnas or Scientology or something?’
I settled down next to his scrawny frame. He whimpered for Mouche all night. About 3 am, a bad case of the paranoias set in. Max started freaking out about people being after him, knowing where he lived, looking in the window. Petrified, I hovered over him, only once or twice forgetting to dodge a projectile chunder. Things has reached an all-time high in lows. It was then I finally admitted we couldn’t handle it without Mouche. She would know exactly what to do.
The hotel door focused on me with its Cyclops eye. The electric lid blinked shut. I had tracked her down to the penthouse suite of the Sebel Townhouse, a glam hotel chock-a-block with the Fabulously Famous. Party noises filtered out from behind the closed door. The lifts regurgitated another cluster of multitalented, interstate type persons. The sort of people who wear sunglasses at night, have sex on vinyl sheets and boast their individuality while looking identical.
‘How do you know Elton?’ oozed a guy with swastikas on his sneakers. ‘Creatively, or socially?’
As we waited for the electronic lid to lift the other guests bragged about their fame (dropping your own name – now there’s an art form). I gushed a phony ‘Hi’ to the guy with the swastikas. Presuming that I was his lover’s herbalist’s therapist’s niece’s masseuse or some such, he chucked me a cheesy. I attached myself to their party and, talking loudly about Elton’s claim to have given up bisexuality, slipped inside.
There’s less to being elite than meets the eye, let me tell you. The trick is to simultaneously juggle beer, cigarettes, your purse, your decorative date and a Lilliputian piece of bread smeared in what looks like dog food, and look, well, suite-wise.
Elton John appeared briefly, wearing dark glasses. Pointless really. He’s so Fabulously Famous, he’d have to wear a dark bus to avoid recognition. While the trendoids grovelled, I surreptitiously slipped plates of cold meat, vol-au-vents, a huge wheel of cheese and fruit into my voluminous bag. I had never seen so much food. I stuffed myself. I was like a Strasbourg goose. Another mouthful and I wouldn’t just have sclerosis of the liver, I would have sclerosis of the whole body. I waddled off to find Mouche, lecturing myself that I mustn’t under any circumstances tell her I’d been worried sick, demand to know where she’d been, or ask why she insisted on hanging around with this Aussie fuckwit.
Mouche was leaning back on a leather lounge, her arms stretched out on either side of her. ‘I’ve been worried sick,’ I blurted. ‘Where’ve you been? Why do you hang around with this fuckwit?’
Aussie swivelled round to look at me. ‘Jesus. What is it with you two? You can’t even fart without the other one comin’ in for the sniff.’
A man appeared at the door holding a chair above his head. Short and tenacious, he was like a two-legged Chihuahua. You know, the type who sinks his fangs into prominent people at cocktail parties, head bobbing up and down at the level of their knees.
‘Shit! Do you know who that is?’ Aussie exclaimed. ‘Only the most powerful man in rock and roll. Elton John’s manager. Welsh. Owns fourteen white Rollers … ya know, Rolls-Royces,’ he decoded for my benefit. ‘Been inside for GBH. Famous for his Glaswegian kiss – headbutts,’ he deciphered once more.
‘Does your boyfriend always talk like a Fantale wrapper?’ I asked Mouche.
‘He’s got power, smartarse. And he’s hot for our band. But like I was telling Mou –’
‘Mou?’ I looked at Mouche, appalled at the intimacy this nickname implied.
‘He reckons, to get needle time, we need a chick. Upfront.’ The Chihuahua was now dangling the chair over the eleventh-storey ba
lcony and ranting about splattering some pedestrians below. He hadn’t liked the room-service chicken sandwiches on offer apparently. My crap antenna wobbled. This guy was three notches below psycho-rapist. As he and his chair missile were manhandled off the balcony by Elton’s bodyguards, Aussie beamed a bionic smile in his direction. ‘Ah, Sir, ah, this is the, ah, girl I was tellin’ you about …’
Honestly, Aussie’s was the sort of indestructible, iron-clad smile that would have smiled right through Hiroshima without melting.
The Chihuahua looked Mouche up and down hungrily. Mouche was wearing white. The coke-head probably hoped to sniff and inhale her.
‘If ya like what yer see, wait till ya hear her sing. Our music’s hot, mate! Cookin’ with gas! And Mou is, like, the Roaches lead singer …’
‘You are?’ I asked her.
‘I am?’ she parroted my query.
‘Yeah … Why don’t cha come hear us, tomorrow fortnight – you’ll be back in town by then with Elton’s tour, won’tcha mate? I mean, Sir … Shit, Mouche. How many chicks get asked to sing for Elton John’s manager, eh? What a fuckin’ honour.’
‘But that underarm growth’ll have to go.’ The Chihuahua ran his finger along Mouche’s pale arm. The little man was so predatory, his smile so canine that I glanced down at the leg of my jeans, half expecting him to be locked there, leg cocked and tail wagging.
‘Yeah,’ chuckled Aussie, ‘playing “hide the pork sword” with chicks who don’t shave under their armpits is bloody terrible.’ He flogged the conversation along with a jackhammer laugh. ‘Hairy chicks. I tell ya! Once a stray pube gets a stranglehold on your vocal cord, you need a bloody vacuum cleaner to remove it! See you at the gig, mate?’
‘Yeah,’ the Chihuahua growled. ‘Okay.’
I chose that moment to tell Mouche about a gig I’d lined up at the Town Hall for tomorrow fortnight. A benefit to save the Humpbacked Tasmanian Tadpoles or something. Aussie looked at me as though I’d pissed on his shoes. I hadn’t even wanted to do that gig till now.
