The Falling Angel.

For most of my life I have had flying dreams, at first just learning to take off, ascend, somersault, eventually choose a direction and head there, over continents and oceans, espying mystic landmarks below to guide me like temples, towers, serpentine river and guardian mountain, then land in the labyrnthine dark jungle of the Universal Unconscious, on some crazed quest, trying to find my Self, (yes, I love hippie psycho-babble.)

The last few years I haven't had these dreams as I now have become an expert at actually, physically, flying wherever I will. Tho how tedious it was to fly Malaysian, 2 days, endless waiting in the airports, from now on I go Singapore Airlines, they get me to Delhi, India inside of one day, I arrive the day I left, and they serve any favoured booze all along the way, not just halfway, with no movies, like I just boringly did with Malay. But flying into night-time India was miraculous, the darkness below lit up by star-bursts of countless cities, like frozen fire-works, the awesome beauty of the Other had begun.

I have been to Indhira Ghandi Airport many times, once there was a riot out the front and I couldn't get my luggage thru the squalling rabble and into the turbulent departure lounge but my arrival this year takes the crumby cake for chaos, frayed nerves and suffocating crush. We were made to wait an extra half-hour in the plane with no oxygn, I had "Final Destinaton" fears, flames sweeping thru and me trampled in the panic, but eventually we were unceremoniously dumped onto the tarmac, where creaky buses picked up the multitudes and ferried us around and around the landing fields, all of us patient and resigned, we'd now arrived in India, it was to be expected, weaving in and about endless baggage-trains, backed-up planes, convoys of buses, trucks, machines, cars all stacked up and dragged about willly-nilly with an army of worker ants marching in between waving their arms like antennas, and countless befuddled passengers herded about like refugees from "2012", finally we were ejected at a doorway in the bowells of the terminus, what the hell was going on?

Oh, it was an "Avian Flu" scare, for high-tech India there were no infra-red cameras on gangways to detect the feverish like there was in Kuala Lumpur, here just a crabby doctor and dinky nurse sitting at a table to face the thousands of arrivals crowding in from many planes, so overwhelmed and dumbfounded they'd let their requisite face-masks slip below their chins. We were all made to fill out forms declaring we felt OK and designating our seat number, which I'd forgotten and just wrote whatever came to mind. The nurse didnt even look at me or my form when she stamped it, she was distracted by someone further down the convulsive line, I staggered thru the hordes, made it thru customs in a flash, unlike the Indians who took forever to get their passports checked, the stern old stamp-wallah just glancing at me and muttering, "Chello!" as if he knew an incorrigible India-freak when he saw one.

As if the cyclone that had just missed Mumbai had instead centred on Indhira Ghandi Air terminus, the halls were in an uproar, all the baggage carousels had wailing luggageless travellors clambering upon them, as per usual my cheap bag was the last one thru the curtain, but at least it came. I fell down the dreaded escalator, remembering the horror of a few years previous when a crowd of arrivals stampeded down it and pushed those ahead into a carelessly left-open hatch, the machinery below mangling one old man's legs but totally tearing to bits a poor little girl, no one thinking to rush over and pres the OFF button at the base of the escalator rail. Yes, the awful finale to "The Final Destination in 3D" was a true incident, ripped from the front pages of Indian newspapers.

When I finally made it out the front exit, it had been 2 hours since my plane touched down, and the riot continued for many more miles, traffic banked up and horns honking, Indians wandering dazed in mobs and falling under the merciless wheels, some beat-up taxi had broken down in a heap in the middle of the entrance and nobody was bothering to push it out of the way.

My taxi driver had a boy sitting next to him and I asked who he was, telling him I knew about the hideous murder of an Australian women seven years earlier who'd allowed a second man to enter the car with her when she left, she was taken to the back of the airport, ghastly raped, killed and robbed. "This is my little brother and that killer was not a true taxi driver!" "Yeah, I trust you, your brother looks little enough." He was teaching his brother to drive and roared onto the freeway heading into New Delhi with the kid changing gears for him and, while steering with his knees, he hospitably rolled a joint of charas to ease my tension, shared his water with me and beedis to smoke furiously after my aeroplane abstinence.

We zoomed past lots of great architecture, medieval Mughal, British Colonial and funky Post-modern. I was high and happy, like Lucifer the fallen angel arriving in the garden of earthly paradise, oh yes, I've landed, this is India, maybe collapsing under her own great weight, but how I love her!

Roslyn Street Transience.

Virgin Beasts at the Dorian Gray Cafe.

There's a portrait of Vitto hanging in the Groundhog Cafe that, amongst the never-changing patrons and their quotidian routines, does change every time I look at it, I swear it gets uglier and uglier, as if all of Vitto's angst is offloaded upon it. His face is all screwed up like he's having a broom-handle shoved up his arse and every day the broom handle twists and splinters further in, his face growing ever more agonised whilst sitting below it the Real Thing blithely knits his endless woolen shroud, for all the beasties flocking thru the door, he becomes more beatific.

I found yet another gift waiting for me on Vitto's cluttered table, a DVD copy of my bete noir film "Virgin Beasts", brought back from America by a friend who found it on the Cult shelf of a video store in L.A. Troma, the trashy New York company who I signed my life away to for peanuts, not only never gave me just recompense but were so tight-arsed they never even sent me one copy in the twenty years they've had the film. I've moaned about this supposed rip-off before, it's a good thing THEY can't rip one's soul from one's heart as that's all I've got left and am enormously chuffed at having retained it. But I must say, for all my bitching, Troma did a great digital Master, the film is crisp and clear, looking as good as the day it came off the press in 1990.

They also packaged it beautifully, my artwork on the cover, the disc and the menu. My trade-off for never getting any money for the 10 years of hard work is that it has shown all around the world and, for all its trashiness, is still pertinent and cutting, but fame is vacuous when you're starving in a dumpster! I did feel pissed off that Lloyd Kaufman, the originator of Troma, did an introduction that seems to put me down. He's done it for all other Troma releases, (everybody wants to get in on the act), but it's demeaning to have him scoffing that I'm his favourite director even tho he can't remember my name and I've only ever made one film and am actually a nobody when seen against his illustrious stature. There are good reasons for never getting any further in the grand quest of "MOVIE MAKING: firstly They ripped the money and you rarely get a second film up if your last one shows zilch earnings on the books, and secondly I gave a punk critique of civilisation, especially the Godists, (Christians), and They rule the world and are terribly unforgiving.

But still I did it, a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks pulling off a feature film full of wild animation, the whole thing like a moving painting set to music. Many of my paintings have been destroyed but this one will live on, in cyber-space if nowhere else, till THEIR "End of Days" comes about. These days I stay holed up in my apartment painting big canvases that are just as good at story-telling as any movie or novel, without anyone dictating to me, and that keeps me happy, telling stories is my high.

There's been a shit-storm at Northcott Suicide Towers where I live, Cursula has accused the gay guys down the other end of the verandah of stealing our electricity from the laundry, she showed up with a Housing Dept. official, a nice fat guy with a huge bolt-cutter, demanding to know if I was aware I was being robbed and could I replace the lock they were now about to cut off of my connection. I blathered on about how I couldn't believe such nice fellows would do such a mean thing, (tho they've probably been doing it for years), as I'm trying to mediate between the antagonists to keep everyone on side, I want them all to leave me alone and not mind my business, just to be left alone to contemplate and study and bliss out, NO BULLSHIT!

Sad-sack Cursula wanted to stir us up so she could have drama in her life, I told her to keep her trap shut, thankfully she now lives up in the towers with her new boyfriend and is no longer disturbing me with endless racket and jabbering nonsense, my nights are tranquil, my home-front quiet, I can walk away without a qualm. And at the Dorian Gray Cafe Vitto had his 75th birthday amidst much acrimony and grumpiness, he got a luscious fancy birthday cake which he snootily presented to someone else, ignoring me, sniggering at my frustrated drooling, me whose life has been ruined by cakes. He's a hard one to keep happy, maybe the cursing is what keeps him alive, letting it all hang out, and I dont mind being his whipping boy.

And my new best friend Felix, who I met at the Pick Your Bum Cafe, has confirmed he is a keen, angelic mate, tho he runs about with a posse of young Tomcats rutting and yowling on the rooftops he was brave enough to take me to a gig of these teenage rocker friends, I felt like Grandpa from the Munsters at a kindergarten, glad to see the white hot fuzz of electricity exciting the next generation, amused by their longing to grow up quicklyand join the adult's mess. I felt uncomfortable, a battle-scarred Attila the Hun saying nothing, but I'm not going to worry about any social contretemps, the road is calling to me, I'm going walk-about soon, flying free, attachments will be left to untangle themselves. Yes, it's true that I'm an irresponsible runaway, born-again virgin and deranged beast, and I love it.

Who Remembers Narara?

Listening to old hot rock music on the juke-box and espying Michael Hutchins mute up on the television set at the Piccolo-life Cafe, I remembered Narara Music Festival back in about 1983, north of Sydney near Ourimbah, (where the first ever rock festival was held in '69 and I was at that one too), it was such a magical musical event that I wondered surely many others must still remember it also. I've been to many festivals since but for some cutting reason that weekend stands out in my mind for fabulous adventure and rock bliss.

Think of it, Talking Heads, Pretenders, Eurythmics, Def Leopard, INXS, untold other nascent Aussie classics, all the bands at their youthful prime, for an electric guitar addict like me it was heaven. Never mind the gossipy controversy over Chrissie Hynde supposedly refusing to go up against Chrissie Amphlett and knocking her from the line-up, when she came on stage and the crowd booed her, Mistress Pretender pleaded innocence and mercy from baying mobs of Aussie rock enthusiasts and I believed her, but still a pity the Divinyls never made it to the stage, they would've been the spin in the spliff.

I went with two girlfriends and while one soon picked up a rock-gronk and fucked him for three days in her car, Jasmin and I put up a tent, with a kerosene burner we made opium-poppy-pod tea, (illegally snatched from the poppy fields in Tasmania, Jasmin's favourite high, she recently died at 55 from a heroin overdose), we smoked spliffs and then laid-back on our pumped-up lilo beds and dreamed of paradise with steel-guitar strings twanging through the ether. Mostly we sat among the crowd of course and shook our butts to the rock, happy when Michael Hutchence yelled for the television camera to get out of his face and go to the side so we, the paying audience, could actually see him perform at his gyrating best. And of course it had to rain in the middle of the fest, it biblicaly stormed down, as if such a wild concentration of mass ecstasy unleashed the heavens, torrents washing most of the punters and campers away, Jasmin and I comfy, warm and stoned in our sturdy tent up on our lilo beds, the water rushing under us, us above the chaos.

In the background I could hear Def Leopard tearing up the cloudscape, I splashed thru the mire and mud-covered gronks to watch them bang away up on stage half-drowned in the vertical flood, defying electrocution, defying mortality, I exhilarated in their electric-euphoria, I was tripping, I saw the gods of humanity take shape in the purple clouds and roll over me, my eyes rolled to the back of my head, Narara, you really rock'n'rolled me.

Yooowwwwlllll!

Here's another caterwauling yooowwwlll from the Punk Poofy Cat. Last night I went to a wonderful event at the Kings Cross Library, talks on the Green Bans of the 1970's, the Builders' Labourers Union action that saved huge hunks of Sydney's working class housing and heritage buildings from demolition by greedy developers. During a slide-show depicting events Jack Mundey, the Union leader, now 80 years old, spoke about his experiences and the achievements of the workers and resident-action groups. One of those residents, an artist named Brenda Humble, exhibited her portraits of the activists and told funny anecdotes of how she got involved, I talked to her before the show started and pointed out one pic that I liked the best and she gushed, "That one is of me!" She was so sweet and yes, humble, who said oldies are boring farts?

Most of the talking was done by Meridith Bergman, city councilor and ex-leader of the State Parliament House, she gave us a run-down of events from 1971 to 1975 when Woolloomoolloo, The Rocks, Victoria Street, Kings Cross and Centennial Park got saved for posterity, tree-huggers and low-renters. Also an author, Mandy Sayer, reminisced about her childhood growing up on Victoria street with the kooky characters that walked around in the nude, painters, musicians, Utopianists, those were the days of free-living.

It was truly heartening to see that such brave involvements have not only not been forgotten but are respected and applauded this lifetime later. I was amazed to hear that when the German politician, Petra Kelly, visited Sydney in the '70s she was so inspired by the Green Bans, she returned to Germany and decided to call her new alternative, progressive party "The Greens", an inspiration which has spread around the world, and now includes the natural as well as the urban environment.

I arrived in Sydney in 1977 and the Green Bans were still on, I squatted in a heritage mansion in Victoria Street and later got arrested at the Rocks trying to save the houses there so it was a nostalgic trip for me and a sobering one. I've got no regrets, I was just the cannon-fodder, no political career in it for me, not that I'm putting anyone down, some pollies do great things, (Bob Brown of the Greens has my vote), I relished being the wandering artist, the dharma bum, into it for the art, and I sure cracked it, the creativity has been an exquisite high. Throughout the evening they flashed up onto the wall shots of the murals in Woolloomoolloo that are on the pylons holding up the railway tracks, all of them photo-realist paintings of the Builders' Labourers' organising, marching and fighting. But they excluded one of the murals, mine, a twenty-foot high surrealist cartoon of the main drag of Kings Cross with all its sleazy, nefarious activities on show, too provocative and scandalous maybe for the Marxists, not actually to do with the Green Bans, so it didn't worry me, I would've cringed anyway, and I'm used to being excluded, it's the story of my non-career as an artist. Amazing that the fucking thing is possibly still up after 25 years, I guess we are in a demi-democracy and there's some grudging respect for independent, mad, libertarian expression.

Still the slowly disappearing "Hunger-artist", yes my constantly yowled gripe, I had an axe to grind with the librarian, Steve, who had magnanimously put on the event. The Council has printed up tens of thousands of booklets about the Bohemian atmosphere of the Kings Cross and They've mentioned the Piccolo Cafe using one of my cartoons, "Welcome to the Menagerie", to illustrate it. Great, except they've got the name of the artist printed underneath as "Tony Zoates" and I obsessively have to go over every shitty wrong page with a felt tip pen and CHANGE IT with a "b" and a huge slashed Z. He apologised, he knows I also got my art wiped from my show at the library on the WEB site, "Art of the Cross" and commiserates as I get thinner and thinner, like the evaporating phantom of the Rue Darlinghurst.

I flew home on my bike still high from the old-folks daring escapades of decades ago, shit that doesn't seem to go down in these third-millenium times, but as I lay upon my bed ruminating upon it all my 'Loo Mural glared psychedelic fleuro in my forebrain, the Cross with Bob Hawke as the Pink Panther presenting a bag of Uranium to a cowboy Ronnie Reagan and behind them two teenagers shooting-up heroin on the beach with a nuclear explosion's mushroom cloud growing on the horizon and next to it the booze billboard "How Do You feel?" I realised why I got dead stares from the Labour Party politicians milling with the mob at refreshment time, not just because I was frantically stuffing my face with the free feed. It was Them who opened the uranium mines and shipped it out thru Sydney which a riot of anarchists fought hard to stop.

Nogod, I remember Jack Mundey himself coming onto the White Bay wharves in '77 to join us for our vigil and watch us as we climbed the hurricane fences and trespassed onto the uranium cargo-ships, then arrested and bundled off in Black Mariahs. In the midst of this reverie I suddenly remembered, "Holy Shit!" Peter Carrot with his crap band "Midnight Soil" stood opportunistically in front of my mural for one of their rip-off video clips, featured it totally, without my say-so, like he's some anti-nuclear activist, but in reality a fame-whore, money-grubber and lapdog for the power-mongers.

And is it by coincidence that he just went to France, half of whose electricity grid is powered by nuclear reactors, and got some kind of "Artistic Merit" bullshit badge? It's only ever been given to 3 other Aussies, he supposedly gets it for his great rock'n'roll contribution, (barf!) Oh yeah, Auz sells uranium to Europe, some of it must end up in France, and when Pete returns to Auz he Okays the opening of a fifth mine, hmmmmm, how fortuitous! And my slaved-over mural helped burnish his kudos, FUCKKKK!!!! I also noticed that it's Germany who has lately phased out nuclear power, they've got only one reactor left and are about to decommission it, Petra Kelly's ultimate Green legacy. Yeah, yeah, nuclear power is almost carbon free but it has other dangers, which the Germans have woken up to, and so have the Iranians and the North Koreans, forgetting all the other missile hungry nations and, FOR SURE, some of that processed uranium will end up in bombs!

If I'm found murdered in my flat, you'll know why. My non-career as an artist has already been killed off. (Yeah, I should be scared, Peter Carrot is not only the Environment Minister, he's the Arts Minister too.) Yooowwwwlllll!!!

P.S. I just rode my bike down to the 'Loo to take a photo of my mural and discovered it gone, gone, gone, and They didn't bother informing me or asking if I wanted it back, twenty-foot high and done on three panels. Maybe They've stored it somewhere, probably destroyed it, Authority's caring for ART infamously lax, like the Nazis burning books, but all art is transient, even the Picassos and Van Goghs will one day turn to dust or burn in a nuclear holocaust. And I'm a living artist, it's what I do now that turns me on, and my life of wandering the roads, pure Dharma Bum Nirvanha!

Naughty Nicolette, Queen of the Zombies.

I want to write about the 7 beautiful women who have graced my life and the first one I will attempt to describe was the last of them, maybe I'm not up for any more as she has nearly broken my heart and is hard to get over. Her name is Nicolette, but she's not small, I've teasingly called her "Lil Lotta" which makes her squirm, I met her when she was 19 at the Pick Your Low Cafe, she's jaw-dropping gorgeous, 5ft 10", va va voom voluptuous and it was love at first sight between us, she's a die-hard anarchist and knew I was a bad-arse artist, we clicked, she sat on my lap and I was addicted.

It took some time before I found out she was addicted herself, to any and every drug she could get her hands on, but by then I was well and truly hooked and I overlooked it as her human flaw, we've all got some kind of flaw, (I don't know why it's drugs with her, maybe so sensitive and intelligent she needs anesthesia to the horrors of human society/history.) It was 1997 and coincidental that both of us were going off to India to get lost and most of this story will involve our travels in India for the next four years, conflated into one ongoing adventure for economy's sake.

Nic grew up with Hippie parents and went to an alternative school but nothing could mollify this hell-bent wayward girl, she got into so-called hard drugs at 15 and has been a hooker ever since to pay for the inordinate amount of pharmaceuticals she needs to fuel and soothe her passionate critique of a fucked-up world. She'd already done India at the age of seventeen so she was an old hand at the India-freak scene. We met in the idyllic town of Shangri-la nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, she turned up with the two most villainous sadhus I've ever seen, pock-marked rat-faced crims in saffron rags and dreadlocks hanging from mile-high turbans. They tried to stare me down, con me with pseudo-cosmic bullshit and get their hands in my pocket but I put them off with a sneer and a wisecrack, I've had it put on me by big Baba masters and these two creeps didn't warrant a second glance. Nicolette had them under control, they jumped to her every desire and chased down the brown sugar she was so fond of. I'm sure they imagined they'd get to screw her once they got her very stoned but this girl is a bottomless pit, she scagged them under the table, squeezed them dry and left them blowing in the wind.

In early '98 it was Kumbhla Mela time, a big festival of greet and treat, every twelve years it comes to Haridwar, a chaotic bazzar of Babas in tents camped by the Ganges River with 20 million Hindu pilgrims crowding in and shitting everywhere. I preferred to chill higher up in the mountains in Shangri-la but the unflappable Nicolette braved the tumult to scour the masses of brown flesh for sacred thrills, returning to my quiet oasis with breathless tales of sadhus at war with competing clans, flashing swords and cracking skulls with their brass-tipped staffs. She said she'd hung out with a really powerful Baba and I simply must come to meet him, I was in dread of being trampled by the hordes but I went out of curiosity, it was silly of me to totally avoid the Mela, it being such a rare and spectacular happening.

We plowed thru tarpaulin alleyways of mud and shit to a giant canvas tent where the big fat Baba was ensconced. I've hung-out with the baddest and most charismatic dudes from the glaciers to where the three oceans meet and this guy didn't overwhelm me, he was jolly, welcoming, somewhat charismatic but didn't get me euphoric like the mythic gurus of old, (like the female saint Ananda Mayee Ma did back in 1975.) I smoked the requisite chillum and was amused by the antics of a twelve year old Baba they brought out front to impress the Westerners, performing yoga contortions he was the real show-stopper. While the big Baba handed me a cup of opiated tea, the reason he was so popular with Nicolette, a tall athletic sadhu stood behind his enormous hulk and opened up his longhi to reveal his nakedness, his giant schlong swaying like an elephant's trunk, his foreskin pierced with a golden ring. As I gulped my tea in shock Nicolette whispered to me that she'd fucked the guy in the shallows of the Ganges River the day before, he must've thought I was a likely fan, he kept giving me the sleazy raised eyebrows of the Indian come-on.

I didn't realise they'd gotten the water for the tea from the river where the mobs were washing their dirty arses, the next day I got a fever that progressively grew worse, I shivered, projectile vomited, had broken glass grinding in my guts and sweated out half my body-weight till my sheets were sopping wet. I thought I'd get over it but on the third day I was passing in and out of consciousness, the Goddess Kali came to my bedside and danced over me, eyeballs bulging, nose-ring glinting and tongue extruded lasciviously. I was dying and I asked myself if I shouldn't just give-in and succumb, life had been such an ordeal, I was tired of all the back-stabs and rip-offs. But no, there were fantastic things about this world that I couldn't let go of, something great could still come for me, so I fell off my bed and crawled into town to find a doctor.

It was the day of the Holi festival, the local youths were throwing handfuls of coloured powder into everyone's faces and bombing anything that moved with plastic bags of freezing water. I dragged my delirious arse up alleyways begging the boys not to use me as target practice but they just laughed maliciously and plastered me with crap till I looked like a psychedelic scarecrow. I made it to the doctor's office and after listening to my fevered list of complaints he rushed me quickly to a private hospital and gave me intravenous anti-biotics. I was unconscious for three days and when I awoke he told me I'd had a lucky escape from cholera, many Westerners before me had died quickly from it. As I was gathering my senses, somewhat gobsmacked to get another chance at the hurly-burl of life, Nicolette burst into the room and presented me with a necklace of carved-bone skulls, just like Mother Kali wears. She walked me home along the banks of the Ganges River and I breathed in the fresh air and drunk the sky and lapped up her smiles and felt, yes, all was sweet.

A few weeks later I got my nose pierced with a gold ring, just like I'd seen on my apparition of Kali, to remind me forever after how close I'd come to death and that I'd made the clear decision to carry on with living, no matter how painful it sometimes can be.

Nicolette often disappeared for days, weeks, and I lived in fear she'd be raped and mangled deep in the jungles by whatever sleazebags she'd taken a fancy to, deadbeat French/Italian/Indian junkies you'd swear would sell their mother's blood to Dracula for a hit, but she always showed up strong as an Amazon, licking her lips like the cat who got the cream and I just had to trust that this girl could handle any contretemps as if she were the Queen of the Zombies. We decided to split down south to Goa and she insisted on putting up on the roof of the bus her mammoth backpack that seemed to contain a whole house plus other large bundles that contained nogod knows what.

On the bus trip we were talking pleasantly and gazing out the window at the peasants in their fields when Nicolette suddenly jumped three feet in the air and exclaimed that the guy behind us had jammed his hand thru the crack of the seat and stuck it in the crack of her arse. I turned in a fury and slapped the guy across the face to which he and his two mates threw themselves upon us punching and scratching, me slapping the three faces in one swipe as if they were the Three Stooges, Nicolette screaming and flapping her hands uselessly like most girls do. We called for the bus conductor to come do something about the melee, he rushed up and we squawked about the moron's outrageous sexual harassment, but the conductor and the whole busload of passengers just looked at us goggle-eyed as if we were to blame merely because we existed, being whities our sexual charisma was too provocative.

We eventually crashed Delhi and in the bus station we got mobbed by countless porters who wanted to carry our bags, all of them tugging on our arms and legs, tearing us apart. Nicolette insisted on climbing up onto the roof of the bus to get her many bundles, the porters were furious, it was their job and absolutely outrageous that a woman should demean herself so. They only wanted 10 rupees (30 cents) to fetch it down for her but she is notoriously tight and refused to pay it. She struggled up a tiny ladder while they grabbed at her legs and heaved on her fat arse but she beat them off and managed to toss down all the crap, it piled up like a pyramid, ten separate pieces of luggage, and the mob of porters went nuts clamouring and begging us for the job of carrying it all to a taxi, grabbing at our shirts, pulling on our hair, us yelling, "No! We're carrying it all. Fuck off!"

One little old man really got in my face and pleaded soulfully for employment, clutching at my hand and calling on god. I flipped, lost my compassion and slapped him across his poor wizened mug, (yes, I'd become slap-happy.) He looked at me with wide hurt eyes, in shock and deep sadness, and I felt like shit. We hurriedly dragged the wagon-train of goods to a took-took and somehow squeezed it all in, the porters all watching in cheated dismay. We scurried off to New Delhi, to Main Bazzar and got into our hotel room to lay out the bundles and unpack our necessities. On counting the separate packages we got to nine and realised one was missing, mine, in all the fuss we'd left it back at the bus station, the porters would surely get their revenge and steal it, it was hopeless but still I decided to rush back there and search for it.

When I got back to the bus station there were no porters and no package in sight and I was about to give up but on making enquiries I was told that any lost property was sometimes delivered to the local police station. Resignedly, without much hope, I traipsed to the other side of the labyrinthine station, up some stairs and into the grungiest of offices where I importuned a big fat hairy cop. I could actually see my bundle sitting on a shelf and jubilantly pointed it out, telling the cop what was in it, which he inspected then gave to me saying I was very lucky to get it back. I asked him who brought it in and he said, "Oh, a kind little old man." I nearly died from shame, the dear little fellow, typical of old-time Indians, their hospitality and generosity is legend. That old fellow might have missed out but he did all his fellow aged Indians a good turn as from then on I've hired porters at every turn, fed every geriatric that looked hungry and gave respect and assistance when any oldie has crossed my path.

In Delhi Nicolette met up with a gang of Africans hanging about the pissed-on corners of Main Bazzar and disappeared for a couple of days. Again I imagined her getting boiled in oil and stripped to the bone, Africans are infamous for selling hard drugs, often they are Nigerians and are forever getting caught with mule-trains loaded down with smack. They come to India to make money and end up strung-out on the dusty streets, no visa, no bucks, they hiss at you as you pass, "Hey mon, want to get on?" I waited on tenterhooks for Nic to reappear, she showed up with the Africans in tow, they were eating out of her hand like a bunch of tamed jungle cats, I needn't have worried, she was surfing the chaos as always.

On the train to Mumbai, sleeping on our reserved third-class benches, Nic on her side with her butt up in the air, a young fool sneaked up on her and groped her delicious big buttocks, she wore bother-boots and hardly woke up, just gave the guy a resounding mule-kick in the face to send him flying across the carriage, her snarling, "You try that once more and I'll rip your balls off!" He vanished and we all went back to dreamland, ready for Mumbai, city of broken-dreams.

In Mumbai we stayed in Colaba at the cheapskate India Hotel, it's so cool to sit smoking on Mary Weather Drive and watch the passing crowds swirling around the haunted Gateway to India, a fresh breeze coming in off the Arabian Sea. Nicolette loved noshing up at the scrumptious cafes where women can sit in curtained booths and get up to hanky-panky without curious eyes ogling them. When we walked past the Taj Mahal Hotel we saw a huge crowd milling in front of the new tower complex, half of them Westerners in shirt and tie, photographers with their fancy cameras, security guards speaking earnestly to walkie-talkies, fat police, armed soldiers, Indian rubber-neckers.

We couldn't push our way thru and I just had to ask a sweating reporter nearby what all the fuss was about. "The French president, Jacques Chirac, is about to show up!" Oh yeah, he was in India hoping to flog fast-breeder reactors to them to supplement their nuclear industry. Nicolette was in her usual cargo-pants and bother-boots but the t-shirt she wore had a huge tear across her chest and her breasts protruded forth in all their mammoth glory. As we edged into the crowd the men turned, espied her boobs and stepped back, eyes firmly glued to the jiggling flesh-bombs. As we progressed the whole crowd parted like the Red Sea, the much anticipated French President forgotten, all heads and eyes turned to watch the Aussie Amazon stride blithely past, chest thrust forward to churn aside the morass of male hornyness, little me trundling behind in her wake, one smart Indian fucker yelling out, "You're too old for her!" I sneered back, "And you're too ugly!" Then the French President's limousine showed up and we made our escape, back to the sea-wall, to smoke and laugh at the breast fetish that made most men stupid.

Nic had a bag of leafy grass some streetie had given her and we were smoking a joint of it as we gazed upon Bombay Harbour, not getting high but happy to be relaxed and in Wonderland, when an old Indian cop snuck up on us on his beat-up push-bike and grumbled, "What's that you're smoking?" I tossed the spliff into the sea and said, "Nothing, just a cigarette." He spluttered, "You should've let me see it up close." "It's none of your business, " I replied, then hissed to Nic, "Let's go, go, go!" I grabbed her by the hand and towed her quickly up the street and around the corner, looking back to see the old cop fuming, eyeballs glaring. We would've made it to our hotel door safely but a German backpacker stopped us to ask if we knew where there were cheap rooms, and while we politely, stupidly gave her directions the old pig had enough time to gather his posse and come tearing around the bend in pursuit, a wild bunch of pigs on bikes bent on payback.

My guts dropped at their imminent arrival and I ran for the stairs to our hotel, three flights up, Nic in my wake, the horrid cops in full chase like wolves after lambs. I was able to run fast and leap stairs but Nic with her big tits and fat arse wobbled slowly upwards, in too much of a panic to think of dragging the bag of pot from her voluminous bag and tossing it thru one of the many open windows we passed. I had a joint of hash I was saving for bedtime and in a flash placed it out of sight on a windowsill. But Nic floundered along like a baby dugong and just as we got to our hotel door and banged furiously upon it the cops caught up with us and the original old cunt latched onto her like a sucker fish. We all started screaming and cursing, loud enough that the lazy hotel wallahs woke up and unlocked the doors.

I yelled for Nic to rush to the toilet which she dully did, shaking off the pincers of the zealous cop but the old bastard followed hot on her heels while I confronted the other pigs in bad humour. They searched me thoroughly and found nothing, but one fat prick clutched onto my arm as if he wanted to tear it off, I thrust him aside and played the outraged diplomat, "How dare you treat me in so uncivilised a manner!" Just as I was mounting my high horse in high dudgeon Nic reappeared with the skinny old cop riding her like a captive filly, waving the bag of pot in our collective faces. "She tried to flush this down the toilet!" he crowed, Nic shrieking, "I've never seen that crap before, it was there when I tried to take a piss, and he was trying to get a look at my fanny!" We all started ballyhooing with accusations and denials, shriek, shriek, yammer, yammer, the four cops holding an arm and a leg and dragging Nic back down the stairs.

"We're taking her to the police station and charging her with drug possession!" "Yeah, sure, with a wet bag of leaf that you found in a toilet, you'll never make it stick!" I yelled, "And I'm coming with you!" "Why should you come, it's got nothing to do with you!" they barked. "As if I'd let you take her alone, you might rape her, India is infamous for raping Westerners. And I'm gonna put up such a stink, I'll scream all night long in your precious police station, so get ready for a big headache!" They all stopped in their tracks and ruminated upon this hiccup in the smooth running of their big bust. Just then the big fat Hotel Manager got aroused from his sloth and stepped into our midst. As a fellow Maharashtran he was able to jabber jabber in Marathi with the hungry pigs and after much negotiation he turned to us and said, "They want ten thousand rupees to forget about it." "You're kidding, we don't have ten thousand rupees, we're back-packers, we've only got five hundred rupees spare cash." More jabber jabber in Marathi and he blithely mouthed, "Okay, they'll take one thousand and call it quits."

Hmmmmmmm... that made 250 rupees per cop, ($10), pretty cheap when it comes down to it, such desperation was pathetic, my threatened hysteria and the wet pot must've given them second thoughts. Nic gave them their pieces of silver as if they were coins to close the eyes of the dead, I even said, "Now fuck off!" But they were too busy arguing over the division of the spoils to notice. Poor old India, she used to be satisfied with so very little. The Hippie Trail is strewn with such misadventures, we could only shrug with relief and set our sights for Goa where maybe there was true sanctuary for angst-weary freaks.

The highlight for me of the whole journey thru India is the sleeper-bus to Goa, first the long haul thru the entire metropolis of Mumbai, the endless concrete-cancer streets with wall to wall people so closely packed I could walk on their heads as though on a carpet, the satellite cities of ant-hill skyscraping apartment towers, then the rush of the highway, over the precipitous mountains into the full moon, round hair-pin bends, down to the sea, past Portugese cottages entangled in jungle, me stretched out in my coffin-like upper bunk, the window open, the wind rushing in, sometimes hanging into the breeze with MP3 techno sending me into the heavens with the stars and electro choirs. Like the selfish dog I am I insisted on having the window-side of the berth and poor Nic had to cling to the one bar provided for support, every swerve sending her half-over the edge and onto the Indians packed below just as she was falling asleep.

You can smell Goa when you get there, coconuts, sunshine, bananas, sea-salt, toddy. From Mapusa we went straight to Vagatore Beach and the Hilltop Hotel, cheap rooms plus that's where the best rave parties were held. To bring us down Nic's old boyfriend whom we called Gronk turned up from Auz to try to keep the flame of romance burning only for Nic it had fizzled out like a wet fart. She was a Utopianist, no one should be owned by anyone, marriage was redundant, everyone was free to do as they will with no laws or strictures as long as they didn't hurt anyone, blah blah blah, only Gronk wanted her for himself, in every way, with constant instructions on how she should live her life, each hour of the day... aaaggghhh! It didn't take too many days for Gronk to be given the bum's rush and he disappeared back into the mists leaving Nic to peruse the Israeli hunks who sat in mobs around the communal table at the Hilltop Cafe waiting for their pussy on tap.

The techno/trance music cult seems to have got a big push in Goa in the late '80s with the likes of Goa Gill but by 1998 the scene was peaking and we got there just in time to catch the last big waves. While the Hilltop was and is the main hot-spot there were also other sites like Disco Valley down on Vagatore Beach and the Bamboo Forest over at Anjuna Beach along with the Paradiso Club. Rapes, muggings and murder have put an end to the free-for-all wild raves, you'd have to run a gauntlet thru a jungle to get to the dance-floor, sleazy Indians trying to fleece you of your cash and flesh, and any poor white girl who dared to go on the dance floor would suddenly have a mob of Indian yobs around her trying to grab at her tits, as if they'd heard there was free sex available in Goa, all you had to do was snatch the snatch. The girls would fuck off instantly of course and then the idiots would turn their attention to the white guys, even gronky old me, suddenly I'd have some fat milk-wallah from the back of beyond pushing his hairy belly into me and trying to grope my arse. I got so furious I wanted to have a punch up with him and his moronic side-kicks but my Indian mates dragged me away, to a better party, it wasn't worth the hassle fighting such stupidity.

Nowadays the only hot parties are at the Hilltop which is protected inside high walls with armed security guards patrolling the perimeters. The edgy frisson has gone, but I and my girlfriends would rather be safe, all those drunken villains from the hinterland of India now have only the rocky beaches to haunt and hassle. Not all the hot crowd are international freaks, half the mob are local Goans or cool Indians down from Bombay, and they dance the best, wildly, out of control, like pagans from 7000 years ago, I love them dearly, need to be amongst them every year shaking my arse down to my soul, till the day I die.

My favourite party of all time was put on by a hot crew from Britain on private land at the back of the Vagatore petrol station. I think it was "Ministry of Sound", and New Years Eve 1999, the music was intense, from the moment I got in the gates I went nuts and danced like a dervish, like a shaman, on my usual vision quest, up into the astral-planes, my arms and legs swiveling like gossamer wings to take me up, up, up, white-light exploding, bliss, knowledge, truth, higher-consciousness dissolving me into the Universe, me and the crowd as one, stomping, whirling, thrashing, weaving in mesmerising movement, yeah, humankind can fly! Rich/poor, fat/thin, old/young, gay/straight, black/white, male/female, ugly/beautiful, silly/serious, nothing mattered but the music and the dissolution within it.

Nicolette did what she always did when we went to rave parties, every damned time, she disappeared within 5 minutes to hunt out the guy with her favourite drugs and I wouldn't see her for the rest of the night. Lucky I'm a loner, a dharma bum used to traveling the sky's highways on my lonesome, satisfied with being the entire Universe and not needing a Siamese twin by my side to give comfort and solidity to the experience. Music can be one's eternal companion, lover even, I get fucked by the music, fuck the fickle friends. Strangers would always come up and try to chat, move in sync, even lay their hands on as if to grab some of the light, I'd let them all flow over me like silken water, I'd splash the light about with them and then swim on. And Nicolette always nowhere to be seen in the pulsating crowd of hypno-celebrants.

I'd find her past dawn, back at the Hilltop, unconscious in her room with some Euro-trash stoner, for a few weeks it was a cool German guy who shared her delights and gave her good head, lucky also that I'm queer and not jealous, I wished her and her lover well, and prayed they'd revive. The other scene in those days at Vagatore was the Primrose Hotel, every night packed with revelers boozing and dancing on the tiny disco-floor, the Pub's sweet deserts were what got me in. (At some point the owner of the Primrose died and whoever took over wasn't able to pay the local cops the bribes they demanded so they lost their disco license and nowadays the Pub is as dead as a cemetary.) I'll never forget that rare occasion when Nic was having a dance with me, she'd imbibed copious quantities of nogod knows what shit, suddenly she turned ghostly pale, swayed and projectile vomited green slime, yes, just like Linda Blair, but no callow priest could exorcise this Amazonian demon, the spew sprayed upon the designer-clothed tourists dancing politely nearby, they all screamed in disgust.

Then Nic simply toppled like a sawed-off Redwood and crashed straight to the disco-floor, smashing face-first into the ground. The Euro-trash around us yammered and cursed, everyone on the freak-circuit seems to know the nationality of everyone else just with one glance and they yelled, "Fucking Auzzies! Always overdoing it. Someone do something, get her out of here, take her away!" They laser-eyed me, her queer companion, "She's your responsibility, fix it!" I was rolling a joint and I kept calmly at it till it was in my mouth and lit, I slowly toked on it then somehow, I don't know how, little me reached down and heaved up her hefferlump mass and slung her across one shoulder, holding her with one arm while I sucked on the spliff with the other. I pushed my way thru the dancing crowd, past shocked tourists eating at their tables, knocking all and sundry out of the way, chased out of the Pub by curses in foreign tongues, green vomit still oozing from her gob and dripping down my back.

I somehow frog-marched her back to the Hilltop and got her to the door of her room. I asked her if she was OK and able to get to bed on her own and she moaned that she could do it so I left her swaying on the top step. Just as I was about to enter my room I heard a terrible crash and klunk, she'd toppled backwards and cracked her head upon the concrete. Fuckkkkk!!! I rushed over and heaved her up, got her door open and slung her inside upon her bed. I checked her head, apart from a lump she seemed alright and as she slobbered that now she'd be fine I left her to sleep it off.

I saw no sign of her in the morning, nor for the rest of that day. When I tried her door it was locked, I let a few more hours go by but still no sign of her so I banged and banged on her door and finally I heard a moan, some scratch-scratching, the door creaked open and she stood swaying in the shadows, still alive, but barely. She confessed that she'd awoken at some stage and swallowed yet more pills, lucky I'd aroused her as maybe she was close to the edge. Eventually she pulled herself together and went off to the local grungy hospital to have an x-ray on her poor cracked skull but this girl seemed made of titanium, no permanent damage, I think she'd survive a nuclear blast.

In Goa all drugs can be had, if not from some black-marketeer dealer, then from the tin-shed back yard chemists that sell much of anything over the counter, so all drug-lovers have a delirious, dead-head good time there. One of the most popular poisons is that horse-tranquiliser, Ketamine, the Brits and Israelis are particularly fond of it and are forever driving their motorbikes off cliffs and under buses because of it. Nic had cooked up some of the shit and laid out a few lines and assured me it was an interesting, relaxing high. I rarely do drugs, except for an E on New Years Eve for the sacred pagan boost to my flight, everything else makes me violently ill and is no fun, I like to be clear-headed and in control, conscious of every experience. Tired of being such a wowser I thought I'd sniff a little bit of the noxious white goo just to see what she was on about, and how I regretted it!

I vomited and vomited and vomited, I think I even heaved up my intestines, the world spun, kaleidoscopic psychedelia split reality into fractured prisms, I moaned and swore I'd never touch drugs again while Nic stroked my back and said, "There, there, don't worry, it will be all over soon." The hotel staff in the common room next door could hear everything and laughed their arses off, they'd watched the antics of both of us over the weeks and knew I was out of my league.

Nic and I relished Goa four years in a row, and then she gave up on it, it lost its edge for her tho I still love it and have tried to get back there every year, it's a bit like trying to fly to the top of the Himalayas on the back of a genie, hard to do for one only ever gets seven wishes and mine are maybe used up. The cheap seafood, swimming and relaxing 0n the beaches, and above all the wonderful Goan people, so hospitable and accommodating for all the madness they've put up with over the last 50 years of Western hippie/druggie/raver invasions, I've loved the place all my life and will try to always return there, for no other place has the same atavistic, full-on cutting techno-music feast that fuels my spirit, and one has to experience wild India to get there and that's half the fun.

Nic used to stay a lot with me in my apartment in Sydney, I gave her free space, but for the last few years she has grown more distant from me, maybe our friendship's shelf-life is over, maybe she's had me, heard all there is I've got to say, usually scowling at her pathetic drug use, we were once so happy just to be together, now she's afraid/tired of me, I must be a bore in my old age. Like most guys who get with her, I wanted her for life, she gives off a light, a hot excitement, an intelligent frisson, we agree politically/philosophically on most things, we hate the Beast as if in tandem, two alley cats in a dumpster yowling at an unjust world, there's very few such compatriots about for this loner soul.

But I find such egregious drug-addiction really selfish, narcissistic, nihilistic, stupid, just get stoned at whatever cost and go unconscious for a lot of the time. Gee, how exciting, how life enhancing, really grabbing life by the throat and wringing the maximum fun/knowledge from every drop, I think not. Nic has apparently read this Blog and is livid, maybe head-hunting me, she can have my head, she's already had my heart. Don't worry love, it's all fabricated bullshit, a larger-than-life character I've based on you, for the fun of it, I could be dead tomorrow and I just had to tell some of your story cause maybe you never will, clever and beautiful as you are. Yeah I'm uptight you've dumped me but for a few hours there you brightened my life immeasurably, you were the goddess, the Amazon Warrior Bitch, the Queen of the Zombies.

P.S. Nic finally got in contact with me and she still loves me, which chuffs me endlessly, and she loves this story, thinks it's very funny. She's been busy all year, working for a sex workers' support group that flies her all around Asia to organize the hookers and teach them about fighting for their rights etc. She was also busy with the post-funeral arrangements of 3 of her junkie friends who died this year of heroin overdose or their bodies simply fell apart after life-long heavy drug use, she's a very loyal friend, but their stories are a sobering lesson for anyone considering forgetting that old aphorism, "all things in moderation".

I'm pleased to discover she herself has dried out and is courageously taking on the world to have an exciting life, my derision of her daily lying in bed stoned was wrong. I have abandonment issues left over from childhood and am distrustful of my friends, imagining them ever "leaving me", but the REAL beloved do come back, like boomerangs, and I'm always there to catch them. Nic is for life, I could write a novel about her, my heart is beaming.

Caught in a Dreamcatcher.

I got a call from my mother's nursing home that she'd had a fall, maybe a mini-stroke, but was Okay, yet I felt it was my filial duty to go the vast distance down to Mornington Peninsula in Victoria to check her out. I got off the bus at the wrong place and walked for miles down the Nepean Highway in a freezing wind, missed the nursing home that hid behind a new-age fitness centre and was about to give up but thought, nah, my poor old mum, I've got to see her, for all her cold indifference to much of my queer adult life, she suffered a lot to endure my childhood.

So I asked an old lady standing on a street corner and she directed me to the place. It was quite a nice set-up, not scungy like some I've worked in, she had to pay $65000 deposit to get in there and I was relieved it was more like a 2 star motel, not a medieval dungeon. I was led thru a doddering crowd of internees in Nogod's waiting-room to a frail, ancient Jezebel crouching on a couch vacantly staring into a television set that was incongruously playing the Beatles "A Hard Days Night", all those cheery pop songs and comic antics washing ineffectually over the geriatrics' white-haired heads. My mom had a terrible black eye from her fall and when it was announced that "Toby", her illustrious son, had come to visit her, she looked up at me puzzled, a frown on her face, she didn't know who I was. Her frown deepened, maybe she thought I was my dad come back to haunt her, she didn't seem to appreciate this enthusiastic man standing over her shouting, "Hi, mom, it's me, your son, back from the dead!"

The mini-stroke that caused her fall seemed to have wiped out her last few cognitive brain cells, she was now an empty shell, eventually she gave that false-toothy smile of hers that she always used to charm a hostile world and I sat with her for an hour, shouting pleasantries into her profoundly deaf ears, causing all the other oldies to jump and stare, as if maybe I was their own lost son trying to engage them. One old man sitting next to her shook with Parkinsons' disease, I could smell shit and antiseptic and death and tried not to get depressed. Nogod help us, I swear I won't end up this way, I'll die with my boots on, out on the road, on some grandiose adventure, grabbing life by the throat, ecstatic to the max. I remembered as a child I'd dreamed that I'd get rich and famous one day and buy my mom a mink coat to repay her for all her ordeals, it never happened, I was a dharma bum, and in my travels once a year I made it to her far-flung abode and tried to share my high with her, to no avail, she was in love with poker-machines and AFL football, not my thing.

For all my shouting she took no notice and gazed blindly at John Lennon wisecracking in a bathtub, the sight of him made me sadder, I might as well be talking to a doorknob, I kissed her and walked out, the sun was going down and there were few buses back to the city, the nursing home was part of the life cycle in these modern times, and heart-weary I had to accept it. Back in Melbourne my niece Nuala consoled me by taking me to the Coburg drive-in movies to see "District 9", we smoked pot in the car, ate bad hamburgers and laughed and cried at the wild action, I felt somewhat soothed and exhilarated at the alien's humanity, at last some good sci-fi to light up this entropic universe.

When I got back to Sydney I was lolling around my flat one night when there was a knock on the door, "Who is it?" I shouted. "Brandon!" Oh shit no, my old fuck buddy come back after 7 years to plague me like a bent penny. I let him in to hear his tales of misadventure, he was speeding off his brain, had dirty bare feet and proceeded to crush up some eckies and snort them greedily while informing me his wife had left him and he took on odd jobs for biker gangs beating up hapless punters who had "dobbed to the cops". I was in trepidation he would get around to the old sore of me fucking him all night relentlessly but thankfully instead he asked me if I wanted to go for a drive out to the distant suburb of Fairfield to pick up some pot. I needed an adventure so I acquiesced and tightened my seat belt, I was in for a bumpy ride.

We got in a beat up Toyota which he then drove like a rally car, rocketing in and out of the city traffic, cursing any slow driver in screamed purple prose, the radio blaring rock, techno and rap, me thrilling to the roller-coaster existence, Brandon regaling me with hair-raising tales of rumbling with the Kooris, broken legs and cracked backs. We got the pot and smoked ourselves high and tore thru the city again, like djinns on an arcane treasure hunt. He's an accomplished driver, I trusted him and relaxed into it, in the face of the Void we laughed demonically. He dumped me at my flat and zoomed off into the night promising to return soon, I didn't see him again for 3 days, he came back bearing a gift he'd found in a squat to mollify my uptightness at his speedy comings and goings. He gave me the most magnificent, elaborate dream-catcher, something I've always wanted and waited for years for someone of my tribe to present me with. It now hangs above my bed and traps the bad vibes and amplifies my cool dreams, to make them come true.

And one dream did indeed come true that same week, the most beautiful boy in the world has walked into my head-space and lodged in my heart, like the eternal Friend, a manifestation of the Green One, his name is Felix (the cat?), he seems to really like me, respect and trust me, he beams like the morning star onto me and brightens the shadows. Way back since primary school quite a few gorgeous boys have walked with me on my long journey, for awhile, virtually all of them have been straight, my perverse luck, sweet-natured, intelligent, cool, for some strange reason they get a kick out of having a gay boy as a best friend, they must need the psycho-emotional support and dig the "difference", but there's never any sex. Not to worry, as my old mother used to say, sex evaporates quickly, friendship is solid. Perhaps one of the most beautiful things about living on this terrifying planet with flawed humanity is that when a human being is beautiful he/she is almost a miracle. I am yet again ecstatic, fortune has smiled after a period of bad luck, a gloriously beautiful soul has looked at me and brought tears to my eyes. I'm not talking about lust here, just pure friendship and as a wise old man I know it is a treasure beyond compare.

He took note when I said I was a groupie for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and got me free tickets to Dvorak's "Cello Concerto" with a young Frenchman, Gautier Caucon, spinning gold wildly upon his cello. I didn't realise the tickets were given out at Felix's music class at school and I freaked at the prospect of his fellow schoolies and teachers seeing him with one of Sydney's most notorious homosexuals. When I declared they'd all laugh at him the next day at school he bravely assured me he didn't care, he was old enough to do what he wanted, he's 19 and they'd just be jealous of him anyway. He then courageously sat between two crazy poofs, me and Peter, the violin virtuoso getting off on the many maestros' techniques, while his schoolies filed past us to get to their seats, me biting my tongue as this is an era when "gay" is the most pejorative term shouted in the schoolyard. "This is existentially BAD!" I groaned as yet another schoolie in blazer and tie squeezed politely past me, but nobody turned a hair, "We're in the year 2009, Toby, things are different. The young are more knowledgeable, progressive and out-front." I trusted him and relaxed and got very high on the Dvorak concerto, floated to the ceiling of the Opera House, went into Nirvana, especially as I had a brave beautiful soul sitting next to me proud to be my friend.

I got brought back to earth at the "Don't Put Shit on Me Cafe", which is the oft-sung lament of Vitto who can dish out the shit but can't take it, he'd teamed up with a precious queen I call Lady Poncenby to decry the smart-arse mouth of the Punk Poofy Cat, mock-scandalised at my poetic offensiveness while Vitto doesn't mind forever castigating "the tightness of nuns' cunts". They're like the two ugly sisters who don't want Cinderella, me, to go to the ball, and are jealous, (yes, the whole human race is jealous!) of my vivacious electric grasp of life, the beautiful souls that team up with me and turn me from a frog into a prince. That in the face of ever-present death I ride life like a bucking bronco while the two grumpy queens knit scarves like old ladies at a funereal, that I chase my dreams and catch them, and am caught, with a sparkle in my eyes, another con-job to get by in a hostile world.

A Night at the Royal Yacht Club.

After “Dharma Bums” I went on to read Kerouac’s “Big Sur”, his follow up novel where he devolves from enlightened Nirvana at one with nature to the alcoholic’s heebie jeebies where all nature’s shadows had a monster lurking within. The aging process can bring with it a scrambling of the brain cells, a slackening of the will, a flaccidity in the guts and fatigue of the heart, and I’m no different, the dissolute pagan, the fallen yogi, the cynical zorro. Still I’m inspired by Jack’s poetic flow, letting it all hang loose, like dirty laundry flapping in the nuclear wind, and I’ll try just letting the shit pour out, describing one mad night in futuristic pirate-port Sydney.

Wally, one of the old-time freaks from the Piccolo Pressure Cooker, was turning sixty and his sister was throwing him a party at the Rosebay Royal Yacht Club and he invited all and sundry to come along, open bar, quality food laid on and a nice band he wanted people to foxtrot to. Foxtrot? His family must be old fogies but as it was a feast for free, it was for me. Wally had been a deadbeat ex-junkie pothead bum who’d hung about the Piccolo for 30 years, sometimes raving mad, who’d finally inherited great wealth, an apartment and a huge weekly allowance, he was so nonplussed he walked about the Cross handing out $10 notes to any junkie or hooker who passed by with a desperate look on their face. He smokes pot like a chimney on a street corner with a gang of hungry hanger-ons, is a kooky dude and I imagined his party might be a squeaky scream.

My niece Nuala was in town fresh from Europe, Rosebay was a sweet place to take her, she saw Sydney from afar, lit up like a jeweled fairy-queen’s crown, and the yachts twinkling and bobbing in the harbor below. Past million-dollar mansions, into the ritzy Royal Yacht Club we go, me defying the shirt and jacket dress code by wearing jeans and t-shirt, but maybe as the notorious artist I’m given some leeway. I didn’t realize Wally was from an upper middle-class Jewish family with an ex-wife and grown kids, he seemed to live on the edge, he’d only just got out of the Acute Psyche Ward at the Prince of Wales Hospital and this other life of his surprised me. The sister and brother-in-law came over to question and peruse me, a look of befuddlement on their polite faces. I bullshitted diplomatically about my “profession” as an artist, the wonders of Wally and our great friendship, they soon got over my “Creature from the Black Lagoon” looks and went back to hugging family members, leaving me to scoff up every yummy treat handed out by the hovering caterers. “I’m starving, I’m going to eat enough for three days sustenance,” I blurted into a crowd of prim smiles, they know we’re Wally’s deadbeat friends from the Piccolo, freakzone central, and they’re ready for the worst of depredations.

My niece was the best looking woman in the room and the best looking guy, a six foot six tall, drop dead gorgeous hunk, who turns out to be Wally’s 22 year old son, standing high above the orderly crowd, zeroes in on Nuala and decides she’s the one he’ll try to crack onto, the tough registered nurse who's just done the East London medical war zone, only he doesn’t know how to talk to girls, especially forward headstrong girls like her, it’s a disaster, he stands in front of her open-mouthed, ummming and aaahing. And he’s got a short side-kick who’s jumping out of his skin when he gets near us, afraid of getting bum-raped, I called the two of them Jack and the Beanstalk, and I wouldn’t mind knocking off Jack myself, he was a lively Mediterranean type, I bet he’d jump like a bean in bed, I could only dream, me the subterranean. We turned our attention to the booze and food, chicken mince, oysters, lamb chops, duck pancakes, skewered prawns, beef rolls, seafood dumplings, tempura zucchini, then deserts, wild berries, chocolate pudding, lemon meringue, butterscotch birthday cake, coffee, chocolates, I ate and ate like an ascetic Hindu sadhu at a festival for Laxmi, the Goddess of wealth, I won’t see the likes of this for another seven years.

Throughout this bacchanalia of food, wine and jolly jabbering over electronic ‘Sixties pop muzak, I got annoying phone calls from my old mate Cody, he named himself after the “On the Road” hard-living wanderer, just back from surfing in Bali he wanted to have a wild night out and I like a dope invited him to the yacht club party. He is also a reformed junkie/alcho, once the baddest drunk, he’d smash up pubs and beat up the door-men, banned from Byron Bay and Nimbin Town for riot and afray, which really takes some villainy, but he’d always behaved himself with me and I thought he’d be a good fit with Wally. I should’ve known something was wrong when he rang me 7 times asking for directions and telling me the cops had got him halfway there. What the fuck was his problem?

He showed up dead drunk, swaying in the middle of the room, then rushed the open bar and guzzled down as much booze as he could lay his hands on. He then tried to drunkenly chat up any and every Jewish matron in sight, he was hoping to crack a sugar-momma, all the staid mothers star-struck at his drooled blandishments, bemusedly wondering if he was for real. All thru this a frumpy young fashion-violator stuck her camera in everybody’s face as if she were Fran Liebowitz immortalising the jetset and when we told her to fuck off she got aggressive and went out of her way to annoy us, sneaking photos from any angle, frying our eyeballs with her flash, my niece Nuala wanted to kick her arse.

Wally’s family then interrupted the fun with grandiloquent speeches about Wally’s amazing achievements, on and on, the most amazing of which was the fact that he’d reached sixty. All the Piccolo freaks sat up the back and giggled, Charles Haughtry turning to me and whispering, “What in Hell are Wally’s great achievements?” “Well, he was once a successful drug runner, he escaped from a gaol in Penang and he hasn’t been in gaol for a few years, he recently got out of the psyche-bin and hopefully won’t be going back there for a few months….” We broke up the celebratory atmosphere with our laughing and Cody shouting at the top of his voice, “Yeah, right on! Go for it! Get down! No shit! You said it baby!” He was getting himself worked up for a tear-the-roof-down brawl, I grew nervous, flipped and dragged him out front of the Royal yacht Club and told him if he didn’t shut up I’d dump him at the Rosebay Cop-shop a few doors up the road.

When we went back in they were applauding a slide-show of Wally’s fabulous life, infancy, childhood, teens, hippie youth, and one horror shot when he was about 35 with mutton-chop side-burns and big moustache. I shat myself as the photo called up a long forgotten memory, back in about 1985 when I was living in Pyrmont Squats. Wally had showed up with a girlfriend of mine, Sylvia of Wood Nympho fame, bullshitting us that he was one of the last of the royal Romanov family, aristocrats chased out of Russia, and he still had the crown jewels stashed in banks all over Europe and all he needed was a girl to fly overseas and claim them back for him and she’d get a good share of the riches. Avaricious, dumb Sylvia believed him and was all worked up about getting her hands on the diamonds and rubies. He wanted to take her to dinner at the Ritz Hotel to go over the details and she got dolled up like Cinderella for the grand event only to come home late at night furious because he’d tried to lure her to a room and then made her pay for the meal, it all having been a con job, him a dirty old man just trying to get into her pants. For a few weeks we were shitting ourselves that he’d come back to the squats to harass us, he seemed so deviant and sleazy, he could’ve been a serial killer. But no, it was just Wally scamming the world, part of his great achievements.

Cody continued hassling all the well-coiffed matriarchs, falling drunk on everyone till Wally’s son took him by the scruff of his neck and marched him to the front door. The crowd bayed, “Whose friend is this?” “He’s Toby’s friend! Toby is responsible for him!” Fuck! I had to refuse a free lift back to the city and chase non-existent cabs thru the back-streets of Rosebay, Cody staggering like a zombie behind Nuala and I. We got fed up coaxing him along, when we came to a cul-de-sac and he walked straight into the wall, we figured we’d done enough, we picked up our pace and ran over the hill, leaving him to eat our dust. He must’ve collapsed on some millionaire’s lawn and slept there till dawn. I got a phone-call two days later asking me if I knew where he’d parked his car. Nogod, he’d been driving blind-drunk, no wonder the cops had got him. Anyway, the great Kerouacian Cody is off my social list for awhile.

We made it to a rock’n’roll pub down on Broadway called the Agincourt to see a mate’s crashing band, Redbee, and got sent to electric heaven for a few hours so the night ended well, hot white static fuzzing our brains, bringing on ecstasy, leaving polite middle-class society and Royal Yacht Clubs far, far behind.

Dharma Bums at the Ugly Parlour.

The Piccolo Bar is the opposite of a beauty parlour, it doesn't take long there before things turn ugly, anyway beauty often comes from a bottle, ugliness is more truthful, the human condition, flawed and real, the Piccolo is so ugly it's beautiful, my latest zen koan. Vitto knits in his corner like Madame Lafarge at the French guillotine, like Rumplestiltskin weaving gold from straw, like Yoda the Jedi warrior brandishing a light-sword with his third eye, like a stoic atop his plinth out in public day in day out, like Li Po the Taoist monk spouting poetry from under a grungy bridge, with the ultimate Buddhist compassion and generosity, giving away the many gifts delivered to him at the Cafe, especially the books, so many books dumped there, for all the book junkies like me that hang around the arty-farty hotspot.

The latest book I snapped up off the table is Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums" and it's sent me into a zen swoon, it's my favourite of his books, I last read it when I was a teenager and it influenced me greatly, I hitched across Auz and around the world, meditated under trees by rivers atop mountains and got high on the starry heavens and wrote poetry on the wind. And then, like Jack, I got old, tired and cynical and lost my way. Thankfully I didn't become a drunk and kill myself young like that dear, poor genius master, I've no taste for booze or genius, maybe genius kills young. I'm more like a Neanderthal in a cave watching the shadows cast by the flames of my campfire, I still seek out the light, as I head towards my dotage I might even calm down and find the Void in the tubulence swirling around me.

My nights are now still, Cursula next door got given the hard word, three strikes and you're out, she creeps in once a week, Bawl must've finally moved out of his parent's house and rented a room and next door is just used as storage for all her dumpster-diving trash. And the nutter upstairs started throwing rocks and bottles from his balcony at those passing below and the cops seem to have taken him away as silence reigns and I am free to contemplate the miracle of consciousness in the deep of the night.

For all the devils I've met on my long road I still find life an exquisite experience and get a satori every other second, sunshine, starlight, friend's smile, dog's lick, music beat, bike ride with breeze in my face, the illusion is beautiful, Mind is wondrous, and ugliness is interesting. I've always been an unashamed dharma bum, not interested in fame, money, possessions, achievements, history would stop if it depended on me. I thrive on EXPERIENCE.

If the worst came to the worst and I was evicted, bankrupted and friendless, I would hit the road, sleep in ditches, camp by billabongs, like I did when I was fearlessly young, I was never happier than in those wandering times, and when it's all behind me I'll wander again, nirvanic, and all those dickheads who fucked me, you know who you are, for all the lies, continue eating shit, like you've always done. Ha ha ha, I have divine madness, I'm an ugly dharma bum.

Piccolo Life.

This is my latest attempt at trying to capture the Piccolo Bar, I keep reaching for it and am getting closer to being satisfied, though maybe a wild cubist/surrealist vision will be the only way to give a true portrayal.

My latest name for this hot-spot is The Pressure Cooker Cafe as all the action is squeezed into a small box and when anyone is tense, euphoric or hysterical a furore bursts forth like ectoplasm from the spirit world. Yesterday I had a terrible flip-out, on edge from giving up smoking with that bad-arse psycho-drug Champax, I let GlenorGlenda get to me, his nagging had me shrieking and ready to break his turtle-neck, I shook for hours after it. It was so embarrassing, two straighties from Perth shot out of the cafe like cannonballs, I think I'd rather smoke than rip ears from heads. All who enter beware, the ley-lines that meet here bring out any latent craziness. But there's also lots of joy and love if one remains patient and has eyes and heart to see it.

Visions of India.

The Hunger-Artist.

This rave is a carry-on from the previous post where I bitch about the hard slog of the non-careerist artist. I am absolutely spewing about yet another outrage committed against my saintly self so be prepared to get splattered by my vitriol.

When I was a kid I told my father that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up and his face dropped, although a working-class man he knew what was what and that it meant a life of toil, tears and troubles. It's bad enough that a wannabe artist has to face Big Powers along the way, "experts" with millions of dollars and governments behind them, who are like Cerberus dogs at the Gates of Hell tearing to bits many applicants hoping to be hung in their hallowed citadels of Art.

But when you get shat on by talentless brain-dead nobodies with 7 cents worth of power on the doors of back-alley galleries it's infuriating to the point of me getting violent and wanting to kick arse. My friend Richard Machine had updated my cyber-gallery at Soulprojector.com with a new links page and as I was perusing the various titles I came across "Kings Cross Art" and checked it out, and here's the bad-arsed story about the kind of low-down dirty tricks that get perpetrated against the hopeful all along the way.

About seven years ago I got a call from a moronic booze-hound who thinks he's a poet but is really a bag of bad breath. I call him Robert Baywatch because he's notorious for hanging around the life-drawing classes at the Bloodtap Gallery and perving on the naked pussy of the models. He asked me to submit my latest prize-winning drawing to a book of his arse-wipe poetry that was just being published and I said OK, thinking about no payment as per usual but it's cool to help him out. He then stated that I would have to pay him $300 for the privilege of being included to which I replied that I was long over paying to get published, I was always hoping to be paid, and therefore I refused my art to him.

The alcohol-pickled deadhead waited like a crocodile and got revenge a couple of years later when, after I won the People's Choice award at the Images of the Cross Contest, he had the power over who got hung at the Bloodtap Gallery and asked me to politely fuck-off with my painting after three days while the exhibition carried on. I complained bitterly about this, writing him a poison-pen letter, I have no power except with my pen, using it as a sword. Now I've discovered he's got extra revenge by colluding with some fuckwit student from the art college to post a page about a show of mine but excluding my work totally from the walls.

The chief librarian at Kings Cross Library asked me to put on a show of my drawings, posters and paintings depicting Kings Cross for the "Kings Cross Arts Festival". Gavin Harris and I worked for weeks on the show and called it "Cross Crazies." I had 21 works to fill the venue, but being ever the naive co-operative fool, I thought why not give a young friend of mine a chance and invite him to show two works alongside mine, then we invited a third artist to also show his stuff. I didn't have to do this but I am just not that cut-throat competitive, elitist or exclusive and it's always been my downfall. I foolishly never flashed that in this tough time of 7 billion wailing, scrambling humans, even the art-world is ruthless, the top of the heap involving such enormous fame and wealth it's worth betraying anyone and everyone for the prize of being the "world-reknowned artist", if one is soul-less enough to want it that bad.

Years later I find this page "Kings Cross Art" put up by the slimebag Robert Baywatch in which he mentions my name so that if you Google T.Z. his page comes up, but there's not one photo of my art there, there's Nick's two images, both of which you'd never guess were about Kings Cross, and then there's photos of a poetry reading given by the little zombie, Robert Baywatch, his name mentioned twice. What the pea-brain actually does is literally show what a bastard he is, it's there for the thinking person to see, my show but no pics of my work and his name pushed, tho he has nothing to do with Kings Cross Art. What to say about talentless alcoholics, do they even have lives? This guy looks like one of those velociraptors out of "Jurassic park", red leather face, bird-brained and vicious. Young female artists have told me he's always trying to sleaze onto them with his 7 cents worth of power he's dredged from Loosely Dimwit who runs the Bloodtap Gallery.

And he's just one of the arts-holes I've met in the long travail slogging up the pyramid of shit that is the Art world. There's three posters of mine for sale for near $1000 each at the Joseph Lebovic Gallery that were not bought from me, they seem to have been stolen from an archives somewhere and the Gallery didn't even put my name on two of the works though my signature is all over them, they've bullshitted that the work is from "Guttersnipes", my studio tag at the time of production. I hand-printed these posters while on the dole, spending all my money to make them, going without, starving, the proverbial hunger-artist who eventually disappears, the designs stolen, the artist never having existed.

There are 16 of my posters in the Print Collection at the National Gallery in Canberra, again most of which were not paid for, the money collected by the "Earthworks" and "Lucifoil" Collectives. They excluded me from the Catalogue they got printed up, "The Walls Also Speak", I'd paraphrase it with "also crash down upon the artist's head" as that's what the rush to fame and wealth involves. They've got me down as a member of their bullshit collectives when I was never invited to participate in any of their kudos/money/decision-making processes and I printed all my works as an independent artist, paying them all costs involved. After seven years of slaving at the Tin Sheds, when a job finally came up to teach silk-screen printing and I applied for it, the "Juicy-toil" bitches knocked me back for an arsehole who'd just walked in the door, (they got rid of him several weeks later as he tried to crack onto the 'feminists'.) Now they got me in the records as a member of their 'Collectives' and my work is "Copywrited", to whom I'd like to know as I can't get access to it.

I am a street artist, with no connections and powerless, except for this one little Blog where I state all this "for the record", it's not just my side of the story, it's the truth. One of the many underlying threads running throughout this Blog is the travail of the artist, the heights and pitfalls. Lucky for me I don't put all my existential eggs in that one "arts basket", I have a great life with fantastic adventures and beautiful friends and all those arts-holes can't take that away from me. I'm not the greatest artist in the world but I'm not the worst, eyeball the works above as proof that I do have some reason for calling myself an "artist". As much as some arts-holes try they can't wipe me from the many walls where my work has hung and still exists, scumbags like Baywatch will long be forgotten but my work will live on and that's my real revenge. (Wank wank but what else can a scruffy alley-cat do?)

The Punk Poofy Cat Has Landed.

In Chinese hocus-pocus this is supposed to be my year as I'm an earth Ox, having been born sixty years ago, and it's certainly worked out fabulous so far as, after much angst, I got my mother in a nursing home and I'm about to finish the grand novel I've been slaving over for seven years, The Seven Fucked-up Lives of the Punk Poofy Cat. Also I got an art exhibition, Vagabond World, in a back-alley of cyberspace with Soulprojector, and finally I learned how to drop photos into this Blog so from now on there will be illustrations, the Cat has landed on his hairy pink feet and is loving it.

I grew up in Melbourne but left that city when I was 21 and I never exhibited art there. When I flew back into Auz I chose Sydney to live in, it was 1977 and it seemed more cutting edge, which ended up meaning I got my throat cut. Within a few months I entered an anti-nuclear art show at the Opera House Gallery of all places and my painting of Lord Shiva with an atomic cloud exploding as He did his dance of destruction got a commendation from some guy raving about nuclear proliferation.

It was all down-hill from there I'm afraid as I only ever got exhibited in the Sydney underground, never invited to any galleries, openings, shows or soirees, kicked in the arse, stabbed in the back and ripped mercilessly by every wannabe I met in the climb up the pyramid of shit. Many of my works have ended up in "high culture" sites like the National Gallery in Canberra, the Powerhouse Museum and the Josef Lebovic Poster Gallery but most of it wasn't paid for, basically stolen from archives with me left to starve in the proverbial derelict garret.

Every dickhead wants the cachet of being "the artist" and make millions with prints of their butt-holes, it's a cunt of a proffession/life, you're dependant on wankers who work as curators for Govt. galleries to bestow the validation, otherwise you're finger-painting in the wilderness. But what the hell, now there's cyberspace and anyone can get their work up and out there, with no one at the door to bounce you, I pray. So from now on I will post old and new artworks and I hope, you, the unknown voyeur, will cogitate upon my radical, scurrilous visions. Enjoy!

Howling at the Full Moon Cafe.

I was snapped back to present day reality at the Piccolo Cafe by the ballyhoo of yet another madman crashing through the door. I'd been surfing the infinities of cyberspace via my laptop and it was a rude jolt to suddenly find this maniac spitting in my face and throwing the furniture about. His name is Gregory, another troll from under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, he gets about with his shirt open down the front so we have to look at his hairy man-boobs and he's always having a wild, raving conversation with himself, "Gregory did this, Gregory says that...", it's distracting in the extreme.

As usual, he's spent all his money on the drug-addict whores up the street and now begs for coffee and cigarettes off Vitto, snatching what he wants from the table and yelling how he deserves it after all his good custom. In his fury he threw more objects willy-nilly, swearing like a Blooper, just missing some mums and dads with their kids, all the straight customers jumped up and disappeared and Vitto had to call the police to have him taken away, his medication crammed down his throat in some back-street clinic I hoped.

As soon as one lunatic goes, another takes his place, as if there's a sign in all the out-patient psycho-wards saying, "If you're flipped out, go to the Piccolo, don't come here!" Philomena the bag-lady has pushed her way in and squeezed all her belongings into the corner, in her seventies, eternally wearing a night-dress, she seems to suffer from dementia and causes havoc having hissy fits wherever she goes so that no hotel or rented premises will have her and the poor bitch is left to live on the streets. Here she is raving nonsensically at anyone and everyone, disturbing other conversations and, to put the cherry on the cake, dropped a turd onto the floor right between her feet.

When it was pointed out she denied ownership and poor old Vitto had to get down on his knees and clean it up. She hissed and squawked till she was asked to leave and give us all a break to which she started screaming like she was being raped, then picked up a glass sugar container and threatened to klonk Vitto on the head with it. We all had to keep our distance as she was a vicious old battle-axe, an accomplished cabaret dancer in her day, she had the legs of a mule and could kick your guts in if you got too close. We had to wait for another hour before she slowly gathered up her many plastic bags and split, banned from ever crossing the threshold again.

I hoped I could soon catch my breath and get back into cyber-surfing but along came another flip-out, this time one of my best friends, Charles Fauntleroy, as if I don't have enough madness surrounding me. He's let his obsession for Peter Pumpkin get out of control, as if he's an egregious junkie denied smack, only he's denied love, like Glen Close in "Fatal Attraction", and I got to see up close how mad he is, not believing the tales recounted to me in the past. Last Friday night, after a hectic day had by all, me and Peter decided to have a quiet one, a drink at Allison's house, who herself was ill and exhausted, then home for a good sleep. Charles rang and asked if he could join us, we made our apologies and said, "Not tonight, we're having an early one, see you soon."

This sent him over the edge, he felt rejected and that he was missing out on something, possibly a liason between me and the violin virtuoso, he thinks we're the Three Stooges and are contracted to always be together. He rang again and was again politely told we needed to chill, and then he set to harass us inordinately, ringing/texting all our mobiles seventy-seven times each, no exaggeration, our conversation interrupted, Peter's practice at violin disturbed, a pleasant evening ruined by Charles' spoilt-brat demands, till we all turned off our phones to shut up the racket.

Just as we were drifting off into ecstasy to Peter's new gypsy violin compositions there was a loud banging at the front door, like the cops doing a raid or some Muslim father come to demand his virgin daughter's return. Peter let the hysterical slob in, Charles launching into his old refrain of being vulnerable and needing support, and apologising for his furor but he was a sensitive being who needed much mollycoddling. I could stand it no longer and rushed out yelling, "Get out of my way you fat cunt! Your behaviour is appalling, I now see how your obsession with Peter is offensive harassment and for this you are being sent to Coventry for a few weeks!"

I ran off up the street but to my horror he chased me, trying to explain himself, asking why we didn't include him in our soiree and repeatedly moaning, "What does this all mean?" like it was some intellectual stage-play whose metaphors he wanted to solve. I yelled for him to "fuck off!" and finally shook him from my tail a few yards from my front door. And here he is at the Cafe Lobotomy with a torrent of excuses and apologies which I don't want to listen to, much else of my life is a mess and I don't need him adding to it. I told him I'll calm down in a few weeks but so as not to enable his temper-tantrums I was giving him a rude REALITY CHECK and banishing him from my presence for awhile.

Ayesha the Drag(on) Lady is on one of her periodical manic flights, jabbering and posturing like Fu Man Chu on acid, when I tried to get a word in she rushed over and slapped my face to which I could only laugh, she's so pathetic a slap back wouldn't improve things. Tired of howling at the Full Moon Cafe I went home but that was like going from the pan to the fire, Northcott Place is the biggest lunatic asylum in the southern hemisphere, the State having closed down all the chronic psyche hospitals and dumping the mentally ill into public housing, most of them at my joint. There's a new guy directly above me who rushes from his apartment many times a day screaming for the birds to stop twittering and singing, he throws buckets of water at the trees and waves big sticks, yelling, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" He's even threatened the old ladies on his floor to get the fuck out of his face whenever he meets them in the corridor and has us all quaking in terror at where it will all end.

And my next door neighbour, Cursula, is the worst of them all, she gets the Shit-brown Ribbon for grungy contrariness. It all came to a head the day before I ran away to Nimbin, after her Mongolian yurt had been burnt down she'd rebuilt her hobo's camp up into a vast ragged circus-tent in front of my door, attracting every drunk, junkie, schitzo and derelict in the area to sit yahooing with her till dawn. I was too scared to go out my door but luckily she had another fight with her boyfriend Bawl and called the cops on him, they first took him away and fined him for "disturbing the peace", then came back the next day, saw the mess she'd made of the area, discovered she was sleeping in the workers' toilet instead of her own apartment and dragged her off to Caritas Acute Psyche Clinic for a few weeks respite.

Respite was what I got, peace and quiet reigned through the nights, I finally caught up on my sleep, the neighbours cleaned up her mess and the Housing Department came and told her if she continued with the dumpster-diving she would get evicted. She's come back in the last few days, within seven minutes she started the noise and rubbish collection again, speaking loudly lots of nonsense in an elevated whining voice, typical of long-term Methadone addiction, her brain-cells fried and re-programmed into maniacal self-centerdness.

She woke me up whining loudly to some fellow zombie how her next door neighbour hates her and won't let her keep her precious stuff stacked up out the front. I heard the zombie reply, "Don't worry luv, I've got a six foot boyfriend who'll come and sort him out. I promise you you've got support, I know lots of people who have filled their flats with junk till you can't squeeze in, what's wrong with that?" I tried not to worry but this isn't the only one, Cursula has inveigled other deadheads to join her brigade, no one else listens to her, she's like the Witch of the Zombies and can set her army of the walking dead onto whoever crosses her, and so I lay awake shitting myself cogitating how I could counteract her cunning passive-aggressive war tactics?

I know, I'll get a zombie of my own to sick onto hers, it'll be like" the Zombie Wars" with Northcott as the battlefield. A mate of mine has come from out of the past, just got out of gaol, seven times as nasty as anything she can throw up, with one of those zombie wranglers around his neck I can direct him to whatever bastard she's entertaining out the front. Again she woke me up bullshitting to some workers trying to concrete our verandha about how she's an artist and it was an artist's studio she'd built into the workers' toilet. I screamed from my front door, "She's no artist, she's a drug addict trying to manipulate you!"

She then whined, "Gee Toby, I hoped you'd just wish me well." "You're kidding, after seven years of living hell I wish you dead, do us all a favour, kill yourself!" "I'm calling the police on you for saying that, you not allowed to say that to me!" "Oh yeah, call the cops again, they just love coming here to deal with you. Like you called the cops on Bawl, he won't be back, you'll die a lonely old hag. The cops'll just cart you back to the bin!" She seems to have gone back to the bin of her own accord, for her it's like a holiday camp with dinner served up and a team of therapists waiting on her hand and foot, she'll have them all around her little finger, manipulating the system to get what she wants.

But at least the nights have grown quiet again, I have to take advantage of this halcyonic interlude to rush through my creative projects and/or get some sleep as madness rains down like hail-stones in these tough times and I'll have to work hard not to join their howling, full moon disaffected ranks.

P.S. I saw one of those old lunatic asylum movies once where a nutter was about to tear a few heads off until they played classical music to him and he calmed down. And music did indeed soothe this savage breast, all is not dark and nasty in my world, for I went to the Sydney Opera House to hear the Sydney Symphony Orchestra play William Walton's "Balshazar's Feast", conducted by Vladimir Ashkanazy, that intense genius who has blessed Sydney with his talent this year. I got swept away, lifted out of my body and floating above the choir, tears brought to my eyes, white light hot in my forebrain, music makes the shadows flee and life worth living.

I was the Seventh Lover of Alexander the Great.

I flew through the non-space of the techno-mind and brought up before my inner-gaze the Earth of ancient Greece, three hundred years before the so-called Common Era. I landed, feet firmly placed on hallowed ground where philosophy had grown and flowered with the perennial inquiry as to what the Universe was made of and what a human’s worth and purpose was on this wondrous planet. Was there a soul in each person’s breast, was it eternal, did it cause them to truly love, and how was it possible for the multifarious multitudes to live in harmony with each individual’s needs met? These are BIG questions but I was mainly concerned with the influence of sexuality on history, and so I sought out the man-god of my obsessions, someone I’d chase through all of time just to be his friend.

I stepped into history in the city of Memphis, Egypt, choosing as my avatar a perfect specimen of male beauty from the rough-and-tumble mountains of the north of Greece, Leonnatus, son of Onasus, with the blood of old Macedonian warrior-stock running like molten gold in my veins. I felt confident to shape-shift to the person who best fit my intentions, a boyhood friend of the future king, Alexander. Leonnatus was a shy, uneducated lad who had always been kept on the outer circle of Alexander’s admirers, as an unremarkable country bumpkin he was rarely noticed and so I could slip into his persona without anyone questioning any strange behavior I might embue him with. I awoke to the glorious day when my cherished ambition was realized for I was chosen from the ordinary army regiments to join the exclusive company of Alexander’s personal bodyguard, the Seven Royal Companions. They had watched me from a distance and now I was brought close.

In that illustrious band of special Companions I replaced Arrybas, who had died valiently in battle with the Persians, the very battle where my King had taken note of my valor and prowess, for he admires no one more than a courageous fighting man. Yet it was my diplomacy with the captured Queen of the Persian King, Darius, that commended me above others, for Alexander esteemed above all others those with intelligence and kindness of heart as well as bravery in war, and he desired to have around him only the best of men. I had climbed up through the ranks by impressing my commanders with ingenious tactics and daring exploits, but my blonde good looks may have helped my cause as well, enticing the King to look my way and notice my actions. All of the seven bodyguards are extremely beautiful, brave and intelligent and are more like loyal friends than subjects of Alexander and I am truly honoured to be included in their number.

In Memphis the Great King had himself crowned Pharoah of all Egypt and son of the God Ammon. The oracle of Ammon had reassured him of his divinity at the Oasis of Siwah in Libya; he had always secretly believed the God Zeus had touched his Mother the night of his conception while she was performing her ecstatic role as Snake Priestess. I could readily believe in his godhood as Alexander had a bright presence as well as great personal beauty, and he could inspire legions of men to follow him, even to death. Not that I believed in the gods, but as man made god in his image Alexander fit the bill perfectly and he was such a remarkable character who achieved such incredible feats he definately had some extraordinary spark powering him.

And the whole universe was a party to his endeavours, such as the eagles that attended the outset of his every campaign, and the two hissing snakes that led him and his lost army across the desert to the Oasis of Siwah, where he was told he would indeed conquer the world. Some say he used divinity to magnify his importance in the eyes of his subjects, to appeal directly to their hearts rather than be feared like the harsh, arrogant Macedonian kings of yore. But I think he believed in his god-given mission, as if he had some kind of divine madness.

I think he truly is special, with his keen intellect, super-human endurance and uncanny instinct for the right move, his fearlessness in battle and nobility to those he defeats, all mark him out as a superior human being and can only be explained by him having some type of divine essence. He has been daring in all his pursuits and habits, with his own inimitable style, being the first to shave and bathe daily like an Athenian democrat, unlike his fellow uncouth Macedonians, and was copied by all the Companions such was the high regard they had for him. With his golden hair, piercing blue eyes and shining bronze armour, he looked part-god to me and I was determined to follow him to the ends of the earth if needs be.

At last I was near to the one whom I had adored from afar and worked so hard to reach. I tasted of his food for him and stood guard by his bedroom door, and I prayed to the Gods that there would come a night when he would welcome me to his bed. I dreamed he would take me as a partner to protect his back in the maelstrom of battle and I’d have gladly died by his side, like the ultra-masculine lover-warriors of the Sacred Band of Thebes.

But since childhood Alexander had the devotion of a best mate whom nobody could surpass in his affections, number one in the shining seven, Hephaestion; still I could live and hope that my turn might come some blessed day. Alexander was enchanted by the great heroes of Greek literature, particularly from Homer, and he tried to emulate and better the hero’s feats, repeating the tasks of Hercules, dancing further over the horizon than Dionyssus, achieving greater fame in war than Achilles. My fondest wish was that I could have played Patroclus to his Achilles but that role was assigned to Hephaestion and I could only look on and wonder at what such intense male love could be.

It was at Zariaspa, after the success of the Bactrian campaign, that I nearly lost the friendship I had barely begun with the great Alexander. I had been somewhat swayed by the speech given by Callisthenes protesting the debasing act of prostration Alexander was encouraging in the court, forgetting the lessons in democracy he received from the great thinker Aristotle. I had lately come to question my view of Alexander as a divine incarnation for he revealed in his attitudes and mannerisms an all too human nature.

He could be brutal and vengeful, not only to those who stood against him in war but even old friends were unsafe from his murderous tempers, as in the case of his killing one of his Royal Companions, Cleitus, in a drunken argument. He broached no insult and suffered criticism badly, and was prone to flattery by the court sycophants, something that got on my nerves as well as Cleitus. When he conquered all Persia he seemed to forget he was a Macedonian King, surrounding himself with the pomp and decadence of an Asian satrap and to the scandal of many, dressing in Median fashion. He swapped the tunic for trousers and he donned the pointed bonnet instead of the crested helmet worn by Macedonians since time immemorial.

Worst of all was Alexander had come to expect and enjoy the humiliation of prostration from the vanquished Persians. He had contemplated aloud that it would be a good thing if we Macedonians copied this foolishness as a mark of respect to his evident godhood. Even I, Leonnatus, devoted companion of the King, baulked at such a ridiculous, dehumanizing act, for the ways of Macedonia have held true for countless generations and I could not see why we had to adopt such foreign, barbaric ways just because we conquered their country. I was already infamous for boorish fights, for being kept at arms length by Alexander had me drinking too much and taking it out on whoever crossed my path, the whole Persian influence had made me more cantankerous, especially the adoption of eunuchs into the court, their effeminate carrying-on such an insult to the manliness of the Royal Companions.

One little catamite named Bagoas particularly got my goat as he caught Alexander’s attention with his doe-like eyes and lithe body, and he became a beloved favourite, taking up much of the great one’s free time, leaving little for anyone else. Hephaestion himself was relegated to the sidelines for awhile and I rarely got a look-in, and I hated that little Persian sodomite with a vengeance.

My seething jealousy and hysteria came to a head one night at a court function for all the Persian overlords whom Alexander had chosen to rule the conquered territories in his name. Many of the Royal Companions were present and resentful of the amount of power Alexander was entrusting to these vanquished enemies. While the Macedonians refused to prostrate themselves in front of Alexander up on his throne, the chief diplomat of the Persian contingency flung himself upon the floor. He groveled in such a silly manner that I could not help but burst out laughing, quite raucously, garnering the attention of everybody in the room. The Persians were highly embarrassed and Alexander was furiously angry with me for disrupting the sanctity of the occasion and what he felt was having a dig at his pomposity.

He wouldn’t even look at me for weeks and I was relegated to the back tents on slops duty, until I achieved further valorous deeds and looked sufficiently humble enough to be in his sublime presence again. And all the while his little bugger-boy, Bagoas, gave me smug looks and cryptic smiles so that I wanted to strangle the catamite, only that would’ve finished off my relationship with Alexander for good. It was better to let time pass, Alexander would surely tire of the girlish Persian eunuch given the fabulous masculinity of the warriors around him.

I got myself into his good graces again by fighting harder and thinking smarter than our foe in the following clean-up operations till Alexander was compelled to admire me. He convinced me that his adoption of Persian ways was a political move to appease and win the hearts of the vanquished masses and make the ruling of them less fraught with misunderstandings. Alexander is such a brilliant tactician in all things military and wise in the ways of governance that I came to trust his judgment implicitly as he constantly proved his genius in every one of the campaigns. While he was a butcher to those who scorned his supremacy, he was in the main a benign ruler, replacing despots where ever he found them with humane leaders who would provide just, compassionate governance to the masses, and for this I truly loved him. He was the epitome of the masculine ideal, athletic frame, beautiful face, sharp mind and courageous heart, a living representative of the male supremacy lying at the centre of our ancient Greek system of values. Like Narcissus, I got lost looking for my own reflection in his glorious being.

After he took the impregnable Rock of Sogdiana, Alexander felt exultantly invincible and so he marched his army quickly to the more formidable Rock of Choriennes, confident of somehow conquering its sheer twelve thousand feet height. It was here I excelled in my duty and commended my diligence to my King, who smiled brightly at me again after our estrangement. The Rock was seven miles in circumference and surrounded by a deep ravine with only one narrow path winding up to the fortress at its summit and thus easy to defend and difficult to conquer. Alexander was dauntless and, on viewing eagles flying above the Rock, he was inspired that it augured victory.

He ordered his men to fell the pine forests near the Rock and make ladders of them to climb down to the deepest part of the ravine and there drive in stakes, to have layers of woven wattle placed atop them. Then a layer of soil was put down and thus the ravine was gradually filled to enable his army to climb the rock. We worked day and night, with protective screens built over us to block the bombardments from above, and I was put in charge of the night shift, making a great accomplishment of the job. King Choriennes himself had taken refuge in the fortress and, seeing the relentless success of the Macedonian army in broaching his Rock, was persuaded to surrender, trusting in Alexander’s magnanimous character to treat him honourably. And this Alexander did, believing in the sincerity of Chorienne’s submission, treating him with the utmost consideration, even reinvesting him with control of the Rock and its surrounding territories.

Alexander continued his infatuation with the Persian eunuch, Bagoas, much to the disgruntlement of the Royal Companions. I had other reasons to be jealous as after the Sogdian campaign Alec took a fancy to the Bactrian Princess, Roxanne, and married her. I thought we had lost him to the allure of womanhood but he rarely visited her, keeping her in a tent down the back with all the other Companion’s concubines. I believe the whole affair was a political act to appease the Bactrians, for she was the daughter of their recalcitrant King Oxyartes and Alexander wanted to bind his loyalty to him more surely. He performed his conjugal duties then left her much to herself, preferring the company of Hephaestion or other of the Companions or that little whore, Bagoas. Alexander was a real man’s man and I gushed with pleasure on the days he sought out my presence, whether for a hunting expedition, a military tactics session or a wild carouse with good Macedonian wine.

After all his victories he gave animal sacrifices to the Gods in thanksgiving and he held literary competitions and athletic games in celebration. Everyone vied for the top honours and while I excelled at the physical sports, it was my readings from classic Greek literature that had Alexander swooning and he would look at me tenderly, eyes bright with tears. He loved to hear of Hercules and swore that the blood of the hero ran in his veins. The God he made obeisance to most often after a victory was Dionyssus, patron of the arts and culture, and of ecstatic revelry in wonder of being alive and master of the natural environment. Dionyssus was reputed to have danced all the way to India and Alexander was determined to follow in his footsteps, even to go one better and conquer all India and thus bring the whole world under his domain.

Dionyssus is my own personal patron God and so I wholeheartedly agreed with the grand march to the vast, unknown subcontinent of India though it took me ever further from that land of great thinkers, Greece. We all believed the Universe got involved with men’s fates, especially that of the bright and powerful, and all the world’s manifestations did seem to foretell of Alexander’s greatness, the very animals of the land and air promised him success, and I could only go with the flow.

Alexander did indeed reach India, crossing the Indian Caucasus Mountains where he received the homage and support of King Taxilas of the country below the caravan town of Kabul. Unfit soldiers and friendly natives garrisoned the town of Taxila while Alexander moved on towards the Indus River, conquering all the tribes along the way.

These Indian warriors were the most courageous and ferocious of fighters that Alexander’s men had encountered in all the long campaigns and, in taking the first town we came to in the Aspasian’s territory, Alexander was wounded slightly in the chest by an arrow. The Macedonians slaughtered the whole town and put it to the torch in revenge for the harm done to their king. I myself was wounded and was honoured to spill blood alongside my lord and master. Past the town of Arregaeum we were confronted by an army twice as large as ours and I was given charge of one third of the soldiers and in three sections we attacked the Indians charging from their fortified hilltop. My troops were able to vanquish a superior force allowing the other sections to batter and defeat the rest of the diehard natives. Forty thousand prisoners were sold into slavery and 230,000 oxen captured, of uncommon size and beauty, the best of which Alexander had his pick to send back to Macedonia.

The town of Massaga proved very difficult to take, the siege and attacks spread out over four days. The defenders only asked for a truce once their chief was killed by a missile and Alexander admired their fierce courage so much he asked them to join his army as mercenaries. They agreed but planned to sneak away in the night, as they didn’t have the heart to kill their fellow Indians. Alexander got wind of their desertion and he surrounded their camp, caught them in their escape and had them slaughtered to a man. We went on to conquer the Rock of Aornas, something that fabled Hercules himself could not achieve and thus Alexander continued to outshine the great heros of yore. In all this vicious fighting I proved myself the most valorous and proficient of leaders and Alexander chose me more often as the one to stand guard over him while he slept. And there I stood, deep into the night, thirstily drinking in his precious exhalations.

We were marching ever closer to the Indus River and once across, the whole of India would lie ready for his possession. The legions of Macedonians who had accompanied him the full distance were now tired from the long trek, weary of war and homesick for their own country, aggravated by the harsh Indian environment and with no wish to discover any more new worlds. Alexander had an overwhelming lust to explore and conquer; he had to discover what lay beyond every horizon and could not relax until he had done so. He had been promised the whole world and he felt conquering all India was a necessary part of fulfilling his destiny. But many of his followers did not feel the same and they kept up a continuous grumble about their painful frustrations.

I myself loved the Indian experience and like Alexander was highly desirous of pressing on. Finally arrived the night when I stood guard over his sleeping chamber and we were discussing our mutual love of the mysterious Indian landscape and he invited me to sit on his bed. I couldn’t help myself, before long I veritably fell towards him and kissed him gently on the lips. At first he passively allowed me to make chaste love to his divine figure, kissing his delicious throat, muscular arms, the curves of his chest, his erect nipples. It was deliriously splendid to hold him in my arms and kiss his lips, for a moment I felt like I had melded with divinity and my every fiber was lightning-struck.

For a long while he seemed only half there, enjoying the comfort and affection but his eyes seeming to gaze into infinity. Then of a sudden he came alive and arched his back and moaned so that I held him close and felt his erection throbbing up against my abdomen. He pulled my head up and kissed me with total abandon as I lay between his legs. Gradually he raised his legs and as he bit me on the lip I fell into him, I entered his body and felt his flesh close around me. We rocked to and fro in a delirium of pleasure, a bonfire ignited in my head, a timeless Void engulfed us and we fused like two stars in the black heavens, one radiant sun bursting between us. I recovered consciousness some hours later and found myself alone in the bed and I lay there contemplating my love, stunned by the knowledge that I had fucked Alexander the Great.

For a short while I allowed myself to forget that he was committed to Hephaestion heart and soul, and I prayed that we might grow into discovering a great love. But that little Persian poof, Bagoas, got any left-over lust, I never got looked at in that way again. In a blue moon he chose one of the Companions or outstanding captives as his bedmate, though rarely for more than one night. His greatest, over-ruling lust was for battle, victory, power and knowledge, it was these that drove him ever onward, and myself with him. He never mentioned what had passed between us, never made an intimate gesture and never asked me to his bed again though I groveled at his every beck and call, my nerves tingling in memory of our tryst. I out-achieved the most valiant of warriors in the hope that I could replace Hephaestion as his eternal, one true love but I was wasting my energies. Yet we all live in hope.

At a town called Nysa Alexander was met by a delegation of the locals who gave submission but begged freedom of governance, as this was the very town founded by Dionysus when he came to India and the god himself had given them their freedom. They praised Alexander at having penetrated the subcontinent further than their revered god Dionysus and this appealed to his hubris, having bested his patron God. He acquiesced to their wishes and left them alone to run their own affairs as he wished the same thing for the cities of Alexandria that he had founded all over the world. It is easy to believe that Dionysus had indeed come this way, spreading his ecstatic practices, for the Indians are inordinately fond of singing and dancing and lose their inhibitions in festivities at any given opportunity.

Alexander fervently wished to visit the sacred spot of Mount Merus as it is the only place in all of India where the Ivy plant, dedicated to Dionysus, is to be found. The priests of the shrine prepared a sacred potion from the juices of the vine, mushroom and poppy and Alexander drank of it with deep reverence, along with his Companions and chief officer’s. Once the ivy crown was placed on all the Macedonian heads, we seemed possessed by the god himself, shouting ‘Euoi, Euoi”, dancing wildly and losing our wits in true Bacchic frenzy. Alexander laughed and danced in total abandonment and claimed he could see Mount Olympus in the clouds and that all the gods were streaming from the gates to bestow their blessings upon him. I only had eyes for the King himself, who radiated sublime light like some exquisite treasure.

It was in the battle for the principal town of the Mallians that we nearly lost our magnificent King and leader and where I won the greatest commendation of my military career. As always, he insisted on leading the charge over the walls, being the first over and down into the fray. In battle he went berserk, as if in ecstasy, and gave not a thought to his personal safety. He didn’t notice that the rest of his army was having a hard time scaling the walls, their ladders breaking beneath them, and he was virtually alone in fighting off the hordes of the enemy. A couple of us leapt down with him and helped beat off the ferocious onslaught, for Alexander’s famous huge, white crested helmet informed the attackers of his identity and so they threw themselves at him with murderous eagerness. We slashed and hacked as if possessed by the furies yet the blows rained down upon us so heavily that Alexander received many grievous wounds and collapsed helpless upon the ground.

Peucastas, who had been given the duty of carrying the Shield of Achilles alongside Alexander in battle, held the Shield over him for protection, while I fought like a maniac to keep the enemy at bay. On hearing of Alexander’s danger, his army went berserk, tearing the walls down with their bare hands to rush to his rescue. Thus the town was eventually taken and all its inhabitants put to the sword for the dire act of endangering the King.

Alexander lay very ill for several weeks and we feared he indeed might die, the army wailing at his door day and night. As well as logic and ethics, Alexander had learnt much medicine from his old mentor, Aristotle, and was able to guide his attendants to give him an effective healing regime. I myself nursed him throughout the ordeal, cleaning and stitching his wounds and applying herbal poultices to them, and I gave thanks to the Gods when he eventually recovered.
A captive prince of the defeated Mallions had been kept in chains awaiting Alexander’s verdict once he survived his heinous injuries. This Indian Prince was of uncommon beauty, with skin the colour of dark honey and huge, limpid black eyes shining proudly from his manly face. He was reported to be the bravest, most fearless of warriors and was captured only with the greatest of difficulty.

Yet he had a very sweet disposition and keen intellect and recognizing Alexander’s superiority he lay humbly at his feet, accepting of the King’s will, honoured to be dealt with by the best of men. Alexander took a great liking to the fellow and kept him by his bed like some kind of exotic pet. I myself witnessed their first night, cold and chilly at that time, when the proud prince offered his body as a foot warmer to the shivering King. This endeared the fellow further to Alexander and he laughed and pulled the husky devil up onto the bed with him where they lay most of the night hugging and caressing. They talked at great length on philosophy, fighting styles and the proper governance of Kings and Alexander seemed to take deep consideration of this barbarian’s ideas. I was furiously jealous for it was I who had saved his life and I should have been the one to receive his ardour. On hearing of their intimacy many of the Royal Companions thought it scandalous, for only pure blooded Macedonian warriors were deserving of the honour of sharing the King’s bed.

After so many weeks he gave the Indian prince his freedom and the governance of a large territory, such was his great affection and trust for the fellow. Hephaestion had been sent off ahead with some battalions to prepare the ground and I hoped I would have Alexander for myself at last. Then, because of his act of bravery at the town of Mallian in protecting his life, Alexander elevated Peucastas to the company of Royal Bodyguard Companions, bringing their number to eight and breaking the sacred number of seven, which really irked me. He favoured Peucastas in all things, keeping him constantly by his side and rarely giving me any private moments of intimacy, as if he was avoiding that side of me, though he continuously praised my part in his rescue. My jealousy and disappointment increased till I thought I might go mad from it and tear the whole world asunder.

Yet I followed my King faithfully, entrusting my destiny with his, and we crossed the mighty Indus River and moved on into India proper, conquering all the tribes that stood in our way. The Indians are such magnificent fighters that we were tested to our utmost strength, and only Alexander’s military genius and inspiring leadership got us through. The Indian terrain and climate made it extremely hard going and the Macedonian veterans’ complaints and grudges increased till they became quite unruly. They felt they had finished with conquering Asia and it was time to turn back towards home.

They massed at Alexander’s tent and demanded a hearing. After patiently listening to their grievances, Alexander launched into an impassioned speech, reminding them that his father, King Phillip, had changed them from swineherds and hill brigands to be citizen warriors inferior to none and that he himself had made them everything they were, commanders of a world-wide power. Did he not lead them in battle, march with them, thirst with them, eat with them and undertake their hardships with them? Had he not won them much glory and treasure? Why should they give up now when more treasure than they could dream of lay waiting for the taking in India? He then declared he disowned them and would carry on with the more loyal, foreign mercenaries. His oratory appealed to the soldier’s deepest ideals and shamed their pride, and so they wept and begged his forgiveness and even stoned the ringleaders of the quasi-mutiny to get back into Alexander’s favour. He soon relented and offered all the army a pay increase according to length of service and so things settled down for awhile.

I stood by my king throughout the entire debacle and he grew to trust me entirely, giving me much of his army to command while he went off exploring far into the Indian hinterland. He took a fancy to hunting and capturing wild elephants and adding them to his battle ranks. I had to move the troops down to the town of Pattala on the Indus Delta and wait there while Alexander sailed off into the Indian Ocean to see what lay off the coast. I had come to love the country dearly, the amazing vegetation and wildlife, the beauty and hospitality of the friendly natives, and their simple, satisfying, blissful lifestyle, seemingly in tune with the world and at peace within themselves. They worshiped different gods than us but still had the same reverence for life and love and I for one was disappointed at all the talk of turning back.

Alexander had inexorably returned to his first true love, Hephaestion, and no one else could get close, they shared all duties and sports, continuously had their heads together whispering, and had eyes only for each other. Even the Persian boy, Bagoas, was dropped from favour, Alexander too wrapped up in exotic India and his final campaign to find the boy of interest, and he rarely called him to his tent. The poor lad was devastated, moping about the camp, making sad cow eyes at the King whenever he passed, doing any menial task that the King’s household needed, he was like some devoted, neglected lap-dog.

One night the little catamite gave me such seductive looks that I must admit I was aroused for I had been celibate for long, keeping chaste for Alexander alone. I was tired after a long march and had been drinking and the little devil kept plying me with strong wine. Somehow we ended up in bed together and I sodomised the devious creature and he acted as if he was some divine houri in my arms, able to convince me of anything. Relaxed and off my guard he started plying me with questions about Alexander and Hephaestion, would they ever tire of each other? And, if Hephaestion should disappear, could we both get back into his heart? I was so drunk I’m afraid I contributed to the slander of my King, calling Hephaestion his whore and a witch for enchanting Alexander so, and wishing the gods would strike him dead or some brave soul get rid of him. I blathered on about Alexander being my one true love, I lived and fought only for him, I hoped to die next to him, on and on, cursing and moaning. All the while Bagoas sat smiling cryptically, eyes narrowed as he contemplated some nefarious scheme, but I was so inebriated I passed out and virtually forgot my stupid outburst until much later in the game.

The exploration of the Indus Delta was as far as the men would go, they were fatigued, diseased, lost and estranged and they just couldn’t go on, and Alexander had to take mercy on them, either leave them there to die or take them back home to Macedonia. Alexander realized the odds were against him and with a heavy heart he surrendered to their wishes and set off with his army on the long, arduous return journey. At the town of Oreitae I was left in command of half of his army to await the arrival of the fleet off the coast. I was also to tend to the new settlement, helping to introduce such order and discipline among the Oreitae as to induce them to be more obedient to their governor. Alexander marched off into the Gedrosian Desert with the rest of his force and so uninhabitable was the region that I constantly fretted over Alexander’s safety. I was resigned to being always left behind to complete the dog’s body of the work, for me it was yet a grand honour to serve him to my best, though I sorely missed being in his company.

Though warned of the terrors of the desert, Alexander blundered on regardless, possessed of the idea that he could overcome any obstacle and even outperform the Gods and thus at times had lead his men to disaster trying to better the previous accomplishments of explorers and conquerors before him. Such was the case with the Gedrosian Desert for when he finally straggled through to the other side to meet up with my contingent and the fleet of ships he had lost three quarters of his men. I suppose I should’ve been grateful I missed out on that catastrophe but the truth is I would’ve shared any hardship or danger just to be near him, for though fallible, I’m sure Alexander’s name will live forever as one of the greatest of men. And perhaps my own name will live alongside his.

During his Indian sojourn Alexander met with many of the country’s wise sages and he was much impressed by their peace of mind. He tried to convince the best of them to accompany him back to Macedonia but they spurned his invitation, telling him he had nothing they wanted. One old seer by the name of Calanis, deviating from his tribe, did agree to the journey out of admiration for the brightness of Alexander and sheer curiosity about the world. Alexander had him always squatting in a corner of his tent and took intense pleasure in having philosophical discussions with him, often applauding his advice but rarely acting upon it, being the contrary leader he was since childhood. Calanis was a wonderful old man and I felt at peace just sitting near him while he did his extraordinary contortions and meditations.

He seemed to endure the march across South Asia well though on reaching Persia he fell ill and declared his days were over. He demanded a funeral pyre built and against the protestations of Alexander and his retinue, all of whom were extremely fond of the old sage, he walked steadfastly into the flames. He then calmly lay down in the conflagration and, chanting his prayers, disintegrated into ash without blinking an eyelid or twitching a muscle. It left all of us in awe and I have come to believe some men are so knowledgeable they are capable of overcoming earthly restrictions. Perhaps Alexander is one of these sublime men.

At Susa, near Babylon, Alexander held a huge wedding festival, marrying off many of his army to Asiatic brides. His officers and Royal companions were given Persian princesses yet still they grumbled, for Persian ways were not theirs and they preferred the good women of Macedonia. To Alexander it was a political ploy as it would bind all the important vassal families to him and make the territory easier to govern. He even took a wife himself, Barsine, daughter of the assassinated King Darius of Persia, even though he already had a wife in Roxanne. All this Persian claptrap riled up the Macedonian’s conservative angst for they were too narrow-minded to see the political expediency in the mass wedding ceremony. I myself asked for a captive Indian Prince as my companion for only men could arouse my ardour, I had no wish to be weighed down with feminine needs, and I had taking a liking to the Indian’s caramel skin, doe-like eyes and lascivious nature.

It was at Susa that I also received my most impressive symbol of honour, a gold crown, placed upon my head by Alexander’s own hands in a marvelous ceremony to acclaim my achievements in all the campaigns, especially the saving of my King’s life in the battle with the Mallians. Peucastus also received a gold crown for his valiant part in that rescue and he was made Governor of all Persia, adopting their mannerisms and fitting in so well he became a superb and honourable administrator for many years. To Hephaestion, Alexander gave Drypetis, another of King Darius’s daughters, and all this Persian elitism made the Macedonians even more resentful, criticizing the King and his favourites for demeaning themselves with the barbaric customs of the country. Alexander, yet again, had to give them a good dressing down but honeyed his sharp words with bonuses for everyone, especially those who would settle in Persia and help rule it in his name.

Then the big calamity occurred and it resulted in the ruination of our whole life’s purpose. At Ecbatana Hephaestion fell ill and, after seven days of fever, died. Alexander was inconsolable, lying upon the body of his friend for a full day, weeping uncontrollably for several days after that and cursing the gods for his bereavement. He had the Shrine to Asclepius, the patron of medicine, raised to the ground, as no doctors could save the soul and love of his life. He held the most elaborate funeral rites the world has ever seen, spending ten thousand talents on the pyre and forcing the whole nation to make obeisance. He tried to have the god Ammon declare Hephaestion a demigod, the oracles refusing to comply, and so Alexander made do with the building of a giant funeral cortege, like a towering temple to the glory of his friend. He had it dragged right across Asia and Greece on a colossal cart to finally rest in honour at the city of Alexandria in Egypt. In all this extravagant mourning he revealed his ever ongoing obsession of out-performing the heroes of classic Greece, his grief for Hephaestion being deeper than the grief Achilles felt for his dead lover, Patroclus.

Rumours abounded of foul play; that Hephaestion might have been poisoned, for there were many who were jealous of his secure relationship with Alexander and of his marvelous achievements. I felt guilt at my own antagonistic thoughts towards the man though I would never have dreamed of harming him, as his was such a decent soul. I thought back to my querulous outburst of murderous nonsense to that little bugger Bagoas, and I wondered if he was capable of such a heinous deed. He had knowledge of poisons and for some time had worn a look of sheer loathing whenever he crossed paths with Hephaestion, so that I wouldn’t put it past the dirty little bastard. I watched him closely for weeks and he did indeed seem to slink around with a stricken face, averting his eyes, avoiding conversation, not even a greeting. I felt horror to the bottom of my heart for if it were true then I was an unthinking party to the murder and would bear the guilt to the end of my days. For the death of Hephaestion also meant the eventual death of the great Alexander, and this defeated all the machinations of the jealous murderer, for the object of his obsession was irretrievably lost in such a stupid act. Everybody was left with nothing to cling to but a ghost with a famous name.

Alexander was never the same after the death of his soul-mate, he seemed to waste away and was not as enthusiastic as of yore, though he still continued to carry out campaigns and subdue rebellious tribes. Despite the fact that he was warned by several soothsayers not to go to Babylon for it would be the end of him, unusual for him, he ignored their warning and carried on into the ancient city, defying fate and perhaps indulging in a death wish. All was well, Babylon rejoiced at his entry and the omens seemed mistaken. On an expedition down the Euphrates River he suddenly caught a fever, perhaps he picked up some exotic disease when he swam in the miasmic water, or, I dread the thought, perhaps his enemies poisoned him like they poisoned Hephaestion.

I, personally, think it was a broken heart over the loss of his one love that debilitated him so, for he gave up the ghost without his usual struggle, dying after seven days of painful infirmity. At the very last he still had the strength to call his good friends, officers and loyal Companions to his bedside to bid them farewell, thank them for their endeavours on his behalf and commend them for their immense valour. The whole army wept, howled and tore its breasts, for their great leader was gone and they were inconsolably lost without him.

Alexander, for all his detractors would naysay it, was the greatest leader the world had yet seen. Brave and adventurous, hungry for fame, temperate in the pleasures of the body with a passion for glory only, he was intelligent in his deductions of observed facts and wary of cheats. His word was inviolable, he was generous and compassionate to those who deserved it; he was the best of men and rulers. He was accused of taking on the pomp and arrogance of Asiatic Kings, cruel and barbaric, but I knew him to be noble of heart and sincerely sorry for his mistakes, giving pardon to many of those who had stood against him. He displaced incompetent and despotic rulers wherever he found them and tried to instil a society of peace, prosperity and justice in all the territories he subdued.

He was a man ahead of his times, with an eye for sensible innovations and rational consistencies. Yet he was also perfect for his times, for the whole world lay ready for the grasping for such a man as he, of great will, strength, intelligence and courage. He was the King of Kings and no one could replace him, his vast kingdoms falling to ruin and anarchy not too many years after his demise. Only Alexandria of Egypt lived on in history to bear his name forever.

I was nothing and heartbroken without him and I will never regret my great love for him, as such love has long been revered in Greece as a necessary part of our warrior’s social fabric. In Alexander’s private circle were renowned homosexual lovers such as Hermalaus and Sastratus, whose affection was so great they dared to plot against their King for a slight he gave one of them and they died together as a consequence. Then there was Alexander and Hephaestion themselves, and one could only wish to emulate their mutual devotion. Yet I am resolved never to go home to North Macedonia due to my inner shame that somehow I wished the whole tragedy into existence. I feel I must somehow pay recompense, do penance by living cut-off from everything I have ever known, abiding in an alien country, cursed by the gods unto the seventh generation, half the man I was under Alexander.

I'm afraid one only gets one great love in this life, he was my mentor and my shining light and I will never love another man again like him. I am returning with my Indian friend to the land of his birth as there he declares I will be treated like a god and life will be blissful. I did so much love India that I do not mind too badly my self-imposed exile to that far off land, for if there is any site in the world where I might rediscover some peace of soul and awe of life, that place could be there.

I had lived out the life of a warrior in the time of Alexander the Great, even had him as a lover for a few fleeting ecstatic moments, all my dreams come true. Somewhere deep in the jungles of India my avatar must fade into the mists, as all souls must do in this entropic universe, but there are many more worlds and times for me to explore and I can only marvel at where my soul’s desire may lead me next. And so adieu, beautiful, sad, unfulfilled Leonnatus, son of Onasus, it was glorious to be you and stand next to the divine Alexander.

The Evolution of Homo Homo Sapien Sapien.

Flying through an infinity of cyberspace I concentrated on the exotic world of my desire and there it was before me, Paleolithic Earth made virtual. I flew into a hothouse planet, mist enshrouded, jungle covered. The epoch I’d entered was about twenty-one thousand years before what the Ancients termed the Common Era, where in prehistory a mysterious event occurred, humanity had made the leap from a kind of dull awareness of being in an overwhelming world to the sharp consciousness of being self-aware and able to influence that world, with language and the rudiments of culture. My implant had collated all the scientific theories and archeological proofs reconstructing the ‘grand event’ and pinpointed it to an equatorial region and I was intrigued to explore the era and find out for myself, especially to see if sex had anything to do with it.

I zeroed in on a huge river cutting through a sandstone escarpment, giant snow-covered peaks in the distance, with signs of human habitation in the jungle nearby. I created as my avatar a form not too different from my real apearance as I need to get accustomed to this cyber-virtuality shape-shifting before I start experimenting with bodies. With my dark burnished skin and hair matted into dreadlocks I hoped I wouldn’t stand out too much as an alien by the tribe of primitives I allowed myself to be captured by, that they'd see me as an outcast from some distant clan. They were a ferocious looking Negroid race, naked except for bone and shell jewelry, and at first shook their spears at me to scare me off. When they saw me making handprints of red ochre on a cave wall, and stick figures chasing horned creatures in the hunt, they were fascinated, their primitive minds lit up, I was magical and worthy of respect.

The wonders of nature like lightning storms, starry nights and fiery sunsets had long had humanity dancing and singing in awe, they mimicked the sounds of nature, the animal and bird calls, and their proto-language was able to build upon these zoomorphisms, supplementing it with hand gestures and powerful sounds like grunts, howls and hisses. But mostly they communicated in a sing-song voice like the birds, and they told each other about the shaping of their universe and how to ward off hostility if possible. I watched them intently for the first few weeks I was kept tethered in their grass-hut compound and quickly picked up the essence and flow of their language. I eventually convinced them I could be a boon to the tribe, especially as I applied some basic healing methods to their hurts and ills, like washing wounds in fresh water and exposing them to sunlight, applying Comfrey herbal poultices and encouraging potent wild-garlic drinks morning and night.

At night, around the campfire, they told stories in birdsong whistles and mime about the creation of the world and the birth of Humanity within the animal kingdom. They sang tales about surviving a demonic flood that had destroyed their original homeland, and of the endless wandering of their ancestors across plains, deserts and mountains. And they sang of some original Mother tribe that had found its way around the Red Sea, foraging for sea-food along the coasts of Arabia and into India, Cro-Magnon types evolving into Homo Sapiens trekking over the horizon to see what lay there. While many tribes pressed on in different directions to eventually inhabit Turkmenistan, China and Australia, some Sapients took up permanent residence in the subcontinent to hunt and fornicate in the lush jungle wilderness.

They were black skinned and they reified their dangerous world into an all-consuming Black Goddess, who dealt out life and death randomly, and they propitiated Her with sacrificial rituals, including song and dance as ever. At nights they sat around the communal fire, men on one side and women on the other, and they had competitions in storytelling, the men often disgruntled because the women always managed to one up them with ingenious innovations and existential insights. Many of the wittiest of the raconteurs went on to mate with each other as they discovered their intellectual compatibility made their sexual communion more interesting.

I found myself falling into the psychic embrace of a tribe that clicked its name to sound like Alackananda and that’s what I called them, the Alackanandas, for they had developed a cohesive identity, a sense of being different from the other tribes marauding on the edges of their territory, and they had their own animal totem, the Wildcat, that they much honored. To guard against inbreeding the tribe was organised into sub-clans, the Bob cat, the Fishing cat, the Leopard, the Lion and certain cats could only mate with certain others. They had been waiting for their next shaman, whom they called the Alack, to appear amongst them, the old one had died a generation before. They hoped for a Clever Man who could soothe their fears, follow the Song Lines and interpret their destiny, and though I wasn’t born of their loins, as a weird-acting alien they saw me fitting that role, the sexually ambiguous Berdache, the Medicine Man and Vision Quester.

The tribe ranged over a wide expanse of jungle, with many numinous sites scattered throughout, like sacred trees, outlandish rocks and sweet-water springs to which they made obeisance, all the while singing/whistling various songs to map and know the landscape. Their favorite sites for camps were besides rivers, ponds and waterfalls. In winter they lived in caves, in the summer in thatched lean-tos, most of the year they wandered from campsite to campsite chasing game and the season’s fruits. Their vast territory over-ran the hunting grounds of two other human tribes plus a hungry Neanderthal community still clinging to the edges of existence downstream, and clashes over resources were inevitable. The jungle teemed with voracious wildlife that could carry a man to oblivion in seconds, where everyone had to be constantly on guard against attacks from giant cats, bears, boars, elephants and snakes. Life was tough and short for most. The men had to become warriors as well as hunters, and the boys were trained hard so that they grew up strong and able.

In the last few generations the Alackanandas had learnt to capture the wild orynx, the horned-cow, and consume its milk. It took much learning to trap and tether the terrified, bucking beasts, squeezing as much milk into gourds as they could manage. While many tribals grew ill from the first experiments at consumption of cow’s milk, others managed to find nourishment in the miraculous white substance and over time the tribe thrived, those with the genetic mutation to digest the milk being a boon to the rest. The extra protein, vitamins, fat and calcium gave them the strength to defeat their enemies and range over bigger territories. They had more leisure to improve their tool and weapon making, their weaving, pottery and painting, and their communication skills. And if the jungle was bountiful more time could be devoted to ritual and story-telling, music and dance, games and sexual practices. When winter or droughts set in they had the fortitude to weather every setback.

In different seasons the men wandered far from their base camp, to follow the herds of horned game for meat and the milk of the cows, or to fight off any alien interlopers, or to attend to male initiation rites. There were times of the year when the women ordered the men out of the camp, demanding their own space for their special mysteries, refusing sex with the excuse that they weren’t in the mood. They disrupted domestic harmony until the men went off and, after the long break, returned with copious protein and spunk.

Imagine the barren cold of winter when game was scarce, the food stores had run low and tempers were frayed from the continual confinement in the caves. If the omens augured well, the women would set up a commotion and all the men would trudge off in different directions, except for the very young and the very old, who were banished to a distant camp. I chose a group of six mates, with me as the pathfinder, the optimal number of seven that allows cohesive action, and we set out in the chilly mists of dawn, in jubilation at the new moon slung like slim horns on the horizon’s brow. As the women ullullated a send-off chorus, their arms affectionately around each other, we men sang in strange bellows to attract us to the cattle, we were off to track down a cow herd and initiate an adolescent into manhood and Clever-man status, namely me. I was to achieve this eminent position by capturing a wild bull with its harem of cows that could then be pacified and submitted to milking.

The tribe had noticed the many scars across my body and thought I’d undergone the rites of puberty some years ago. Now what I needed was the rite of passage into true manhood, to be a leader and warrior, dare-devil and wise-seer. They’d seen the hair sprouting in bunches like a halo around my arse-hole and considered this the sign of warrior-maturity. I’d made it to twenty-one years old and ready to take on leadership responsibilities. As we strode through the jungle, hooting and whistling melodically to follow the path of destiny, I was made alert to all the variegated life-forms bursting around us and, my mind ticking over, I thrilled with anticipation for the adventure ahead. I had exercised for hundreds of hours, mimicking the prowess of the animal kingdom, swift and agile as the deer, poised and silent as the cobra, supple and lively as the river-trout.

They’d given me the personal name of Watcher as I was to be found most nights awake till dawn, peering from the hut or cave entrance, at the rustling jungle and the sparkling stars, alert to the dangers in the dark, they revered me for it, I could warn them against dangers like hungry big cats and crafty cannibal enemies. Watching and Seeing made up the seven talents a Shaman needed, along with Healing, Dancing, Singing, Knowing and Ecstasy.

I also revealed my cleverness with the plastic arts, clay and bone sculptures falling magically from my fingers, sketches of daily life on animal skins to hang on the walls and reflections of the tribal soul projected upon the cave walls via stick-figure drawings that had even the tribal elders in awe of me. Thus I felt confident as I led my special comrades into the wilderness, seven of us, each with a particular talent that I esteemed. The horned moon grew to a half moon and then full as we trekked for many days, the wild cattle having being scared off to distant pastures.

Each night I had to endure hours of tortuous tattooing, singing visionary songs throughout, then dancing wildly, leaping over the fire, twisting sinuously about my fellow tribesmen, somersaulting over their heads, the inspired drumming and rattling driving me on, all enthralled by my athletic voluptuousness. I felt the maddened drums pounding in my heart. I lifted off, I could beat anything, I was afraid of nothing, except my destiny, for if I can’t ride the Bull and placate the great Horned One, I’m not fit to be the Alack, mediator with the Black Mother of Chaos, for all my special training. And I’ll be caste out into the dark.

Yet all my fellow travelers whistled in admiration when I danced, for I the Watcher, man from the future, am cut out to be the Alack, whether I have the physical prowess or not, because several times I’ve gone into an ecstatic trance and flown to the spirit world on a winged horse and there I met my animal helper, Bhageera the Panther, who clawed my leg and made me his own, and he’d tell me the type of demon that was plaguing the tribe and I’d exorcise it with song, myth and wisdom. I was able to return to consciousness and direct people to stop drinking from a certain pond or find the best herbs for a particular illness or discover the reason for someone’s disquiet, usually a mating-rivalry problem which I would mediate.

This moon I was ready for the final initiation into Shamanhood and attain independence in my travels and choices, especially those of a companion. With eagerness I followed the passage of mythological sites through the jungle, looking-out for fresh cow dung and trampled tracks. We foraged and hunted for small game and ate of the rare winter fruits along the way, and my excitement and dread grew for all that was left for me to complete was ride that terrible bull.
We walked till the moon grew nearly full looking for the signs of a herd’s passing that way, and on one occasion encountered our tribe’s despised enemy, the alien Monkey-men, drinking at a pool. My fellows drove the sub-humans away under a rain of missiles and grunted curses; the Neanderthal’s crude clubs were no match for the Homo Sapiens’ advanced weaponry of spears and crude bows and arrows. I held back pretending to be the detached mystic but really I felt some compassion for the Neanderthals’ emaciated desperation, also I had personal reasons for empathizing with them. Every night my six male companions camped out under the stars, lying snug around the fire, each resting his head on the buttocks of the one in front of him, leaving me the Watcher as night sentinel.

On the night before the big final ritual, when all the men had finished grooming each other and had settled down to sleep, I sat gazing at the stars splashed across the heavens, ecstatic at the beauty and wonder of being alive. I glanced around at the men snuggling into each other, massaging, caressing, licking each other’s crotches, even in the midst of sleep they would nuzzle their noses in their fellow’s furry buttocks, muttering low moans of pleasure. I longed to join them and enjoy such privileges of adulthood, full body grooming by my mature clan-mates. I’d enjoyed the few times I was asked to give massages to the older warriors’ prostate-relaxed butt-holes, now my turn was coming, all I have to do is ride the Bull.

I couldn’t help drinking with my thirsty eyes the men’s bulbous buttocks, spread open as they lay in foetal position with their mate’s face cushioned lasciviously within, I was excited by all the gaping, wet hairy orifices and the heady, musky perfume the pile of bodies gave off, it screamed of horny delirium from my cellular structure upwards. The pink anuses glowing from their hairy crevices reminded me of the women’s vaginas on those celestial occasions when they flashed themselves red-hot to get some sexual attention from us men. From seven feet away the hairy boy-pussies shining like a Cyclop’s eye atop the silken-sheen of the legs looked like cunts, like Venus-flytraps. Indeed, the Alpha male warrior of our gang, Gronk, an incorrigible pussy-hound back in the village, was right now lapping up the hairy crack of his second-in-charge, for his favorite female had refused him access since birthing her last child.

My gaze was dragged inexorably to the other side of the fire where my new-found best mate, Hanu, slept alone, no one nuzzling into him though he’d reached adulthood last year. For he was different, a troll’s child, and nobody desired to groom his matted, louse-ridden body, except for me, I’ve secretly given him a good going over out in the deep jungle. I think Hanu is lusciously cute but the difference of his Neanderthal features has the others teasing and excluding him and it means I’ll have to give him lengthy psycho-grooming sessions if he is to be my friend to smooth over his atrophied emotions and let him know he is loved for his difference.

As he slept Hanu wrinkled his endearing brow-ridge in the loneliness of his dreams and shivers ran along his extremely broad, muscular back. His buttocks and legs were covered in a pelt of glistening black hair, with masses of curls sprayed around his exposed anus, and I longed to run my fingers through that soft luxuriance. Hanu’s Sapient mother had been captured and raped by the Monkey-men, and when rescued had brought back with her this half-caste boy. He had been the butt of everyone’s ire since, except of late for me, who knows his keen naturalist’s talents, his dreamy meditations, his soft heart, and I have learnt to love him. The day will come when the Tribe will have to accept with resignation and respect the choice of Hanu as my partner and assistant in healing vision quests.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught the reflected glint of green cat-eyes from the undergrowth and froze, hand tightening on my spear, muscles poised to throw. With calmed breath and emptied mind I zeroed in on the big cat, to catch its attention, to feel its intentions, to warn it off, this was family sleeping around me, not prey. From out of the lush vegetation emerged a large Black Panther, green eyes flashing, and it surreptitiously approached me in long stealthy strides.
Confident I could call my fellows to my rescue in seconds, I voided my breath and fear and melded with the universe, still and calm as a rock, and waited, curious as to cat-nature. The Panther slunk right up to me, put its muzzle in my face and sniffed me all over, particularly the claw marks on my right leg, then stared into my eyes for a few infinite moments, purring.

Suddenly the beast slavered out a huge pink tongue and gave me a wet lick across my smiling face. I slowly reached out and ran my hand soothingly along the sleek, black back of the Panther, all the way to its long tail. The big cat then turned on its heels and bounded off into the jungle, as I gulped in breath and flung my arms at the sky in jubilation. Yes! The real thing had come to me, validating the Black Panther as my personal totem. I glanced over at Hanu who I found staring at me, fascination shining from his black eyes. I winked and put my finger to my lips, there was no need to disturb anyone, it was all part of the course. I am the Punk Poofy Cat.

As the full moon loomed overhead I found fresh cow dung and located a small herd of the large humped bison we favored above all horned creatures. We marked out the bull and I figured my coming strategies. Nobody informed me how I was to do the great deed, dance upon an angry bull’s back, I had only learnt of past initiation feats from folkloric pantomimes around the campfire and I had to sift their humorous antics for clues. The night set in and my crew set up a wailing and howling brouhaha, drumming up hysteria while I painted my body in psychedelic patterns, with a peacock-feather headdress, and mixed up a potion of Soma, oil of cannabis with opium poppies, ephedrine plant and Goldtop mushrooms.

I drank it and so did a couple of my best mates, including Hanu, to support me on my trip. I danced about the fire in wild animal abandon and lifted off in my mind’s eye, we seemed to be in a canoe paddling together furiously into the celestial realms. Nebulae gave birth to stars, galaxies crashed together, I chased the star formation of Taurus and lassooed it with a thought beam and rode it on a crashing wave of singularity particles.

I came back to consciousness and earth at dawn, clear-headed and light-footed. We prepared our tools and weapons, camouflaged our bodies with jungle stripes and crept up on the grazing herd. Hanu and I separated the big bull from its cows by firing small arrows into its rump and chasing it towards a sacred Peepul Tree growing not far off. My comrades had already prepared a long hemp rope and had it waiting, ready to tie it firmly to the tree, a noose fashioned at its free end. With much energy we chased the beast about, firing arrows into it, directing the rampaging creature close to the Peepul Tree by dancing in its face, and ducking from its charges, getting braver and braver, my brains and daring outmaneuvering its bellowed head-tossings and attempted gorings, though terrified of it we got it closer to the tree.

I danced swiftly around the bull’s heaving flanks and lassoed it around the neck as I somersaulted over its humped back, throwing the rope to Hanu who with the others lashed it firmly to the tree. As Hanu threw more ropes around it to further restrain its heaving fury, I climbed into the tree and leaped upon the creatures back only to be instantly bucked off. I knew how to tumble and so was able to clamber back up and repeatedly kept jumping, sometimes riding it for minutes, doing handstands, even a bucked up somersault before I was thrown by a side kick. But up I would jump and have another go at clasping the horns and swinging myself through them, the drug had made me indefatigable and devil-may-care.

The other five tribesmen assisted Hanu and threw more ropes over the furious beast, attempting to hold it down. Gradually the monstrous bovine tired and slowed its threshing about, allowing me to leap from side to side and straddle it for many minutes, clasping its flanks firmly with my legs and hanging onto the hump. I did many somersaults between the bewildered horns to prove my established prowess and my fellows whistled in encouragement. With the ropes ever tightening, the Bull knew the futility of its rage and cowed by the hours of athletic maneuvering of myself and friends, eventually it slowed and stood shivering in resentful resignation, bucking and heaving only occassionally, pinioned by the ropes.

The cows had loyally followed in the wake of the bull and their herd-agitation settled down somewhat along with their stud. The Alackananda tribesmen fell upon each cow and tethered her down, though at first she struggled hard to escape, bucking and kicking, they quickly, deftly milked each cow into the bunch of gourds they’d carried with them, drinking great gulps of the delicious white fluid as they went.

They selected three calves for slaughter and made sacrifice to the Great Black Mother, then settled in for the night, to feast and celebrate my ingenious accomplishment in riding the Bull. They were now reassured of a new, strong Alack to lead them in the Underworld, and that I was an Illuminated Dancer augered well for the Tribe’s health. The bull snorted and struggled against its restraints in the background while I jumped up and performed a victory dance around the fire, the cows’ bellowing becoming part of the music. We ate plenty and prepared cheese and curds from the milk and wrapped it in banana leaves to eat as we trekked, then as deep night descended we curled upon the ground to sleep.

Each tribesman presented himself to me, the shining Clever Man, as I lay butt-up on a bed of leaves, and they performed a token grooming and prostate massage upon my fresh-washed boy-pussy, and as much as each caress was welcome and thrilled me to swooning, I waited for the last of them, Hanu, my best mate, to lay his head upon my muscular buttocks and nuzzle into my groin. And taking him by the hand, to the surprise of the others, I led Hanu to the other side of the fire where we curled up together, faces in each other’s crotch, and gave each other an orgasmic prostate massage. This is what manhood meant, the mutual giving, taking and protecting of an adoring companion, and for this Watcher the ecstasy was worth the wait.

In the morning we milked the cows some more then released them, the Bull last of all. It gave one almighty, insulted snort and stampeded with its cows off into the wilderness much to the glee of the tribesmen. I had mastered the Horned One and now was a fit devotee to attend its consort, The Great Black Mother, whose milk gave life and death. We strung the veal carcasses on poles, slung the gourds from our necks and waists, and took a more direct route back to winter’s camp, singing valorous songs as we went. The men had a spring in their step for the protein they brought back should get them ingress to the woman’s sexual welcome and abandonment and, with a warm tingle in his arse, each man felt ready for a marathon session with the woman of his choice.

I the Watcher was the only one who didn’t think of women on the return journey, still wet between the legs, I walked directly behind Hanu and my eyes perused those flexed, hairy buttocks with great affection. I could still smell our rutting session of the deep night and I felt like I was walking on air, confident and fulfilled.

At last the Tribe had a new and exceptional Alack, I had gained manhood and possessed an intelligent soul that could lead where few men dared go. Already I was dreaming on the possibility of corralling the wild bulls for longer periods so the cows could be milked more frequently and not chased about the country with such enormous expenditure of energy. I knew they were wild and vicious beasts and it would take many thousand more years to domesticate them but at least I could plant the seed idea.

As a Warrior/Shaman I could henceforward procreate with whom I pleased, or not procreate at all if my skills lead me elsewhere. I had consolidated a life-long partnership with the friend of my desires, he would help me through good times and hard, and the Tribe would have to accept my quirky lifestyle of having a husband instead of a wife as my honored shamanic prerogative. I sighed with pleasure and relief as I gazed upon Hanu, my chosen one, the friend who would keep me company on those long, dark night vigils that stretched to eternity ahead of me. And if I should disappear back into the quantum flux I have trained him well to take my place, the Alackananda tribe will still have their shaman and he will at last have the respect he deserves, sweet soul that he is.

The night before we reached the home caves, as the others slept, I stared into the luminous heavens and matched the star-shapes up with those of the animals we depended on for our survival, their position above the horizon perhaps indicating the time when the bulls, deer etc would be plentiful or not. I thought of the vastness of the universe, the infinite potential, the other worlds where my kind might exist and what a bright, glorious future they might have, living, loving and knowing in an awesome Nature-wonderland that would continuously evolve into stunning variegated shapes. And hopefully some evolution of consciousness would include me. In some distant night, when I felt it was time to do so, in my Mind’s eye I will fly to those new worlds and live other, marvelous lives.

Fear and Loving in Nimbin.

I took a break from the jumps and jitters of Sydney to go up the north coast and attend the Nimbin Mardi Grass Festival. I've been visiting this town for the last thirty years and am at home in its funky parallel universe, not an alien, not a cop, the local fairies and pixies take one glance at me and relax, another freak in the passing circus-parade. My friend, Channon, trannie extraordinaire and gay pioneer of this frontier wilderness, let me put a tent up in her backyard, close to the centre of town, so I was in the thick of things for the duration. Nimbin's psychedelic painted facade is fading, the back-to-nature trip winding down since the 1973 Aquarious Festival that rejuvenated the cow-cocky town, the alternative paradise of the Green One fading into the mists of time with half the world's the children still chasing after his hypnotic pipe music.

On the first day, Friday May 1st, a laconic old gonzo musician playing in the town's central park commented on the intense police presence and how it was trying to throw a wet blanket over events, but hippie ebullience will get on top and surf it through, high as a kite. He yelled loudly, "Fear and Loathing in Nimbin!" and the tidal wave of cops crashing upon the party sure made for a lot of contempt, yet in spite of it, the crowd had a thumping good time, they just didn't smoke in public, everybody split back to their tents, cars, vans and houses to choof up, get stoned, then venture out to the happenings. And all the body searches garnered the State few fines but cost a fortune in Pigs' overtime, most of the fines were for alcohol, the whole Police effort could've built a med clinic for drunks. The riot of disparate pot rebels remained patient, collectively outlawed we felt solidarity with each other, and universal compassion, for a few moments, the locals still strongly believing that love will conquer all. So I've dubbed the weekend, ""Fear and Loving in Nimbin."

The local Lismore paper, "The Northern Star", trumpeted a headline, "Nimbin: Smoke without Fire" as the Mardi Grass is supposed to be a protest and it somehow all got laid-back under a cloud of smoke, maybe a riot would've emphasised the displeasure of a whole section of the public at the draconian drug laws, but most of the crowd just wanted to get high, have fun, then crash with their lover, if they had one. Riots are the ultimate in group-orgasms and at the peak of excitement there nearly was one that threatened to engulf the whole tiny, tidy town, that doof dance that got too thrashing outside Daisy's Dress Shop. A few days in the local lock-up, what joy! No, we want to avoid that, we're trying to have a relaxed, euphoric break from the hard times in the cities and plains below. So very few pushed their luck.

When the few unwary tourists tried to light up in the middle of town and the ever-present cops would catch them, before a bust could happen a crowd would gather and shake with the tremors, and then some bright spark would throw handfulls of joints into the mob, pot raining down, every ganjha-thirsty punter diving and coming up with some sticks of the sacred herb, too many now carrying, hard to grab a hold of the shifting, disgruntled crowd, the cops would just give a Caution and rush away. The music pounded on, eyes collectively went red and looked into space, people made friends, tribes coalesced, and the Pigs bided their time, hungry for their seven cents worth of power against those infernal freaks.

At the Friday night opening ceremony, after the Koori mother welcomed us to Aboriginal Australian land, a rabble-rouser named Graham Duncan gave an articulate speech about "The Drug Wars", originating in America and forced upon Auz as a client state, THEY seem to find Ganjha particularly revolutionary and waste vast resources in its oppression. All pot tokers should not only protest but "RESIST" in any way possible. "Let's take a minute in silence to remember the casualties of this very real war... This very weekend there are people in gaol for drug busts that they should've been able to buy in the free market or on prescription from a chemist. Young men right now are being fucked up the arse in prison as a way of humiliating them, punishing and putting them in line with the other robotic citizens. This is the kind of System we have!" Very strong language, and the mob cheered and whistled, then smoked some more and blobbed out, that's half its use, to forget, to lay back and chill out.

And dig the music. Every nook and cranny had its resident band plonking away, reggae down in Peace park, Arabian Nights out the back of the Oasis Cafe, jazz out the front, techno/didgeridoo in the park, hard rock in the pub, pagan rock in the town hall, cosmic meditation music in the schoollyard with the dreadlocked hippies doing a slow snake dance to it, and for the climax late Saturday night a psychedelic rock band from Japan named "Tchambo" exploded in Peace Park, blowing the revellors away with their wall of guitar, samplers and drums, like Hendrix on mushroom-laced sushi, even tired, jaded, cranky old me got into some head-banging, the beat was so addictive.

Then I wandered up into the town to see what was happening, if the doof had reached some peak of jumping jungle-bunny exuberance and brought down the house. I arrived in the mainstreet just as the Police did their big raid, their classic flying wedge executed to crush all opposition, pig-cars, wagons and mounted police rampaging, dragging the wine-flasks, booze-bottles and spliffs out of the staggering crowd's avid embrace, punters and pigs were riled up, somehow the inebriation made protest hopeless, the mobs dispersed quickly, the town had only ghosts drifting through it when it should've been a throbbing dance-floor.

I tried to make my escape, I had a joint on me I was saving for bedtime and panicked when a squad of cops circled me. The were about to pounce and I shat my pants, I threw myself onto some bushes, dropping the spliff, and flailed about, the cops asking me what I was doing.
"Mate, I've had too much to drink, I can hardly stand up." "Oh, booze we undestand. You better go home to bed, mate." And off they scurried, to supress every music venue where the cognoscenti had gathered to enjoy, we don't call the Pigs the "Anti-fun Brigade" for nothing. I searched for an hour in the wet grass for my sequestered joint, an Aboriginal woman saw me and commented, "Lost your yaandi, mate?" like she had mental telepathy. "No, I'm having fun getting wet!" With great relief I finally found it and crept back to my tent, avoiding the cops on their horses clip-clopping back and forth like out of some old-time western frontier-town.

On Sunday the vast throng of alternatives, hippies, punks, surfers, skaters, suburban smokers all marched in protest and pot appreciation down to Peace Park where we got more rabble-rousing diatribes to "Resist". Madame Slash came past waving and blowing kisses on the roof of a limousine, grabbing some spotlight as ever, maybe with Chong inside behind the smoked glass, he was supposed to be guest of honour only he didn't show his face. At one point I was standing in a daze and felt something wet nibbling my neck. I looked behind and found a police horse standing over me, the female cop smiling, the horse trying to give me another kiss.

Gangs of Frenchies, Israelis, Germans, Japanese, Yankees, South Americans, Africans, Indians, Asians, Polynesians and Aboriginals tripped by, each in their national funk costume, all eager and ecstatic, Auz living up to its utopianist promise, in spite of the cops, they were used to such spoilsports back home. There were talks and demonstrations on everything to do with marihuana, medicinal, industrial, farming, fashion, too much information for this info junkie. And there were the usual competitons for best joint rolling, growing, dealing, bhong throwing, the winners with code names so the cops couldn't latch on. The Nimbin Museum amused me, hippie gothic, looked like Ed Gein's bedroom but with every grungy, feral tableau having a video installation on the minutiae of Pot, including footage of the day the Museum got busted.

But I couldn't take any more in, I was exhausted, the party was over, as Sunday night descended the town emptied out, only the dregs and droogs remained, determined to squeeze the last gram of joy from the freak-show. A siren went off at 10pm warning the trolls that the Festival's street permit had ended and they better scurry back to their caves.

My old girlfriend of thirty-years, Sylvia Nudey, had recently picked herself up a new boytoy after 21 months of sexual abstinence and when we marched down the street we looked like the Three Freakin' Mouseketeers. She fears she's a sex junky, which leads her into pot-bingeing and much dopiness, daftly straring at Fashion TV for hours on end.

Now her discipline has collapsed yet again, after 7 thousand therapies and councelling sessions, her new lover is profoundly deaf and dumb, with facial tattoos and a mohawk haircut, he'd put a band of purple make-up across his eyes then wear purple mirror glasses on top of it, he looked WILD. We spent the whole weekend making crazy sign-language that none of us understood, I think his disability has driven him mad, every now and then he would punch the wall or burst into weeping, yet he's very smart, reading every sign about him to figure out what's going on. After much waving of hands and fingers which we misinterpreted he wrote furiously on bits of paper what seemed to be garbled nonsense but often contained figures added up with dollar signs next to them and we realised he'd been asking us for money most of the time.

We got an emergency call that required out attention in Lismore so we drove quickly down the magic highway, under the Nimbin Rocks, only to be pulled over, as every car was, by the police to breath test the driver for "alcohol". "No, plonk is not a problem with us. We don't drink. No, we've taken no illicit drugs over the weekend." "Thankyou and drive safely." We rush back to the countryside city of Lismore, its square grid lay-out had me walking in circles, nothing to see. I'm flat and happy, soon to go back to Sydney for a rest from the fear and loving of numb-bum Nimbin.

A Posse of Poofs at the Pecadillo Cafe.

The Piccolo Cafe has always been a sanctuary for poofs, mostly from having the Fairy Queen Vitto front it for the last fifty years. On any day half the denizens will be homos of one kind or another, not that this puts Hets off, or women, it's a free-for-all but we poofs can particularly relax there. All the world has long been cruel to us, in spite of gay-lib lip-service, and the red-light area of Kings Cross is especially rough, the redneck yobs at their brothel-crawling seem to find us an imposition, an insult to their upright, macho normalcy and beat us into beatitude accordingly, but there's always the Piccolo to run to.

First I must emphasise, Australia and Sydney are glowing sites of freedom and human rights compared to many areas of democratic darkness around the world, where poofs are proscribed, tortured, gaoled and murdered. We homos have evolved with the human race for millions of years, we've been around throughout history, we've certainly contributed much to civilisation, and, when not oppressed, our free movement represents society at its most progressive, most humane, most cutting-edge, where we tread be sure the catch-cries are liberty, equality, fraternity, hopefully without the Terror. And in this regard, Sydney glows in the dark. So mistake not my satire, I'd fight for my fellow gays with my last breath, I just want to have a bit of fun and describe the 'deviants' thriving in that "Oasis of Onanism", the Pecadillo Cafe.

I've long wanted to do cartoon portraits of the disparate camp characters parading through but live in fear they may take umbrage and fry my balls in the microwave, still I'm gonna risk it and see what I get away with. To start with, I'll sketch the latest addition to the gay menagerie, a skinny, fragile 18 year old we call Ricky Martin, a brisk wind could snap him in two, pale as a ghost, red-haired and freckled, he walks on egg-shells as if he's just been screwed up the street, and probably has. Apparently he's the son of a Christian minister, driven to continuous psychotic breakdowns by an antipathetic world, already on a disability pension and he hasn't even started life, every day in a tizz over some small domestic drama, it's not easy being an OUT and OUT pansy since infancy. He's possibly a proto trannie as he follows Ayesha around like an acolyte chasing her guru and hopefully will learn how to gird her loins against the deluge of slings and arrows yet to come her way.

Ayesha the Drag(on) Lady is the reigning queen of Roslyn Street, never to let us forget she was the star attraction of Les Girls, the female impersonators that "Priscilla Queen of the Desert" emulated, the only Aussie-Asian in the bunch, all that miming to bad disco hits her claim for the cure for cancer, she swans about in outre costumes, snarling glib wisecracks from a cheeky pose like Gloria in "Sunset Boulevard", quick to relate a flippant tale of glory long gone by, she's very entertaining and has anybody who crosses her path beaming with a cheesy grin. In her madness she forgets to shave, her lapdog like a drowned rat in her arms taking snaps at passing strangers, she mugs for every camera flashed, it could be Leni Reifenshtal making a doco about the decadent downfall of Sodom Sydney and she'd put in her 7 cents worth.

Danny Aboud sits across from me, trying to hide his gaping maw with his hand, he'd lost his teeth and is sensitive to his disfiguration, once a raving beauty on the Drag circuit, compatriot of Doris Fish on their world tour, he'd been a hustler in New York and out of drag was notorious for having a giant shlong and thus done tricks with the likes of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote. Now in old age he permanently resides in his male persona, another wit quick with camp wisecracks, actually a sweet natured angel, benign, content to sell his costume jewellry at Surry Hills markets in near-obscurity.

Every circus has a fat-lady and for us it's Gremlin, looking much like Jabba the Hutt, a monster with a vicious creature in the folds of his belly, his mentally-challenged side-kick Larry, supposedly his adopted son, they fight incessantly, only last week Larry had thrown a knife at the fat gronk. Gremlin has nothing good to say about the world except to complain about Larry's latest outrages and telling nasty sex jokes that aren't funny. Ayesha likes to quip that he parks his van behind Long Bay Gaol with the doors open ready to sweep up any desperado on release to work at his business of sucking out the old grease from fish and chip shops among other things that doesn't bear thinking about. He's had seven heart attacks and when he finally does drop dead everybody will have to run for it to avoid the tidal wave of shit that he'll surely let go.

Oh, no saints preserve me, a monster from my past has come back to the Cafe to try to crack back into my good graces, but he hasn't got a hope. Ian Cheeseburger and I were buddies and warriors in arms for seven years back in the 'Eighties and 'Nineties but he got into ICE on top of the poly-drug abuse he already practiced, he was already mad and he got madder. Manic after drug-fueled orgies with strangers he'd arranged on a phone-sex line, he'd then dredge the dumpsters of the city's back-alleys till dawn and drag back the rubbish to hoard in his hovel with bullshit fantasies that it was all for his great arts' career, burying himself under it all.

Often he'd come over to my place and disturb me with paranoid harangues, shouting "The CIA flew those planes into the Twin Towers! Toby you can't eat anything red, put that apple down! You broke your leg because you had bad karma!" He'd scream and wave his arms about, me in bed with my leg in a "Zimmer splint" after my grand motor-cycle accident, too vulnerable and tetchy to soak up his eye-rolling rage, I asked him to leave to which he stood out the front of my apartment and shouted, "Toby, you're a dirty old poof!" I hopped outside and threatened to brain him with a cudgel and swore I'd never talk to him again, and I never did. Now he here is shrieking superlatives about my punk approach into my face, my new best friend. I don't want him in my life anymore, too tired and reclusive, I need peace and enlightenment in my companions.

Here comes Malcolm Wrathschild, another sorry soul back from the dead, scion of a wealthy family who'd scandalised their good name by being a schitzo gay reprobate, they'd bought him off with large sums which he'd blown on klunky cars and addled rentboys. The poor thing has hunched up over the years like Quasimoto, in spite of the riches he looks like a tramp from under a bridge, in and out of the psycho-bins, living proof that money doesn't buy love or sanity. He's betrayed the Piccolo in ghastly fashion over the years, calling the cops and the health department, abusing Vitto's sister, Maria, as " a nasty old slut!" He's always forgiven, people feel sorry for him and talk to him like he's got half a brain, he creeps about, waffling on with some nonsense concerning Marilyn Monroe.

James is working today, he's the ascerbic cook who thinks he can be as rude as Vitto who has nastiness down to a fine art, has made his reputation swearing at his customers and is funny and endearing, but with James it's just plain hideous, a pity because he'd be a goodlooking boy if he smiled and didn't snap like a cranky turtle. He's half-Aboriginal and claims to belong to the Royal House of Turtle Island up near Lismore, a princess in waiting no less. Another drama queen, these days he's going to court to get an AVO against some other queen who he says has put a contract out on his life.

Charles Haughtry has walked up bearing a tulip ripped from the Fitzroy Gardens by our local Aboriginal beggar Rosie to give as a gift to Peter Pumpkin for his birthday. Looking like a cross between Oscar Wilde and Droopy the Dog, as usual his dinner has stained the front of his wrinkled clothes and hairs shoot from his nostrils like Poof the Manky Dragon. He's long had the hots for Peter, thinks he has a special relationship with the angelic violinist, virtually stalks him, sending him 77 text messages a day, and is scheming that the presentation of the tulip will get him further into Peter's heart.

Both of them are mad geniuses, Pete composes heavenly music while Charles writes plays, his short piece, "The Rose", recently won the Short and Sweet Competition for writing and direction because it was the only play that had real emotion. Peter comes on hot and cold over their non-affair, happy to have a supportive friend, not so keen on the "special" bit, he dreams of a butch, sensitive symphonic music composer to wave his baton by his side, but neither artist has found the man of their dreams and looks into a cracked mirror wondering why. Lucky for me Charles is the most benign of souls and laughs when he reads these scabrous portraits.

Oh Oh! Here comes the mummified Edwin Duff, cabaret singer extraordinaire, one foot through the Pearly Gates, the poor old thing needs a walking-frame these days to get about, toddling inch by inch down Roslyn street, dressed in a "Joker's" suit like a psychedelic carny-barker, he's come to grace the Pooparazi Cafe with his royal presence. He thinks he channels Frank Sinatra with his singing and if you dare question his expertise he flips and shrieks curses that would curl the hair on the Pope's bum, has made such a terrible commotion around the Cross that everyone disappears when they see him coming. I love to give the cranky old dick a hard time, calling him Edwin Muff and asking him if his next hit record will be titled, "Up the Duff", he howls and spits like a mangy old alley cat, miffed that a little punk like me is not afraid of him.

All these portraits seem to come from a "rogues' gallery" so I have to mention that many sweet-natured, sane gays come to the Venus Fly-trap Cafe as well. There's Dr. Glen the lawyer who gives legal help to the streeties, ready to give succour if one is down on one's luck when asked, often with a gift of a book or theatre tickets for Vitto. And Adrian, a young blonde gay who is drop-dead gorgeous, smart and honey-natured, all the frustrated poofs drool over him but he's in a long-term relationship and a bit too Alpha-male for these local deadbeats as he's the President of the Kings Cross Businessmen's Association. And Steve the architect from Gosford, beaming joy, amused by the comic routines of the Hell's Kitchen Cafe. And last of the Sweeties, another Peter, with the most beautiful little fluffy white dog, who commiserates with all my traumas and whose quiet smile somehow calms me.

To yell, "Gay!" is an insult in the school-ground, many gays grow up brutalised, alienated, dysfunctional, worn down by the bigotry, they turn to substance abuse, alcohol, heroin, pills, pot, ICE, and become hissing, sneering harpies slagging off the world, all as a defense but reinforcing straight society's disenchantment with them. A case in point would be Bobby Dogcart, with his terribly fey manners, the classic snippy gay, his nose ever turned up, snarling through his hairy nostrils at the world, he puts shit on everything, no good turn gets his approval, it's all self-aggrandisement or money grubbing. He had a heroin habit for 21 years, now over it but drained of substance till there's only a husk left, he seems totally lost and haunts the Pleasure Chest Sex Shop looking for his soul-mate.

And last on the line, me, the pinhead geek in this freak-show, one more confused fag sitting fucked off at the Hairy Angel Cafe, bitter and twisted from having been beaten up 777 times, my potential limited, my road lonely. The few times I thought I found a lover he turned into ashes in my mouth, I rarely get laid, often discovering I've been entertaining a ghost in my heart. Lucky for me I've long searched for enlightenment, finding much of this world ephemeral and not worth losing my nuts over.

Father Sin walks in, (you'd think they'd demand a name change), from the Catholic Church down the street. He's got Cardinal Pell with him, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, and one of the most noxious of anti-gay powers in existence, they've come to make obeisance to the fairy Queen Vitto. The six foot five monster fills the cafe and looms over the little hobgoblin Vitto, asking him if he's Italian and Vitto snaps, "No, I'm Chinese!" Then the old bugger speaks Italian to him and Vitto melts, eats out of his bishopric hand, kisses his ring.

Pell keeps his apalling, huge back to me, he knows a Luciferian when he senses one, The Hairy Angel Cafe is a hotspot of atheistic ferment and irreligious philosophy, and I'm one of the most articulate demagogues, forever rebelling against THEIR tyrannical gods. Maybe he's come to exorcise the place, but I think he and his church are one of the great demonic forces denying human rights across the planet and throughout history, and it's him who should be exorcised. If I wasn't so distracted and distraught I would've heckled him but that would've been impolite, and if we're anything at the Dante's Inferno Cafe we're lovely law-abiding, diplomatic citizens who wouldn't say "boo" even when confronted by the Great Beast himself.

Remembering Pyrmont Squats.

I once lived on Pyrmont Point from 1978 to 1990 in a bunch of old workers' cottages that had been squatted by an eclectic gang of libertarians, artists, misfits and junkies. It was another of my great universities of survival and fun, I had the wildest of times, nothing as terrible as Northcott Concentration Camp, and for all the fear and punch-ups that we experienced I never regretted a moment of it. We'd tried for years to get the Sydney City Council to renovate the houses and give them to us to run as an artists' co-operative and they blew smoke up our collective butts interminably promising to come to the party but at the end knocked us back and moved us all into public housing instead.

For all those years the Council had tried many times to evict us and bulldoze the houses, tearing the roofs off some domiciles so we couldn't live in them and causing them to rot further. Many times they sent the police in to terrorise us but we bluffed and beat them off every time and managed to keep the heritage-worthy mid-19th century structures standing, fixing the leaky roofs so they didn't tumble into the mire. As noted from my raves, I've since lived in Northcott for the last twenty years and always refused to go back down to Pyrmont Point to check out the renovations, being heart-broken at their loss and furious at the Council's betrayal. But last night, to console me for my beating by the ICE troll, a friend drove me down there to reminisce on old times.

I was shocked to see the small city built there, countless deluxe apartment buildings, the Star-city Casino, the Theatre Wharves, even the tacky old Wayside Terrace up on the hill, home to the council-worker rednecks that had harrassed us squatters for a decade, now turned into a post-modern/art deco wonderland. But the biggest shock was what had been done to the old block of squats. All renovated into lovely townhouses, their old structure hidden under new materials and hardly recognisable. Except for my quaint little cottage at No 6 Scott St. which I'd clung to for 12 years like a hairy barnacle.

It was exactly the same as it had been for 150 years only painted nicely, new windows and complete roof. In my days the roof had constantly leaked and a waterfall had poured down the walls like an art-effect. The little house next door had also been preserved but on the other side of me they'd renovated and gutted the little two-storey terraces and turned them into a restaurant named, of all things, "Viva Goa - A Taste of Goa"!!! Talk about synchronicity, I was stunned, the very place I'd just spent the last twelve years hiding out in for New Years' Eve techno raves.

In about 1996, when the renovations had been completed, the press had announced what a wonderful effort at saving heritage buildings it had been and proclaimed they'd been left empty for 30 years with nobody loving or caring for them. I was furious and wrote a letter to the S & M Herald calling them revisionists and filling them in on the real story, and miracle of miracles, they printed the letter. On looking closer at my litle cottage I saw a brass plaque that announced the buildings heritage value, told of the politicians who dedicated them, the funding bodies who'd paid for the whole shebang and that they now were used by some Design School for art students to study in. Last but not least the plaque mentioned that squatters had lived there for many years and in so many words saved the place for posterity. No god I thought, at last recognition of the truth.

All those battles, all that angst, hassle, labour, pain and joy, we'd even gone to the Supreme Court to get ownership or at least stop them from destroying the quaint architecture. At least the end result was not too far from what we'd dreamed, preservation and a sanctuary for artists. I got over my bruising from the bashing of that day, I felt proud and honoured, I had actually influenced the history and design of this mad South Seas Pirate Port City of Sydney, little nobody punk poofy me. Hee hee hee.

Old Lady Northcott on the Rocks.

I was bemused to note that a Sydney Harbour ferry by the name of Lady Northcott was driven upon the rocks last week. I also saw that in the film "The Changeling" starring Angelina Jolie the ranch on which all the boys were murdered was called Northcott. But for sheer contempt plus loathing nothing beats the horror of Northcott Housing Estate in Surry Hills. At the risk of being a bore I can't help but tell the ongoing story of living there, reality is always more perverse than fiction, it's terrific grisly material for a writer plus I may need a diary of events one day to plead special consideration for my release from such a purgatory.

Concerning the ongoing saga with my awful next door neighbour, Cursula, I took the advice of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" and figured diplomacy was the best way of winning a battle and besides, I was so stressed by our bitch-fights I risked another heart attack. So I talked to her with friendship and reason hoping she would stop getting on my nerves but this only encouraged her passive-aggression and again she knocked at my door all night long demanding attention and hassling for my xanax stash while I just put my MP3 in my ears and listened to techno music, oblivious to her wailing. When she piled the junk furniture up outside my door I ignored it. When she built the Mongolian Yurt in the garden fronting my place and filled it with garbage I just warned her that the Housing Department wouldn't like it.

On Saturday night I got engrossed in the sci-fi masterpiece "Minority Report", trying to follow its' convoluted plotting, when I heard the "crackle crackle bhoom bhoom" of a large fire erupting in my flat's vicinity. I looked out the door and saw Cursula's Yurt going up like a Guy Fawks' bonfire, the flames a hundred feet high and spreading to the workers' toilet-house nearby. Cursula ran about shrieking in helplessness while the gay guys from the other end of the building got out the fire-hose and sprayed the inferno into submission. Ashes, the burnt detritus of rags and mattresses, newspapers and umbrellas, scattered and floated through the air, making a horrendous mess of our front verandah. The multitude of tenants came out on their landings to stare down at us in dismay, Cursula bawling her eyes out, screaming, "Someone here really hates me! Who did it?"

"Who do you think did it, you stupid brain-dead cow?" I yelled, "the same firebug that's been attacking Northcott for the last few years. If you didn't pile all that rubbish up it wouldn't have happened!"
"You probably did it Toby, you're always hassling me about my recycling."
"You rotten bitch! It's not enough that I have to suffer your rubbish, and then the fire, I've got to be blamed for it as well. I hope you get evicted for this!"
"You should have compassion for me, that's all my precious stuff that's been burned," she moaned as a torrent of crocodile tears poured forth.
"I hate your guts. All that crying is just typical manipulative behaviour. You're hoping attention will be diverted from your dirty slut habits and people will be sorry for you but everyone actually despises you. Look at this fucking mess. A real person would be apologising and trying to clean it up."

I left her wringing her hands, Dravid the gay undertaker pretending niceness and trying to give her a cup of coffee to calm her down but she slammed her door in his ugly mug. I tried to get back into the movie, Tom Cruise agonising with Max von Sydow about "Pre-crime and the Thought police", but again I heard flames crackling and fire-engines wailing. I looked out my door to discover firemen hosing down the front of my place, my bathroom window about to crack from the heat. The firebug had come back for more revenge and set alight to the crap she'd built into a pile near my door. Someone really did have it in for the vacuous cow and I was going to burn at the stake with her.

The police were called and after much ballyhooing they carted the sorry bitch off to St. Vincents for emergency psychiatric treatment. But, sadly, she was back in an hour and hassling me for xanax as the hospital staff knew a substance-abuser when they saw one and refused her entreaties for drugs. She had the Easter weekend to clean up the mess before the Housing Department bureaucats came and saw it but like a sloth she lay in her manky bed for most of the holiday, only carrying out more rubbish to add to the disaster, the front of my place looking like a tsunami had hit it. I can't wait to see what the officials will do about it when they clap their beady eyes upon it, hopefully they'll banish her to the Black Stump in Woop Woop. Or show me mercy and allow me to take a long break from this madhouse called Northcott.

The last thing for me to say about my incarceration at Northcott is that the Sticky Beaks theatre mob have not returned to give succour to the lumpen proles; after swan-necked Kerry Armstrong, a doctor in a TV drama, read lovely poems gushing upon the desperately lonely Northcott denizens, she rushed off to flog her good rep to Coca Cola, endorsing the wonder drink as good for the teeth and low in calories, and now Coke and her sainthood are being pilloried in the press for false advertising. We here at Northcott carry on with the bedlam of screams, curses, smashing glass and breaking doors thundering night after night, unhappy gay Dravid, mortified by the dead-bodies he lays out in his funereal parlour, hanging out his window in a drunken furore shouting his favourite refrain, "You lousy fucking bastards, you no good lazy pensioner shits! You've got no money, you own nothing, you've never ever had a job! Fuck the lot of you!" No god save me. Old Lady Northcott has seen better days.

P.S. No god did save me. When I got home after writing the above I found a troll urinating against the wall near my front door and I said to him, "What are you doing? You can't piss here!" He flew into an instant rage, tucking his worm of a penis away and charging at me screaming, "Everybody shits and pisses around here! I can do what I want cunt!" He then picked up an iron stake that the lovely Cursula had planted as part of her gypsy camp and swung it heavily at me. I put my hand up to protect my head and he cracked me right across it almost breaking the bones. I fell back onto the ground and he took several more swings at my head which I ducked, his eys popping in a maddened glare, swearing filth, he looked like an Orc from "The Lord of the Rings" strung out on ICE, for seven seconds I trully thought my last moments on earth had come, nothing was going to stop this monster from beating me to death.

On hearing my screams many of my neighbours had come out to watch but were helpless as he was a heavily built ogre too strong for anyone to take on. I emanated an egg of protective white light around myself and as he made ready to bring the iron bar down on my head in one finalsing deadly blow I stared deep into his deranged eyes and yelled in an authoritative voice, "Don't do it!" and by some miracle he stopped in mid-air as if hypnotised , the weapon poised above my face, and cursing maniacally he instead pounded my push-bike then charged off up the path carring the weapon with him. This was the 777th time I had narrowly escaped destruction in my eventful life, how did I manage to come away almost unscathed yet again? My hand was cut and swollen, my body bruised , my heart shaken and my neighbours sympathetic, even crag-faced Dravid tried to console me, furious that such brutality keeps erupting at Northcott. Who will be next, 87 year old Dolly?

I told Cursula later that all the junk she left lying about out the front made perfect weapons for the fuckwits and she might be the next victim so she quickly carried the lengths of wood and iron bars back into her lair. I aslo pleaded with her to remove the piles of old clothes, magazines etc but the next morning saw that they they remained piled up there still, burnt and mouldy, ready for the firebug to set the place alight again. Nothing can convince this moron that she endangers us all, that her hobo's camp attracts the low-lifes, but such is life in the desperado's lane. Why do we exist here on Planet Earth? To suffer, pleasure and pain, there is no heaven and hell, it's all here.

The Mysterious Confusion of Existence.

Every day I wake up and am amazed I exist, life, consciousness and the universe like a miracle, a mirage, a madness and I'm not dead yet, I have to continue finding my way through the mists, the mire, the media maelstrom, to discover my purpose, why I should wake up at all. I guess many of us sap sap sapiens are lost and confused, we find food and shelter, with loved ones if we have them, and try not to ask for more, but I hanker for knowledge, what the fuck is it all about?

I haven't blogged for ages, no hot stories to tell, my creativity engaged elsewhere. After years of cogitating on it I finally got a succinct history of my artistic endeavours on a site called Soul Projector, engineered by a digital wizard mate, Richard Machine, and I feel I've arrived on the world-wide psycho-map, in a back-alley of cyberspace, my very own art gallery, The Vagabond World of Toby Zoates, a lot of silly twaddle but who gives a shit in this world sinking like Atlantis into the Great Muck?

Now I'm in the doldrums, the down-side of my manic flights where I'd been frantically writing till dawn my epic tome, The 7 Lives of Toby the Punk Poofy Cat, the last thing to get off my chest, my life's long journey, trying to figure out where I fucked up, reliving the grand adventures, an explanation of dysfunctions, an apology for mistakes, a never-ending suicide note, a message in a bottle to tell a deaf universe that I, a nobody, existed, a fun ribald tale that makes me laugh for all the kicks in the arse I got. Writing gets me high, then I crash.

The chaos of Northcott Housing Ghetto doesn't help, it exploded last night and woke me up from deep sleep after days of manic insomnia. Since my neighbour, Eric the Beserker, got taken to an assisted-care hostel, a little alcoholic woman, Box-car Bertha, has moved in next door. She's sweet and quiet when sober but makes a racket when pissed, so blind drunk she has to feel her way along the wall and can't put her key in it's slot, someone has to do it for her. She has the nasty habit of bringing drunks back home with her from the pub, and last night hosted a Maori woman, dead-drunk and in a fury, who decided she wouldn't put up with Cursula's whoring/hoarding ways and accused her of stealing equipment from the council worker's compound nearby and stashing it in her flat with all the other junk rescued from the dumpsters. For hours she kicked Cursula's door and screamed about her being "a no-good stupid bitch", and I pissed myself laughing for it was just karma for all the crap Cursula makes me endure by living her frumpy life on my doorstep.

Cursula called the cops and I heard the caterwauling rend the night, blame and counter-blame, the cops left with a warning but 7 minutes later the Maori warrior returned to continue her attack, kicking my door as well and shrieking, "you too, ya white shit!" I opened my door and told her, "I've got nothing to do with anything, thrash Cursula for sure, she deserves it, but lay off me!" The cops were called again, I listened from inside my flat, much swearing, cursing, Cursula living up to her tag and soaking up the abuse, the Maori rebel squawking on and on till the cops got fed up and arrested her, taking her off to chill in a cooling tank, and silence descended at last. Until, past midnight, Cursula decides to hold a conference on my doorstep, yap-yapping interminable nonsense with some schitzo from the block who's hoping to screw her, and I have to yell more curses, "You selfish cow, fuck off, or I'll call the cops on you!" And she replies, "Oh, I didn't know you were in there." "You brain-dead scumbag, it's midnight, where else would I be? I'm trying to sleep!"

I had recently tried a truce with her, the stress from the antipathy and contempt straining my heart, but she took advantage of my friendship, piling up the garbage on my doorstep so I tripped over it every time I went in or out, leaving her breakfast spilled on the concrete for me to slip on, knocking on my door at all hours to plead, cajole, whine for my stash of xanax which I need for emergencies, not for her to get stoned on.

The last straw was her dragging junk from the dumpster noisily thru her door at 4am and calling thru my balcony door for attention, attention, attention, Mistress Passive/Aggressive in the saggy flesh, till I ran out with a stick and threatened to beat her mercilessly if she didn't desist from disturbing me. "But I'm nocturnal," was her big excuse. I really wanted to hit her, I weighed up the consequences, the pleasure of whipping her arse vs. years in gaol. I remembered my mother beaten to a pulp by my father, all too horrible, a waste of energy, the working out of ages-long misogyny absolutely pathetic. The world needs peace and love, but where there is no peace, love is hard to find. I crept back to my bed and took a xanax, and pondered my sorry fate.

Just as I'm dozing off I hear a thump, a crack, a crash as if a body's been flung from the top floor, then lots of swearing and moaning. I peeped from my door to see a skinny, craggy-faced ICE junkie limp by, blood streaming from his head, so stoned he'd walked off the concrete embankment holding up the gardens and fallen five feet, in his pickled state he'd probably survive the Grand Canyon.
''Mate, I didn't see the drop, I walked straight over the edge, nearly broke my skull on the concrete, it's so fucking dark out here!"
"Who are you, you don't live here?"
"That'd be right, you don't fucking care!" I shut my door in his ugly face, glad he'd fell, teach him a lesson for lurking about where he's doesn't know what he's doing.

Such is life, no time to wonder why I'm here, the turbulence of the gutter sweeping me along, the planet cries out for help, everybody's suffering, no one's got conclusive answers, maybe it's the mystery is what keeps it interesting? I don't know, I'm searching for knowledge, that's why I exist. Maybe knowledge isn't everything. I'd like to have the wisdom of equanimity in the midst of the whirling maelstrom, and compassion for the retarded, like Cursula, but such ideals seem illusory, like Utopia, Nirvana, Love. I am, after all, typical of humanity, flawed and ever reaching out for soemthing better.

Making Whoopi on the Cross.

Then there was that night, many years ago, when desperate for a job, I applied to Porky's Sex Shop to be a sales assistant. Mickey P, the manager at that time, said he'd give me a try-out and if I sold a lot of sex-junk in one night I'd be in like Flynn. He was a programming wiz and while he plugged away at his computer, creating gay chatrooms for Arabs and flogging advertising on a flood of porn sites he'd commandeered, I stumbled red-faced amidst the plastic vaginas and blow-up dolls trying to encourage the tight-arsed trickle of punters into buying the trashy porn and sex-toys. I was so embarrassed approaching giggling midget Asian girls with giant rabbit-eared dildoes and big-bellied, drooling Euro-gronks with flavoured condoms, I mumbled, perspired and tripped over myself and scared the would-be orgiasts off, not selling a thing, not even the rubber dildos on bargain-basement sale that were piled in a mountainous heap and threatened to overwhelm the shop. Micky P, busy capturing gronks from various sordid chatrooms into his own cyberspace domain without them quite realising they'd been shanghaied, them buying shit they didn't want, was furious I hadn't made a buck here in the real world and refused to pay me for my hours of tongue-tied toil. He placated my annoyance with the offer of one of the cheap dildos on sale which I grudging swept up as I stomped out of the dump, shoving the noxious rubber dick deep into my pocket in an attempt to hide it. I wandered up to the big traffic intersection and noticed a crowd of rubber-neckers corralled behind a roped-off walkway that led to the foyer of the Kings Cross Hotel. They were making such a loud hubbub I couldn't resist pushing my way to the front of the mob and stretching my neck out with the best of them. "What's going on?" I asked a young gay guy clutching onto the velvet rope. He turned and frowned at the sight of my craggy face then snipped through his nostrils, "Oh, some movie star is coming. They want to turn this part of the strip into Sydney's own 'Walkway of Fame', it's so exciting!" He then promptly turned his back on me. The crowd pushed and shoved, threshed about and hullaballooed, craning necks and popping eyeballs. Fucking hell, it would have to be a resurrected Marilyn Monroe to get this kind of attention! I got squeezed up against the young gay guy and he must've felt the dildo in my pocket poke into his butt for he suddenly straightened up as if he'd had a kundalini rush, then glancing down at the inordinately large bulge in my pants, while the crowd heaved and swayed, he surrepticiously reached behind him and groped the hardened phallus, in the crush of bodies unable to divine it's artificial nature. In the meantime Security Guards on the roadway beat back the marauding crowd while a black limousine pulled into the kerb. As the collective hysteria raged to a furore, the limmo's doors silently , slowly opened and two body-guards the size of Summo wrestlers leaped forth, reached into the back and dragged forth a diminutive figure, a little black woman with a vast pile of dreadlocks swaying from her head like Medusa's snakes. Whoopi Goldberg in the flesh, delivered like a sacrificial victim beneath the redlight of Kings Cross. Grinning in bewilderment, she was manhandled up the pathway, burly arms gripping her fiercely, hurtled along so that her feet barely touched the ground, the mob howling for her attention, grubby hands reaching out to grab a piece of her, the security guards thumping anyone who got close. The charismatic comic was heaved down the walkway and then flung to the ground just inside the foyer of the hotel where a block of wet cement was waiting for her. As she pressed her hands into the gray sludge she smiled into my face and quipped, "This sure aint Grauman's Chinese Theatre but what the heck!" While she carried on writing her name under the handprints the gay boy in front of me kept feeling me up, gripping my false proboscis with such fervour, massaging and tugging at it that bit by bit it slid up my trousers to finally pop out of the pocket and flop upon the ground.
The silly poof had at first a look of profound shock upon his mug, as if he'd amputated my pride and joy in his enthusiasm, but then contempt quickly took over as he espied the rubber object getting trampled under foot and sneering at me as if I'd planned the whole subterfuge to get his attention, put his nose in the air and grappled his way through the crowd, never to look back. I grabbed up the loathsome tool to fling it after him but then another creative idea hit me. Dear Whoopi carried on, doing what was required of her celebrity, wet cement dripping all over her, she was heaved back to her feet and once more manhandled through the screaming crowd, dodging the outstretched claws trying to tear her to pieces and finally thrown into the safety of the limmo to make her escape. While the whole crowd concentrated on her departure, security guards and hotel staff all rushing towards the limmo to beat back the baying mob, I saw my chance at a bit of mischief, for I was feeling despondent, unloved and unremarkable. I was standing very near the hotel entrance, right over the wet cement pavement and I realised I could still leave my mark, like some crazed fag Zorro and swiftly, in the blink of an eye, I slapped down the rubber dildo, right between the handprints, and then snuck it back into my pocket as I rushed away, nobody seeing a thing, Whoopi's hands looking as if they were reaching for dick, an apt symbolic artwork for the entrance to the Cross, if ever there was one. As I stumbled back up the Cross I pondered long upon the nature of fame and celebrity, I suppose the money and kudos was what made it all worthwhile, but all that grappling and wrestling, not being able to walk under one's own steam, to not be free to do ordinary things like go to the shops or have privacy with a lover, every move and fart watched and commented upon, hmmmmm. Maybe there's something to be said for anonymity. I sighed with longing for something I'll never know, to be adored by the multitudes, special, like the best meal on a restaurant's menu, to be eaten alive, 7 Academy Awards wouldn't be enough, forget it! And so I disappeared into the night, the huge neon Coke-sign illuminating me with a red glow as if I were a fallen angel on the lam from hell.

Spagbog in Melbourne.

I've just been thru one of life's supposed great crisis, what to do with one's ageing parents when they're fit for the glue factory, and so I haven't written for months, too stressed to take flight in the written word. I'd found myself back in Auz after a dream sojourn in India and decided to go to Melbourne for Christmas with family and friends, the first time in 12 years plus. It was on New Year's Eve, just when I was ready to celebrate, that I got the phone call telling me my mother had been found wandering miles from home, not knowing who or where she was, and I was asked to find her a nursing home pronto.

This flabbergasted me as I didn't have a clue as to where to put her or what paperwork to fill out. My control freak brother had been organising to get power-of-attorney over her, without informing me, and was close to finalising the paperwork for her affairs and so I didn't have to worry about the bureaucratic side of things too much but I had four sets of people henpecking me over the affair, the social worker and nurses at the Rosebud Hospital where she had been delivered, the Community Care Workers who had been on her case for the last few years, my brother and his interfering wife who thought they knew best, and my oldtime friends from my teenage years who all had advice and theories about the psychological machinations behind my mother losing her wits. Thus I was distracted and could hardly squeeze out a "happy new year" as we watched the fireworks over the Yarra River, me thinking of Goa and India and the trance parties I was missing out on.

One of my mates happened to be passing thru Melbourne, he'd ridden his pushbike all the way from Sydney, complaining of the great expense of staying in Motels on many nights, the cheapness of riding bikes as compared to flying by aeroplane defeated. He was putting up with one of his women friends in a squatted church on the edges of the city, and now she was asking him to split quick from her squat after only 2 days residence as she couldn't stand him any longer. I suggested he'd given her sexual vibes, him not having got his wick wet for 4 years, but he swore it wasn't the case, she was simply a bitch pothead anarchist and as such was not to be trusted.

"Melbourne's been a failure for me, I've got no friends except you, it's all a sad disappointment. I'm leaving early, going to Tasmania."
I tried to entertain him with my observations upon humanity, "I like reading the T-shirt designs people wear, you can tell from what they put on their chest what their philosophy and interests are, it gives you an instant clue."
"I don't wear T-shirt designs, I like anonymity, keep them guessing. Except of course for that one word I went and got printed up myself on a T-shirt in red plastic letters, "Spagbog", I like it cause it's meaningless, not some trendy design for wankers."
"Spagbog, ha ha ha! Yeah, it certainly sums you up."

So I'll call my mate Spagbog to avoid criminal prosecution as I try to give a quick portrait of him, one of the kookiest dudes I've ever met in my long life of dealing with freaks of all shapes and contortions. He's very tall, rake thin and dresses in lycra bike-tights and flowing t-shirts and with his bike helmet looks like an alien nerd from Planet Geek, he goes on shoplifting sprees dressed like this, standing out like a freak from outer-space, and somehow squeezes into the front of his tight lycra shorts half a department store's worth of consumer goods, all as his revenge against corporate capitalism.

He's always got some wild story to tell me, so far-fetched I don't know whether to believe him, except he's so kooky they could very well be true. He's got this crazy antipathy against t-shirts with Japanese rising sun designs and every time he sees a fool wearing one he attempts to rip it off the guy's back with a lecture about Japanese Imperialism. He says he saw one fuckwit down in the hick south coast town where he lives wearing a Nazi swastika and was so furious he challenged the fascist to a fight. They agreed to meet after sunset at the local football field and, before showing up, Spagbog took off his top and smeared his upper body all over with his own faeces and when the Nazi showed up with his gang for a fight he freaked out and wouldn't touch him and they all ran off, terrified of the madman. I thought it was a good trick tho extremely icky.

Then there was the story of his next door neighbours' yapping dog, he is a "cat" person and hates dogs, the mutt never stopped barking day or night and it drove him crazy, frothing with angst he planned his revenge. Sneaking over in the dead of the night he captured the little beastie and tried wrapping it in Gladwrap, the poor thing put up a furious fight and bit his hands, scratched and writhed about in it's struggle for existence but the unwinding Gladwrap was inexorable, mummifying it in plastic till it stopped breathing. He then unwrapped it and left it's inert body for it's owner to find and be mystified as to the cause of it's demise. I was horrified by this tale as I love dogs and all animals, the dear creatures are badly put upon by humanity, tortured, enslaved, torn apart for consumer products, I was crook on Spagbog for weeks tho he's such a confabulater, it was probably all bullshit.

He'd been cracked on the head by a falling iron pipe some years ago and probably had frontal-lobe damage which would explain his outlandish behaviour and misanthropic attitude. I've always had a soft-spot for freaks, I attract them like a circus ring-master and try to encourage them to join the human race regardless. He'd given me some comfort in my ongoing trauma over my mother's emotionless dementia so I wished him bon voyage as he sailed the seven seas looking for his kismet.

Back to my mother's predicament, I went down to Rosebud past the Mornington Peninsula to see what succour I could give her. Many suburbanites flock to Rosebud for the Christmas holidays and park their butts in tatty canvas tents in tea-tree scrub beside Port Phillip Bay, elbow to elbow right up to the edge of the highway, sucking in car exhaust and beer, desperate to be in a south seas paradise no doubt but barely surviving the urban sprawl of a big city. I found my mother staring into space in her hospital bed, lost to the world, but she instantly recognised me, like a mother hen knowing her own chick in a busy barnyard tho she seemed to know nothing else. She'd forgiven or forgotten our fight of two years ago and, relieved to not have to go thru another shreiking temper storm, I was asked by the nursing staff to go to her house and fetch her personal things for she was delivered to the hospital in a night-dress and now wore only a paper surgery gown.

I trudged the backstreets of Rosebud only to find her house locked up like Fort Knox, no way in no matter how much my nephew and I scratched around the premises. Finally I simply broke a window and my nephew crawled in to allow me ingress. We ransacked her house looking for her private papers, War Veteran's Gold Card, Bank Book, toiletries, underwear, dressing gown, dresses, slippers, etc etc and carted it all back to her in the hospital. At last she was comfortable trudging to the toilet in fresh undies, slippers and voluminous bathrobe, and I was again pressured to find her a bed in a nursing home ASAP. Many homes I rang wanted $250,000 as deposit, impossible for this working class pensioner, I rang the Community Care Workers constantly to hassle them to assist in the search and in a few days they were able to find a place that required only $35000 deposit, a nice, friendly nursing home where she would be happy as she chilled out in Nogod's Waiting Room ready for the big flight to the Pearly Gates of Oblivion. Thus I left Rosebud, praying to that same phantom god that I never have to return to that seaside purgatory again.

My nephew admitted to my take-over-merchant brother, who was stewing in his backwoods bush-hut in Tasmania, that we'd broken into mum's house and he flew into a rage,
"How dare you no-hopers trespass in her sacrosanct domain! What precious goods did you steal from her? I've a good mind to call the cops on you!"
No explanations of helping make the demented old bitch comfortable would placate him, he was itching to have some ridicule to hold over his wayward, irresponsible elder brother and it shocked me to realise he'd held onto sibling resentments from early childhood, pissed off I might have achieved greater reknown than he and that his own kids enjoyed my company as if we're best mates whereas they dreaded getting another straight-laced lecture from him whenever they met.

I rang him to ask why we couldn't both have power-of-attorney, "what's the problem?" and he flipped, spitting chips about me being a vagabond before crashing the phone down on me. I had so many existential torments at this time and he was adding to them, no brotherly love there for all that I'd protected him throughout our childhood and, sadly, I'm determined to never speak to him again. Even at our mother's eventual funereal I will have to be restrained from rushing up to him and smacking him in the chops.

I was relieved to return to Sydney, forswearing my romance of moving back to Melbourne, I'm indeed done with that city forever, Sydney has long been my hometown and haunt, at least there's sunshine and cool rain here to lift one's spirits when zooming about on a pushbike, not the sleet or furnace of the south. Now I'm back to limbo and sour-pussed over certain denizens of the underworld whoI run into at Kings Cross but I will save my vituperation for another story, possibly entitled, "A Posse of Poofs at the Peccadilo Cafe."

Mumbai Mon Amour.

I first came to Mumbai in 1972 as a young hippie on the soul-seekers trail, I was so poor I slept on the streets but the Mumbaikers always looked after me, even the legless beggars fed me. I love the city so much I've come again and again over the years, it's vibrant culture, the awesome Saracen/Gothic architecture, the refreshing sea breeze, sitting on a mat on Chaupatti Beach with my friends looking at the stars, the skyline of Marine Drive, the yummy restaurants and cheerful pubs, the wonders of the sculptured caves of Elephanta, and the many cinemas showing hot shlock movies, (lately I enjoyed "Deathrace" the most, perverse considering all the machine-gunning it contained.)

When in a good mood I even adore the ebullient crowds rushing about the Arabian Nights buildings, where even the desperately poor find some succour here and can be seen laughing with the joy of being alive in such an industrious metropolis. (Of course, I've seen them wailing piteously too for Mumbai can be very cruel, and right now we all have our hearts broken.)

I was here a week ago and sat in front of the majestic Taj Palace Hotel and all over again was awestruck by it's fabulous architecture, gazing up into the mystique-lit windows, wondering what the life of the rich was like ensconced within, wishing that one day I could afford to stay just one night there. And I walked past Leopold's Cafe on the Colaba Causeway, it was packed to the rafters with yammering tourists, even a crowd on the footpath outside swaying to the music, Indian boys flirting with laughing blonde girls, many desperados trying to grab a hold of me to sell whatever rubbish they could, not interested I rush on by, for me the cafe is a tourist trap, a place to meet and be seen by any and all , an easy place to find trouble.

Now all of it blown away, the Taj a burnt out, blood-soaked mess, the lifestyle of the rich and famous tarnished, they too can't escape the awful realities of this hate-filled world. And Leopold's Cafe shut up and dark with only candles burning for the dead giving any light, as much as it wasn't my scene I still couldn't help but cry for all the pain and horror that had been visited upon it, it was a site of joy which are becoming rarer these days. The terrorists struck here first as a diversion for the unprepared security forces, then running to the backstreets to plant a bomb outside my favourite pub, the Gokul, which would'v blown the whole area to smithereens except that it didn't go off, thank nogod, and in passing they shot a couple of hapless locals dead in their shopfronts for bad measure.

Ten were killed at Leopold's, at least two were foreigners, and many injured, (it's hard to get the exact figures), and the freedom of an open society was trampled upon. For some arcane reason, the Indian media/authorities seemed to obfuscate on the massacre at Leopold's, concentrating on the Taj and Oberoi Hotels, maybe because Leopold's and Colaba are a central site for the masses of ordinary tourist activity and They don't want to scare the Christmas visitors off.

The maniac murderers then made it several blocks away to Sivaji Train Terminal and slaughtered 58 innocent souls there, many of them their fellow Muslims, as well as the three top anti-terrorist cops shot dead out the front who got caught by surprise without their bullet-proof vests on. They hijacked the dead-cops car and drove to a nearby hospital where they murdered staff who, kind and unwitting, gave them water for their thirst. Continuing on their death-dealing spree they shot dead an old cop out the front of my favourite cinema, the Metro. At another of my beloved cinemas nearby, The Sterling, the management, knowing about the reign of terror in their vicinity, kept the late show audience in the theatre all night, feeding them from the food-court, and only letting them go home in the morning when it was safe. (I bet I would've squawked and thrashed about demanding to be let out, terrorists don't scare me!)

The psycopaths then drove to Chaupatti beach where they were stopped by a police-blockade and one of them shot dead, the other captured to spill his guts about his Pakistani origins and beg for mercy, he'd been brain-washed by fundamentalist crackpots. All of these sites attacked, butchered, destroyed, were favourite haunts of mine and I could've been passing thru any one of them except it's not my kismet, not yet anyway, and so my heart is heavy with anguish.

I had arrived back in the city on the last day of the seige at the Taj, I knew it was all happening but I didn't let it put me off, I came regardless for I love Mumbai so much I wanted to share in her grief and sorrow and, while most tourists fled, I wanted to show the locals that this particular tourist wasn't going to let the murderers cower him, curtail his freedom or lower his estimation of the city and it's free-wheeling nature. I saw saris hanging like ropes out of the Taj windows by which some must have escaped, the magnificent domes charred, the windows smashed. The streets of the city were deserted, the shops shut up, the pubs and clubs darkened, the beaches empty of their crowds, the populace in shock, depressed, then angry.

Where were their leaders, what do they do to earn their privilages and high status, where are all the vast resources going? This terror attackwas done so easily, in hindsight the targets so obvious, there's no protection on the streets, at famous landmarks, at soft-spots like Leopold's, the coastline is as open and vulnerable as a poor-man's chest where a thust of a knife to the heart can be made in a flash.

Now the powers that be are rushing about in a tizz, suddenly there are machine-gun toting guards at every seven paces, the movements of us tourists are restricted and so we suffer doubly, all a bit late, the crazy horses have already bolted. Indians , especially those paid to have forethought and act accordingly, spend too much time navel-gazing and turning up their noses at us peasants on the streets, and only an explosion in Their face snaps them out of their daze, into a flurry of useless restrictions and finger-pointing, all of it to settle back into lassitude and business as usual elitism, till the next horror descends.

Still I love the country, it's all-suffering people and pagan culture, it is an attempt at an open pluralistic democracy, far from perfect but getting there and I pray the society doesn't close down and become a police state, with the life of the ordinary people on the street harried and run down as the ruling class carry on with their careless, limousine cavalcade, only giving a shit about their 5 star lifestyle and not a fig for doing their job to the best of their ability. Mumbai mon amour, I love you so much and cry with you and will always come back to you, no matter what comes your way, I am irrevocably attached, the strings of my heart entangled, I can never undo the connection, all the terrorists in the world be dammed.

Post Script: A week after the attacks Leopold's Cafe opened for business again and patrons, mostly Indians, sat at their tables as if to defy the hate-fuelled madmen but the mood remains dark and sombre. The hotels had withstood incredible damage and remained standing but not so the heads of govt., the non-leadership collapsed and was removed, the populace rightly blaming them for their lacksidaisical, brainless attitudes.

Yet the dithering goes on, a week later a huge bomb was found at Sivaji Train Terminus in the baggage claim area where the terrorist had left it amongst the belongings of the dead and injured and only a miracle stopped it from bringing the stunningly beautiful edifice down upon the heads of the common throng. No wonder most tourists fled, it's still dangerous here. Thousands of Mumbaikers march across South Mumbai in protest, shouting slogans, letting off steam, hoping things will change, but with hate as a religion in itself, it will take an evolutionary advance for the whole human race, where all the gods are left in the medieavil past and humanity deals with existence responsible for itself alone and as one, for there to be a safe future.

The Tree and the Cross.

There is a magnificent tree at the heart of Kings Cross sheltering the Fitzroy Gardens like a giant umbrella under which I've taken refuge many times over the years. A vast entanglement of outreaching branches, chunky fluted trunk and serpentine roots, it stands proud, strong, silent, non-judgemental, all-welcoming like the quintessential nature spirit, guardian angel of my soul's travaille.

I'm one of the restless multitudes of the disenfranchised who have quested to Sydney in the hope of making a new start in the pursuit of a happy life. Much of the time I lived on the streets and couldn't help but gravitate to Kings Cross, that 24/7 mecca for colourful misfits and anonymous deviants. And it was always that tree that gave me succour, consolation, companionship, when I was alienated, distraught, lost, inebriated out of my senses, I took shelter under it's branches, I slept it off, I found new friends and lovers, I contemplated the twisted pathways that brought me to it's sanctuary and I schemed my way into a possible, brighter future. In summer I rested from the glare in the tree's shade and on stormy days I hugged it close, trying not to get wet while it shook and swayed and writhed like some chained leviathin trying to break free with the help of the wind.

Under it's hypnotic influence I often daydreamed, reminisced, fantasised about what had gone before and what could fantastically be. I dreamt about my great, great, great, great grandmother, an indigenous Australian, eyes as big as the night, who possibly leant against a tree like this high on the ridge above Sydney Cove where one day Kings Cross would be built, and she observed the pillars of smoke from the campfires down below of the strange new invaders, ghosts from the Dreamtime, white colonisers landed from huge-winged sea creatures, who scared her but also made her maddeningly curious.

And when a foraging white bushwhacker stumbled upon her in that wilderness he might have seduced her with intrigueing sign language, damper-bread and shiny glass baubles so that eventually she would give birth to a mongrel child, a caramel-skinned daughter who in turn would be ravished by more hungry white-skinned ravagers of the land, and so on down the ages, each child of each generation getting paler and more blue-eyed, till I, the deep-future progeny, after wandering the furthest reaches of the Australian landscape, should return, no tribe or country to call my own, washed up at the base of the all-forgiving tree, blanched and drained by dispossession, to haunt the Cross like a Dreamtime ghost of old.

There came the day I was sitting under that tree wishing I was Buddha, desperate for Enlightenment, with the world swirling around me in all it's diversity and common bonds, the eager-eyed prostitutes and demonic druggies, the existentially challenged and the aged fulfilled, the cops and tourists, the businessmen and council-workers, the leisure geeks and pleasure seekers, the hoi polloi and the demi-monde, the bustle of it all weighing upon me, me trying not to feel crushed, the wannabe artist pushed asunder into the Underworld.

Next thing I knew, an unremarkable little man in shirt, tie and baggy gray trousers was sitting beside me, eyeing me dolefully and licking his lips incongruously. Lost in reverie, I took no notice of him till he coughed nervously and spoke up,
"Excuse me, excuse me, you wouldn't be waiting for anyone , would ya?"
I focused upon his pallid, wimpish form, "What?"
"I'm wondering if you want to meet someone?" His eyes widened, hopeful.
"What are you talking about? I'm just trying to get some peace here."
"You look a bit lost, maybe you need a friend. Do you want to come back to my place for a drink?" He licked his lips again and smiled weakly and I flashed what he was after.
"What do you want exactly?"
"Just a bit of company. I'm as lonely as you are. I'll pay you for your time, fifty dollars, just for an hour, easy money, you'll enjoy it."

I was somewhat bemused, even chuffed by his offer, someone actually wanted me. Tho a long-time desperado, at that moment I didn't give a damn about money or sex. I was depressed and staring into the void of no-hope, Sydney can be a cruel city, class-ridden for all the myths of egalitarianism, and I felt like I was nailed to the cross and dying by inches. I wondered what it would be like to coldly hand myself over to a stranger with no love, lust, liking or familiarity to provide the comfort zone. Maybe it would take me out of myself, shake up the mundanity of my pedestrian existence? Hankering for something new and wildly different I agreed to go with the gnome-like chap, as if for a ride on a ghost train, to see what thrills and chills might be on offer.

He led me to a bedsit off Macleay Street not far from the park, unkempt and drab with no art or style, the pad of an estranged, boring office clerk. Without further ado he jumped me and groped me all over like the proverbial blindman trying to ascertain the shape of an elephant. I shrugged him off, "Whoa, easy there fella, what happened to that drink you promised me?"
The little drongo gave me a pained grimace and fumbled about at a side-table. "I don't really have anything to drink but I've got this stuff, this'll relax you, take a whiff."

He held a small brown bottle under my nose, and as I grouched, "What the Hell is this shit?" and, against my better judgement, snorted and breathed in it's noxious fumes.
"It's Amyl Nitrate, it'll blow all your inhibitions away, you'll really get off."

My mind's eye exploded into a whirling kaleidoscope as my brain felt like it got shrink-wrapped in poly-urethane plastic, my air-ways clogged up with molten acetate and DDT flyspray seemed to flood down my gullet till nausea rushed up and launched me into a delerium like a rocketship crashing into a grinning deaths-head moon. All the while my would-be paramour clutched at the fly of my jeans, yanking at the belt, trying to tear my pants from me as if they were on fire.

The room spun, I shuddered to the core of my being, the lonesome maniac tore at my guts like a starving cannibal till I had to shove him roughly from me and stumble away from the bed upon which he'd steered me, pulling my jeans up, gathering the denim around my crotch protectively and, tripping over the loosened pants, I staggered to the door.

"Don't go!" he yelled plaintively, "here's the fifty dollars, just lie back, let go, enjoy!"
"What the fuck are you on about? That's the worst shit I've ever tasted! Forget it, I'm out of here!" I struggled out into the tear-stained streets, a soft rain falling, and breathed in gollups of luscious fresh air, his wail echoing behind me, "Please don't go! I need you! I love you..."

I made it back to the calm, enigmatic presence of the tree in the Fitzroy Gardens and sucked in the glorious oxygn it shed so generously. It's branches, like cool arms, seemed to embrace and soothe me, my heaving respirations quietened, my head cleared, my sight sharpened. The peace of the tree elated me in a way that drugs and sex never would, and I felt courageous, enough to take on the trammels of an unjust world once again, and for a few gorgeous moments tranquility hushed my tempestuous soul, right there in the midst of the hurly-burl of Kings Cross. I'd just been granted a glimpse of hell and, like hitting rock-bottom, the only way for me now was up.

Rocking Sydney.

For what it's worth, (zero), I have 7 great passions that I live for, friends, movies, books, travel, knowledge, dance and music, and my love of music is eclectic: techno, hip hop, jazz, blues, world, classical and maybe most exhilarating of all, rock'n'roll. For the last few years there's been lots of moaning about the dearth of music venues in Sydney because they've all been given over to the dubious high of gambling on pokies. But I attended one of the last functioning rock pubs last Friday night and nobody was there, for all that there were 6 bands playing from all over Auz, they got no support, so what's all the bitching about?

My best mate's daughter is married to a hot guitarist and he asked me to come and see what I thought of the band and so on a rainy Friday night I journeyed up the long, lost highway of Parramatta Road to the Lewisham Hotel to check out his three piece band, Red Bee. With some confusion I marched into the backroom to discover a nubile girl dressed as a nun slowly stripping off her habit to reveal skimpy bondage gear all to the whistles of a small posse of horny gronks. I thought I'd stumbled into the wrong place but, no, sleaze rules, stripping and rock have always been sexy bedfellows, whatever it takes to draw a crowd, and still they didn't come.

We first had to endure a real daggy, pedestrian glam rock band, sounding like every other band in the world mulched down into one raucous rock cliche, not one word of the hot blonde mama's croaked songs being decipherable. My mate's band, Red Bee, was up next and I was expecting the same boring daggy rock but I got ecstatically surprised, they played what I'd call funky metal, actually had an original take on it. Dan, the frontman, had exciting show biz presence, sang his kooky songs well, I heard every word, his lead guitar-playing was euphoric and when he did duets with his brother on base, the electric music was transcendant, I got very high, a hot white light lit up my lizard brain, the drumming was headbanging, the trio were tighter than a nun's g-string, Dan danced about the stage like Jagger on acid, this was rock that I live for and I had despaired of ever getting turned on by it again, as these days I'm OVER IT.

But I'm glad to say, there's still hot talent out there practicing hard and zooming around the corner to smack me in my forebrain and make life a joy, for music is the background soundtrack to our lives, even the busker in the Central Tunnel earlier that night provided the ebullient beat for my stroll down Destiny Lane. While I bopped as a teenager in the '60s to many rock bands in Melbourne, it was in Sydney, where I've lived from '77 onwards, that I really drank in electric music as if it were the nectar of the gods. There were so many hot Sydney venues to satisfy one's addiction but they've nearly all gone now, just the Lewisham, the Anandale, the Hopetoun Pubs and the Metro Club on George St. remaining, and I want to take a few minutes to bow my head in fond memory of all the transcendant electric times I've had, where I rolled about on the floor in ecstatic delerium with my rock'n'roll mates and heard the best in rock artistry the world had to offer.

Young people today swagger about with their jeans sagging below their arses and their noses in the air like they invented outre clothes, electric music and krumping wild moves, but us wizened black-garbed oldies got there long ago and latterday youth can only follow in our turbulent wake. I have to admit I gave my soul to rock'n'roll, like a zombie for a religious cult, eschewing money-making, secure career and societal responsibilities, living in the white hot electric moment as if there was no tomorrow, headbanging my way to spinal damage, not even drugs got in the way of me immersing my self in the music, music was the drug! What a fool I was! For now that hard beat, like the pulse of a god, has faded and all I'm left with is a tinny ringing in my ears, (sob sob!)

(Many of my fellow travellors did get into smack/speed, supposedly to pay their dues or live fast and die young, whatever, but I never did hard drugs, not even once, as I had enough handicaps in being a bipolar pothead poof from the gutters of the Olympic Village in West Heidelberg, i.e. the wrong side of the tracks.)

As a child I was impressed by that animated cartoon of an Aesop fable, "The Grasshopper and the Ants" where a jolly grasshopper lazes away the halcyon days of summer enjoying his music while the ants work industriously stashing food for a rainy day. And when the harsh cold of winter sets in he's out in the snow starving whilst the ants are cozy underground feasting it up, tho all ends happily with the ants inviting him in to share their banquet as long as he plays his music for them to help move the celebrations along. Back in the real world, the ants eat the grasshopper, and here I am at the end of days leaning into a cold wind, scratching my arse like I'm being eaten alive, still I have no regrets, I've got my memories of rock'n'roll so exilarating my soul remains nourished, my heart remains warm.

I was one of the teenagers who rocked out at the Ourimbah Festival outside Sydney in '68 to Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, Wendy Saddington and Chain etc etc, (I hitched all the way from Melbourne) and then again at Narrarah in '84(?), not far from Ourimbah, with the Pretenders, Talking Heads, Eurythmics, Def Leopard and INXS et al, possibly the best rock festival in Auz ever, and I epileptically flipped as if at a religious revivalist gathering and possibly never came down from my seventh heaven.

But it was the Sydney suburban pub venues that gave me my weekly hit and of all the happening venues my favourite was Sellina's at the Coogee Bay Hotel on the beach. What a rock'n'roll gladiator arena it was, the mosh pit fully thrashing, grappling, smashing, punching, stomping black-eyed, bloody-nosed joy to the Cramps, the Divinyls, Primus, Iggy Pop, Screaming Jay Hawkins, the Butthole Surfers, New Order, Ministry and sooo many more I forget them in my head-spinning brain sloshed memory loss. (Divinyls was my favourite band, I chased them all over Sydney, Chrissie Amphlet is a goddess!)

I hit the ceiling at the Tivoli, now the Metro, to Johnny Lydon and his Public Image on New Year's Eve, (1986?) pogoing on goldtop mushrooms, maybe the best delerium rock tremens I've ever experienced. And it was me who gave Tex Perkins his first goldtop mushroom at the Evil Star Pub on Elizabeth Street so long ago, ('89?), he'd disown me now but we've all got to have one small claim to fame, and we splattered ourselves on his grunge rock tripping off our faces. (I know, I know, I said I didn't get into drugs but there were rare pagan hotspots like the mid-winter's solstice where sacred fungi helped kick the elation to greater heights.)

I can go on and on about my rocky psychosis but will just mention clubs of old that frayed the edges of my soul, the Trade Union Club with Hunters and Collectors, the Graphic Arts Club with Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls, The Grand Hotel with Suicide Squad and The Rejex, Bedhogs at the Vulcan in Pyrmont, Rose Tattoo at the Stagedoor Tavern near Central and Cold Chisel doing their first ever Sydney gig at French's Tavern on Oxford Street, (maybe the wildest, grungiest venue in all Sydney rock history, oh fuck, those were the days!) I also got titillated by the Mu Mesons at the Anandale Pub with Go Go dancers up on the bar and at the old Mandolin Cinema in the city with Box the Jesuit and soft porn up on the movie screen behind them.

There was the Boys Next Door (whatever Nick Cave's early band was called?) at Rags on Goulbourn Street when the disco redneck's next door tried to beat up us punks, and the Phoenix Club on Broadway when Nirvana played and Kurt got his stomach pumped, Secret Secret at the Rock Garden on William Street (the old Whiskey A Go Go), Beasts of Bourban at the Paddington RSL, The Slugfuckers at the Landsdowne Pub in Chippendale, and the Cure at the Bondi Tram way back in the early eighties when all of us were young and naive and hoping we could all be rock stars and not just rock-hard arses.

Those were the days when every street corner in Sydney had a rock band banging away on it, one's footsteps fell to a thumping beat while walking the tight-wire of a highly strung guitar, it's wail matching the existential cry, "I'm here, I'm alive, I'm living it to the max!" It was AC/DC with Bon Scott giving a free concert at the Haymarket on New Year's Eve '77 that actually got me sucked into Sydney in the first place, as if it were a quicksand pit, and I never left, such was the rock orgasm they flung me into, and I don't regret a moment of it, for all this city's whiplash cruelty.

I bet when the convicts first arrived here circa 1800 there was some cool soul who twanged away on a banjo or fiddle in a wattle and mud rum-bar down at the cove to lift the hearts of the dispossessed and weary, and his ghost can be heard yet by the campfire deep in my heart, Sydney you rocked me.

Serial Killers and Acolytes.

I love horror flicks, have done so since my parents took me to see "Psycho" at the Preston Drive-In Movies in 1962. Getting your hair stood on end is as good as a roller-coaster ride. I was pissed off when film critics across the spectrum gave the "Hostel" films zero stars, calling them torture porn, when they did for me what they were expected to, made me shit my pants in terror and then flee from the theatre relieved that the lead actor had escaped in the end.

I've been going to opening weekend big-screen horror movie releases all my life, am addicted to having my blood curdled, my adrenalin rushed, my guts dropped and my brain warped, screaming in unison with an enthusiastic audience, as if in group catharsis, it's one of the great pleasures of being a cinephile. One particular cinema was a key site of my childhood adventure fantasies and nightmare horror rides, the Forum in Flinders Street, Melbourne. I was lured into that Arabian Nights palace like a kid following the Pied Piper into Wonderland to be scarified by celluloid creepies such as "The Birds" and "Dinosaurus". It was at the Forum, post "Psycho", that I relished Willian Castle's shock shlock, "Homicidal", where he promised such terror as to need an ambulance at the end of the show to attend to the faint-hearted, with the female serial killer finally revealed as a man in drag, a bit of a mind-blower to my post-puberty sexual angst.

Forty-five years later, in 2008, I again attended the fantastical Forum Cinema for the Melbourne International Film Festival and I'm pleased to say I got my flesh crawled all over again, this time by, surprise, surprise, a new Australian horror flick called "Acolytes" directed by Jon Hewitt. Promoted as a "teen chiller", it's "an urban Gothic tale about three Queensland teenagers who blackmail a local serial killer into dispatching an ex-con they hate." There's not much these days that can scare us, except for war, famine and disease, the old horror stand-bys like aliens, disfigured monsters, vampires and werewolves being mostly unbelievable and worn-out cliches, but the modern plague of serial killers is something that still resonates with terror, and Jon Hewitt's movie hits the chill spot with the concept that the killer(s) can be anyone amongst us, our ordinary next door neighbour in bland, uneventful suburbia.

The refreshing thing about "Acolytes" is it's stark realism, the contrasts of light and dark giving it a tabloid photographic edge, making it more believable, a return to the realism of a classic like "Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer", and eschewing the over-blown, fantastic visions of generic killer-flicks like "Nightmare on Elm Street", "The Cell" and "Saw", entertainingly hallucinatory tho they be but not believable. As if Larry Clark and Gus van Sant did a version of "Disturbia", the raw, fresh, untrained acting of the teenagers give "Acolytes" a naturalistic feel, I empathised with their vulnerability and went on their terrifying journey with them instead of distancing myself watching stars do their schtick. "Acolytes" gives a nod to the history of "serial killer chillers", the butterfly symbolism and dungeon of "Silence of the Lambs", the terror-run thru the forest of "Kiss the Girls" and the innocent tourists as victims of "Wolf Creek", "Hostel" and "Touristas", but arriving at a unique take on what is itself getting to be a much worked over genre, getting squeezed dry of ideas, ( to name a few of the latest,"Taking Lives", "Untraceable" and best of them all, "Funny Games".)

"Acolytes" is unique because it's very Australian in it's setting and larrikan characters. The movie opens with a glorious pan of a Queensland landscape, then juxtaposes it with a zoom into the uniformity of an urban housing estate, suggesting the theme of nature vs. nurture that lies behind much psychological hand-wringing on the subject of serial killers. The high-school teenagers, their hated ex-con foe and the killer himself are all laconic, irreverant, hard-arsed suburbanites you could meet in any Aussie pub or milk bar. And the plot has a few twists and surprises that lift it out of the hum-drum to give you the willies when thought out, the nice, normal family being vicious, cold killers just one of the nasty implications.

Joel Edgerton is soooo scary playing an Ivan Milat-like killer with moustache and aviator sun-glasses but even more ordinary and unprepossessing in his looks, cold, distant but almost handsome in his white collar and tie, a family man who holds down a job, supports a wife and kid and lives in a nice white, antiseptic house in suburbia, the type of killer that will never be caught, because he has no history of deviance, does'nt have the signifying mask or disfigured face like Jason or Freddy Kreuger and does'nt dress weird like the Joker. All those people gone missing while hitching on the north coast of N.S.W. were possibly picked up by this type of killer. And the idea that young, wayward impressionables can be groomed to carry on a tradition of killing strangers as if it's some kind of callous philosophical school of existentialism had me shivering in horror. The nightmare that suburbia can become, of boring, restless lives that seek out murder to spice up the banality as depicted in "Acolytes" scared the shit out of me.

I only hope that "Acolytes" can get the audience it's made for, teenage thrill-seekers, as quirky originals like this deserve support by the Australian movie-going public, too many good Aussie thrillers get ignored and thus fail at the box office because big, splashy junk-food Hollywood fare offers a slicker thrill. Shlock like "Scream 3" compared to "Acolytes" is a bit like a Big Mac as opposed to a lamb roast, which one is more satisfying? "Acolytes" in my mind is more scary because it depicts the reality of killers in our midst more naturalistically. And Jon Hewitt is to be congratulated for pulling off a tough artistic assignment, creating unique Aussie cinematic horror in the wake of "Wolf Creek".

Maybe the movie's distributors should emulate William Castle's outrageous publicity campaigns to get teenage bums on seats by declaring nobody is allowed to enter or leave the cinema for the last revealing, terrifying seven minutes, there will be guards on the doors looking like Ivan Milat and, at risk of heart attack, the audience will be forced to watch unprotected the denouement of "Acolytes" in all it's terrifying, gory glory.

Free Sex in a Red-lit Fog.

As I was wheeling my beat-up bike thru the Kings' Cross red light feeling blue, a handsome young man seeming lost and restless crossed my path and smiled and I smiled at him in return and, encouraged, he approached me and with wild eyes said, "Do you want to have some hot sex?" "Sure, with who?" I replied, somewhat taken aback. "With you of course. Do you want it?" "Yeah, but what do you want, money?" "Nothing, I just want to have a good time. Do you live near here? Let's go, I'm really hot for sex!"


"I don't live far but I can't believe you want to give an old gronk like me sex for free?"
"Why not? I can tell by your eyes I can trust you, I really want to get it on right now!"
"OK, I suppose so, I'm desperate, tho it seems crazy asking a stranger straight out for sex."
"Come with me to my hotel, I have to get my bag, I'll check out and come to your place."
I halted in my tracks, oh ohhhh! I said I'd wait for him and considered running away, there was something fishy in his mad eagerness, Kings Cross is the land of sub-humanity. But he insisted I accompany him and I did for I was horny and he was very goodlooking.

He dashed into a seedy hotel and came out with a tatty shoulder-bag and said, "Let's go."
"We'll walk awhile, I want to talk to you to figure you out. There's something wrong."
"I've run out of money, that's all, and can't pay my hotel bill and need somewhere to stay."
His story gets worse by the second and all the zombie desperados of the Cross stare at us as we limp by as if to say, "Another mug hooked by the gamble death does play with fools."

"I don't think I'm so keen, I'm desperate for a human's touch but I don't want to be ripped."
"No, really, all I want is to have free sex with you, believe me. Are you into chems?"
"Chems? What do you mean? Chemicals? What kind of chemicals are you talking about?"
"Crystal meth. I've just had some. If I start acting crazy at your place, dont'worry, I'll come down soon and will just need more drugs to keep me going for your pleasure."

I knew it was too good to be true, so out of touch with reality he overlooked my grungy bike!
"Umm, ahhh, I'm sorry but I'm not into drugs at all, and ICE is the worst, it makes me sick!"
"But I've nowhere to stay. I had a fight with my family in Punchbowl and they threw me out."
"Why, because of the drugs?" (I'm sure.) "No, my sexuality, I'm Mid-Eastern, they hate gays!"
I love Mid-Eastern guys, I'm still sucked in. "If you're cool, you could stay with me I guess."
"Great! I just need more ICE. If you lend me $100 I'll pay you back on Monday, I promise!"

"I don't have $100 and I wouldn't give it to an addict for drugs if I did, it's horrible!"
"I just rang a gay fuck-buddy and asked him for money but he knocked me back, we have really rough sex, I love it, he whips me and punches me about, I can't get enough! I'll give it to you rough as you want, all you've got to do is give me drugs to power me up!"
Now he's scratching at his hairy chest, rolling his eyes and complaining of the long hard walk.
"You're really turning me off! I couldn't think of anything worse, I'm out of here, goodbye! You're too fucked up for me, sorry, I might be desperate but not that stupid!" What a life!

I moved off quickly and he yelled pleadingly, "Don't leave me! You've got to help me, please!"
He screamed and screamed, we were on Oxford Street and all the straight gays oggled us. I left him outside Headquarters where all the fast-food, dirty sex on premises happens and I wonder if he didn't find succour inside those gloomy red-lit cubicles for the hungry blind and unzipped maniacs, his humanity frozen into submission by that nasty drug called ICE.

I went back to the Cross to my broke-down bike where I'd locked it and felt a sad relief, for all my gutter-level white trash deadbeat Skidrow broken-arsed dreams I'd survived, thank no god, without drugs. I'd handicaps enough, I was even a Bohemian success story, so said an encouraging friend, but I had to bitterly laugh, it was all so fucking pathetic!

P.S. A few weeks later I saw his photo in the papers, face twisted in harried dismay, he was a witness at a Coroner's Inquest into the murder of an American woman found murdered in her flat, her body under a pile of junk with cords wrapped around her neck. He'd admitted to having rough sex with her but was innocent of her death, they had no proof so they let him go, free to harass the poofs around the city, and on the grapevine I heard one fool got sucked in by his sweet face and taken him home only to have his apartment trashed in a sado-masochistic flip-out, thank no god I'm too old for it.

Where There's Life?

From the comfort of my warm bed last night I watched a doco on TV called "Stranded"
about a plane crash in the snow of the high Andes where the survivors ate the corpses
of their friends such was their will to live, and two trudged across impossible obstacles
to find rescue for them all and I felt inspired to crawl out of my own not so deep dark pit
for the seventh time in my existence to carry on for where there's life there's....

Long ago when I was young and starving on the Isle of Crete I laid down to die
on soft green grass but after some hours I didn't waste away and got back up resigned
and toiled on up the infinite highway to find succour picking oranges for sympatico Greeks.
And on my return to my beloved India in '97 I caught cholera at the Kumbhla Mela
and lay sweating out my soul for 3 days and I considered letting it take me into Oblivion
for I was tired of all the kicks to the arse, rips of my arts and stabs to the heart
but then I groaned "No! There's life yet to love" and I crawled off to a doctor's office
who saved me with anti-biotics and told me I was lucky to survive, a sentiment moot
to my existential torment for it's been a hard and lonely travail to arrive at such ignorant bliss.

And some years later I laid down in a hotel room high in the Himalayas after a scooter accident
in which I'd torn my shoulder muscle, the pain sending me into stupid narssicistic disarray
and I considered suicide while listening to the music of a nascent Ganges River crashing
by my window, waiting all night for the moment to hang myself from the ceiling fan
but clinging fanatically to consciousness, not yet, not yet, till the honey of dawn light shone
and fed my spirit to once again tackle the ordeals this chaos world had to throw at me.

Does the Big Exit ever beckon over the shoulder for all of us when hurt and weary?
(The next thing I read was Bukowski's "Factotum", he considers a gun without the guts
to end the tedium and horror of it all, I'm just as gutless, that's my existential problem.)
Now in Sydney, lost in TV, wondering what next, a survivor of the Andes assured me of all
he'd learned, to wait, just patiently wait and a door would open eventually for freedom,
joy, peace and achievement, from my soft Australian bed much is yet possible to jump to.

So I rowed in a borrowed dinghy to Cockatoo Island for the trite arty crap of the Biennale
where Art looks to be a conceptual con-act, nepotistic net-working the proof of cleverness,
yet I surfed my fears of the deep harbour, speedboat-swells and water hovering at the brim
of a leaky boat while the raves of a loonie mate urged us on, like a quaint artistic performance.

Then I trained it to Melbourne where I ate counter lunches at a funky pub with a log fire
and enjoyed the caring attention of my all-forgiving friends from teenage discos of the '60s.
And I enjoyed Pacific Islander and African fertility drumming, dancing me into ecstasy
at a festival of dark-skinned immigrants, krumping, hip-hopping, booty-shaking me high.
I went on tours thru old movie palaces like the Forum, the Capitol and the Cinerama Plaza
where I lived out childhood dreams that life for me would be an ongoing adventure movie
like "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" and indeed, with guts, it really happened for me.

On return to Sydney I attended a wake for an old friend who'd died at 55 from a heroin o/d,
found dead on a bed of dirty needles she'd not had much of a life the last few years
and tho she'd ripped me off I forgave her now that she was gone, she'd paid with her life
for her follies and so we let go 55 red balloons into the Redfern night to help her spirit fly
away, away into the Void, for me, to be alive, to breathe, to feel the cool breeze, is Nirvana.

There's always something awesome around the corner waiting if one is patiently in love,
even Northcott ghetto is my time-out refuge, the screaming of the druggies outside my door
like sounds from nature akin to seagulls squawking over scraps, I simply live in a wild garden.
And the Freak's Club of the Piccolo Bar is reassuring, I'm not alone, tho Vitto's gone
he will return I pray, the spirits of Roslyn Street cry like the wind for rememberance,
and I remember the wonder and horror of it all and am recharged, for where there's life....

The Devil in Me or Is It You?

My sorry-arsed saga with the uncaring healthcare system here in Auz continues. I've often been warned there's a chance going into hospital will kill you rather than cure you, I guess time will tell.

I eventually made my escape from the St.Vinnies but I have to go to out-patients every day for a month to have a rare anti-biotic given intravenously to kill the hardy bug I picked up in an operating theatre somewhere along the way. THEY should've treated the Golden Bug 5 years, 2 years, 1 year ago but somehow it got overlooked and I had to suffer the consequences. My paranoia nags me it's because I'm a deadbeat bum, a queer freak and a misfit rebel and THEY just didn't give a shit about me, but I probably just got lost on the battlefield.

After I moaned to the doctors about my ill treatment from the grumpy night nurse and the reason for my running away, not one person of authority questioned me over the affair, it seems THEY don't want the boat rocked, even tho the nurse's fabrication of assault was egregiously slanderous. If I really had threatened him with a knife, why weren't the police called or some censurious edict whacked upon my head? He's hoping his lie will counter any complaint I may make about his incompetance, like in some devious game of chess. But when I next went for my doctor's appointment I found 2 thuggish Security Guards standing by the treatment room door, and my name was mentioned. "Why, what's wrong with him?' "We don't know but we've been told to watch him just in case!" Bloody Hell!!!

All my life ogres like this have stood over me, insulted me, tortured me, ripped me, I'm heartfelt not kidding about this, maybe I've got a persecution complex. Because I've always stuck up for myself, spoke up with an articulate cutting tongue, sometimes hit back when rudely smacked in the face, then I'm told I've got the Devil in me and IT must be rigorously exorcised, usually with a good beating and then expulsion. My delerious brain thinks it's because there's no room for free will and individual quirkiness in this world of herd mentality and population control. Every one must stay in their slave's box, not even a little toe to be extruded or a peep of protest made. Many people have the job of 'overseer' in all it's guises, policeman, teacher, nurse, bureaucrat, politician, priest, busdriver, doorman, whoever, some gronk trying to earn a buck stripping skin from my back, and they don't mind applying the electrodes to sensitive parts if it's needed to keep the individual in line.

Give a person 1 cent worth of power and they'll use it, to give themselves a buzz, it makes them just that bit higher up the pecking order of the vast morass of clutching humanity, and they do what they're told, no questioning, no matter the cruelty of the orders. Many of the petty power-mongers I've met in my life have gone straight for my jugular, there's something in my manner that triggers their wrath, their prohibition, maybe it's my piercing "Midwich Cuckoo" blue eyes or my punk sneer and lacerating tongue, my ugly, rebellious disposition: the world is built on shit and the unenlightened will stand on anyone to climb it.

Yeah yeah, harsh words, as per usual from the Punk Poofy Cat but I'm fucked off to the point of madness, to the edge of oblivion. The little I had to offer, it always got ripped off, to reiterate: scumbags will harvest their grannies' organs if it gets them money, cudos, power, survival in a world where the ruthless have to claw their way to their goals over heaps of dead bodies. Who takes any notice of the loser's story? It's always been winning that counts, to win at any cost, history can be rewritten.

Even way back in kindergarten as a tiny-tot I threw a temper tantrum when my free will was denied and I wrecked the art-room in response, my grandmother was told to come and get me and not bring me back. At Primary School I was spanked at morning assembly for supposedly lying about black-board chalk found in my possession, I'd found it in the playground but was accused of stealing it. I was given a dishonourable discharge from High School for being a bad influence on a gang of robopath Prefects. On and on, every job, every landlord, every club, I was eventually thrown out, like a reprobate Bukowski punching up the pub, only I didn't have his cute irascible genius.

There are many names for that supposed devil in me and I'll run thru a few of them, just to be bullshit poetic: miscreant, misfit, fuckwit, malcontent, rebel, renegade, retard, freak, fool, bohemian, hippie, punk, larrikin, bodgie, drop-out, outcaste, outsider, fringe-dweller, anarchist, iconoclast, tramp, dharma bum, one-per-center, poofter, loonie, loner, raver, Luciferian, deviant, dissident, brat, non-conformist, alternative-lifestyler, wastrel, emotional cripple, disaffected, disassociated, dispossessed, dysfunctional, bipolar..... blah blah blah. But is it really me?

One friend told me long ago that I was one of the last true individuals left in this post-modern world of manufactured socialised personalities. She was kidding me, all I know is I'm a fuck-up from way back, from being damaged goods in infancy, my parents didn't have the abilites to bring me up properly and civilised society is a machine that has to have everyone be a perfectly fitting cog or otherwise one gets jammed on the slightest slip-up.

Yet many poor souls I sit down with tell me a tale even more horrifying than mine, I'm an angel in comparison and have led a charmed life, mostly of escapism from the real terrors of work, family and responsibilty. The Piccolo Cafe Bar is a classic flop house at the cross-roads of misery and injustice where I hear so many woeful stories even the output of Edgar Allen Poe wouldn't cover it. Toothless Ken lost his young son in an auto accident and has been homeless, on the drink and drugs, ever since. Goldy is in court trying to get custody of her grandchild from her nasty junkie daughter who has falsely accused her of prostituting her since childhood. Old Joe Blow has bowell cancer and has had his operation cancelled over and over and will be dead before they get around to him. And cantankerous Vitto, ringleader of the freak circus himself, is beset with demons scratching at his cafe's creaky doors.

I was wrong to think old Vitto was a secret millionaire. He does indeed own property but it's all mortgaged to the hilt and he slaves 24/7 to pay it all off and keep his tizzy head above the murky waters of insolvency. On her death his sister Maria left her apartment to the Piccolo business but she also left two sons behind, like twins of folklore, one a hardworking angel, Lorenzo, who runs the cafe at night, the other, Luigi, a veritable roustabout demon who drinks and smokes and scrabbles for money any way he can, is in a biker gang called "Life and Death", who seems to have gone thru any money he was left by Maria but continues to demand sustenance from the labours of the rest of the Italianate family. They could sell Maria's flat and pay off all their debts only Luigi has placed a caveat upon the sale, unless he gets a big hunk of the proceeds, it's a no go.

He often snoops about the cafe on Roslyn street, giving all us regulars the willies with his dark glowering looks, one never knows when he'll go on a murderous rampage. It's Vitto's slavery that any family wealth is based upon and yet Luigi feels he deserve's a share of it, he's drained the family for years, and I have the dreadful vison of the biker-gang crashing their 'hogs' thru the plate-glass windows in retribution. But the last straw was when Luigi got drunk in a nearby pub and made threats to a bum he didn't think was listening, to the effect that he was planning to kidnap little Theresa, Lorenzo's seven year old daughter, and murder her if he doesn't get more money. He was asked to repeat the threat twice to make sure he said it, then it was related back to the family. Luigi has already done time for manslaughter, years ago he killed a man in the heat of anger and so it can't be ignored that this nutter might still be capable of doing something ghastly in his brainless lust for cash.

So Vitto is running away to Europe for 2 months, taking his niece with him for her own protection, at least it will get him out of his prison/box for the first time in umpteen years, let him see that a world actually exists out there and give Theresa a tour of their ancestor's homeland. In the meantime the family will deal with Luigi's outlandish demands, they've put an AVO out on him, he can't go near the Piccolo, maybe he'll do the world a favour and run his bike off a cliff and solve all their woes. And all us freaks will get time out from the Piccolo sweat-lodge.
As for me, I won't have Vitto for awhile to whinge about my broken-arsed follies, the Piccolo is a refuge for us existential derelicts, I'll just have to swim thru the muck of my problems alone or sink without a trace, but not without a smart-arsed poem of protest. The world is on fire, 7 billion souls cry out in despair and I can only beam out into a chaotic universe at the watching silent stars, peace, peace, peace, peace... and hope not only my own devil will be exorcised some bright and sunny day but also the demons plaguing the entire world, tho they be as countless as those uncaring stars. Some hope!