He Died with a Felafel in His Hand

Table of Contents

1 WHITE NIGGERS

2 THE WILD THING

3 THE BEAST

4 THE SMALL WORLD EXPERIENCE

5 THE FOSTER-LINDBURGH INCIDENT

6 NO JUNKIES

7 NORTHERN GOTHIC

8 THE YELLOW UNDERPANTS OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL

9 DON’T COME ANY CLOSER FRANKIE, WE HAVE A GUN

10 MOVING ON

John Birmingham is on the run from some mistakes he made in Queensland. He doesn’t know how those drugs came to be inside his shoe. He grew up in Ipswich but asks you not to hold that against him. He writes for a wide range of publications but finds that porno mags pay the best rates and most promptly. Some of his best friends are lesbians. He used to work for the shadowy Office of Special Clearances and Records within the Defence Department but has also loaded boxes onto trucks, pulled a few beers, and read newspapers for a clipping service. He is kind of lazy and watches too much television. He recommends flu tablets for hangovers.

John’s other books include
How To Be A Man
and
The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco.

He Died with A Felafel in His Hand

Hilarious stories of share house accomodation in Australia in the 1990s.

John Birmingham

DUFFY & SNELLGROVE
SYDNEY

Published by Duffy & Snellgrove
PO 177 Potts Point NSW 1335 Australia
[email protected]

First published by The Yellow Press in 1994
Reprinted in 1995 (twice), 1996 and 1997 (twice)

This electronic edition published 2011
Ebook file created by
hourigan.co

© John Birmingham 1994

Cover by Alexandra Snellgrove

ISBN 978-0-9870820-0-8

1 WHITE NIGGERS

He died with a felafel in his hand. We found him on a bean bag with his chin resting on the top button of a favourite flannelette shirt. He’d worn the shirt when we’d interviewed him for the empty room a week or so before. We were having one of those bad runs, where you seem to interview about thirty people every day and they are all total zipper heads. We really took this guy in desperation. He wasn’t A-list, didn’t have a microwave or anything like that, and now both he and the felafel roll were cold. Our first dead housemate. At least we got some bond off him.

We had no idea he was a junkie, otherwise we would never have given him the room. You let one junkie in the house and you may as well let them all in. We had another secret junkie live with us once. Melissa. She was okay, but her boyfriend stole all of my CD’s. Told me some Jap guy, a photographer, took them and if I went to Kinselas on Wednesday nights I could probably find him there. Yeah right.

Paul

When I first got to Melbourne I was working about sixty hours a week in a new job. I had enough money to carry the rent on my two bedroom flat but after a few weeks I interviewed for someone to take the spare room. I offered it to this guy, Phil. He said he worked in the bond markets and had a heavy schedule so he’d move over a couple of evenings. First night, he cleaned the flat and dumped some gear in his room. I offered to help but he said he was okay. He crashed on the couch and I gave him a lift into the city next morning. He came round late that night and said he was going to be up past midnight. Said for me to give him a yell if he woke me up. Fine with me, I went to bed. I heard him once or twice after that but he was pretty quiet. Next morning I get up and look for Phil to see if he needs a lift. But the flat was empty. I mean empty. My stereo was gone, along with my TV, my wallet, my car keys, my car and my flatmate, Phil.

Melissa, on the other hand, ran a credit scam out of the same house. Months after she’d left, a couple of debt collectors came round looking for Rowan Corcoran. That was the identity she’d set up, but we didn’t know that. We were very helpful, because bills had been turning up for this Corcoran prick for months. We didn’t know who he was, just some mystery guy racking up thousands of dollars in debt and sending the bills to our place. We sat the debt collectors down in the living room with a cup of tea. Showed them all the other bills that had been arriving for Mr Corcoran. When they saw that the last bill was for two Qantas tickets to America their shoulders sort of slumped. I’ve still got those bills. $35,000 worth.

Harry

Ken moved out of home without understanding laundry. He’d never done any. He didn’t understand the importance of rinsing. He’d give his clothes a good soaping then hang them out. I caught him trying to break his jeans across his knees once so he could get into them.

But Melissa was okay. In fact she was a real babe. She used to steal food for the house from this restaurant she worked in. (If you’re reading this Melissa, we really appreciated the food.) There were four or five of us living at Kippax Street at that stage. Everyone was on the dole or Austudy or minimum wage. The house was typical Darlinghurst, this huge, dark, damp terrace with yellowed ceilings, green carpet with cigarette burns and brown, torn-up furniture.

Maria

Never move into a house with someone who plays The Smiths all the time. Don’t do it. I never liked The Smiths and now I loathe them because it’s all I hear. Three in the morning they’ll come home and play The Smiths at full volume and wonder why you get into a bad mood. Three in the morning is the time of choice for Smiths fans to play their albums. The suicide hour. Like, ‘I’ve been out, I’ve been rejected I’m coming home to my damp little flat to play The Smiths and be depressed and kill myself’.

We’d sit around on Tuesday night waiting for Melissa to get home with our stolen dinner. She usually walked through the door just before
Twin Peaks
came on, so there was this nice warm feeling in the house as we all sat in front of the teev scarfing down the free stuff. On a good night, when someone’s cheque had come through, we’d have a couple of beers to share round. And on a great night when someone, usually Melissa, had scored, we’d pull out the bucket bong and get completely whacked. On those nights, that nice warm feeling was really close. It wrapped you up like your Dad’s old jumper, kept you safe. On those nights, you could delude yourself that share housing, which is all about deprivation and economic necessity, was really about something else: a friendly sort of half-sensible descendant of the communal ideal. But it never lasts. Never holds together. Somebody always moves on, or loses their mind, or dies with a felafel in his hand and you’re on the road again.

Jeffrey!

That was the dead guy’s name. It got away from me for a minute there, but I knew it started with a ‘J’. He died watching
Rage
with the sound turned down. One of the hip young inner-city cops who turned up to investigate said he probably snuffed it half way through the hot one hundred. Just like a junkie. There was a nightclub stamp on his wrist, bruises up and down his arm. The felafel’s chilli and yoghurt sauce had leaked from the roll and run down his hand in little white rivulets. For a brief, perverse moment it seemed to me that he himself had sprung a leak, a delicate stream of liquid heroin escaping from the seams of his fingers.

I’ve seen a hundred lives pass through the bleary kind of sleep-deprived landscape of a dozen different share houses, but Jeffrey’s was the only one that ever fetched up and died on a bean bag. The others all moved along on their own weird trajectories. They were never still. Everybody was constantly mobile or wanting to be – moving targets, random drifters and people whose lives rested on nothing more stable than inertia. White niggers every one. Some of them now work for gigantic weapons corporations or drug cartels. They’ve got these incredible lives. Jet travel. Credit cards. Respect, even fear, from those top-hatted guys who stand in front of the Hyatt. But if they were housemates of mine, I’ve seen them bludging meals from the Krishnas. Or sitting on the lounge room floor in home-brand underwear with all the windows blacked out and hundreds of candles pushing back the dark. Not doing much. Just sitting there. Or smashing five hundred empty beer bottles into a million jagged pieces on the kitchen floor while greying mincemeat patties slowly peel away from the ceiling … slowly, slowly, slowly … then plop – impaled on the waiting fangs of glass below. Or sitting in front of the television for two days straight, with giant frilled lizards clinging to their shoulders, a bowl of magic mushrooms by their feet, their weeping bloodshot eyes the shape of little rectangles.

Madness, as one flatmate of mine used to say with just a hint of satisfaction in his voice. Things get out of control all the time in share houses. It’s not just a matter of the rent slipping behind, or the washing piling up. People flip over the line. Way over. I know about this. Been there myself a couple of times. One place, Duke Street – home of the smashed stubbies and falling patties – was nothing but a madhouse. A huge rambling kind of place, an ex-brothel, we all thought, because there were so many rooms in there. A lot of them looked like they had been jerry-built at some stage. Bedrooms where bedrooms shouldn’t ought to be and so on. We were paying $11 a week each between the ten or eleven of us living there. We were never completely sure of the number because of the continual drop-ins and disappearances and the strange case of Satomi Tiger.

Karen

Living with other people you start off in that nice accommodating phase. ‘Okay we’re going to get on’. You try really hard. It’s all going to be great. You buy stuff together, you talk, you share, you bond over instant coffee in the kitchen late at night. And then it starts to get a little cramped, becomes too much. Your dope’s getting smoked. Your car is always getting borrowed. The phone kitty never makes it above a handful of coins even though you keep filling it with change. You don’t want to put the effort in anymore. It’s almost like an ill-considered marriage. All this shit comes up like a marriage like, ‘You’re supposed to be loyal to me because I live with you.’ Even if they’re wrong. So you start thinking divorce. You’re not talking. You’re knifing each other to your mutual friends, trying to entangle them in a complicated network of alliances to suit your ends. Then you’re not even thinking divorce, you’re thinking pre-emptive strike. Who’s going to run up a thousand bucks on the phone and skip town at midnight leaving the other holding the bill.

I just know you’re thinking – what the hell is a Satomi Tiger? Well, we’re sitting on the lino floor of the living room one night – actually we had two living rooms in this weird house, but we turned the other one into a basketball court – and we’re watching teev, as usual. And this Japanese girl walks in wearing these audacious tiger-striped pants and a poo-brown imitation dead fur thing. ‘Good Ev-en-ing,’ she says. ‘I move in now.’ And that was all. She had no other English. She drops a wad of cash on the teev and wanders off to find a room. We’re all just sitting there thinking ‘What the hell is this?’ But then again, she’s dropped this wad on the teev so who cares?

Susan

An English girl whom I didn’t get on with very well put some dead fish up the chimney in my bedroom and then went out for the night with some of the other girls who lived there. While they were out she had a fight with one of them. She came home steaming, marched into my room, while I was there, took the fish out of my chimney and put it in the other girl’s bed.