You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (24 page)

Drinking alone is life affirming and a joyous exercise. I do it because sometimes I am simply jack of toeing the line and being good and I want to give myself over to the rakish unpredictability that liquor offers. And for that I'm willing to stand up and be counted, to not write a sad and breathy memoir about bar-hopping days of yore or tip out all my Campari bottles in martyrish ritual. This one's for the drinking girls.

I will file that lunatic's letter and its accusatory pamphlet away, along with the aerogramme telling me I dress like a common prostitute, and the postcard helpfully pointing out that my forehead is too big for my face and if I am in any way set on a further career in the public eye I should have it seen to. I'm aware these kind people are only trying to assist me, but so far I have made a life out of being a drunk with the sort of forehead you could project 3D movies on and if it's all the same to them I'll carry on doing so and sifting through matters in my own sweet time. There may have to come a day when I put down the wine glass. I know that. But everything until then is fluid. Everything until then is liquid.

Parts of this story first appeared in
Frankie
magazine
.

The Bubble

We were known as the Bubble.

It was a name that sprang, I suppose, from the all-pervasive bubble of fun that surrounded us at all times. Nobody could remember who coined it. It probably started one morning as we sat on some sagging rooftop, eyes curly-wurly with sleeplessness and chemicals, watching a
Miami Vice
pink dawn break across Melbourne. We were sprawled out over each other, half covered in blankets, clothes askew. Somebody spoke in hazy murmur.

‘I think I'm supposed to go to work today.'

There was a collective outcry at this, a chorus of sleepy condemnation. Nobody should have to work today. Not today, not any day. Nobody should have to leave this rooftop, ever. We should just stay up here forever and demand somebody fetch cocktails for us and while out the remainder of our days being young and handsome and on a roof and off our faces. It would be groundbreaking.

‘Just
stay
.'

‘I know, I should. I don't want to leave the bubble.'

It was the Bubble then, officially, with a capital ‘B', and remained thus for about three years. There were twelve of us, musicians and lovers and furniture makers, as well as a handful of addendums who would come along for a four or five month ride, holding on for dear life in their side-cart as we powered forward, demolishing everything in our path. Those inside floated about like dust. Being ensconced in the Bubble represented being free of responsibility, of commitment. There were never any emotional repercussions to dreadful behaviour.You could get away with just about anything and somebody else in the Bubble would inevitably have your back. There was simply safety. The next soiree. Forget about the trouble and strife. Let's open another bottle of champagne.

Parties would go for two days and in a groaning heap we would collapse in the Edinburgh Gardens with six packs of beer and olives from Piedmontes. At home waiting for us would be unanswered emails and telephone messages from irate parents and, on some occasions, a partner in floods of tears wondering why the fuck the other side of the bed hadn't been slept in for a fortnight. Rather than face this melee, we would simply stay in the Bubble. Turn the mobile phones off. Pretend everything in the outside world was simply an illusion, designed to test our will. Somebody would suggest we head to the Builder's Arms to see The Forefathers play. After that we could go to Alia for booty night and dance to Jay-Z like the busted-up kids we were. We would crash out on each other's couches, floors, beanbags, soggy with substances, and wake up and do it all again. Breakfast at the Tin Pot. Afternoon wines in the backyard. Another two-day party.

The Bubble had a secret language, an impenetrable dictionary full of in-jokes and songs and nicknames and lewd tales.We played Gin Rummy and the Italian card game Scopa with shrieks and slaps and our own set of rules. There was a vaguely abhorrent period where we chanted every time we were in public. We took Polaroid photographs of each other and stuck them to toilet walls.

In retrospect we were probably the most obnoxious people in the universe. But in your twenties being in the Bubble was the sort of thing that kept you breathing.

Everybody is, at that age, a refugee from another friendship group, another time. We somehow fell in with each other, an unspoken contract in unspilt blood. It never seemed to be a choice. It was accepted as fate.

Two of the boys in the Bubble played in Dallas Crane and it was the done thing to show up at every gig, waving beers in the air and singing along to all the songs. After one week-long party refused to end, I clambered into a stranger's van and followed them up to the Broadford Bike Bonanza. Enormous bearded men in leather vests howled at the moon. There were fires, women who spat. The echoed revving of powerful engines, mating calls of a desert wolf. The band took to the stage, all skinny denim and zip-up Beatle boots from Roccos. They looked, in the eyes of their hard-bitten audience, like flamboyant homosexuals, possibly five minutes away from bursting into an upbeat rendition of ‘YMCA'. Pat, the bass player, instantly started to regret wearing white pants. His party trick involved falling asleep before anybody else. We called it ‘Bernie-ing out' because once he was unconscious we acted like he was the lead role in
Weekend at Bernie's
and took photos of him doing things like eating cigarette butts and sticking his finger up Dirty Derek's arse.

Someone threw a tinny at the stage. Someone else threw a spider. A
spider
? I could see the look on Shannon's face. He turned to me in confusion and panic, shrinking behind the drum kit.

‘Someone threw a
spider
,' he mouthed.

I didn't really think before I stripped off. It was an oddly auspicious occasion where I just happened to be wearing matching underwear. Dallas Crane played a very loud rock 'n' roll song. I ran on with them and jumped around like an idiot only recently released from an asylum. I had been awake at that point for three days and would stay awake for at least a couple more. People stopped throwing spiders. Maybe there were no spiders in the first place.

Dallas Crane were essentially the focal point of the Bubble. If they were playing somewhere it was an unspoken meeting place; somewhere you would go and know without question half the people at the bar. Ted Danson was right, sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. None of us would think twice about following the band to Ballarat and watching them play a show, or spending eight hours at the Espy from soundcheck to last drinks. We would help carry out Shan's drum kit to his mincy-looking Vanette, hoisting the snare above our heads and weaving about in the car park. At an after party in Collingwood the lead singer—the Denim Sausage, an ex-boyfriend of mine once savagely referred to him as—spent the night cowering in fear in a bedroom while his girlfriend raged through the house trying to hunt him down. I wish I'd seen him climb out through the front window and onto Sackville Street to make his escape. It must have looked like Meatloaf trying to flee from a mineshaft. You couldn't blame him, though. Dave was on the run from reality like the rest of us.

Four little boys used to come to every Dallas Crane show too, crammed down the front of the stage, whooping and hollering and gazing up at the band with open-mouthed expressions of adoration. They formed a band themselves eventually, and called it Jet. We watched from the sidelines, graceless and sore as hell, as their startling career trajectory took them in what seemed a matter of minutes from Tuesday night gigs at the Duke of Windsor to the life of international superstars. They played the Fuji rock festival and supported the Rolling Stones. When one of them bought a summer home on Lake Como we set to badmouthing him so hard it's a wonder his ears didn't turn to ash.

Everybody in the Bubble lazily slept with everybody else. It was gluttonously sexual. Too young for the Grim Reaper commercials to have any real impact, we indulged in promiscuity with fervour. I had begun to fall in love with Sime while he was half dating somebody else. We tried to have serious conversations about love in the backyard on overcast mornings. A pair of apostrophes on the concrete, coffee in hand.

‘Do you think I'm a hussy?'

It was laughable. We were all hussies. It was why we got along so famously, probably.

‘I hope not,' I said, ‘because that cheapens whatever this is with you and me. And I don't think it's cheap.'

‘Cheap, no. Confusing, yes,' he replied, pulling his trucker's cap down over his eyes.

Women were hitting him over the head with things at that stage. At parties he would face infuriated ex-girlfriends with violence in their eyes. Ice-cube trays and blocks of wood. He was having a bad run. We decided on a whim, somewhere in the midst of that perfect entropy, to have a pine forest wedding. The Bubble stood around us and threw confetti and for a while at least he escaped the routine of being smacked around by past lovers. I loved him as much as I was capable of then, which was with everything I had left after devoting every inch of my waking life to my friends. He was subsumed into the Bubble and acquiesced gracefully. We barely paused to take a breath for long enough to sign the marriage licence.

It was probably the fog of acceptance that allowed that glorious period of The Bubble to stretch out for so long, a morally ambiguous vacation without calendar or close. The more time we spent together the more people had trouble telling us apart, as though we were just a braying mass of arms and legs and joy and flesh.

Gabi and I, being of similar build, being dark, being fond of neckerchiefs, would often be mistaken for the other. We didn't discourage the confusion. I would titter graciously when complimented on my spastic burlesque dancing, she would grin bashfully when congratulated on her work with
The Age
. We tried to have a threeway once (‘wouldn't that be a
scream
'), in a bedroom beaded with sweat above an Indian restaurant. Outside the room, a party throbbed. We kept seeing ourselves reflected in the eyes of the other and ended up laughing so hard we couldn't go on, much to the obvious displeasure of our rapidly deflating contender.

On mornings after we would drag ourselves from sleep, heads rattling like dice, and look in dismay at our to-do list. There were family lunches to go to. A work meeting. Some breeder was holding a baby shower.

‘We can't just say we're hungover and can't make it,' Gabi once lamented. ‘It's not a decent enough excuse.'

‘We need another excuse, then. Something they can't argue with.'

‘Just strange them out. Invent a really messed up reason.'

‘Fine.'

Which is how, I guess, we once texted a girlfriend with apologies regarding her afternoon tea party.

Dog shat bed
, the text read.
Not coming
.

We bought a bottle of wine and a wheel of white Castello cheese and sat in the backyard squirting each other with Super Soakers. Everybody came over and told us we'd done the right thing by not going. We were staying in the Bubble.

The Bubble put on an art show. We drew names out of hats and created a secret art piece based on another member of the group. For weeks everybody worked tirelessly, sheathed in giggles and whispers. Upstairs at a bar on Smith Street, we showed off the results of our labours and congratulated ourselves on our cleverness and unshakeable friendship. It couldn't have been more self-absorbed and beautiful. ‘Look at us,' we were saying. ‘Look at how much we love each other. Look at how funny and interesting and devoted we are. This can never change. This will never change.' Dirty Derek made stickers featuring a wicked looking child holding a big ball up to his face.
SMELL THE BUBBLE
, it said, with details of the exhibition printed beneath. ‘Everybody is showing tonight.'

It never felt exclusive but people inevitably started feeling left out. The high fashion Fitzroyals despised our pack mentality and one of them kicked a window in at the gallery on the exhibition's opening night. Drunk, we suggested a street duel, like in
West Side Story
, to be held on Johnston Street. Them in their Lush wide-legged pants and asymmetrical haircuts, us in Miller shirts and cowboy boots. Last person left dancing gets dibs on the Napier Hotel. They took one look at us, boorish and ridiculous, and walked away.

‘The Napier is ours!' cried Spicer, in skittish triumph.

The Bubble used to make an annual visit to Lake Eildon, where we would hire out houseboats and spend the weekend cheating death by writing ourselves off and racing speedboats in the nude. We weren't allowed to commandeer a speedboat without a licenced driver, so Blair simply went and got his licence on the morning of the trip. He was nicknamed ‘GTD' with good reason. He didn't get a question wrong in the exam, just walked out grinning and waving his new boat licence over his head. We made him personalised business cards to celebrate. Gold, with a cartoon of his capable face gracing one side. ‘Get Things Done' it read simply, with his mobile number beneath.

The houseboat trips were exercises in heedlessness. Cath's sister broke her leg in two places and was forced to sit on the back of the boat in abject agony while eight people high on drugs told her not to worry, it was probably just a scratch, here, have some Panadeine Forte and a red wine. Her face was etched with pain and the Panadeine Forte pulsated through her bloodstream and made her vomit. Dirty Derek, who had been watching over her in a fatherly fashion, took one look at the ice cream container full of upchuck and vomited too. Somebody else passing decided all that vomiting seemed a great lark, and heaved lavishly into the water. It was like that scene in
Stand By Me
where the fat kid makes an entire community of rednecks puke. I kept waiting for Richard Dreyfuss's voice to say something pithy and poignant about all that we were going through. In the end the poor girl had to wait til morning, when somebody was finally sober enough to take her into town and ferry her to a doctor. Word trickled back to the boat that she was alive and in plaster and we toasted her health and good fortune.