Caught in a Dreamcatcher.

Home Sweet Homo

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 center 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 Coventry!"

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 to me. 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 rented a piece of my heart, like the ageless Friend, a manifestation of the Green One, his name is Felix (the cat?), he seems to like me, respect and trust me, he beams like the morning star onto me and brightens the shadows, transiently. 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, for 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.

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 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, actually another con-job to get by in a hostile world.

P.S. What an old fool I've turned into, any con-artist with a Cheshire cat smile can suck me in, Felix turned out to be a phantom just passing thru, thank nogod I didn't lose my balls over him. He must've wanted some kooky older mentor for 3 months, which is cool by me, I only hope I imparted some "surf the chaos" vibes, it's best to try to have a good influence on others, especially young people. Anyway, you can't win them all. My Dream-catcher has a break in the net that allows anything unreal to slip thru and get-away, and I'm glad of it, only substantial, sincere souls need apply.

It makes me worried that as I hit my dotage around 70 maybe my true libidinous type may waylay me, some slick hairy Italian gigolo who'll drain me of all my juices like I read in much classic literature ala "The Roman Spring of Mr. Stone-arse"? Fuck, let me get driven off a high mountain road in the Himalayas instead. Although, goong off the edge with "him" would make it more fun.

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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.

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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.

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If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

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.

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If you enjoyed this story please go to the WEB address above and consider buying my book of tales about growing up anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.