Absolute Mayhem (2 page)

My dad shoving soap into my mouth for
swearing – that's my earliest childhood
memory, and I was only three years old. If that sounds
weird, consider the next thing I remember after that:
masturbating when I was five.

And it all went downhill from there.

I was born in Brisbane in the suburb of Brookfield,
in the district of Moggill, some ten kilometres west
of Brisbane city proper. It was a conservative suburb,
with a small population but lots of land and some big
Queenslander houses. There were places to go and ride
horses and a farmer's market with locally grown fruit
and vegetables, that type of thing.

My mother was born and raised in Wales. She had
blue eyes, dark-brown hair, which she always kept
short, and an olive complexion. When she was 19 and
living in London, she jumped on a ship to Australia
and ended up in Sydney. She met my dad in London,
after moving back there from Sydney, which was an odd
sort of parallel because my dad is actually from a coastal
town in New South Wales a couple of hours north of
Sydney. They got married in London and eventually
made their way back to Australia, via Madrid, where my
mother gave birth to my brother at the age of 30. Then,
two years later, she gave birth to me in Brisbane.

My mother was six years older than my father and she
was always bossing him around and putting him down.
This was in spite of the fact that he was the breadwinner
of the family – he worked in the music business as a
recording engineer and radio DJ. Mum wasn't at all a big
woman – she stood just five feet tall – but she certainly
made up for her lack of physical stature with a quick
temper and an angry disposition. She was an alcoholic,
too. My father put up with it for seven years, for the sake
of us kids, until my mother kicked him out in a fit of rage
one night. They divorced when I was three years old.

At the time, we were living in Kenmore, adjacent
to Brookfield. It was a good suburb, and after my dad
left we clearly couldn't afford it. I remember a lot of
hills, a lot of trees and a lot of really beautifully kept
gardens. In the houses my mother rented, we had our
own bedrooms, and some places even had a swimming
pool. Kenmore was really my mother's way of keeping
up with the Joneses – almost literally, since Jones is a
very Welsh name!

After the divorce, my mother won custody of me and
my brother (who has requested his name be withheld
from this book), so we were left alone with her incessant
smoking and drinking. She smoked Martin Blues
– quite a rare brand, whose scarcity oft en made her
settle for Benson & Hedges or Dunhills in the blue box.
As for the booze, she drank the worst, most awful white
wine – usually a Riesling or a sweet, fruity Lexia that
came from a cask. Since it was cheap, and she was on
the welfare, she would drink this crap all day and all
night, and basically stayed drunk the whole time as her
means of getting through life. She was also a serious pill
popper. I don't recall a time when she wasn't hooked on
pills. Don't ask me what they were, since I never checked
the labels, but she had so many of them.

The remainder of her government welfare money she
would spend on fine foods and other treats for herself,
without ever thinking of me and my brother. On that
account alone, I guess, anyone could consider her to
have been selfish and cruel. But that was her nature. She
was a very cold, bitter, aggressive woman.

She had this habit of always sitting outdoors – on the
verandah or on the plastic patio furniture in the back
yard – smoking and drinking and reading Stephen King
novels. She would do this for hours, and you couldn't
talk to her. Every time I tried, she would tell me to go
piss off . And then she'd chain-smoke her cigs everywhere,
even though she knew I was a chronic asthmatic,
and whenever I started to choke and cough she'd just
tell me to shut up.

In the mornings, she used to ring a bell from her bed
and ask me to bring her tea or wine, oft en from as early
as eleven. I was not allowed to sit down and talk to her
until I had delivered it. Then she would watch old British
comedies on TV –
The Benny Hill Show
,
Fawlty Towers
and
Monty Python
. Sometimes, I would watch them with
her, and I grew to love them too. Mum seemed happier
when she was watching these funny shows, and she was
certainly less scary to be around. I tried so hard to get
her to love me, and these seemed like the best times to
be in her company.

She did work occasionally, but every time she got a
secretarial job she would quit for some stupid reason –
such as she didn't like the tea or she thought her boss
was an asshole. She couldn't get on with anyone, really,
and she didn't have many friends. The ones she did have,
she ended up pushing away because of all the drama she
brought into their lives, and people can only take so
much. I only recall her ever having had two boyfriends
after dad left . One was when I was five. Exactly who this
guy was, I don't remember, but I know that he didn't
last long. The other man was a Chinese scientist, whom
she worked with in Brisbane. That was also short-term,
only about a six-month relationship, because he ended
up going back to China.

One of her good traits, which I inherited, was her
cooking ability. She made amazing roasts and great
Mediterranean food, although she was always smoking
in the kitchen, so there must have been cigarette ashes
in our food. And sometimes she got so drunk that she
would forget that she'd already cooked dinner, and
she would suddenly get up two hours later and cook
another dinner, doing it all over again!

Did I complain? Of course not. She never gave me
money for lunch at school so I was usually starving by
the time I got home. I think this must have been why
I was always so ridiculously skinny as a kid and why my
brother and I sometimes stole a few dollars from her
purse – just so we could eat. There was never anything
in the fridge that I could take with me to school because
she would always make sure to buy all this fancy
shit that needed to be cooked and that only she could
cook.

I went to Kenmore State School for primary school
and absolutely hated the fact that I was the poorest
kid there. We all had to wear school uniforms, so I
was spared the embarrassment of people knowing my
clothes outside school were all hand-me-downs from
our neighbours' older daughters because my mum never
took me shopping.

My school life was centred around a group of friends
who, I'll admit, were not always the best kind. I was
always putting some kind of gang together and became
a bit of a problem child. I was a little smartass and got
caned over the knuckles quite a few times.

But school wasn't always bad. One of my fondest early
memories is of being six years old and choreographing
little dance routines in the school courtyard with my
friends at lunchtime. Most of the dances were to songs
by Madonna, because her
Like a Virgin
album had just
come out.

And then I put my first band together with a friend a
couple of years older than me who played the keyboard.
I could play the keyboard a bit myself, as well as the
recorder, thanks to the occasional weekends when I'd
got to visit my dad before he moved to Sydney that year.
I'd never really kept it up, though, because my mother
wouldn't pay for me to have lessons and didn't seem to
want me to get into music – I guess because it reminded
her of Dad. Anyway, in this band I sang and wrote the
songs. (I don't remember many of them, because I threw
most of them away.) I also joined the school choir – just
for the chance to sing, and certainly not for the music
itself since they made us sing such lame songs, mostly
about Jesus, whom I didn't believe in.

The other area I excelled in was sports. My primary
school was very sports-orientated, and I played tee-ball,
soft ball and tennis. I was into little athletics and won
a lot of competitions in the 100-metre sprints, hurdles
and long jump. Amazingly, my mother would fork out
for the after-school sports events. I also swam, though
it was very hard to race in swimming because of my
chronic asthma. I'd nearly died from an attack when I
was three. I kept having major attacks after that, up to
the age of around 12, where I would have to miss days at
school and be put on a nebuliser (an oxygen machine).
My mother would take care of me in this regard, too, as
she would set up the machine and get me to the doctor
that we always saw. I think she was actually worried that
I could die every time I got a really bad asthma attack.

In short, my early life was defined mostly by
my immersion in music and sports, which remain my
strongest interests in life to this day (aside from sex,
of course!).

After leaving primary school and progressing to high
school, my life was marked less by music and sports and
more by my actual involvement with a real gang. (Yes,
drum roll, applause!) Whereas the little gangs at primary
school were meaningless – never lasting long or amounting
to anything more than a bunch of kids to run amok
with – this gang was more organised. It had an identity
and a name, which was known to the authorities.

I became more rebellious than ever, and I was smoking
and drinking at the age of 12. By 13, I was ditching school
a lot and spending my time hanging out at the creek or
in the bush with my friends, smoking weed from home-made
bongs, each one exquisitely craft ed from a small
orange-juice bottle with a piece of someone's hose and
some tin for a cone. I wore an under-cut hairstyle
and I used to sew my school-uniform skirts into tight
miniskirts because I hated the long, ugly pleats.

I became the sort of kid that most social workers
would probably classify a juvenile delinquent. The
Juvenile Aid Bureau in Queensland is where troubled
teens are sent for mandatory counselling, and I ended
up in there a few times during my first high-school
years, mostly for doing drugs.

In class, I was always arguing with teachers about
why I needed to learn certain things and I felt like they
could never give me a proper answer. I always believed
I had a right to ask such questions. All that crap we were
taught in school has proved absolutely useless when
applied to my life. I made the maths teacher so mad
that as punishment I was oft en sent to do my maths
in the deputy-principal's office. The deputy-principal
reminded me of my mother, in that she was always
putting people down, and I think she singled me out for
especially mean treatment, having obviously seen the
rebellious side of me. Needless to say, we fought a lot.

Interestingly, at high school I excelled in all the
artistic and creative stuff – art, drama, English, music,
home economics, metalwork and woodwork. I had
pretty much already given up sports: I was way too busy
getting stoned, smoking cigs and drinking like a fish.

There were lots of girls at the school who liked to
say they were going to become actresses and models,
and I was one of them. Most of these girls thought they
were too hot to trot, though. They would put me down
and say mean things to my face, teasing me about my
big eyes. I tried to ignore them, but it made me feel like
an outcast, even inside my own peer group. There was
always this sheen of negative energy around me. I have
a photo of me taken when I was 12, wearing a black
Motley Crüe T-shirt and a very short black skirt that
showed off my long, bare legs – the kind of legs they
call 'legs for days'. My mother wrote on the back of that
photo, 'Guess who? Still wants to be a model!' It was
good to know that my own mother rated my chances as
highly as my so-called friends. As it turned out, I'm the
only one I know of who achieved their dream – even if
it was slightly in the extreme!

Maybe surprisingly for someone who later became a
porn star, I wasn't a hit with the boys at school. I think
this was probably because they didn't like the fact that
I was too tough for most of them. Those were my gang
years. Most of the girls I knew had older siblings who
were in gangs, and I got in through knowing them. We
would crash parties and get into fights, oft en running
from the cops and finding ourselves wanted for vandalism.
We'd get wasted a lot and go to nightclubs, able to
get in because Brisbane bouncers oft en didn't ask for ID
and I looked much older than I was.

As I grew up, my mother's drinking became more and
more a major source of embarrassment for me, and she
would oft en humiliate me in front of my friends. She
would show up at our hangouts and start yelling at all
of them, telling them to leave me alone. She would call
their parents when she was drunk, crying and talking
nonsense, and even called the parents of my enemies,
which made it intolerable for me at school. I lost a lot of
friends because of all that.

One night when I was 14, my mum allowed me
to attend a party. She said it would be fine as long as
I came home by 11 pm, so off I went. My drug-taking
had moved on to speed, acid and magic mushrooms by
this stage, but that night I didn't do any, as I knew I'd
have to face my mother. Maybe I drank a little, at most.

I was waiting outside for a ride back at exactly 11 pm
when a police car pulled up, and one of the cops asked
for me by name. I was initially fearful and didn't want to
let him know who I was, until he said, 'We're looking for
her because her mother's been in an accident.' So I went,
'Oh, shit. Yeah, that's me!' And I jumped into the police
car and they drove me home.

Apparently, my mother had decided to go out at 9 pm
to look for me. But she was already quite drunk – she
was six times over the legal limit, they said – and had
ended up wrapping her car around a pole. I found her
sitting out front with a bleeding nose and clutching a
glass of wine!