THE NIGHT I ALMOST KILLED THE BAND
I’m 22, it’s 1981, I’m still living with my parents – GODDAMMIT! – and home from work, I hoover up my dinner, change and then jump in my car and head to Parramatta to see the band.
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.
(Cross-posted from Groupthink)
SMELLY TONGUES 