He Died With a Felafel in His Hand

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 were never completely sure of the number because of the continual drop-ins and disappearances and the strange case of Satomi Tiger.

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?

We found out later that Satomi Tiger had met our invisible flatmate Tim on his last trip to Asia, the one which ended up with him being investigated for espionage and committed to an insane asylum in Hong Kong. You can see Tim in the mini-series Bangkok Hilton. He plays three different bit parts, most notably that of a drunken buffoon in a boat. A frighteningly accurate performance. Tim escaped from the asylum with the help of a friend, also called Tim, but he was always a little elsewhere afterwards. He’d met Satomi Tiger in Japan and invited her to visit him in Queensland. She took him up on the offer. Only thing was, we never really knew where Tim was at any given moment. When Satomi Tiger arrived, rumour had him cutting cane in the north. Whatever. It didn’t bother her, and it didn’t really bother us. It was that kind of house. The set-up with the rent, for instance, was mondo suspicious. We’d send a cash cheque every two or three weeks to this post office box in the western suburbs, deep in serial killer territory. We’d never get any receipts but we never got any hassles either. There was a phone number to call in emergencies, which we used when the bathroom looked like it was going to fall off the end of the house one time, but there would only be this spooky message at the other end.

SAVE MONEY. EAT LESS

“There’s no one here,” click, brrrrrrrrrr ……………

At that stage, I’d quit my job in Canberra and was kicking around Brisbane, wasting my life again. Duke Street seemed the perfect place for it. The floating population, the lack of furniture, the crazy tilting floors, the freight train line which ran through the back yard, the hallucinogenic mushrooms in the front yard, the tree which grew through the bedroom window, the constant low grade harassment by the Department of Social Security, the week long drinking binges, the horror, the horror.

Early in my stay there, I took a four week job as a typist with the Department of Primary Industry. They had these reports that were seven years overdue. I’m not joking. They stressed this point to me. Seven years. Probably dog years too. So I’m bashing away on a word processor, getting into the Zen of typing because it’s so dull if I actually stop to think what I’m doing, my head will implode and I’ll be this sultana-headed guy walking around town. Anyway, after a while I look around the typing pool and I get this huge Fear. This Fear grabs me by the heart and squeezes like a bastard for three days straight. It’s saying This Is Your Life. So I enrol in Law at Queensland University.

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 preemptive strike. Who’s going to run up a thousand bucks on the phone and skip town at midnight leaving the other holding the bill.

God, I hated it. A few weeks into semester the first assignment is due. I’ve already missed a few classes and my notes aren’t that great. I’m surrounded by these carnivorous teenagers, fresh smelling, label wearing, beady-eyed little ratbastards who never lend me their notes. On the day I’ve set aside to do this assignment, I can’t find anything, not even the question sheet and I flip over the line. I start screaming. It sounds like something from the jungle or a subterranean prison for the criminally insane where all the inmates have devolved into these lower forms. They don’t even look human any more and they’re taking messages straight from the brain stem, primitive reptilian urgings. I’ve got this working through me. I kick a hole in the wall and pick up a golf club and charge into the living room and start laying about me and letting go with more of the monster screeches. Well the other guys in the house, they’ve been there. They sort of hang back and watch the show. Get a beer from the fridge, that sort of thing. And eventually I do calm down. I’m not that fit, and my arms go tired and I deflate like an old balloon. I realise everybody is watching me, grinning hugely. I shrug. Means nothing. An hour later we found Satomi Tiger hiding in a cupboard. She’d never stay in the same room as me after that.

Jane

I had a hairdressing flatmate who had a tribe of dumb hairdressing friends. Every Friday and Saturday night they’d come around to tease and spray each other before going out. I came home early one Saturday from a horror date which I’d mainly gone on to avoid the hairdressers. My other flatmate had taken the TV into her bedroom and I went in there to tell her about the date. While we’re talking we notice this funny smell. We both thought “Oh that’s really weird. It must be coming in the windows or something.” We started watching a movie. But this smell just got stronger and stronger. It was like burning chemical smell, it really got into the nostrils. We’re going around checking all the points and electricals. Finally we went into her room. There was a cord going into her bed. When I pulled the doona back I briefly recognised a plastic curling iron before the oxygen got it and – whoof! fucking fire. We grabbed the burning doona and ran into the kitchen which was tiled, started stemping on it, throwing water and so on. Totally spun out. The hairdresser got home at three in the morning, pissed off her face, woke us up and accused us of setting fire to her bed.

Madness, you see. Things getting out of control. It’s one of the constants of share housing. Now I’ll allow that most of the time it doesn’t get to the stage of kicking out walls and terrifying obscure tiger-suited Japanese girls, but it’s always there, a sort of chaotic potential snaking about under the surface of things, rearing its head only briefly in the course of arguments over phone bills or cleaning up.

Like, I used to share a flat with a bank clerk called Derek. Derek the bank clerk pitched a tent, literally, on the living room floor. The house budget needed one more rent payer but had no more rooms, and Derek the bank clerk needed a place to stay but was kind of a tight-arse about money. So he builds this tent thing in the corner of the living room and pays half-rent. Crawls into this thing at night. Crawls out of it in the morning. A real fringe-dwelling bank clerk. It worked for a while. But Derek was very territorial. Used to gradually creep that tent across the floor into the television-watching area. Liked to poke his head out of the flaps and watch the ABC. During the day, when he was gone, I’d push it back. At night, he’d creep it out again. It started small at first, a few inches one way, a few inches back. But the confrontation went on. He’d jump his border out a whole foot. I’d push it back a metre. He’d take two metres. I’d break a tent pole. And the whole time, never a word was spoken. It was a lucky thing we didn’t keep guns in the house. You could feel it moving towards a bloody climax, but fortunately the bank transferred him and this taxi driver moved in. We said, “No tents taxi driver, just throw a mattress here on the floor.” That was cool with him. He liked being in the centre of things. But it raised another problem, made it difficult to keep the flat tidy.

I have to jump a couple of houses here and tell you that the worst place I ever lived, absolutely the dirtiest filthiest place, was King Street. A rat died in the living room at King Street and we didn’t know. There was at least six inches of compacted crap between our feet and the floor. Old Ratty must have crawled in there and died of pleasure. A visitor uncovered him while groping about for a beer. I don’t want to go into detail on King Street yet, but remind me later to tell you about the open door policy in the toilet, and the pubic hair competition and how the kitchen got so bad we had to do all of our cooking in the back yard.

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.

You shouldn’t get the idea that all share houses are like that though. I’ve lived in some beautiful places. Really I have. Mostly they stayed that way because women lived there too. Not always, but mostly. I don’t want to be sexist about this, but there’s something about men living together that unleashes the Beast.

Gay guys are okay to live with on that score. They’re hyper-clean. Problem is, they’re also hypersensitive about the gay thing. I had a housemate come out on me once. This guy, Dirk, appeared in the living room at one or two in the morning when I was putting the moves on this girl Nina, who also lived there. There were tear tracks on his face as he stood there staring at us. I was giving this Nina a foot massage at the time, I mean, really giving her the works so I didn’t notice him at first. But he starts snuffling and kind of whimpering and we spin around. I’ve got this girl’s foot in my lap and there’s old Dirk, sort of staring and snuffling and of course I think, uh oh, old Dirk’s got a thing for Nina. The moment’s destroyed as you can imagine, and then Dirk says, “I’m gay.”

Whew! What a relief.

Now I can see old Dirk is doing it tough. And I like to think myself a broad-minded sort of guy. So I say to him, “Hey. Always thought you were.” At the time, it passes for male sensitivity. Anyway Nina sits through the horrors of the night with him and I get to go to bed dreaming of her soft, milky white feet. I ask you, who got the raw end of the deal? Funny thing is, Nina and Dirk hated each other. They were always having these knock-down drag-out scream-o-ramas about stuff like whether the tuna chunks went in the cupboard or the fridge.

Nina moved out shortly after that, so this other girl Emma and I got to live with Dirk while he was coming to terms with his sexuality. The trouble wasn’t with him being gay (we did pass a house by-law that banned kissing and fondling on the lounge room couch, but it applied to all sexual orientations). The trouble was that we didn’t care he was gay. So we’d say these brutal things which he’d pick up on his sophisticated gay radar. We’d say, “How about cleaning the shower, Dirk?” and he’d decode it as, “You filthy little arse-bandits should all be nailed to a tree.”

Do you think we could get old Dirk to clean that bathroom? No way. He wasn’t buying into any heterofascist sterility conspiracy. “Gay men are dying,” he’d screech at a bemopped Em on cleaning day. He eventually inherited half a million dollars and moved out to set up a gay men’s retreat in northern Queensland. Hope his gay brothers put him straight about the cleaning thing.

Don’t know how Dirk would have coped with finding Jeffrey the junkie all cold and blue and sprawled over the bean bag. An actual dead guy as opposed to the rhetorical gay ones which littered his post-closet conversation. Seeing as Dirk never surfaced before Donahue, I guess it would have been academic even if he and Jeffrey had lived under the same roof. One thing’s for sure. He wouldn’t have cleaned up the mess, so he wouldn’t have found the thousand dollars Jeffrey had stashed away in his room. The cops told us to stay out of there until the science guys had come around to check it out properly but we snuck in about ten minutes after they left. It didn’t take very long to find the cash rolled up and hidden away in the battery compartment of his ghetto blaster and since he’d lied to us about being a junkie and brought a world of hassles down on our home we figured it was only fair that Jeffrey make this posthumous contribution to the kitty.

a modern aesthetic

Voices of the Damned

Ted

ON LIVING WITH MARXISTS

My friend Ted says Marxists are worse than junkies. You know, you let one in, you let the whole anarcho-syndicalist commune in, and then your little home isn’t the warm and friendly place you escape to at day’s end.

It’s a brave challenge to the dominant paradigm of crypto-fascist domestic enslavement. Until the washing has to be done. Then it always seems to be Ted’s turn.

TED NOW WORKS FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ADMINISTRATIVE AFFAIRS.

Adam was a full-on Marxist, originally from Broken Hill. He’s probably lecturing in English now. While I was living with him he would interpret everything according to a Marxist line. When we went shopping you’d get a little diatribe on each product. If this were a Marxist society, for instance, one-litre bottles of Spring Valley orange juice would be just the right height to hold dry fettucine. But because this is a capitalist society they make the Spring Valley bottle two and a half centi­metres too short to store your dry fettucine. They do this on purpose.

Adam said he wouldn’t read a book if it did not have the word Marxism in the index. He fucked every woman he could get his hands on whilst professing to be a liberated feminist man. Big, flabby, white-bodied old Adam would wander about in a sarong with his willy hanging out because he wasn’t part of any sexually oppressive state mechanism or anything.

He had a big mouldy chair in the corner which he would sit in half-naked, overseeing the room. There was a reading light carefully arranged behind the chair to put him into an enigmatic perspective for anybody who walked into the room. He bought Freddy the tabby cat to sit on the arm of this chair and complete the illusion. Blofeld with his cat, but in a sarong.

Freddy was meant to be an aloof cat, sort of a guardian. But sadly Freddy was very affectionate and he’d interrupt Adam’s reading by purring and headbutting him all the time. He’d also bring grasshoppers into the house to terrify Rodney the gay guy. We came home one night and found Rodney pinned to the door, screaming, with Freddy sitting a few feet in front of him crunching away on a grasshopper.

The cat had no idea Rodney didn’t want it. He must have taken Rodney’s theatrics for excitement, because he followed him around with this twitching corpse until we got home and rescued him.

Rodney was also on the Left but he was in the drug-taking, campy gay faction. Rodney had just come from a house in Taringa where they had set aside one day a week as Nude Day. Even visitors had to get their gear off and leave it at the door. One Nude Day they got stoned and decided that it would be completely cool to watch a glass fall off the balcony onto the path below. They dropped this glass, got really excited when it shattered. So the house s entire crockery collection went over after it and was left in a pile in the driveway. The next morning they didn’t have any bowls for breakfast.

Rodney and Adam didn’t get on too well because Adam was very much into being a bloke. He thought Rodney a little frivolous. Whereas Rodney was all for fighting the revolution aided by copious quantities of drugs and condoms. He thought Adam a little uptight. These two factions then contended for control of the house. The serious young stick insects’ Stalinist discussion group and the drug-fucked, dick-sucking, no-hopers’ collective.

Rodney won in the end. Adam moved out because he just couldn’t hack it. The telling blow came when Rodney brought home about seven or eight of his gay drug buddies and they all piled into the bathroom, which was next to Adam’s bedroom. They lit dozens of candles, filled up the bathtub, got naked and got into it. They were stoned out of their heads, yelling and singing awful Billy Bragg songs while Rodney played along on his piano. He’d play for a while then go back to cavorting in the tub. About three in the morning Adam came out of his room to yell at them to shut the fuck up and start acting their age. He bawled them out for a good ten minutes but when he got back to his room three of them were fucking in his bed.

Two (#ulink_5077cd42-e4dd-58c9-a9b7-cf165b1574ed)

THE WILD THING (#ulink_d76a1c83-1bb5-55ab-880c-a9577f77482c)

I can listen to my flatmates have sex for ever. I once lurked in a lounge room for a whole weekend on the slim chance that two flatmates were holed up in the front bedroom, and that if I waited long enough, I might hear them at it. They were young and desperately trying to be cool about it, but the signs had been there for a week – meaningful glances, late night teev, foot massages, the standard routine. And there was no way I was letting them off without some heavy duty, gargoyle-style voyeurism on my part. When you’re young and blameworthy, there’s this circuit in your brain that’s always pushing you to go for the end zone, and I did – made a quick trek to the 7–11, bought both the weekend papers, a fruit loaf, a litre of V8, and camped out in the living room, directly downstairs from the point of maximum creaking and moaning.

Melissa, you remember her, the credit scam queen, she was a great one for bringing home these rough-headed bastards with tattoos and biker boots and the stench of failure about them. She was a safe sex girl. You’d hear her through the bedroom door and all the way down the hall – “Just put it on, you fucking dickhead” – and these guys would grudgingly comply, slap on the latex and wake up in the morning to discover that Melissa spends the best part of her daylight hours asleep. Sleep is her natural state of being. These hellmen would wake up, take in her chainsaw snores and figure they could slip away, sneak out of the house and avoid those always awkward post-coital negotiations. So they’d pull on their gear in careful silence and pad downstairs to where I’m waiting in the lounge room, pretending to read the papers because it is absolutely my favourite thing to catch these guys out. The good-mannered ones might throw a grunt at me, but mostly they’d steam through the lounge, heading for the front door and freedom. They’d fling it open. And freeze. Because the house has got these heavy cast iron security gates over all the windows and doors. There’s this great pause as the hellmen realise they are locked in with me, the dog and the girl upstairs. There’s always a few seconds while these ugly bastards stare at the bars. I’m biting my cheeks to keep a straight face when they come back into the lounge. They always say something like “Uh, you got a key … man?”

“Sorry. Lost mine. Melissa’s got one though.”

Stella

I walked in on a flatmate one day. His girlfriend was sitting naked on his desk with her legs spread wide apart. I reversed out at top speed really embarrassed. He came and knocked on my door later. He said “It’s not what it looks at all. I’m actually a virgin. I’ve had this girlfriend for two years but we don’t do anything. She just comes around once a week, sits herself up on the desk and shows me what I can’t have.”

I got a taste for this sort of thing in the first place I ever lived out of home – the Boulevarde, an old off-campus unit block in Brisbane. The place had light blue walls which used to sweat at night and shake whenever a truck drove past. I moved in with Warren and Mel, a young couple I knew from my high school days. It was pretty exciting for all of us. They had never been able to sleep together at their parents’ homes, and I’d never been under the same roof as two people I knew, for a fact, were having sex. Parents don’t count, unless you’re a pervert.

It wasn’t all fruit loaf and voyeurism though. I came home one day and found the flat deserted but feeling odd. Things seemed out of place but not in any identifiable way. It took a few minutes before I realised my coffee table had disappeared. When I asked Mel about it, she blushed, muttered something about Warren, and disappeared into her room. The table had always been wobbly, and as Warren was a carpenter’s apprentice I thought he might have taken it off to be fixed. In fact, he had taken it off to the dump. My flatmates had been coupling on my cheap chip-board coffee table that afternoon, and it had collapsed under the onslaught. I privately thought it was kind of cool, but they moved out shortly after. Said something about privacy. Andy, the med student who took over their room, had no such hang-ups. He was happy to let you perch outside his door while he worked his magic inside. He was a handsome cad, but kind of dopey for a future surgeon. He liked to walk around with his food, but would forget he was holding it. You’d watch him tip a plate of spaghetti towards the floor, tipping it and tipping it, and you’d think – “Surely he’s going to tip it back the other way soon.” But no. It’d slide off and hit the carpet and his shoes. Plop. His eyes would go wide, and then after a pause, he’d chuckle just like Goofy. The other med students called him Dr Death. Once, over the course of a fortnight, he invited three different girls to a college ball and only realised what he had done on the day of the event. He cancelled one date, but thought he could keep the others apart. He couldn’t of course, and the third girl turned up anyway. It was a disaster. A few weeks later he bedded all three of them, one after the other. The first girl turned up at three. He was rid of her by four. Then the second arrived, unannounced, with a couple of suitcases and a pure wool sweater she’d knitted for him. I answered the door and she brushed straight past me. “I’m moving in,” she said. Andy had her and the suitcases out of the flat by six. He kept the sweater and gave it to the last girl who showed up just after dinner.