So St Saviour’s College, the dreaded gulag, turned out to be a pretty manageable system. It was just a case of surfing over the kooky personalities of a bunch of power-trippers, while making the most of a few diamonds. It’s the same way most of us get through our work lives, isn’t it? Good prep then, which I guess is exactly what it was supposed to be.
From the moment I entered the education system, I was always one of many. Michelle was a very common name for girls my age, so to make identification easier, we all had to use our last initials all the time. I was Michelle L., and by Year 9 I was sick of it. One day in Geography, sitting with my friend Rachel, a hilarious shit-stirrer, I experimented with ideas and finally hit upon MESHEL. I liked it because it looked kind of symmetrical, and because it was phonetic. It seemed clean to me somehow. I know today it’s regarded as the height of boganry, as pointed out to me by Craig Reucassel once on Can of Worms. Obviously the world would be a better place if we were all called CRAIG, but given that I came up with my kooky spelling in 1987, I think I deserve some leniency for being so far ahead of the zeitgeist.
My frenemy list lengthened in high school. There was Kristi, whose parents were in the midst of splitting up, although I don’t think even they knew it. She was deeply troubled, self-harming and all that. We snuck out, rode in cars with boys and indulged in any kind of risky behaviour we could think of. She disappeared one day—off to another school that her parents hoped would make the difference, when in reality it was a truce between the two of them that she needed more than anything.
Next was Katie, a really nasty girl who presented to adults as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. My mother was relieved by my friendship with Katie because she was not the riding-in-cars-with-boys type, but she made my life hell. Ignoring me, then instructing me to ignore others, bitching with me, then berating me in front of the other girls for talking behind their backs. She was a real piece of work, and I was a nervous wreck for the two years or so that we were besties. I decided not to be friends with Katie anymore, out of boredom more than anything. I wanted to get stuck back into the fast lane of teenage experimentation, and she was far too uptight to drink, or smoke, or seek out the company of boys. She was a drag, and I took great pleasure in dumping her arse quite publicly and unceremoniously.
I moved on to the popular group, some of whom had been in the original popular group I sat on the oval with on my first day as a Catholic schoolgirl. They were still a feisty bunch although I formed a particularly close relationship with one of them. We’ll call her ‘Navy’, after the colour of all her clothes. In truth we all hated her. She was a spoilt, backstabbing little moll who bitched about every single one of us when we weren’t around—but by that stage, that was the only friendship I knew how to have, so I went with it and we were barely parted for the last two years of my schooling. I had no intention of ever seeing her again after Year 12 though. None whatsoever. I was biding my time in every aspect of life by then.
I wasn’t terribly engaged at school. There was no drama class, and Sister Christine’s musicals didn’t particularly inspire me. The only creative outlet I had was the beautiful big new art room, which was fully stocked and quite often empty. By Year 11 and 12—those years everyone tells you are so important to your entire future—I quietly worked away in there for hours every day instead of attending my scheduled classes. As far as my teachers were concerned I was Miss Coyer’s number-one ball-games helper!
To this day, my only real relaxation and contentment comes from being alone, in a quiet room creating something. I’ve been lucky enough to make a career out of showing people what I’ve made, and naturally it’s lovely when they like it and respond favourably. But by far the most enjoyable bit for me is the process of the making. Some of the things I’ve enjoyed making most have never seen the light of day.
Unfortunately though, our personal enjoyment of life is not that upon which we are judged! So I sat at the long tables in the bingo hall with all the other girls and fumbled my way through those final Year 12 exams. I was not, you’ll be pleased to know, one of those annoying geniuses who never studied and aced the exams anyway.
A big yellow envelope from the government arrived in our letterbox some weeks later containing exactly the results I deserved. Mum cried, Dad got angry and went back to work, and I went into my bedroom and closed the door. I lay on my bed, gazing up at the big poster of Michael Hutchence as he appeared in my favourite movie, Dogs in Space, and tried to focus on the real point of it all—which was getting to Melbourne and starting my actual life.
THE DEMON DRINK
I started drinking alcohol when I was fourteen, when I went to the Toowoomba Royal Show with my friends and a couple of their boyfriends. I can’t remember who brought the vodka, but I do remember all of us scurrying down a gully, taking a few swigs each, and then stashing the vodka bottle in a tree for safe keeping. I had no idea how to drink, so I had very little the first time, and ended up back down the gully about half an hour later for a couple of good gulps. By the time I climbed back up to street level, where hundreds of Toowoombans were strolling around in the crisp night air with show bags and dagwood dogs, I was off my face and I knew it.
I can’t believe I wasn’t panic-stricken at being completely out of control in public. That’s what happens to me now, which is why I could count on one hand the number of alcoholic drinks I’ve consumed in public in the last decade. It’s hard to remember a time when my life didn’t involve tip-toeing around the Gods of Anxiety, but this is an example of how forgiving my brain and nervous system were back then, before I tampered with them so recklessly. Coincidentally, I was on The Project one Sunday night, just as I was writing this, when the topic of underage drinking was in the news. The expert we interviewed said violence was not the only problem associated with people drinking before their brains could handle it; he seemed pretty confident that long-term anxiety and depression could also be attributed to it. Not just me then? Wow, it never ceases to amaze me how truly average I really am!
Anyway, back to the Toowoomba Show, where I was doing my best to be remarkable. The night quickly devolved into a patchwork of blurry impressions I’ll call memories, although I don’t think they’d be accepted as evidence in court. I remember getting involved in an argument that was raging around the anti-abortion stand, which was decorated with graphic photographs. (Bizarre, yes, but this was the Toowoomba Show, don’t forget. The highway between Toowoomba and Brisbane is still dotted with anti-abortion billboards to this day.) I remember thinking everyone looked like they were reflections in those funny circus mirrors, and I remember lying across the back seat of my friend’s mum’s car, completely unable to move, speak or understand what anyone was saying. I had a bloody ball!
That lady quite wisely dropped me off in the Laurie driveway and kept moving, leaving me to crawl alone through the garage and up the stairs before falling through the kitchen door. It was all of 10.30 p.m. and Mum, bless her, was waiting up in her dressing gown, no doubt expecting me to arrive home with fairy floss and an oversized novelty hair comb.
The only part of that conversation I remember is the slap across my face. It was fascinating because I saw it coming, suddenly realised my head had snapped to the other side, needed a minute to refocus my eyes, but didn’t actually feel the slap at all. Just like the movies.
Next thing I knew it was the morning after and my father was sent to give me a talking-to. He seemed a bit embarrassed by it all, as well he might, given his love of the grog and its omnipresence in our lives. He mumbled some stuff, mostly about how much I’d upset Mum, and asked if I’d spewed. I got the impression he was quite chuffed that I hadn’t, and that was that. Mum dragged me straight to church, which made my dad laugh for the first time in years. I didn’t really care what either of them thought, about anything. I thought the whole thing was cool as shit and couldn’t wait to do it again. I realised I had to be a bit more savvy about it all though. Winding up completely shit-faced in
the back of Mrs So-and-So’s car was funny the first time, but I knew that people truly respected those who could ‘hold their piss’, as my dad frequently said. Even teenagers expected it of each other, so I set about improving myself in that regard.
Fortunately, my experimentation didn’t inspire either of my parents to curb their own drinking in the house, so there was always plenty of grog around with which to build up one’s tolerance. Dad had Bundaberg Rum and beer, both of which I thought were gross, but luckily Mum always had a trusty cask resting on the top shelf of the fridge. It was perfectly positioned to perform a few cheeky white-wine lay-backs of an evening, while doing the dishes.
I always had a healthy respect for the rum, because even my dad, who was undeniably ‘piss fit’, drank it sparingly. He’d have one or two, at the very end of the night after about a dozen beers and directly before bed. The one time I decided to give it a go turned into a case study in poor timing and total lack of respect for my adversary.
It was a balmy night in 1988 when I poured myself a quiet rumbo and took it to my room to drink. I know it was 1988 because the next morning I had to be up bright and early and down at the bus station to travel two and a half hours on a coach with my mum, little sister and littler brother to Brisbane, for Expo ’88.
I feel as though I should include a brief summary of Expo ’88, even though I know that true Queenslanders will think it the height of rudeness to do so. ‘Doesn’t everyone remember it as the glorious coming together of nations in Brisbane, during which the Queensland capital grew from a big country town into a city?’ That’s the question they’ll be asking themselves, which is also a handy summary of both the event and its legacy in the Sunshine State.
We were quite used to travelling in those coaches that stank of cheap disinfectant and diesel fuel because Mum was too scared to drive to and around Brisbane. She had to take my brother to a specialist there once when he was tiny, but my dad refused to take the day off work, so she and her sick baby boarded the sickening coach, which always managed to turn the 90-minute trip into a two-and-a-half hour ordeal because of all the stops along the way.
The coach was a blessing on Expo ’88 day because if we’d driven, Mum would’ve known how many times I vomited during that journey. She just assumed I was sitting up the back on my own, next to the little toilet wedged into the corner, because I was ashamed to be seen with her. On that occasion at least, it was not the case.
I was fifteen by that stage and easily buying my own alcohol every weekend with the money I was making out of my part-time job as a check-out chick. It was a pretty cool job actually: I worked Thursday nights and Saturday mornings and made about $60 a week. The most satisfying part of the job was giving groceries away for free to people who looked poor. I’d simply hold my hand over the barcode of some of their shopping and toss it into their trolleys. It was so noisy in there that no one could tell I’d missed a beep. I felt pretty good about it, but when I told Mum she pointed out that it’s not actually charity to give away someone else’s stuff, i.e. the supermarket’s stock. Always raining on my parade, that one.
Luckily Mum never asked what I was doing with my money, because the answer was buying vodka and getting drunk in parks. There were many risks associated with the park sessions, not least the possibility of being spotted by my father or one of his mates. My dad was a taxi driver, and as such, he had about a hundred sets of eyes cruising those streets on any given night. Those blokes loved to inform on each others’ kids almost as much as they loved lost property, which was a lot. My father found a whole kabana sausage in the boot of his cab once that had obviously rolled out of someone’s shopping bag. You’d think he’d won Powerball.
Anyway, there are always parents who want to be friends with their kids and their kids’ friends, and theirs were the homes in which we would have our big drinks. We’d all roll up with bottles clinking in brown paper bags, as we’d seen our parents do all our lives, and role-play a grown-up, suburban party complete with overflowing ashtrays and Hey Hey It’s Saturday grinding on in the background. I never got as drunk as on that first night at the show ever again and Mum never pulled me up on it again. I’m not sure if she didn’t realise I was drinking every weekend or just gave up, but I don’t remember many obstacles being placed in the way of my becoming a habitual binge drinker.
By sixteen, many of our parents accepted our drinking. My mother would sometimes drop my girlfriends and me down at the pub on a Friday night, although we’d drink a couple of bottles of Passion Pop—a sparkling white that retailed for about $3 a bottle—before we left the house so that we were well charged by the time we got there. My father was trying not to see me by then, because he didn’t want to miss a paying fare by driving me and my friends home for free, or be hit up for twenty bucks to keep the party going. My little brother Pete was much smarter than me when his turn came seven years later. He’d hide in the bushes while his mates scoured the taxi rank for our father, then race out and jump in the car last, trapping the old man into a free lift.
I seem to recall a curfew of some kind, but by Year 12, when I was seventeen years old, I was awarded roughly the same autonomy Sonia had enjoyed at ten. No curfew and not too many questions asked.
From the pub where Mum dropped us off, we’d make our way straight down the road to the nightclub to get a stamp. I say ‘the’ nightclub because The Berlin Club was literally the only one open on a Friday night in Toowoomba. If you made it to ‘The Berla’, as we called it, by 9 p.m., it was free entry and the stamp got you back in for the rest of the night. That was a saving of four bucks right there. No such joy out of Rumours, the only nightclub open in Toowoomba on Saturday nights.
I thought Rumours was a dump because it was always full of bridal parties kicking on after the Saturday afternoon weddings and receptions. Brides still in their dresses sipping green and blue drinks through short straws, men in cheap rental suits with matching cummerbunds grinding on matching bridesmaids, and tired old aunties tagging along for a thrill. It was a waking night-terror of taffeta and baby’s breath. Worse than that was running into the single mums of our friends who were out trawling for men and pretending we were women they worked with. I had one friend who had to pretend to be her mum’s sister for years.
Can you believe that hell-hole had a strict dress code? Under no circumstances were jeans to be worn inside Rumours. This was the late ’80s and designer jeans were all the rage. I swear that every single time I darkened its door, I was witness to an argument between the bouncers and a guy in jeans about the cost of the jeans (more than the bouncer’s entire suit) and the idiocy of the rule. I didn’t even wear jeans myself because I couldn’t afford the JAG variety my friends were all into, but I found the dress code inappropriate and grandiose given the overall shit-holery of the establishment.
Every private school in Toowoomba had its own pub, pretty much. It wasn’t like we weren’t allowed to go to other schools’ pubs, we just didn’t want to. We’d wander through every now and then, but for various reasons just didn’t feel comfortable and scuttled back to ours. What the state-school kids were doing on Friday nights I have no idea.
St Saviour’s and our brother school St Mary’s had the Courthouse Hotel. Coincidentally, it had been my father’s favourite watering hole when I was little. In those days we’d all go along for the Sunday session, Dad and his mates in the front bar, while Mum and the other wives and girlfriends and kids sat around tables in the ladies’ lounge smoking menthols and drinking ladies’ drinks like Baileys. There were chook raffles and meat trays, and intermittently the men would stroll in to see how the girls were going. As the afternoon wore on, and everyone got drunker, there’d be more intermingling, and the young blokes and their girlfriends would end up dancing in the lounge while we kids ate the chook that someone had won and hit our dads up for more jukebox money. You won’t believe who owned the place in those days—Shit Box’s dad, Whisper!
They were happy afternoons indeed, and
I thought of them often as I hung out in the same rooms getting drunk with my friends only ten years later. Under different management, it had a very different vibe by then, with sticky carpet and low-level lighting. It was the kind of place where you learnt to check a table and its surrounds thoroughly for vomit before sitting down. It was full of schoolkids and the odd young teacher who’d popped in for an inappropriate tipple, knowing full well their students would be there. Local bands were set up in the old ladies’ lounge, and it wasn’t Friday night without a good old-fashioned fight breaking out to finish a disagreement that had started on a football field. (I should point out that although there was violence, it never reached the level of glassing, knifing and king-hitting that we see now. I’m not condoning violence on any level, but I remain curious as to why young people take it so far these days. My father, who’s been observing young men getting drunk for 50 years, says it’s because they’re not sticking to beer anymore. He reckons the crazy concoctions of spirits, energy drinks and pills drive them mad. I find it interesting that people stopped smacking their kids about twenty years ago, and today’s twenty-year-olds are stretching the capabilities of hospital emergency wards with their violence.)
Across the street and a few doors up from the Courthouse was Tatts. It was a much flasher pub, brightly lit with red carpet and gold fittings. It was frequented by kids from schools more expensive than ours. These were the real R.M. Williams–wearing kids, who played rugby union. A lot of girls from my school fancied moving up the social ladder with these guys, so we generally did at least a sweep through every Friday night to see what was cooking. Then out the back door of that joint and up a laneway to my favourite pub, which was my favourite because it looked like something out of Dogs in Space.
The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny: A memoir Page 6
