John Birmingham: He Died With a Felafel in His Hand

Don’t know how Dirk would have coped with finding Jeffrey the junkie all cold and blue and sprawled over the bean bag. An actual dead guy as opposed to the rhetorical gay ones which littered his post-closet conversation. Seeing as Dirk never surfaced before Donahue , I guess it would have been academic even if he and Jeffrey had lived under the same roof. One thing’s for sure. He wouldn’t have cleaned up the mess, so he wouldn’t have found the thousand dollars Jeffrey had stashed away in his room. The cops told us to stay out of there until the science guys had come around to check it out properly but we snuck in about ten minutes after they left. It didn’t take very long to find the cash rolled up and hidden away in the battery compartment of his ghetto blaster and since he’d lied to us about being a junkie and brought a world of hassles down on our home we figured it was only fair that Jeffrey make this posthumous contribution to the kitty.

a modern aesthetic

Voices of the Damned

Ted

ON LIVING WITH MARXISTS

My friend Ted says Marxists are worse than junkies. You know, you let one in, you let the whole anarcho-syndicalist commune in, and then your little home isn’t the warm and friendly place you escape to at day’s end.

It’s a brave challenge to the dominant paradigm of crypto-fascist domestic enslavement. Until the washing has to be done. Then it always seems to be Ted’s turn.

TED NOW WORKS FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ADMINISTRATIVE AFFAIRS.

Adam was a full-on Marxist, originally from Broken Hill. He’s probably lecturing in English now. While I was living with him he would interpret everything according to a Marxist line. When we went shopping you’d get a little diatribe on each product. If this were a Marxist society, for instance, one-litre bottles of Spring Valley orange juice would be just the right height to hold dry fettucine. But because this is a capitalist society they make the Spring Valley bottle two and a half centi­metres too short to store your dry fettucine. They do this on purpose.

Adam said he wouldn’t read a book if it did not have the word Marxism in the index. He fucked every woman he could get his hands on whilst professing to be a liberated feminist man. Big, flabby, white-bodied old Adam would wander about in a sarong with his willy hanging out because he wasn’t part of any sexually oppressive state mechanism or anything.

He had a big mouldy chair in the corner which he would sit in half-naked, overseeing the room. There was a reading light carefully arranged behind the chair to put him into an enigmatic perspective for anybody who walked into the room. He bought Freddy the tabby cat to sit on the arm of this chair and complete the illusion. Blofeld with his cat, but in a sarong.

Freddy was meant to be an aloof cat, sort of a guardian. But sadly Freddy was very affectionate and he’d interrupt Adam’s reading by purring and headbutting him all the time. He’d also bring grasshoppers into the house to terrify Rodney the gay guy. We came home one night and found Rodney pinned to the door, screaming, with Freddy sitting a few feet in front of him crunching away on a grasshopper.

The cat had no idea Rodney didn’t want it. He must have taken Rodney’s theatrics for excitement, because he followed him around with this twitching corpse until we got home and rescued him.

Rodney was also on the Left but he was in the drug-taking, campy gay faction. Rodney had just come from a house in Taringa where they had set aside one day a week as Nude Day. Even visitors had to get their gear off and leave it at the door. One Nude Day they got stoned and decided that it would be completely cool to watch a glass fall off the balcony onto the path below. They dropped this glass, got really excited when it shattered. So the house s entire crockery collection went over after it and was left in a pile in the driveway. The next morning they didn’t have any bowls for breakfast.

Rodney and Adam didn’t get on too well because Adam was very much into being a bloke. He thought Rodney a little frivolous. Whereas Rodney was all for fighting the revolution aided by copious quantities of drugs and condoms. He thought Adam a little uptight. These two factions then contended for control of the house. The serious young stick insects’ Stalinist discussion group and the drug-fucked, dick-sucking, no-hopers’ collective.

Rodney won in the end. Adam moved out because he just couldn’t hack it. The telling blow came when Rodney brought home about seven or eight of his gay drug buddies and they all piled into the bathroom, which was next to Adam’s bedroom. They lit dozens of candles, filled up the bathtub, got naked and got into it. They were stoned out of their heads, yelling and singing awful Billy Bragg songs while Rodney played along on his piano. He’d play for a while then go back to cavorting in the tub. About three in the morning Adam came out of his room to yell at them to shut the fuck up and start acting their age. He bawled them out for a good ten minutes but when he got back to his room three of them were fucking in his bed.

I can listen to my flatmateshave sex for ever. I once lurked in a lounge room for a whole weekend on the slim chance that two flatmates were holed up in the front bedroom, and that if I waited long enough, I might hear them at it. They were young and desperately trying to be cool about it, but the signs had been there for a week – meaningful glances, late night teev, foot massages, the standard routine. And there was no way I was letting them off without some heavy duty, gargoyle-style voyeurism on my part. When you’re young and blameworthy, there’s this circuit in your brain that’s always pushing you to go for the end zone, and I did – made a quick trek to the 7–11, bought both the weekend papers, a fruit loaf, a litre of V8, and camped out in the living room, directly downstairs from the point of maximum creaking and moaning.

Melissa, you remember her, the credit scam queen, she was a great one for bringing home these rough-headed bastards with tattoos and biker boots and the stench of failure about them. She was a safe sex girl. You’d hear her through the bedroom door and all the way down the hall – “Just put it on, you fucking dickhead” – and these guys would grudgingly comply, slap on the latex and wake up in the morning to discover that Melissa spends the best part of her daylight hours asleep. Sleep is her natural state of being. These hellmen would wake up, take in her chainsaw snores and figure they could slip away, sneak out of the house and avoid those always awkward post-coital negotiations. So they’d pull on their gear in careful silence and pad downstairs to where I’m waiting in the lounge room, pretending to read the papers because it is absolutely my favourite thing to catch these guys out. The good-mannered ones might throw a grunt at me, but mostly they’d steam through the lounge, heading for the front door and freedom. They’d fling it open. And freeze. Because the house has got these heavy cast iron security gates over all the windows and doors. There’s this great pause as the hellmen realise they are locked in with me, the dog and the girl upstairs. There’s always a few seconds while these ugly bastards stare at the bars. I’m biting my cheeks to keep a straight face when they come back into the lounge. They always say something like “Uh, you got a key … man?”

“Sorry. Lost mine. Melissa’s got one though.”

Stella

I walked in on a flatmate one day. His girlfriend was sitting naked on his desk with her legs spread wide apart. I reversed out at top speed really embarrassed. He came and knocked on my door later. He said “It’s not what it looks at all. I’m actually a virgin. I’ve had this girlfriend for two years but we don’t do anything. She just comes around once a week, sits herself up on the desk and shows me what I can’t have.”