He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (13 page)

Voices of the Damned

Mark

HEROIN. ALL THE ANSWERS!

Apart from Scientologists and born-again Christians, junkies are probably the worst people in the world to live with. Even other junkies will tell you that.

Mark is still alive. He now edits a major fashion magazine.

I
’m the dickhead in this story. Despite maintaining a terrible drug habit I liked a tidy house. It was probably my method of pretending everything was all right when I was fucked on the drugs. But it would cause tension when I was living with other junkies who didn’t give a shit.

I went mad over this kitchen in Kings Cross. Domestic things were just instinctive to me. Cooking and cleaning and so on. But nobody else got into it because they were all young and drug-fucked. I went completely insane. It was a butter and milk impasse which got to me. It drove me insane that I could never have soft butter. I liked to keep the butter out of the fridge and the milk in the fridge. I finally put this huge notice in the kitchen: PUT THE FUCKING MILK BACK IN THE FRIDGE. LEAVE THE FUCKING BUTTER OUT OF THE FRIDGE. Very, very uncool. I suffered a lot of harassment over that. I became the laughing-stock of the house.

Years later when my life and drug habits had degenerated in tandem I was living in Roslyn Gardens, where Paul Keating has a place now. This was with a bunch of girls. I mostly tended to live with girls. It was one of those things. The stereotype of men being totally unhouse-trained is so often accurate. All-male households are usually frat house beer dens, which is pretty unendurable for a guy who puts up signs about the milk and butter. As a young bloke I looked at that slob archetype lifestyle, which was supposedly so rebellious, and I just wanted to tidy up the kitchen.

There were two of us maintaining covert habits in this house. One of the girls, let’s call her Alice, started to screw the dealer. I then figured she had lots of smack and I had an excuse to steal it. I’d hang around when she went out. Wait a while. And as people tend to hide these things in pretty obvious and consistent places I’d then find her smack and take it. It was like a welfare supplement for my own habit. I lived for a long time like that.

I had to skip on that place because a couple of fraud jobs caught up with me. If you’re going to get into the smack and you don’’t want to get into mugging or break-and-enter it virtually ensures that you will become involved in credit fraud. And fraud inevitably involves skipping on share house arrangements. I had recently skipped on a place and they traced me because I took everything but a bag of garbage which contained a letter with a return address for my brother. The cops showed up and took me away. They had a huge file on me but they couldn’t make it add up exactly so they let me go.

I drifted for a while. Just took couches and temporary beds with friends. Then I moved into a friend’s house in Nimrod St. Kings Cross with a couple of noted thespian types. It was another terrible drug saga. These were bacchanalian thespians. They loved to smoke joints, eat cheese and drink red wine. I was into heroin, leather pants and rock and roll. I guess they thought this was a touch of glamour and danger under their roof. Then the reality hit them.

They were all sitting around one night smoking and throwing back the plonk and the King Island brie. I came home with Michael and Sonya, some guys from my band. We’d had a really good gig so Michael and I had gone out and scored. Sonya was quite mild-mannered, didn’t do smack at all. But Michael and I disappeared into my room, took this dope and were completely flattened by it. Michael just dropped, all but dead on the floor. I could see he had overdosed and wasn’t breathing but I was so out of it I honestly didn’t give a shit. I shambled into the living room to find Sonya, who was like the bridge between us and the thespians, and mumbled, ‘Eh Sonya.. come ’ere.’ I pointed to Michael and turned my back on him, walked out into the living room, into this collection of polite people and flopped in a chair, a drooling, drop-lidded vision of horror. I had a cigarette burning down to my fingers and picked up the nearest bottle of whatever was going. Sonya bolted out ... ‘Fuck fuck fuck!!! Michael’s dead!’

These people had never seen anything like it. Michael had to be brought to. I think we succeeded without the help of the ambulance. After he comes to we partied for ages. The next morning my thespian friend put his head round the door and politely says ‘Uhm Mark, I think uhm ...’ I put my hand up, ‘Don’t worry mate. I’ve got a new place. I’ll be gone by lunch time.’ He was very relieved.

That’s how I ended up with these two gay guys. The problem was that I was a bit boofy, you know. I’m sort of blokey and I like to spend the weekends in front of the telly watching the footy and I think it got to the guys. That was an aspect of my blokiness that just wasn’t going to work in a gay house. So I was asked to leave under the pretext that I spent too much time there. I said, ‘But while I’m spending time here I’m doing the cooking and the cleaning up.’ Didn’t matter.

I ended up on a friend’s couch after that. I was there for a while but he was a bed smoker. He set his futon on fire one night. I was pinned so I slept through most of the emergency but when he woke me up the place was pretty much wrecked by futon smoke and water damage. My friend was packing shit so we borrowed a ute, this is at three in the morning, threw everything in the back and fled. I was getting pretty tired of this by now. I was a man on the run. So I went the whole hog. Sold my guitars and bought a ticket to London.

7 NORTHERN GOTHIC

The house sat on the edge of a monstrous freeway development, just outside the city. An overpass had been rammed through the front yard, so the owner didn’t really care what happened to the place. He just wanted whatever rent he could get, which wasn’t that much because the house was full of Goths. Being out of contact with reality, Goths tend to neglect the mundane things in life like paying the rent, and when the estate agents got serious and sent the strong arm boys around, the little vampire colony was $4200 in arrears.

I’m not sure how many people lived there. There were three regulars and lots of drop-ins. Kevin the carpenter – plying his trade in a completely dark room lit by candles – had a great cordless drill. When I asked if it was powerful enough, he said ‘Fuck yes!’ turned around and started drilling holes in the wall. The teev was turned on all the time but only half tuned so that the picture could distort in time to the beat of Front 242 and Revolting Cocks which screamed out of the stereo pretty much incessantly. I met an apprentice printer from the front room who was totally hung up on Laibach, this Yugoslavian band. They were a blood and soil act. Played a lot of new Nazi anthem stuff, wore big deer antlers and crap on stage. They were not actually fascist themselves, you understand, it’s just an art thing, called New Slovenian Art. Of course you can’t say New Slovenian Art in English. You have to say it in the original language because that’s all part of the art. There was a bald guy who lived out the back. Totally serious about his image, shaved his head, wore black eyeliner everywhere. He rarely ever paid for anything, denounced property as unimportant. Very snobbish and elitist. Hardly saw him speak a word to anyone. And there was another guy called Luke who was said to be into creating music, but the only thing that he’d really done was drill off-centre holes in his collection of old 45s. He’d whack them on the record player and sit there all night, thrilled with the discovery that the music speeds up and slows down and speeds up and slows down and speeds up and slows down. Infinitely. Actually the whole household was pretty excited about that.

But the strong arm boys came down heavy and they all skipped on me one night – took off like a swarm of bats flying out from Indooroopilly Island. My name wasn’t on the lease and I more or less took the frighteners in my stride – strong arm men don’t bother me anymore, you just look blank and dead and disinterested at them long enough, and they eventually realise that beating you up would be very, very boring – so I wound up with the house to myself. Good deal. I set up camp. Found a table to put my typewriter on. Bought some groceries. Thought about life for a while. Then the extended family that is Brisbane sent some people along to keep me company, and for my sins, I took them in.

Sam

Goths have a great hide-and-seek party game. You put on really loud music, so loud you can barely hear yourself think. Everyone has two or three bongs. You extinguish all candles. The house is blacked out, like jet black, then one person hides. Everyone goes looking for the hider. But when they find the hider they don’t say anything. They quickly crawl into the hiding place with them. This goes on until one person is left, stoned as hell, careening around the dark, empty house.

Dirk was a funny little dude. I told you about him earlier. Remember? Thought cleaning the bathroom was a heterofascist plot? Well Dirk had this strange hair. Sort of a mutant afro. He told me once that he really wanted hair like the guy from
Eraserhead
but that rather than growing up in a curly high rise, it grew out. A tragedy. He came with two women – Em, a banker and still one of my best friends, and Crazy Nina, a complete disaster, one of the most deranged people I have ever lived with in my whole life.

We had a great housewarming party. One of those parties that came in human waves – bingeing crims, yuppie yobboes, professional crashers, hopeful punters, crazy ferals, angry punks, hairy freaks, girly swots, naive schoolies, cynical journos, screaming fags and sweaty dykes, bent cops, backdoor specialists, conquering heroes and hopeless jokes, great pretenders, pale imitators, smooth operators, and even some of the vampire bats who did a runner on this house in the first place. People got drunk and scaled the hall. Feet on one side, arses on the other. There were a dozen of us, leg to leg up there, weeping drunk, bottles in our laps, girls over our knees. We didn’t come down for some time and the walls were permanently bowed afterwards. People went tripping, naked in the bath, just lying there, with a little water dripping on their heads. A couple of chemists made up a half kilo block of potassium nitrate and sugar smoke mix. A chunk the size of your thumb will fill an ordinary room. There were nitrous tanks and hydrogen balloons. Tied them off, attached a fuse, lit them up and let them go. Boom! The front stairs collapsed, but some builders made temporary stairs out of stolen milk crates. Meanwhile there’s this exercise machine, this gut buster, sitting out there in the lounge room. It had a belt you put round your waist which vibrates really quickly. Breaks up the fat cells. A drunken wideboy locks himself in and cranks it up to full power – smoke starts billowing out of the thing and it sucks the wideboy closer and closer, into its maw. He’s screaming because his arse is being torn to pieces, everyone’s panicking, no one knows how to turn it off or disconnect the belt, and suddenly it vibrates itself to pieces and starts snapping and slapping like a crazed rubber snake. Somebody set fire to all the posters around the room, and while we’re trying to beat out the flames, one of the Goths jumped into the next door neighbours’ pool, slicing through a carpet of thick green algae on the surface. He was stark naked, white as a magician’s rabbit, and had jumped from the roof. A dozen people were up there, fucked on alcohol, acid and nitrous oxide. Every now and then, you’d hear someone slide off and crash to the ground. I woke up the next morning buried in furniture.

Sarah

I lived with a cop who was also a homophobic Nazi. It was in Paddington and he was always complaining about ‘filthy’gays and how they brought down the neighbourhood. The thing was, one of our other flatmates was openly gay. The cop would carry on like this around him but he never actually attacked him personally. A couple of years after I’d moved on I met the gay guy who told me that the cop and he were having an affair at the time. They used to wear his gun and police hat to bed.

The domestic tensions kicked into second gear pretty much the following day. I don’t recall the specifics of the incident, but I think the girls had just come home from a shit day in hell when Dirk waltzed in and demanded to know where his dinner was. Jesus, I shudder to think of it. He obviously hadn’t had much to do with women because I don’t know a single straight guy who’d dare pull a stunt like that. Not one, out of all of the arse-scratching, beer-guzzling yahoos I’ve lived with. Your cock would be on the chopping block before you could scream. We were still scraping bits of Dirk off the wall three days later. Crazy Nina was particularly harsh. It was a bad moon rising. Nina and Dirk were simply programmed contra to each other. She must have spotted him as the weak link in the house, because she bore down on him without mercy. They’d have furious arguments over whose turn it was to hold the TV remote, whether or not the pineapple chunks went on the third shelf or the fourth shelf in the cupboard, whether it was Tiny Teddies or Iced Vo-Vo’s in the shopping trolley this week. Really bitter gouging encounters which sent Em and me into hiding to laugh ourselves sick.

There’s a club out there for Crazy Nina’s ex-flatmates. There must be dozens of us now. We get together occasionally, rent a hotel for speeches, dinner and drinks. Sometimes we go to the opera together. We’re all bonded by having lived with her. Other people just don’t understand. Nina looked normal. She was a beautiful girl, raven-haired, with striking green eyes. She knew how to present. She seemed like a competent human being. But at her core? A heart of Darkness. You didn’t get to know this until you had lived with her for a while. She had a very good act. Fooled us for weeks. As I said, it’s difficult to recall the details now. Only the texture and echoes remain.

Sometimes you can tell straight off that a lunatic is bearing down upon you. During the interview, when black leathery wings burst from their back and their head does the three-sixty, hosing the room down with thick, green pea soup, it’s a pretty easy thing to grab the biro and scratch their name from the list. Most often, however, it takes about a week. You’ll wake up at two or three in the morning to the sound of your new flatmate, the quiet librarian, ranting and screaming at her boyfriend as she stoves in the windscreen of his Volvo with a Club Lock in an attempt to stop him driving away. Or maybe you’ll be rooting around in the freezer, trying to figure out how to get to the Vodka or that last fish finger, or the legendary Lost Tab of Acid, and you’ll notice that the ice cube tray has been filled full of tomato paste. Or you’ll catch the new girl sandpapering her books. For that fresh, just brought home look. Or you’ll come home late one night and trip over a new hat stand. I’ve noticed that neurotic young women all own hat stands. And hats. Lots of them.