He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (16 page)

The band of course was completely hopeless. Called themselves The Black Dogs. I tagged along with them on a three week death march to a terminal point in Mt Isa, where they’d landed a semi-permanent gig at the Overland Hotel.
Rolling Stone
came up with the idea. Said they wanted a gritty account of a pub rock band on the road, and in a Duromin delirium I came up with this great concept piece. I’d call the article
The Yellow Underpants of Rock ’n’ Roll
, get the Lizard Man, the band’s frightening lead singer, to buy a pair of white Calvin Klein boxer shorts on the first day of the tour, and get him to wear the underpants consistently for six weeks on the road. (This was a not a big ask given Milo’s unwashed jeans-wearing record at King Street.) We’d take a photo of the Lizard Man’s underpants at the end of the tour and I would somehow convince the editor to run it as a front cover. I don’t remember the rationale for all this, but I do recall that the phrase
The Yellow Underpants of Rock ’n’ Roll
evolved into a short-hand tag for any unsavoury truth about the nature of the music industry. Like the set-up at the Overland in Mt Isa, for example. The Overland paid the band a handful of beer-soaked dollars to play every night, and threw in free accommodation at a house across the road. The house had two pool tables downstairs, which wasn’t too bad, but it was the only place in Mt Isa that didn’t have air-conditioning. There were a couple of ceiling fans but they were fucked from having had so much stuff thrown into them. The heat was unbearable. We couldn’t stand it, so we’d go to the pub, spend our handful of cash on beer, running up debt, paying it off, and running it up again. The other problem was those locals who thought it was hip to come back after the gig and have drinks in the house because you were a band. You’d get back and there’d be about thirty rednecks drinking in your lounge room, wheeling out the bullshit.

They’d been into this ritual for years. Everyone knew each other in Mt Isa, so you had all these bullshit artists who couldn’t bullshit each other any more. They’d sit around waiting for the next band to roll into town – strangers who didn’t know them. Then you’d get the racing car drivers, the hang gliders, the croc wrestlers and mercenaries all coming out of the woodwork to tell you about their fascinating lives. We took it for a few days before turning feral. We’d go, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’and piss off to our rooms, but it wouldn’t bother them – they’d hang around, keeping the bullshit flowing until the early hours of the morning.

Michael

Alan was the Sega player from Hell. He decided he didn’t like living at his own place so he was always coming around and visiting Roy, my flatmate. They’d pull a dozen cones then Alan would attach the Sega to the telly. We only had one TV, mine. So he just moved in and turned the place into a video game parlour. He’d play games for six or seven hours at a time. Wouldn’t matter whether it was night or day. He'd play for a whole day, pull a few cones, eat some delivery food, play for a night, crash on our couch, wake up and start playing again. I don’t know how he did it. Occasionally he’d go off to a couple of classes during the day. Then he’d come back and plug in the Sega. He only stopped after three or four months when his girlfriend dropped him. He was really surprised at her.

We did our best to get picked up by the local women who’d have quiet beds and air conditioning. It was a desperation thing. I went off with a dancing girl who shuffled around in a cage when the DJ was on between sets. She had air-con and a car, which Hooper and I tooled around in while she was at work. But there was a price to be paid for all that of course – hard blown, mining town sex.

It was the women torched the tour in the end. Hooper, who played quiet guitar or something, ended up as a kind of tragic trophy for a particularly hard-faced specimen. He spat the dummy, loaded the band’s yellow van with as much equipment as he could steal from the pub and drove into a tree. There was some kind of police inquiry and the whole yellow underpants trip started to get very ugly. We had to hitch back to Brisbane. Keith was so upset he sold his drum kit to pay for an airline ticket out of there, flew straight back to Sydney. He’d moved out by the time I got home. I still see him occasionally, walking up Victoria Street. I’ve tried chatting with him but you can see the whole thing is scar tissue now.

Jeremy turned into an incredible band Nazi in Brisbane, thought he could salvage the whole disaster by organising a couple of gigs and even went so far as to recruit my old school friend Stuart to fill in on drums. Jeremy had gone insane by this stage. He was completely disconnected from the local scene but he monstered every half-smart operator in town until he got a couple of dates. There was real madness about the week The Black Dogs were in Brisbane.

I’d run out of lounge room floors to crash on in Brisbane, so in desperation I rang my parents and asked if I could stay with them. Then Jeremy told me that he and Hooper had enough money for a motel but I’d have to do the right thing by the Lizard Man. Put him up somewhere. Keep him away from them because his underpants were really beginning to smell. He had locked into this idea and refused to let go. Just would not change those underpants. I parked the Lizard Man at my parents’ house and the ugliness inflated like a life raft in the back of a Japanese car.

The Lizard Man was a six-foot-two love machine who oozed really creepy sex – he had this thing about being naked, couldn’t wait to get his gear off and run his hands up and down his body. He had really bad skin on his back. Weeping sores and blisters, big black bristling hairs that stuck out from his neck and shoulders like spider legs. And of course there was the underpants thing. He’d gone mad for it. Really wanted his soiled Calvin’s on the cover of
Rolling Stone
. He stuck to me like glue.

Jon

The new flatmate arrived with a dog. It was skinny, it had fleas and it dribbled a lot. A vote was taken and it was decided that the dog was NOT to be allowed inside. The dog-owner agreed, although it soon became obvious that he was letting the dog inside when everyone else was out. The house became infested with fleas. The other flatmates took it very well, they were an easy-going bunch. In fact they began Flea Races in which they would put on only a pair of shorts, and run through the house to see how few fleas they could pick up. The record was 12. This, remember, was full-speed running right through the centre corridor of a Queenslander. The fleas were difficult to tally because they kept jumping around while you were trying to count them.

We got to my parents’ house and it all got too hard. I’d signed on for the Isa tour as a straight-forward working holiday – a Hemingway trip, like running the bulls or killing a marlin. Plenty of blood, but at the end of the day you put the book down and crawl between the clean sheets. Now, here we were. The Lizard Man and I. At home with my parents in Stafford.

In a weird kind of way he did himself credit by not even attempting to deviate from the script while he was around them. Took it all in his stride, explained to me later that he didn’t want to be unnatural. So he got around with his shirt off, practiced his saxophone loudly in the living room, even jerked off in the shower.

The pressure was there from day one. A migraine which just wouldn’t quit. My parents, decent folk who didn’t deserve this, started locking themselves in their bedroom. I tried to do the right thing. Kept the Lizard Man out of the house as long as I could. We trawled through a lot of pubs and parties, searching for some poor stupid girl I could dump him on. But no. The night we had some interest from a couple of Gold Coast hairdressers, both off their tits on ecstasy, the Lizard Man sidled up to me and asked, in a really reasonable tone, if I thought my parents would mind him fucking them both on the lounge room floor. ‘It’s two in the morning,’ he said. ‘I’d be really quiet. I’ll have them out of there the second I’m done.’

I lost it. Cabbed it over to Jeremy’s room at the Travelodge. Found Hooper and him carousing with a couple of girls who said they were from
Paradise Beach
. Told them the article was dead, the band was doomed and I was going back to Sydney. They weren’t really surprised. The yellow underpants of rock ‘n roll? – I was wearing them, and I don’t even like music.

I headed back to my parent’s place, grimly determined to pack my bags, throw the Lizard Man out and spend the next few years redeeming myself in their eyes. My Dad, the quiet man, was waiting for me. My Dad really only speaks when he has something important to say, and this time it was,
‘Get this idiot out of my house’
. I nodded wearily and started to say I’d take care of it all when I saw a terrible thing out of the corner of my eye. Over my father’s shoulder, out of his field of view, I could see the Lizard Man peeling out of his clothes and walking up the stairs in the nude. Leaving his gear in a pile on the floor. He’d wanted a shower and was just being
natural
about it. Walked all the way up to the bathroom, naked, as he would have at home. The sight of his weeping, bristly back and acned bottom disappearing up the stairs was too much. My brain locked up like the brakes of a speeding car. It was a turning point in my life. A Satan’s lounge room goat’s head moment. I was never going to have this sort of trouble again. It was insane. It was madness. Real people don’t behave like this. Real people have jobs and families and live in clean houses and drive cars that work, and they do the shopping, and their fridges are full of fresh food and their clothes are washed and clean and ready for the first day of the rest of their lives. Naked love monsters don’t prowl through their houses, practicing the sax and wondering if it would be all right to fuck a couple of hairdressers on the floor. It just doesn’t happen.

My parents and I did speak to each other again. Eventually. After about two years. But we never mention the Lizard Man.

Voices of the Damned

Pete

ON BEING A FLATMATE FROM HELL.

Musical taste is one of the great sleeping issues of many share houses. It can rival the unwashed frypan as a source of tension.

The second or third thing you should ask any potential flatmate is: What sort of music do you like? A John Denver fan just will not fit in with a house full of Sonic Youth fanatics.

PETE IS THE GRAPHIC DESIGNER WHO LAID OUT THIS BOOK.

M
y parents set me up with the first flatmate I ever had. He was a Lismore guy who had gone to Sydney to work for the RTA. His name was Neville and he was a true career public servant. At 18 he had a brain dead job, an airless, boxy flat, some cane furniture and a disgracefully cheap stereo. He had it all, but he felt a bit lonely and thought it might be time to find a girl – the right sort of girl, you understand – and settle down, get married and breed. So he joined the local Lions Club, and went on the prowl. He urged me to do the same but I declined. Sure enough, within six weeks the first prospect was led home. I don’t remember much about her, but she lasted about three weeks. Within a month the second prospect came over. Her name was Bernadette, and she was a stayer.

I was the flatmate from hell for him. I used his stereo till it broke and I ruined his candle-lit dinners. I was still into heavy metal at the time. It was my first year in Sydney. These guys I knew who were repeating senior came down from Lismore on the overnight train to catch a big Iron Maiden concert. If you were a Lismore teenager into Heavy Metal it was a big fucking deal. We had all these joints rolled up and we were completely metalled out, wearing cut-off denim jackets with 200 patches on them, wrist bands with studs all over them, replica motorcycle boots, hair everywhere, the lot. I do remember being a bit perplexed at the actual gig – it was kind of odd, you know, grown men in spandex pants and beer guts waving their fists at the audience, but we managed to get totally wasted and have a good time regardless.

Eventually the concert ended and we all decided to go over to my place to smoke the remaining joints and drink the emergency supply of beer one of the guys had thoughtfully stashed in the fridge. We staggered home, desperately stoned, only to find my quiet flatmate Neville there. Having the big Romantic Dinner with Bernadette. Her parents had even come around to be introduced to their prospective son-in-law. They’d negotiated dinner and were finishing up with coffee and chocolate mints when we stormed in, stinking of dope and beer, looking like extras from some woeful Viking movie, taking up all the space in this flat. We were confronted by these aghast middle-aged boring fart parents, this frizzy-haired girl and Neville the mustached public servant in the lemon yellow short sleeve shirt with the palm tree on the pocket, grey slacks and a cloth belt. There was an awkward moment while he introduced the parents to us. I remember looking at these people and thinking ‘Fuck, they’re from Mars.’ I was becoming more and more fixated on the lapels of the father’s jacket and was just about to reach out and inspect them closely when they all fled to a coffee shop on the other side of town.