Still Riding on the Storm

by Robert G. Barrett

  I have friends who run stalls there, the vegetarian food’s good and if you’re a writer there’s heaps of characters walking around you can slot into a book. There’s a hotel on the corner of William Street and Oxford called the Paddington Inn. Out front is a sort of ledge where I sometimes sit and drink coffee or orange juice and watch the passing parade. The clientele at the hotel are fairly young and vibrant.

  The girls are attractive, the boys are mostly good styles, everybody dresses casual and clean. I’ll admit the blokes don’t pull up out the front in Holden utes with a concrete mixer and a mongrel dog in the back, hit the bar and pour 15 schooners down their throats then walk around belching, breaking wind and scratching their privates before going home and punching their wives in the head like the big men in the local round my way. But by the same token I don’t think they spend the week working on their float for next year’s gay mardi gras.

  A gay bar, the place definitely is not. What’s happened though. A bunch of anencephalic thong clappers from around Terrigal have made their annual, magical, mystery tour to evil, sinful Sydney. They’ve finished up at the markets, saw me sitting outside the Paddington Inn and gone. Oxford Street, hotel, gay bar, Barrett out the front. Poofter. I tell you, some of these clickers up here are that narrow minded they can look through a keyhole with both eyes at once. And they wonder why I laugh at them, pull faces behind their backs and say untoward things at times.

  Getting outed was bad enough. Next thing I get sabotaged. Someone’s been teaching the pointyheads to read. They’ve got hold of Nine to Five and saw some of the things I’ve been saying about them. Like how they make Caesar salad. There’s two things they hate up here, xenophobia and strangers. Especially ones from Sydney that bag the place. The first thing that happened was a white feather pinned to the door and a dead cat in my mailbox with a dead canary in its mouth. I woke up one morning and there in bed next to me was Lt Worf, the big scrubtail possum I feed on the sundeck’s head. I sneaked out the front to check the car and driveway.

  I looked up the street and saw a bunch of pointyheads with the corner blocked off, getting a bucket of tar and an old feather mattress out the back of a ute. I didn’t need any writer’s intuition to know what was going on. Grasshopper. It was time to leave the temple. And quick. I threw what I could in the car, gunned the motor and lay rubber up the street, right over the top of them. I could hear their children scream as their little webbed hands and splayed feet were crushed under the wheels. With their screams and curses ringing in my ears, I laid more rubber out of town. But where? I had no money and barely the clothes on my back.

  I was no better than a street kid. So where does an overweight, balding street kid finish up? Kings Cross. Bright lights, big city. Mean streets, sinister shadows. I could hide in the crowds and darkness, no one would see me. Bad luck, it was daytime when I got there. I parked the car and started walking up to the Wayside Chapel.

  I had a bit of time so I thought I’d head over the fountain and see if I could score first. I was hanging around waiting for a pusher when I bumped into an old South American mate of mine I used to work with at the Bondi Hotel during another part of my illustrious career. G’day Ramos. Buenos Dios. How’s things? Ramos had just got busted with a heap of cocaine. He’d got bail, but he wanted to skip the country. I was a writer. Could I help him? It wasn’t much of a day and I wasn’t doing a great deal and what else can you do when an old mate asks you for a favour. So I helped Ramos steal a car, got him a gun, a false passport and an airline ticket, drove him out to get some counterfeit American Express Travellers Cheques and waited in the car while he cashed them for American dollars. Then drove him over to Tempe and waited in the car again while Ramos shot the two drug dealers he reckoned set him up and pistol whipped their grandmother. Mascot wasn’t far from there.

  I left the hot car in the airport and walked Ramos into the departure lounge dressed as an Argentinian Air Force Colonel and put him on a plane for Brazil. He was going to meet Ronald Biggs, see about some plastic surgery then come back in a year and sort out where he’d stashed all his money and drugs. He bought a couple of my books to read on the plane, which I gladly autographed for him. Naturally, being an old friend, I couldn’t ask anything from Ramos for doing him a favour.

  I didn’t have to. He gave me the keys to a flat he owned in Bondi he got from the money he’d made dealing drugs. It was under surveillance. But I could have it for the twelve months till he got back. I couldn’t believe my luck. I saw Ramos off and wished him all the best. I always said he was a good bloke. I got a cab at the airport back to the Cross.

  I’d meant to drop Ramos’s gun off in Tempe Canal, but I sold it to a heroin dealer down near the wall. So with a small stash to see me over and a place to stay, I drove over to check out my new digs in a new state of mind.

  The place was all right. I can’t say too much. But it’s all here. TV, stereo, good furniture etc. If this is how drug dealers live they’re doing okay by my standards. Ramos was also a man with good taste in literature. There were about 20 books of Charles Bukowski’s novels and prose. It was still hard to believe I’d landed in my old home town though. Then I saw it on the floor. At first I thought it was a brown leaf blown in then the leaf started to move across the carpet. It was a Bondi butterfly. I belted it first with Tales of Ordinary Madness. The Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts. That butterfly was tough. They always are in Bondi. I finished it with Dangling in the Tournefortia. Charles Bukowski would have been rapt.

  It only took three of his books to kill a cockroach. So here I am in Sydney, a fugitive writer trapped in a neon nightmare. Holed up in a flat being watched by the drug squad. Ramos’s mates in the drug cartel will probably come round and torture me to find out where he is. And the pointyheads back in Dogpatch want to tar and feather me because I’m a poof. Plus the unknown Elise Currey and her bunch reckon I’m a tedious, objectionable, sexist, chauvinistic old toad and my idea of a food column makes them vomit. Which was all I wanted to do in the first place. Write a nice food column.

  So what direction this column will take now I don’t know. One thing I do know. I’ve been more than bloody outed.

  So, here I am on the 1 a.m. in beautiful downtown Bondi disguised as a Russian Orthodox Jew. Luckily, I found the outfit in one of Ramos’s wardrobes because I didn’t bring many clothes with me when I split from Dogpatch and it fitted okay too. Long black coat, big fur hat, false beard. He was a master of disguise, Ramos. I know the outfit looks the part because I was standing in a doorway just up from the Hakoah Club and a rabbi offered me a job. He said they were looking for a bloke to do the circumcisions in a synagogue near Old South Head Road. $125 a day plus tips. Normally, I would have jumped at the offer but at the moment I have to keep on the run. So, I just thanked him, and moved on. Shalom or whatever. In the meantime, I’ve also got a column to try and write and I’ve also got to sneak back to Dogpatch, dig up some money I got buried in the backyard and find where I put my VISA card. So this week’s column could be a bit mediocre.

  But, I did, sort of, take a girl out, and I have, sort of, reviewed a movie. Sort of. One thing I can tell you though. My old home town sure has changed after 12 years absence. How can I describe it? It’s, it’s a scene.

  Where there was once daggy butcher shops and pie shops and daggy grocery shops with nothing in the window but dead blow flies and old newspapers. Now, it’s all bistros and trendy little restaurants and coffee shops with tables and chairs on the footpath. An absolute must. I mean don’t even consider eating in Bondi now unless you’re going to sit on the footpath. People are that desperate to eat on the footpath or suck on a cafe latte; at one place they sit on milk crates while the passing dogs pee on them. It’s something else. I don’t wish to bore people in the suburbs about tales of Bondi. But you must remember this is all new to me. After 12 years in Clickerville, this is like moving to another country.

  Even the old Astra Hotel is gone. The
beautiful Astra Hotel. Where we used to buy our drugs, bet SP, meet some of the lowest women this side of a back alley in Shanghai and get punched in the head by some 200kg Maori bouncer for your trouble. Gone. Just a faded memory. Now it’s the Bondi Trattoria with more outdoor seating than the Colosseum in Rome. Even the Maoris, the Cook Islanders, the Poms and the Irish we used to have to fight with every time we went out have all gone too.

  Now Bondi’s full of film stars, and actors and models or film directors and producers or scriptwriters. And writers. Or, as we like to call ourselves, ‘awthers’.

  Every second shop window’s got a little notice in the front. Writing courses. Writers’ workshop. Lessons in writing. Writers’ seminar. And some of these wannabee and gunnabee ‘awthers’ and ‘righters’. People I’ve never heard of are charging up to $300 a pop. In the 12 years I’ve been away, there’s a whole new generation of mugs out there willing to fork over their hard earned, convinced you can learn writing like learning to play a guitar. Tee-hee-ho-ho-hah-hah! That’s it for me. I’m getting rid of the fur hat and false beard. I’m getting a corduroy jacket and black skivvy and hanging a shingle out the front myself. I may as well be ripping these poor turnip heads off as anybody else.

  However. Schemes of avarice and dishonesty, do not a column make.

  So there I am, strolling around Bondi, looking like Dr Zhivago’s butler and I’m there just in time for a thing called The Festival of the Wind. In other words. A monster kite flying day and the place was packed. Thousands of people, most of them flying kites of all shapes and sizes. And it was a good day for it. A cloudless sky and a gusty southerly blowing. Or as we Russian Orthodox Jews say: ‘The sun vas shining on the vater and the vind vas very vindy.’ Which was how I met Weona Wetfin Surfer girl.

  Weona was skinny, gaunt, had scraggly blonde hair and that vacant, kind of, offshore wind look in her eyes peculiar to a lot of spaced out waxheads. She was barefoot and wearing a pair of patched wet-suit pants and a frayed, Mambo T-shirt. When I first noticed her, she was going through a garbage-tin. But she still had a kind of style and elegant sophistication the way she was running a slice of pizza crust she’d salvaged round an old sardine can.

  Now I have to admit, I’m not real good at approaching strange women. Plus there’s also the pitfalls. If you do, you’re accused of either hitting on them or some kind of sexual harassment.

  Plus women just love mugs to front them with their best lines so they can not only shoot them down in flames but blow them out of the water and machine gun their lifeboats as well.

  For example you might say. Hi there. Where have you been all my life? And they reply. Well for the first 25 years I probably wasn’t even born. Or. Gee. I like your dress. And they’ll reply. You should. My brother stole it off your clothesline, you miserable old poof.

  But I’ve still got a bit of suave and I had to say something as I watched her gnawing on her pizza crust like a water rat; even if it was only for the sake of the column. So I said: Hey scrubber. Are you hungry? And she tenderly replied: ‘What do you &%$#!@* reckon, you dopey looking Jew bastard?’ So I said come on Ratso. I’ll shout you something to eat. I had her. The Barrett charm, it works every time. I was going to take Weona to a restaurant. But without trying to sound picky and fussy again. Weona had wonky finger, toejam football and BO that bad you could photograph it. Plus after two minutes of conversation, I reckon you’d have to X-ray Weona’s head to see if it had a thought in it. So we just strolled around sampling out all the different, ethnic takeaway foods.

  We had some kind of Turkish cabbage rolls and stuff in oily vine leaves. Vegetarian lentil burgers, Burmese chicken and noodles in coconut milk, Indian curry puffs, Japanese, Chinese, Thai. There was even a place with a sign, Himalayan Cuisine. What do they eat in the Himalayas? Yak casserole and tea made with yak butter. I was then firmly convinced, that if you painted your face green and opened up a stall with a sign above saying Martian Cuisine and dyed all the food blue, purple and orange. It wouldn’t be five minutes and you’d have a queue of yuppies and trendies two metres deep aching to be the first to try it out in the name of multicultural cuisine. Think about it. I picked at different things for a while but Sally Sea Slug ripped into everything on offer. She even got stuck into some sausages from a sausage sizzle, swimming in enough cholesterol to grease the engines on the Fairstar. But by then even Sally had had enough and she muttered something about the wind had dropped and there were some unreal tubes or something just off the baths. I said see you Weona, hope the surf’s good. You too Roshkoff. Thanks for the unreal food and I hope the rest of your family can get out of Russia. I strolled around for a little while longer, watching a kite like a monstrous, pink pig and one like Superman and others. Plus the jugglers and acrobats. Then I saw this bunch of strolling minstrels or something wearing these long, funny looking pointy hats and I got a bit toey, thinking they might have come from the Central Coast. So I split for the flat and watched TV.

  And now here it is. The world’s shortest film review. Universal Soldier starring Claude Van Ham and Dolph Lummox. I think I understand now why some women get cheesed off with men who like these kind of movies. Apart from the numerous explosions it literally stunk on ice. If you’re unfortunate enough to have seen it, you’ll know exactly what I mean by that. Claude Van Ham couldn’t get arrested acting and Dolph Lummox has all the on screen charm of the Duke of Edinburgh during a pheasant shoot. Between them they generate about as much personality as two tins of Spam. Though I could be a little severe here. In an early part of the film where they both kill each other before being brought back to life. As they’re being zipped up into separate body bags they play the parts of two corpses almost perfectly. Indeed they add a whole new dimension to the word stiff. So if this movie was such a stinkeroo how come I sat through it? I didn’t feel like getting up to change the channel.

  Let’s just say that after shoving all that Burmese, Lebanese, vegetarian and other gunk down my throat when I was strolling around with Sally Sea Slug (especially the Himalayan beans).

  The festival of the wind didn’t end with the kites down on Bondi Beach.

  When I fled to Sydney I said something about this column could take on a new direction. What I meant was, it’ll get a lot worse before it gets better. Well it’s finally happened. I’ve got nothing to write about. I haven’t gone out for dinner and I haven’t been to the movies. How can I? I’ve got hardly any money left and no clothes. I left my credit card and book of phone numbers back in Attitude Valley so I can’t ring Madam Zelda to get a dinner date.

  I fluked that poor starving waxhead. But apart from her, even if I did have any money, my chances of finding a girl to go out with me are pretty skinny to the point of dying from anorexia nervosa. So I’m more or less stuck in this drug dealer’s flat sitting around picking my toes and watching out for the Feds and the cartel. I’ve read all the books and I hate watching TV during the day. So I’ve been listening to the radio. Which gives me an idea and I don’t get handed all that many. Why not write about radio in Sydney? I’ve got nothing else. I reckon Sydney radio would be on a par with the worst in any city in any country in the world. From Port au Prince to Pyonyang. The AM band can be mildly uplifting at times. But FM is nothing but chewing gum for your ears. If that. I was sitting in the kitchen on this particular day, so I did a bit of dial twiddling between AM, FM and the ABC to see what I could find. AM is run mostly by greenie bashing know alls or motor mouthed bigots. Except for Brian Bury. Brian’s Mr Nice Guy. If you rang Brian Bury and said what this country needs is an Adolf Hitler or a Joe Stalin running it for a while, Brian would say, ‘Yes, you’ve got a point there. Something should be done.’ If you rang Brian and said the governments running this country are like a bunch of Adolf Hitlers and Joe Stalins, he’d say exactly the same thing. Then give you the time and weather. Alan Jones and John Laws hate me and my friends in Greenpeace. According to them, anyone who tries to save whales and dolphins or a little bit of rainf
orest, and stop polluting the ocean is a communist. They’ve got their little world where they like to think they’re walking tall and talking tough, and they’re welcome to it on 2UE. On 2GB you’ve got Ron Casey. If you think Ron’s a boofhead, you should hear the millipedes that ring him up. When he left 2KY to join 2GB he took all the retired greyhound owners, parking cops and sewerage workers with him. Bewdy Won. Wipper Pwogwamme. Apart from him there’s Michael Yabsley, who I’m not remotely interested in and Clive Robertson. Old El Pedanto. The pedantic one.

  Robbo not only never splits an infinitive, if he saw one lying around he’d pick it up and try to put it back together with superglue. I got interviewed by Robbo once on 2GB. I fully realise it’s pointless getting dolled up to do a three hour shift behind a mike. But surely you can at least tidy up a bit if you’ve got guests. It was like being interviewed by a grave robber.

  And even if the guest is only some hack writer doing the rounds with a new book. When you shake hands with someone it’s nicer for them to feel something more than if they’d just squeezed four sticks of asparagus. The interview was fairly reasonable though. I then twiddled over to the ABC’s two sheltered workshops, 2FC and 2BL. I’ve been interviewed on the ABC in a big building behind William Street. It’s like entering a cross between a girls’ boarding school and a set on The Sullivans. Prim, old and musty. The best way to describe 2FC and 2BL would be safe. Plus environmentally friendly and politically correct. With sensible shoes thrown in. But I wanted music and razzamatazz. So I switched over to FM.

  What I got was musical Valium and rafts of ads hyped up by a bunch of pre-programmed, crash test dummies. It was pathetic. I’ve been reading a bit in the papers about FM stations lately and how they’re squabbling over their ratings and fine-tuning their wonderful music mix. What a joke. I used to write copy for DJs once. They’re the most insecure, egotistical shysters on the planet. They live and die by station ratings. They play schmuck music and try frantically, desperately, heroically even to be funny and most never remember to switch the spotlight off when they leave the station. I kicked off with Wendy Harmer and the breakfast crew or something on 2Day FM. I’d like to hear the breakfast crew on 2Day do that joke about the bloke called Mark who’s lost in the Simpson Desert. He’s just about at death’s door when he hears someone calling out his name.