John Birmingham: He Died With a Felafel in His Hand

That was about the time Warren and Mel totalled my coffee table, moved out and got married. Tom and I wore brown tuxedos with fat lapels to the reception. Andy the med student took their place and you already know most of what there is to know about him. Except that his mother had this habit of sneaking into the flat to clean it while we were away. I caught her once. Came home a day early from a trip to my parents’ place and found the front door wide open, a vacuum cleaner going inside. Neither Tom nor Andy was supposed to be there. And we didn’t own a vacuum cleaner. Clean burglars? Hoovering up the evidence? I tip-toed in and found Andy’s mum had cleaned the entire flat, my room included. I wasn’t too sure I approved of this, but it didn’t happen again. Absent-mindedness ran in their family. Andy’s sister wasted an Ampol station a few weeks later – drove into the restaurant without getting out of the car. Andy had to move home to help pay for the damage. (Just one footnote on him. He married one of the three girls from that outstanding afternoon of passion – the one who arrived with her suitcases and the knitted jumper. She was a nurse. They split up a few years later and both asked for transfers to get as far away from each other as possible. They were both sent to the Cocos Islands.)

Keiran

I once shared with some guys and this very, very strange woman. She had this really violent, ongoing and intermittent affair with a truckie. She used to beat the crap out of him after drunken nights out. Took to him with whatever came to hand. A chair, a claw hammer, anything. That was, of course, in between one night stands. You’d be watching the Sunday program on TV and the bleary-eyed Beast (as we called her) would wander out to vomit off the verandah. Then, about ten minutes later she’d boot out the latest guy in her clutches - a different guy every weekend. We tried to warn them but they wouldn’t listen. They’d ring constantly and turn up with flowers.

Derek the bank clerk replaced Andy the med student. He didn’t build his tent in that particular flat, he actually had a room there. The tent came later. He was a funny little dude. Went to the toilet about eight or nine times a night. Thought this was normal. Wondered why he never bumped into us the same way he bumped into the members of his family all the time at home. Derek didn’t have much in the way of a life back then. He’d put in eight hours at the bank and come home to arrange his collection of travel brochures. He read travel brochures the way most people watch television. All his money went into saving for the trip he’d take at the end of the year and all his energy went into planning that trip to the smallest detail. So even with Derek in the house there was never too much money around. We seemed to survive week to week, but there were plenty of moments when the bills outstripped our income by an impossible margin. One week we had twenty dollars between the three of us, so we bought two family-sized jumbo cans of Spam, a bag of onions and some beer. We fried up the spam and onion, made this big ugly mess and ate every mouthful because we were so hungry. I investigated a rumour that IVF programs paid twenty dollars a pop for semen donations but found it to be baseless.

We split from that flat in December. Derek the bank clerk was off to Japan for a month. Tom and I were off to minimum wage holiday jobs and our parents’ homes to save the thousand dollars we were allowed to earn before the government cut off our $37 a week Austudy grant. And our yearly $2.10 travel allowance. The flat we took the following February was, as I mentioned, a two room affair. Hence Derek’s tent in the living room. When the bank transferred him he asked me if I could arrange to move his miniature Indian village. I said sure, and threw it off our third storey patio an hour after he’d driven away.

Martin the paranoid wargamer replaced Derek the bank clerk, but only for two weeks. Martin would ask you to play wargames with him four or five times an hour, becoming increasingly moodier as the refusals mounted up. He was also a pig. Tom caught him messing up the lounge room just after it had been cleaned. Scattering Mars bar wrappers and soiled underwear about like fertiliser pods in a promising garden. When we hinted that he wasn’t welcome anymore, he accused us of trying to poison him, just like his previous flatmates. We actually did consider poisoning him, but he was a runty little specimen and it proved easier to frog-march him out the door and toss his stuff off the patio, where it joined the pile of mouldering tent debris.

Taylor the taxi driver dropped his swag in the space left vacant by Martin’s sudden exit. It was kind of cool having our own cabbie. He had an account at a strip club in the Valley, a basement firetrap with cracked mirror balls and one slightly hunch-backed topless waitress whom Taylor was courting with the few lines of Shakespeare he remembered from high school English. They served meals in this place and he’d drive us into town at three in the morning for video games and greasy food binges. Things ran smoothly until the landlady came around for an inspection. We knew she was coming and had hidden Taylor’s stuff away as there was only supposed to be two of us living there. But she was a sharp-eyed old biddy and when she saw the three neatly lined-up pairs of differently sized shoes she tumbled to our scam. She was pretty cool about it. Said we could stay, but we’d have to pay full rent for three people. That was never going to happen so we loaded our minimal gear into Taylor’s cab and split for that old reliable share house bolthole. Our parents.

STUNNING

DECOR

CHOICE

Share House Artefacts : Number One

Brown Couch

AAAH, LEISURE!

Trip to the snow this year?

A little snerkelling around the Reef? Maybe some time on a genuine homestead?

Yes these are all fine ideas.

But have you ever considered the Brown Couch?

Our special four seater model comes with a complimentary set of Paisley Pillows, an Old Newspaper and a Remote Control for the TV.*

Why waste valuable time and money when everything you ever wanted in a holiday is available in the LUXURY and CONVENIENCE of your own living room.

THE BROWN COUCH.

FIRST CHOICE OF THE CHOOSEY.

* TV sold separately.

PJ’s life revolved aroundCold Chisel, karate, beer and babes. He was a country boy. Loved his fish fingers. Favourite recipe: three deep-fried fish fingers on fried bread with fried cheese and two fried eggs, still runny, forked open and covered with tomato sauce. You could eat three of those suckers and stay within the tightest budget. Of course if you did get through three, your heart would explode and you’d die.

Milo’s life revolved around his car, his mum, beer and the Buzzcocks. He had a weakness for generic brand meat pies. You couldn’t trust the bastard with shopping duty because he’d come back with twenty of these family size Woolies Own bowel-cramping horrors. Milo won the house competition for not changing out of his jeans. PJ and I dropped out at four and five weeks respectively, but Milo, who liked the feel of rotting denim – “It’s like a second skin!” – was pronounced the champion at ten weeks and told to have a bath or leave.

It was an all-male house.

A house where I claimed as my own a gorilla pube I found on the soap in the shower. Must have been at least thirteen inches long. The guys were impressed but insisted they could do better so we nailed a board to the wall and mounted our curlies for a couple of weeks. I seem to recall this as a time when even fewer women than usual graced our happy home. We were deeply into the ‘men without babes’ thing, which is a terrible thing. Maybe the worst. It’s like living on the Planet of the Dogs without leashes or rolled-up newspapers, a sanction-free zone, where you can go deep and really find your own hostile imbalances. You want to know what living in Dogworld is like? You can see it fully realised in redneck wonderlands like Townsville, where PJ came from. He loved to get drunk and curse off that place. An abbatoir town with a really bad vibe. A masculine vibe. A lot of death and sadness. They kill a lot of beasts up there. Some mornings you can hear the low moaning of the cattle before they’re taken up into the food chain. I can strip it back now, see a thematic unity there, a ripeness of the male spirit, like time in the wilderness or the smell of raw pollen. The strong will consume the weak and they won’t bother cleaning up after themselves. The thing about guys, the only thing really, is that guys just don’t care. It’s our little secret. Ask any girl who’s ever lived with a herd of us. We’ll never wash up, we fart in polite company, and there is absolutely no point in dumping your problems on us because all we want is a regular feeding time and someone to play with. Want another secret? There isn’t a guy alive who hasn’t at least tried to lick his own balls. And just as with a dog pack the truly serious rivalry was reserved for mating season.