Look Evelyn, Duck Dynasty Wiper Blades. We Should Get Them.: A Collection Of New Essays (7 page)

“Where’d that come from?”

“Sarah lent it to me. You don’t know her. She got a new keyboard for her birthday so she said I could borrow this dirty old one.”

“Why does the cat keep licking it?”

After three months, Rachael asked me if I wanted to make extra money doing ‘club promotions’ on Friday and Saturday nights. I told my mother that I had applied for a night job stacking shelves for a local supermarket. No, it wouldn’t interfere with my schoolwork and yes, I would be careful riding home after dark.

It was essentially the same thing I had been doing - giving people cigarettes - but in nightclubs and for a different brand called Horizon. I had to be at the company’s office at 9pm where I changed into an outfit consisting of white shoes, white pants, white shirt with Horizon branding, and a guest-pass badge. The back of my car was loaded with boxes of cigarettes and promotional items and I was given a list, with the names and addresses of ten popular nightclubs to visit, and a street directory.

I drove to the first club, where I was waved in by bouncers, and gave out cigarettes and branded lighters from a big bag to patrons until I ran out. Then I drove to the next club, filled the bag from the rear of my hatchback, and repeated the process.

Before doing club promotions, I hadn’t known such places even existed. I had been to a few school discos but these didn’t prepare me for the real experience. There were strobes and smoke machines and really good music with bass - lots of bass - from really big speakers and people danced with each other without being made to by teachers. Not all of the clubs on the list were as exciting as others, piano bars for instance, but these were still interesting and there was only a couple of those as younger smokers were the target demographic.

“How did you do last night?” Rachael asked me.

“Good,” I replied.

“How many on the list did you get through?”

“All of them.”

‘All of them? How much product did you give away?”

“All of it. Lerox, The Toucan and The Mars Bar were the best,

I could have done triple the amounts there. You should give me more for those clubs tonight.”

Within a few months, I was the promotion company’s model employee. Because I loved doing it. As I was ‘in uniform’ with a guest-pass, nobody ever asked my age or to see ID and I gave whole packs to the people working at the entrances so after the first few weeks they knew me by name. I made friends. The DJ at Lerox gave me a set of Senheiser earphones and played tracks I requested. A girl who worked behind the bar at The Toucan gave me my first kiss. She had purple hair. A transsexual who worked at The Mars Bar told me she loved me and made me a Duran Duran mix tape.

The Mars Bar was the only gay club on my list. I’d had no prior experience with gay people apart from schoolyard discussions and my father’s warnings about ‘poofters’. Whenever my father said the word ‘poofter’, he would bend his hand downwards to indicate a limp wrist. There was a boy at school with partial paralysis in his right arm that caused his hand to do the same thing so for years I thought my father was referring to people with this condition.

“Look at that guy in the wheelchair. He’s all bent up and shaking.”

“Yes, he must have advanced poofter.”

I’d been to The Mars Bar about twenty times and nobody had tried to ‘bum’ me. It was just another club. It had good music, a good atmosphere, and everyone seemed to be having fun. The only difference was that boys kissed boys, boys kissed boys dressed like girls, and girls kissed girls. Girls didn’t kiss boys dressed like girls. Occasionally guys, usually older men, would flirt and carry on a bit but it was generally good-natured. I’d tell them I was straight and they’d tell me I was in denial and offer me drinks that I wouldn’t accept because I was working. Not once did I drink alcohol and not once did I feel in danger.

I was friends with the bouncers and they were always nearby.

At around 2am on a Friday night at The Mars Bar,

I approached a booth of about eight people. The booth was in a dark corner furthest away from the strobe lighting and dancing.

“Hi, I see you’re smokers,” I said, noting the packs of cigarettes and ashtrays on their table, “Would you care to try a Horizon?”

“David?”

My mother and I stared at each other for a moment before she leapt out of her seat and started laying into me. She slapped and screamed. With military precision, the bouncers were on her within seconds. One gabbed her hair and yanked her sideways onto the floor. Another grabbed her ankles and dragged her out. It was over in less than five seconds but the look on her face, before her shirt caught on the carpet and pulled over her head, was the last image I had of my mother for many years.

I slept in my car that night. The next morning I parked down the street from our house and watched. After a few hours, a police car pulled up and two officers went inside. They left twenty minutes later and my mother pulled out of the driveway a few minutes after that. I drove to the house, let myself in, and took the hollowed out dictionary containing my money.

While doing cigarette promotions, I had met the owner of a popular bar and hotel called The Austral. Her name was Carol and she was in her late fifties. Her husband had died in a motorcycle accident a few years earlier and she managed the establishment herself with five or six staff members. We got along well so I drove to The Austral and asked her how much the rooms were per night.

“Alright, talk to me, what’s going on?” she asked.

I blurted out everything.

“I’m only fourteen and I’ve been doing cigarette promotions and I bought a car and my mum got dragged out of The Mars Bar by her ankles and now I don’t have anywhere to live.”

I might have also cried a bit.

I stayed at The Austral for over a year. I didn’t have to pay for my room or meals but I did help in the kitchen and in the bar emptying ashtrays, washing glasses and writing questions for quiz nights. I was also given a few dollars here and there. I missed my fifteenth birthday. I only realised a few weeks after. There was a roof outside my window and often, I would climb out onto it and read.

A few doors down from The Austral, there was a second hand bookstore called Second Print owned by an old man named Bernard. I spent a lot of time there, it had an entire wall devoted to science fiction and most of the books were priced between ten and thirty cents. The store didn’t get many customers and Bernard read most of the day so he was happy for me to do the same in a corner. One day he closed his book and asked me if I knew how to play chess. I didn’t so he collected a chess board and pieces from the back room and taught me. We played most days after that. I also helped out in the store. Once, when I was helping Bernard put books he had just bought on shelves, I noticed he had numbers tattooed on his left forearm. I asked him about them but he rolled his sleeves down and changed the subject. He lent me books. He liked the author John Wyndham.

“Read this one. The Crysalids.  It’s about repression of knowledge and fear of change. You’ll like it. It’s got kids your age in it.”

“It sounds dreadful.”

“Just fucking read it. And watch the store for ten minutes. I need to take a dump.”

On my sixteenth birthday, Carol knocked on the door of my room. She told me a police officer was downstairs and wanted to speak to me in regards to an ongoing missing person report. I collected what I could carry and left out the window.

I slept in the back room of Second Print for a few months. Bernard gave me an inflatable camping mattress and sleeping bag to use. He also gave me a part time job. I wasn’t paid a set wage; he just asked me at the end of each day how much I needed. One day Bernard stopped coming in to work. I opened and closed the store for a couple of days until Bernard’s sister came in and told me that Bernard had died and the shop was closing. Later, it became an adult clothing store called Puss in Boots.

I took what money was in the till, the chess set, and several hardcover first edition John Wyndham novels.  I slept in my car for the next few weeks.  During the day, I would go to a park to read or walk around the city. I ate a lot at McDonald’s. Often, I would go to a music store called Andromeda Records and listen to albums. They had a comfortable couch with a pair of earphones and even though I never bought anything, the owner, a large bearded man named Maurice, didn’t care how long I stayed. Maurice didn’t like people, especially people who took records out of sleeves or asked about Compact Discs, but we got on alright. He was really into model building and after closing one night, I helped him assemble and paint a plastic ED209 robot. I wasn’t actually allowed to assemble or paint anything but I handed him things when he asked and we chatted about our favourite science fiction authors. He gave me a copy of Ender’s Game to read.  The next day, when Maurice was busy yelling at a customer and the phone rang, he asked me to answer it. I just kind of worked there after that. There was no discussion about it, he simply passed me a Motörhead t-shirt and said, “Here put this on. If you’re going to work here then at least look the fucking part.” 

It was while working at Andromeda Records, I bumped into the DJ I knew from Lerox. His name was Simon Lewicki. We chatted and he told me that he and his girlfriend were looking for a flatmate. I moved into their rented two bedroom apartment that night. I didn’t have any furniture in my room but there was a couch on the back deck that Simon and I carried to my room for me to use. I woke up the first night covered in baby spiders, there was a nest under the springs of the couch the size of a watermelon. I bought a bed. And a bookshelf.

At night, when Simon wasn’t working clubs, we listened to music and he showed me how to sample sounds on his Atari ST.  We also spent a lot of time discussing good DJ names.

“It has to be something that says ‘I absolutely kill the beat.’”

“What about Groove Terminator?”

“No, that’s stupid.  It’s not 1970. Who says the word groove?”

After six months, we received an eviction notice due to multiple noise complaints from neighbours. Around the same time, my boss Maurice was arrested for tax evasion and Andromeda Records was placed into liquidation. I turned up to work one morning to discover chains and padlocks on the doors. I knew the lock on the bathroom window was faulty so I climbed in and took Maurice’s ED209, a couple of t-shirts, and a life-sized cardboard cutout of Kim Wilde.

A friend of Simon’s helped us move out of the apartment using a horse trailer. He told me that his parents, who owned a horse riding school, were looking for a stablehand. The position included room and board so I took it. Simon was a little annoyed at this, as we had originally planned to move together, but he and his girlfriend fought a lot - mainly about him getting a ‘real job’ - so I’d wanted to leave months before.

Years later, Simon went on to have quite a bit of commercial success, releasing several singles and two top-selling albums in Australia. His girlfriend was probably all nice and encouraging then.

While I was working at the riding school, I saw a dog named Pete get kicked in the head by a horse. It killed him instantly. The owner,  a man named John who had very wrinkly skin and bad teeth, rushed to Pete, placed his entire mouth over the dog’s face, and gave mouth to mouth resuscitation. Pete revived and seemed fine but he could never turn left after that. If you were to his left and called, he had to do a right hand 270˚ turn. A few weeks later, I also got kicked in the head. It felt like a sledgehammer and I was lifted off my feet. I was dazed and bleeding but jumped up quickly to avoid John thinking I required assistance.

John and his wife Rose had an Amiga 500 on an old desk in their living room next to a maple and glass cabinet full of ceramic horse figurines. They didn’t mind me using it so, after hours, I taught myself how to use a program called Deluxe Paint. Eventually I became responsible for designing advertisements and brochures for their business, which I liked doing a lot more than raking up manure and dodging kicks.

In those days, before email, I had to take the files to a printer on disk. After chatting with the manager of a printing firm called Finsbury Press several times, I was offered the position of junior in-house designer.  The pay was four times what I was making at the riding school and I didn’t have to get up at 5am so I agreed and rented a small apartment close by.

I quickly became good friends with one of my coworkers. His name was Geoffrey and he was really into dressing up as a knight and rushing at people with a sword in forests. Geoffrey was also really into Macs and convinced me to buy one. I learned Photoshop and Freehand, discovered Fontographer, and collected typefaces as fanatically as Geoffrey collected Magic: The Gathering cards. I applied to university for a bachelor’s degree in visual communication.