He Died With a Felafel in His Hand

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Australia by The Yellow Press 1994

Published by Flamingo 1997

Copyright © John Birmingham 1994

John Birmingham asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006388579

Ebook Edition © MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780008192136

Version: 2016-05-12

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

One: White Niggers

Two: The Wild Thing

Three: The Beast

Four: The Horny London Babes Fiasco

Five: The Foster-Lindburgh Incident

Six: No Junkies

Seven: Northern Gothic

Eight: The Yellow Underpants of Rock ’N’ Roll

Nine: Don’t Come Any Closer Frankie, We have a Gun

Ten: Moving On

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

One

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 CDs. 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.

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.

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.

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, cigarette burns and brown, torn-up furniture.

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!

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.

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.

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.