Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer

by Justin Sheedy

  Chapel Street Prahran was like no main street in Sydney; it was not only wide but straight so you could see all the way down it into the far distance: In Sydney you can see where you are. Sort of. In Melbourne you can see where you’re going and all that’s promising up ahead. And radically unlike any street in Sydney, Chapel Street had stylish clothes stores for men as well as women, also trams with their bells trundling up and down it, as did the other Melbourne streets I saw that morning, at least one with a grand cathedral steeple at its far distant end.

  I bought us an icecream each. We sat close together on a park bench, where Madeleine licked her flavour and I licked mine. When I kissed her gently on the cheek. Then again. When she angled her face directly towards mine. And I made the nicest ever discovery of my life to that point: the flavour of this girl’s icecream inside her mouth. Raspberry ripple. And she said she just loved my lemon-lime. We spent a solid half-hour diligently blending flavours. Romantic? It was even Autumn: red and golden leaves everywhere in the parks through which we then strolled, arms around each other’s waists.

  What was the difference about Melbourne and these Melbourne girls by contrast to their Sydney equivalents? Everything, apparently. To this day I am buggered if I know why: Just like my recent Sydney rejecter, Emma St. John, Madeleine was an elegant private schoolgirl. Yet by contrast to any of her kind I’d ever encountered in Sydney, this one wanted me. After a week of days like this, I travelled back to Sydney on a cloud I think, a vow between us that I would return next school holidays. Mere months from now!

  NO, said my parents.

  In response I think I actually uttered those fatal words of my much younger years: ‘But WHY?! ’

  Of course, my fatal mistake had been to tell my parents anything at all about Madeleine but I thought they’d be happy for me. My fatal mistake had been to be open and honest with them. If only I had strategically withheld the fact of Madeleine, I would most likely have been allowed to go back to Melbourne for my next holidays as requested just as I had this first time. Yet I hadn’t been strategic; I had been honest.

  After being told No as my reward, I could have put to them: ‘Why on earth not?! I’m not going to be doing anything with her in Melbourne unseen by you that I wouldn’t be doing with Emma St. John unseen by you just a few suburbs from here! What if I’d fallen in love with her or even with the girl down the street? Would you ban me from seeing them? Would you? And consider this: The fact that Madeleine is a thousand miles away instead of down the street is actually LESS problematic for you as I won’t being seeing her all the time, will I, just a few weeks a year! And it will give me something to look forward to all next school term, something to keep me happy in my work, something to work towards.’

  Of course, I didn’t put such sound and fair-minded logic to my parents. I think, instead, I just stood there looking terminally gob-smacked. Their answer was NO.

  My parents are good people. Very good. In the childhood prequel to this book I portray and celebrate what fine people both of them are, and deservedly so. But parents make mistakes. And this episode was one which any passing football coach would identify as the moment where the winning team threw the game away by taking their eyes off the ball.

  At the age of 16, being enveloped in the magic of a member of the opposite sex who’s just as crazy for you as you are for them was the most important thing in the world to me. It still is. I don’t know why. I was born that way.

  So here, dear reader, I’d suggest you imagine the sound of a heart breaking.

  If that sound wasn’t a silent scream.

  Winds of Change

  * * *

  My world was in a mess.

  In 1985 there wasn’t just a gaping hole in my heart, there was one in the Ozone Layer. ‘Chlorofluorocarbons’ from our aerosol spray cans and air-conditioners were tearing this bloody great hole in the atmospheric Ozone Layer over Antarctica, the hole letting in ultraviolet rays which were giving people skin cancers and melting icebergs. What, so all the underarm sprays to stop us sweating and air-conditioners to keep us cool were making the planet hotter?!

  Shit.

  Yet it seems there’s nothing quite like a house burning down to radicalize its occupants into maybe doing something about it: For the first time since the Industrial Revolution it was occurring to some of the occupants of Planet Earth that its supply of the natural resources necessary for human survival was NOT infinite. And whereas the now global ‘People Power’ mood of the anti-nuclear movement suggested the human race might not after all disappear in a blinding flash, it was now apparent that the human race could instead be facing a slow death; the ‘Hole in the Ozone Layer’ proved that our human species was now more powerful than the natural world on which we rode through space. And we were sabotaging our ride as we went.

  Shit.

  In Australia our Prime Minister Bob Hawke had come to power on a ‘Save the Franklin’ platform, the Franklin being a mighty river in the Tasmanian wilderness earmarked to be dammed as part of a major hydro-electricity scheme of Tasmania’s state government. Apparently Hawke viewed the need to save our natural environment as rivalling the need to serve big business and industry. A conservative Hawke was not and God bless him for it.

  Nor was keen nudist Stan La Salle who (conspicuously clothed for our visit to his home) proudly showed us the ‘solar-powered water heater’ on his roof, the first anyone had ever seen. He gave Dad a day-glow-yellow ‘NO DAMS’ car sticker, which Dad stuck on the back window of our Volvo. Were my father’s long-dormant progressive tendencies yawning awake?

  In Goodbye Crackernight I gave an account of his private yet rather heroic act as a young officer dental surgeon in the Royal Australian Navy in the mid-1950s: Though gay dental assistants were something of an unofficial tradition in the Royal Australian Navy at that time, Dad took a personal stand against the harassment of some of his devoted staff by their immediate superior and terminated the injustice as a result. In a decade when gays were not defended by their society (let alone championed by it as they are today) this was a ‘progressive’ act on Dad’s part.

  So his ‘NO DAMS’ car sticker was his first (known) socially ‘radical’ act of my lifetime and not a private act but a public one: He copped no small amount of flak from the more conservative of our suburban neighbours and also from the ‘old school guard’ of his medical colleagues regarding the ‘Greenie’ stance that the triangular sticker so boldly proclaimed: Its slogan aligned Dad with the civil-disobedient ‘Greenie’ protesters who chained themselves to forest trees in front of bulldozers! Today, ‘Global Warming’, ‘Save the Planet’, ‘The Environment’ are household terms. It was in the mid-80s that they were born. As was the global ‘Green Movement’, the ‘Greenpeace’ organisation and ‘The Greens’ as a political party here in Australia.

  The leader of the Soviet Union at this time was one Mikhail Gorbachev, a pint-sized Russian whose near-bald head had apparently been crapped on by a pigeon. The Soviet state’s first leader to have been born after the 1917 Revolution, at age 54 he was conspicuously young for the role and his eyes were dark, handsome and penetrating. He was a man taking radical steps. He had to; he could see the vast Soviet economy going down the drain, presumably being sent broke by the nuclear arms race it had been running against the West every day for the last 40 years instead of spending the money on its own people. Obviously a realist, Gorbachev saw the only path to survival as one of Reform. And economic reform of the Soviet Socialist State would only be possible after reform of its ruling Communist Party system. Hence Gorbachev’s internationally-broadcast new policies included Glasnost — meaning ‘Openness’, Perestroika — ‘Restructuring’, and Demokratizatsiya — ‘Democratization’.

  In 1985 it seemed that, in the 40 years since the end of the Second World War, our human race had been on a single, straight path: towards nuclear apocalypse. Which now might just possibly be averted. But even if it was averted, our path was now heading us towards our ow
n ‘expiry date’, be it environmental or economic, whichever came first. And Gorbachev’s radical steps signalled that for the first time since the Second World War even The Enemy realised we could no longer go on as we had been. Champions since 1917 of ‘permanent revolution’, even the Godless Heathen Reds had realised there was one thing they finally, actually needed to have after all this time…

  A Revolution.

  Dear Mads…

  * * *

  I suspect we two were personally and passionately responsible for making the Australia Post mail route between Sydney and Melbourne what it is today; what with all the extra staff they must have put on to handle the volume of love letters my forbidden love and I generated in 1985.

  In the last, golden days of young love before the existence of email, Facebook, Twitter, smart phone messaging and video conferencing, one gushed one’s undying longings via hand-written postal letters, a mode of personal communication these days on the verge of extinction and referred to as ‘snail mail’. The replies I received from Madeleine, ‘Mads’ as she now insisted I call her, were often perfumed. A laughable cliché? Certainly. Also a delicious sensory dimension now extinct from electronic message formats. These days school children have mobile phones on which a phonecall can be discreetly made or received out of parental earshot. In 1985 mobiles didn’t exist and a phonecall on the single landline in the middle of my home would have sent a message to my parents along the lines of ‘I’M TALKING WITH MY FORBIDDEN GIRLFRIEND AGAIN.’ In any case I would never have dreamt of running up a long-distance phone bill for my father to have to pay so the medium of our romantic expression was hand-written letters. These lacked the sensory ‘immediacy’ of phonecalls let alone that of modern e-communications with their fibre-optic speed, attachable photographs and live video. But the simplicity of hand-written letters caused your mind to compensate by shifting your imagination into romantic overdrive. It was ‘theatre of the mind’ and that, dear reader, is the most powerful medium of them all.

  And our clandestine love communications didn’t stop at letters! Oh no… We surmounted the very heights of the era’s information technology state-of-the-art!

  Audio cassettes! !

  I had recently been introduced by my brother’s friend, Mad-Dog, to ‘The Doors’, an American late-60s rock band fronted by a charismatic leather-clad Adonis by the name of Jim Morrison. In a nutshell this richly talented baritone singer and the three fabulous musicians behind him were the band who elevated pop music to the level of theatre ( before Alice Cooper) and brought the atmosphere of such ‘visionary’ poets as William Blake to a million teenyboppers, playing not only the first ‘Gothic’ rock music but also a rich spectrum of other styles. (It should be noted here that the band’s uniqueness has ever since rendered them a tall-poppy-syndrome target of music journalists with a childish compulsion to trash their own golden idols, focusing merely on Morrison’s excessive personality rather than on his band’s fucking huge contribution to popular music.) In any case I included one of The Doors’ songs, along with my ‘spoken letter’ to Madeleine, on a cassette that I posted to her…

  The song was Wintertime Love, a song exemplifying my claim re the richness of The Doors’ work in being a song not about apocalyptic sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll but about a young man and a young woman being joyously together in winter, in love and keeping each other rapturously warm in a world all around them that is cold. With rock and roll power, the song’s electro-harpsichord ONE-two-three driving rhythm evokes something ancient, eternal: a dance between two happy, young people (a waltz in fact). Listening to it, you can feel the winter sunlight on the young couple close together. You can feel their defiant joy.

  In her audio cassette reply a week later, Madeleine’s verbal response to the song was: ‘More than anything I’ve wanted in a long time, Juz, I hope that will be us. That we will be just like it is in that song. Waltzing together in the park.’

  As you might imagine, dear reader, her words sustained me.

  Oh boy, did they.

  ‘Folk Dancer’

  * * *

  Not me, it was the name of my father’s latest yacht on which we sailed around Sydney Harbour: 26 foot in length and all-wooden but for its shiny metal fittings, it was a classic Scandinavian design called a ‘Folk Boat’ known for its graceful curving lines like a subtle smile from bow to stern. Its old-fashioned deck was of ash-grey teak wood strips all curving parallel with thinner strips of black tar gum in between each, its white forward sail called the ‘jib’, back from the varnished wooden mast the larger ‘mainsail’ rigged to the swinging wooden boom, at the stern a varnished wooden flagpole from which an Australian flag fluttered. And though Sydney Harbour sloshed by blue-green and glassy, the Opera House gleaming white, cheerful waves to us from people on other yachts and tooting ferries, the brightest spot for me on such excursions was the presence of my ‘Uncle’ Gabe, part-owner of Folk Dancer.

  I briefly described him in the prequel to this book as a leading Sydney urologist who played jazz piano and told ‘willy jokes’. He was, did and did, was also a charming conversationalist and oh-so refined yet had missed his true calling as a member of ‘The Goons’, post-war pioneers of British ‘alternative comedy’.

  As you might imagine for a urologist (willy doctor), everything about Uncle Gabe was dextrous, his demeanour alternating between medical specialist furrowed brow and a mischievous smile. Think a debonaire cross between John Hurt and Tim Brooke-Taylor, that was Gabe. And despite the decades’ age difference between us he took me seriously, as if responding to my great affection and respect for him. Indeed, it felt like he was somehow ‘on my side’.

  With just the right amount of foppishness about him to make him fun at all times, he tended to be a bit vain on occasion — as such exceptional people often are — but this flaw only added to his charm. The kind of person around whom you cannot help but smile, his whole approach to yachting was miles from my father’s sailing-as-serious-business mode; Uncle Gabe’s approach was ‘let us savour together this most excellent experience’. At Folk Dancer’s helm my father just looked on uncomprehendingly when from time to time, despite being both firmly heterosexual, Gabe and I would ‘camp it up’, Gabe pouting at me with the look of a spurned gay admirer, slinging at me the charge of ‘damn hetero!’ Though his voice shifted down to a sandy John Hurt resonance when we spoke privately on more serious matters…

  ‘Look, Juss old chap,’ he said, ‘you’re 16 going-on 30, I know that. But you have your whole life and love-life ahead of you. This current sadness of yours is something you just have to get through. It won’t last, I can assure you of that.’ His face pained, he drew a hand back through his shock of thinning hair. ‘There are things I would like to say, Juss, but I cannot; I simply can’t take sides. You know that, don’t you.’

  Gabe seemed to get along with me differently to how he got along with his own children: They were pleasant kids but I think I somehow spoke his language. What we had was rapport — the kind apparently rare between fathers and sons. At the end of one long sailing afternoon just he and I were lugging some sailing gear up the side path of his home in Hunters Hill when, being just off the boat, we both stopped halfway up the path to take the opportunity of a discreet but much-needed wee into his garden flower bed. Side by side in our moment of shared relief it seemed the most natural thing in the world when this man in advanced middle-age angled just slightly to me and commented in all professional seriousness, ‘Ah, Juss, that’s an enviable flow you have there.’ I grinned; I knew he meant it as the urologist that he was, and also as a man whose ‘flow’ might not be what it once was.

  We zipped up, and he turned to me properly as we regathered the sailing gear to stow. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’m a medical specialist. And I love being one. I really do. But in this day and age, Juss, I’d probably never have got in to Medicine; everything was easier back in the 50s, getting in to things, that is. Yes, back then Medicine was harder once you
got in but at least they’d let you in, give you a chance to fail f’heaven’s sake… A golden age of opportunity is what it was… As long as you were the right sort of young person, if you wanted to be a journalist, a TV director, anything like that, all you had to do was really want to, work damn hard to become one and you almost certainly would. It’s not like that these days… So I’d say it’s more than likely, Juss, that the next few years will be very tough for you. Very. Though I suspect you may just handle it better than I’d have done.’

  ‘But how could you possibly know that?’ I put to him.

  ‘Because, old chap, in 1949 I was in Archie Brazier’s class just as you are now. And I never won a prize like you have. Ever. Nor have my kids. Not a single one.’

  BISH — BISH — BISH

  * * *

  Somewhere in America in the mid-80s there was a sausage machine of Godzilla proportions churning out the commercial high end of popular music. And no less than two types of it…

  Type 1 (for girls): Romantic ‘Soft Pop’ by which you could perhaps ‘make lurve’ in golden candlelight soft-focus. Think Take My Breath Away from the 1986 hit movie, Top Gun.

  Type 2 (for boys): ‘Soft Rock’, characterised by highly ‘intense’-sounding vocals whose lyrics were just as ‘serious’ as they were forgettable. Obligatory for soft rock was highly intricate, ‘busy’-sounding electric guitar work and very skillfully played too yet with no ‘feel’. (By ‘feel’ I mean the kind of soul-searing humanity that in the late 60s Jimi Hendrix could scream from a single guitar string pluck or strum, let alone from two or three.) But perhaps the saddest thing of all about 80s soft rock was its lame excuse for a ‘beat’…