Some random dive of a venue, bands during the week, disco-shit on the weekend; dark, dank RSL carpet so sodden through to the underfelt each step threatens to suck your boots into the floorboards, tattered red flock wallpaper, tarnished silver trim fittings and mirrored columns, a semi-permanent haze of stale cigarette smoke and polyester sweat, I barrel into the room, all eyeliner and attitude and start straight to the bar for the first gin and tonic of the night. There’s about thirty people, the support act’s already well into their set and nobody’s paying them any attention at all, they’re just a momentary inconvenience to be endured for another fifteen, twenty minutes is all and I clock a couple of scowling disco dickheads in too-tight sateen shirts with collars the size of albatross wings and tight white flares buttoned at the navel and think, “The fuck are they are here for, they lose a mirror ball?”

I grab a drink, and after a few minutes my attention is drawn to the sound of what seems to be an argument over the other side of the room, specifically the words, “WELL, FUCK OFF THEN! GO ON! FUCK OFF!”, spoken by a girl in a Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt, leather mini and fishnets, the object of her ire some nondescript doofus in a duffle coat, about forty badges pinned to the lapels, who spreads his arms out at his sides, palms up, in a “What the fuck have I done?” gesture, after which both engage in a dumb-show of all manner of furious gestures for several more minutes until doofus trails off out the room dejectedly, leaving Siouxsie looking daggers at his shoulder blades, her head shaking in what appears to be exhausted exasperation.

Then the bass-player and his girlfriend and the singer in the band I’m there to see front up at the bar, the singer waves, shouts, “ROSS!”, and I say, “HEY!” and shove an envelope of a half dozen eight-by-tens I’d taken a couple weeks before at him, saying “THERE’S A COUPLE THERE I THINK ARE PRETTY GOOD!” and he takes a look, saying, “GREAT!”, and then he comes to the shot of his head and torso leaning into the microphone and bathed in fluorescent green light and says, “I LOOK LIKE A BIG SICK GREEN PENIS!” and we both crack up laughing.

“TAKE THEM!”, I say, because I don’t want to be dragging the things around with me the rest of the night, so he does, saying “SEE YOU AFTER!”, and the bass-player and his girlfriend and the singer all trail off to whatever passes for a dressing-room in this shithole, probably a toilet the size of a pencil case with walls covered in scribbly Texta scrawls of hairy testicles and vaginas and random phone numbers of random girls that not even the roadie for a drummer would ever consider ringing.

I get another drink, prop myself against a wall and wait for the band; every suburb, every pub, music almost every night, no fucking pokies, and the only television, if there was one, a dodgy black and white 15 inch with shitty reception on brackets up high on a nicotine flavoured wall, the public bar full of bandy-legged, sunken-chested old farts hunched over an infinite beer, rheumy eyes glaring redly and resentfully at the steady influx of all these pretty things, these dandy young faggots in black jeans and ripped shirts and stupid hair coming into their pub with all this faggot music, their slutty girls, and they’d punch them all to oblivion if they had a functioning muscle left in their sagging, sandpaper-skin arms and were only a few years younger, but they just go back to their beer, brains so soaked they can’t hold a coherent thought for more than a few minutes these days, back to dreaming of a fantasy blowjob from Good Old Cheryl, 48 years old, 30 of them spent behind the bar, they wish she could bang them about their hairy ears forever with her tits, even though her breasts have turned the size and shape of drained and dried zucchinis , yet all she ever dreams about is getting the fuck home to her cat and a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner, maybe there’s a late movie to lull her off to a decent night’s sleep, she needs a thirty minute shower every night to scrape the grime of the day off.

Support band’s finished, Sammy the light and sound guy has shoved some music on – LOUD! – Ultravox before Midge Ure turned them all into a flock of poncing romantics, some Magazine maybe.

I grab another drink, drain it, and then another, then the girl in the Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt, all spiky black hair and Chrissie Hynde pout walks over to me, a little unsteady on her feet and she shoves her face in my ear and shouts over the din of the music, “I’VE SEEN YOU BEFORE! WHAT’S YOUR NAME?!”, and I tell her, and she shouts at me, “YOU’RE COMING HOME WITH ME!”, and she prods me in the chest with her finger.

“WHAT?!”, I shout back, “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?”

“I’M LUCY!!”, she yells at me, “YOU’RE COMING HOME WITH ME!”, and she pokes me again, a poke with each word.

“WHY?!” I yell back, genuinely befuddled on account of I went to an all boy’s school and don’t have sisters and I’d only lost my virginity two years before, so whenever a woman spoke to me about pretty much anything back then, befuddlement was the most natural response I could muster.

“BECAUSE I’M PISSED AND I’M HORNY AND I WANNNAFUCKYOUTILLYOURHEADFALLSOFF!”, she shouts back, running all her words together, and poking me again with her drink.

“OKAY!”, I shout back with a shrug, because I don’t really know what else to do and I’m not looking for any trouble.

And then I hear the bass-players’ girlfriend shout “ROSS!”, and she ambles on over and shoves her face in my ear and shouts, “DO YOU WANT A COUPLE OF THESE?!”, and she pulls a blister-pack of pills out of her purse and shoves them at me, they’re diet pills, speed.

“OKAY!”, I shout back, and take a couple, and then Lucy shouts at the bass-players’ girlfriend, “CAN I HAVE A COUPLE?!”, and the bass-players’ girlfriend shouts “SURE!”, and shoves the blister pack at her, and asks her who she is, and she tells her.

“I’M GONNA FUCK HIM TILL HIS HEAD FALLS OFF!”, gesturing at me and I shrug, and then the bass-players’ girlfriend shouts back, “GOOD IDEA!” and then she shouts at me, “ROSS! CAN WE GET A LIFT BACK AFTER THE GIG?!”, and I shout back, “OKAY!”, and then I start to the bar and Lucy shouts, “WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING?!” and I say, “I’M GETTING A FUCKING DRINK!”, and she says, “I WANT A BACARDI AND COKE!” and I say “OKAY!” and I buy her one and bring it back, and then Sammy the sound and light guy comes over to say hello and do I want to take a look at the eight hundred dollar tape deck he’s just bought and I do so we both go up to the sound desk for a gander and he tells me all about it and I say, “I WANT ONE!” and then he asks me, ‘WHO’S THE GIRL?” and I say “HER NAME’S LUCY! I THINK SHE’S CRAZY!”

“GREAT!”, he says, “FRIDAY! YOU COMING?”

“OKAY!”, I say, and then I start to the bar for another drink before the band begins and go back up the front of the room and Lucy dogs me, asking “WHERE’S MINE?” and I say, “I JUST GOT YOU ONE!” and she says, “WHERE’S YOURS?” and I say, “I FUCKING DRANK IT!” and she says, “SO DID I! I’M FUCKINGTHIRSTY!” and I say, “OKAY!” and I wander back to the bar muttering “Fuck me dead!” under my breath and I get her another drink and bring it back and then the band starts, the buzz has kicked in from the pills, and about a dozen of us break out bustin’ moves on the floor so carefully studied in furiously uncoordinated finger jabs, jumps and head pops it makes Peter Garrett’s dance stylings look like classically choreographed balletic grace on mandrax.

Seventy, eighty minutes later, exhausted, exhilarated, soaked through with sweat and stone cold sober, the band’s done and I’m heading back to the bar for a drink when Lucy grabs me on the arm, spins me around and says, “I WANT A BACARDI AND COKE!” and I say, “OKAY!” and I go get her one, and then we have another and then the band come out, the singer comes over, says to me, “ROSS! CAN I GET A LIFT BACK WITH YOU GUYS?” and I say “OKAY!”; the guitarist and the drummer are going with the van, I get the other three and Crazy Lucy.

Down and out of this place and into the car, the roads are damp from a light drizzle of rain, I punch a tape in the player, turn it up and we go, back to the city, civilisation, fuck these suburbs, they all suck donkey dick, we’re young and we’re cool and we’ll all live forever and if our heads were stuck any further up our own arses our navels would flap each time we drew breath.

Bugger all traffic, I’m under the speed limit taking it easy, everyone’s talking, winding down, and the singer and the bass-player ask me what the fuck is it on the tape, it’s good, what is it, and I say, “Suspiria! The soundtrack, you know the Argento movie? They’re called Goblin, they did “Dawn of the Dead” too, it’s fucking fantastic this music, I’ll make you a tape!”

“Great!”, they say, and I say “Okay!”, and I come to a curve in the road, hell, it’s not a curve, it’s a gentle lean to the left, a nudge to the steering wheel, it’s barely even noticeable, and I come to it and nudge the wheel just so, and then …

Steering wheel locks.

Freezes.

What?

Hello?

What?

The fuck?

Oh.

My car begins to spin, it spins on the spot, it spins and spins, right there, in the middle of the road, it just spins, and this ain’t ever happened before, this is most definitely a new thing, and as open as I may have been back then to new things, I’m not sure that this is a good new thing – NO – it most definitely does not seem that.

And my car is a carousel and we are the horses, ‘round and around, up and down and around, it’s a night at the fair and the streetlights are firecrackers, fairy dust, fairy dust, who’s got the fairy floss, where is the lever, pull the lever, the lever, and if this is a movie, then where’s the director?

Someone yells.

And someone says, “FUCK!”

Then, “OH, SHIT!”

And, “HANG ON!”

Backwards now, across three or four lanes, up and over the divider, another three or four lanes, on the kerb now, the footpath, and into a fence.

Made of bricks.

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

“I GOTTA GET OUT!”, someone says.

“FUCK ME DEAD!”, someone else.

“SHIT!”, from another.

“MY FUCKING CAR!”, from me.

Everyone gets out.

I go around to the back, to the boot, it’s where the engine is, it’s a Volkswagen, there’s a dent is all, just a dent, but the brick fence is a pile of rubble, for this was when cars were made of COLD-HARD-STEEL, not the pussy-sucking tin foil they’re made of today, so that’s all okay then, and the singer and the bass-player and his girlfriend and Crazy Lucy are still trying to figure what the fuck just happened, and if it had happened only a couple hours earlier when the roads were crowded, we’d all be deader than Steve Fielding’s brain, but it’s one a.m. in the morning on a weeknight in the 1980’s and we’re alive.

“Mate,” asks the singer, “can I have a cigarette?”

“I didn’t know you smoked”, I say and give him one.

“Just for now,” he says, and everyone mills around aimlessly for a few minutes, quietly ejaculating various muttered expletives of wonderment and shock and surprise and awe and trying to pull our shit together, fireflies for stars, the road a greasy rainbow of damp, but we really gotta get out of this place, we gotta get out of this place now, before someone in the block of flats whose fence we just killed wakes up and calls a cop, so we all pile back into the car, what else can we do, I turn the key in the ignition and when it starts, the singer says, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” and I say, “It’s a Volkswagen! I LOVE this car! You couldn’t kill this thing with a wrecking ball the size of Mars!”, and I tell him how the mechanic at the garage who did the last service on it asked me what the hell had I done to it and I’d told him, “Nothing! I bought it for fourteen hundred bucks at Flemington Markets in 1976, one owner!”, and he offered me two thousand for it and I just laughed and said, “No way, mate!”, and then I pull it back onto Parramatta Road and head to Bondi, back to the bass players’ flat to have a relax and a calm down with a bottle of gin between us all and a reefer or three.

(Yes, I know what you’re all thinking, and you can shove it.)

A bottle of gin and a reefer or three later and a spin of The Residents “Eskimo” album – limited edition white vinyl, gatefold sleeve, TAP YOUR FEET TO WIND!, it’s about four a.m. in the morning and Lucy says, “Let’s go, it’s late!” and I say, “Okay!”, and we take our leave and go out to the car, my killer of fences, and I ask her where I have to go and she says, “North Bondi, down here to Campbell Parade, I’ll tell you what to do!”

“Okay!”, I say.

And she did.

I’m very pleased to be able to report that while my head didn’t exactly fall off, it most definitely got a rattle on.

Just lucky, I guess.

So whatever had been planned, the Principal canned it, and we all went our various ways about eleven o’clock in the a.m., and that was the end of all that.

A few days later, five of us met up. We thought we may as well take advantage of this brief window of freedom and liberty between the end of schooldays and the beginning of our working life, what was to be the beginning of almost fifty years of time where every hope, every ambition, every fleeting fancy of the future as a fantasia of ever stunning marvels would gradually be ground down to irritating grits of devil dust forever to be flung into our dim and weary eyes.

Or, in other words, our young lives had yet to be moulded by the onerous demands of modern office life and its infinitely stimulating rigours.

“We could go camping”, said one, “My brother has a campervan and a tent, we could take that.”

“To where?” asked another.

“There are some nice places on the south coast”, said someone else.

“I don’t know how to put up a fucking tent”, said another, very probably myself, “I’ve never been camping in my fucking life”.

“It’s easy”.

So we all went camping, five virgin boys fresh out of high school, being men in the world and looking for adventure.

Where we wound up I have no recollection, but there was a beach, there were roads, and there were some shops not far away, so it must’ve seemed a good idea to just pull up and pitch our pole there, wherever the fuck it was, and so that is precisely what we did.

Knowing nothing of camping, none of us, it did appear to take an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to erect a tent, but we finally did, so beamingly proud of ourselves at the very modern marvels of adult self-sufficiency that we had become in such a short span of time.

On reflection now, it may have been a better idea not to pitch a tent on a patch of scrubby brush sitting atop naught but sand, for as night fell, a storm blew up, it started pissing down with rain, and we all took turns for a couple hours running outside to bang the tent pegs back in, and no sooner had someone done that they’d pop right out again, and it was the next guy’s turn.

And yes, we did consider taking refuge in the campervan, but were a little terrified the tent would blow off if we did, so we made the sacrifice to comfort and braved the terror of the elements as men should be prepared to do.

We had beer.

None of us were really drinkers of any stripe, but we were men now, therefore we had beer, and beer was the thing men did.

My own familiarity with alcohol up to that point in my life had been limited to a sip or two of my father’s beer on one or two occasions. Yet, as a man, I felt it my manly duty to persevere with this fucking horrible stuff and so, over a period of about three hours, I managed to consume three entire cans of beer, by which point I felt fucking horrible and it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least if I began to hallucinate about bats crawling from out the walls.

We were all a bit like that, and I think someone had to go out and throw up at one point.

By the time the storm had subsided and the wind had dropped and we had exhausted ourselves from doing fifty laps of the tent and blind drunk on three beers each, we all wisely decided to call it a night and collapsed into unconsciousness, only to be woken not long after by one our number yelling out at the top of his fucking voice, “SOMETHING IS EATING MY EARS!”.

At which, we all jumped from our beds and stumbled about blindly in the dark trying to figure out what breed of bastard beast had infiltrated our snug, if somewhat shaky abode.

“Where’s the torch?”, someone asked.

“I don’t fucking know, I can’t see any fucking thing you stupid bastard”, someone else said, very probably myself.

Torch located, no ear-nibbling beastie could be found, so we all returned to our slumbers convinced that our friend had simply gone off his face in his sleep, his Mike Tyson nightmares no doubt fuelled by the depraved indulgence of three entire cans of demon drink.

Next morning, we welcomed our first hangovers.

Some food was in order.

Knowing nothing of cooking or basic food preparation beyond the buttering of a slice of bread, none of us, we had stocked several cans of stuff, some meals in a tin, things like “Meatballs and peas in delicious gravy” and “Frankfurts and beans in delicious gravy” and “Delicious gravy with random bits of unidentifiable gristly meat-like shit swimming about in it”.

Being the wild bunch of “all or nothing” types we were, we decided to dump them all in one big pot, heat it up and just tip the whole gray, lumpy, gloopy mess over some bread on five separate plates.

We all survived and no one threw up.

Then we all went for a swim which lasted all of about three minutes as it was very fucking cold and it began to piss down raining again.

Lunchtime, a few of us drove up the shops for some fish and chips, brought them back to our soggy little base camp and sat on the beach until it started pissing down raining again.

So we repaired to the campervan, and watched the rain piss down in sheets, and we ate our fish and chips, and one or two of us may have had a beer, and then someone asked …

“What do you want to do tomorrow?”

“I dunno”, came a reply.

“Should we stay here, or go somewhere else you think?” another asked.

“There’s not much fucking point staying here, is there? We should at least move the fucking tent somewhere solid, for fuck’s sake”, someone said, very probably myself.

“This fucking weather”, another said.

“We could’ve just stayed the fuck home and gone to a fucking movie or some fucking thing”, someone said, very probably myself, “We could’ve just gone down to fucking Bondi for a day you want to see a fucking beach.”

“What do you reckon?”, someone ventured.

“Yeah, fuck it”, we all agreed.

“If we leave now, we can all be back before dark”, someone said.

Very probably myself.

Consider the pickle.

The pickle is to the cucumber what the butterfly is to the caterpillar, although unlike the butterfly, the pickle lacks any aeronautic facilities whatsoever, and unlike the caterpillar, the pickle is incapable of movement. The pickle, it could be said, is the vegetable equivalent of a blind mole-rat, although unlike the blind mole-rat, the pickle does not live in a burrow, nor could it be considered “blind”, as sight itself is a sense which the pickle, at no stage in its evolution has ever possessed, nor could it, as a sighted pickle would be of no benefit to anyone or any thing and the evolutionary powers that be which determine such developments were appropriately across these issues at the time to sensibly decide that the pickle would not be requiring of any optical sensibilities.

Additionally, the pickle’s inherent physical inflexibility means that, unlike (for example) a domesticated feline, the pickle is incapable of reclining on a cushion, a lap, or a blanket, and nor will a pickle purr.

And so, while the suitability of the pickle as a domestic pet may be an arguably desirable proposition in the eyes of some, we may reasonably assume that, at this stage, and in consideration of those factors we have parsed above and to date, the probability of a surge in popularity of the pickle as a live-in companion for the over-55’s is not looking terribly good.

Sometimes we just need admit to the unpleasant truths of a thing, don’t you think?

Ta.

The internets. Dangerously intuitive, and most definitely of the left.

The mockery. It burns.

MONKEYS, stray dogs, mosquitoes and snakes have been menacing Delhi’s Commonwealth Games venues but Australia’s chef de mission, Steve Moneghetti, says his team can handle it.

Who would have thought this was possible in Catherine Deveny’s home suburb?

He saw me checking her out; she did not.

He instantly started groping the girl like a randy rottweiler having a crack at her leg (she was a little bit more receptive than yesterday’s girl, I will admit.)

The insecurity of people like this makes me laugh. What are they so afraid of? Are they really scared that another guy will be able to pick up their girlfriend at a train station while they’re with her? Do these guys really think they need to metaphorically cock their leg and metaphorically piss all over her?

I hope she metaphorically chops his metaphorical cock off.

“I went to a GP in Victoria,” I was saying, “and listed off all of my symptoms that were textbook Giardia. The doctor just rubbed his hands together and told me to let it run its course. But I’d had diarrhea for a week and hadn’t digested any food in as long as I can remember, I told him; I was weak, I told him. But the doctor just told me it had to flush out and he refused to give me the drugs.”

“How long was it going to take to flush out?” asked Campbell.

“Could be six months!” I exclaimed.

“That’s bullshit,” intoned Campbell and Goober dutifully.

“I know,” I continued, “I mean, I should’ve told him I’d take a photo on my iPhone of my turds so he could see the unique Giardia colour …”

“They’re a different colour?” asked Campbell, intrigued.

“Yeah! Well because the Giardia stops your intestine from absorbing any fat they’re like a greasy …” I began, about to describe this unique colour, but I stopped when I noticed Campbell and Goober turning red in the face and holding back laughter, and followed their glances to the next table where an elderly couple had paused in their eating, forks poised in mid-air, due to mental images of Giardiasis-induced diarrhea.

Q: If we were to offer you the job, where would you like to see yourself in 10 years time?

A: In 10 years time, I’ll be 61 years old, so I’d like to see myself as retired.

Stupid job interview questions.

Have at it.