This morning, as usual, I got the line 51 metro from Henk Sneevlietweg heading in the direction of Gein to go to work. As unluck would have it today it was one of those super shitty old metros that have hard plastic moulded seats and and a subtle air of stale piss about them. There’s only a handful of these still in service; tired old beat up things they are just waiting for the day they can be decommisioned and then sold to some Eastern European country to begin life anew – after a small interior renovation effort – as Western European luxury mass transport for people who still ride around in the back of horse carts. So anyway as I was sitting there reading away at the last part of John Birmingham’s, The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco, I started thinking this guy and I must have crossed paths at some point in our lives in Bris-vegas. I mean, John and I are about the same age, roughly. He’s only a couple of years older than I am, so we would have been share flatting around the same time that he was “researching” for his novels.
The funny thing is, Bris-vegas while actually being the capital city of the fine state of Queensland, is really more of a big country town. People tend to know each other and more often than not when you were at a party somewhere, or slumming it on someones living room floor for a while, you would find a connection with at least a couple of the other people there based on a common friend in a shared flat. So it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that John and I had actually had a few bongs together one night at some hippy trash joint, or at the very least would know friends of friends of each other.
The really funny part about reading his book is that I recognise the characters of his story in friends I lived with when I was there. To me, TTBF wasn’t just a pulp fiction novel salted with true events, but an fairly poignant account of what it was like to live outside of mainstream society in Brissy. After all, if it’s one thing Bris-vegas is very tolerant of, it’s total fucking idiots. For some reason, it just doesn’t matter if you’re the bottom crud of the gene pool in that city, you’ll do just fine! You’ll be able to find yourself a niche and be very comfortable as long as you keep your head down just far enough to avoid arousing the suspicions of the many finely corrupt law men and women who just love to fuck losers and plain stupidity over. But that aside, Bris-vegas was an excellent city for socialising with different groups of people, because there wasn’t that many places to go. I mean if you live in Sydney or Melbourne you get spoiled for choice; more bars, clubs and underground venues than you poke a willy at in a month of Sundays. Bris-vegas on the other hand was smaller in stature and so the places to go for the various subcultures was boiled down to handful (at best). However, those places were pretty hardcore, and could be guaranteed of a dedicated following. I still have memories of the Hellfire club in Fortitude Valley, watching some hairy bastard who was chained to a rack on a wall getting whipped by a fat pig of a domanatrix whilst trying desperately to come to terms with the hideous images on the edges of my vision brought on by terribly strong acid. Certainly these images were not suitable for children, and barely so for mentally vulnerable, chemically intoxicated state government employees. Yet that’s what made it so much fun! In Bris-vegas, in a place like that, noone would care that some guy in candystriped flares was disco dancing in front of a freaky whipping to a remix of Soft Cell’s, Tainted Love with wildness in his eyes. Hell no! In fact, it was almost expected that such individuals would be present, otherwise the overall entertainment value of the night would be vastly reduced. The only golden rule was don’t become a party casuality. You could get as messy as you liked, but just don’t lose it. If you lost it, the bouncers would rid you of your embarassment and potentially libelous medical state by chucking you out the back entrance with a bit of a belting as a wake up call.
So I’m really thinking that maybe I should drop JB a line and see if we don’t just happen to know each other by happenstance from some night somewhere or other. For all I know, we probably had the same acid dealer, which would explain why his pages talking about nights out with Flinthart make so much sense to me. (Yeah you’ll just need to read the book).
You just never know, do you! *grin*
Padwanna!
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