The Shock of Being Human

Writing sure is cathartic, getting pain off one's chest, getting that irritating hair out of one's arse. My recent contretemps at the end of a thirty year liason with a non-friend, Bawl Vasselino, has been like a broken leg that hasn't healed well, in fact it's gone purulent. 

Forgive me for repeatedly moaning about it but it hurts BAD, and writing it out helps heal the ghastly wound. It's only human that I should be upset, devastated even, this false friend's abuse honestly came out of nowhere, we hadn't had an argument, the last time we met we parted on the usual good terms, laughing in bonhomie. The only difference to all our other regular Thursday night meetings was that he carried off a bag of his mother's Oxycontin painkillers. And he must've gobbled up some, in a drunken stupor, for old times sake. And months later he's still tagging me online with "wanker", the poor creature having only a one word vocabulary.

Think about it, shooting up heroin every day for 25 years, once to three times a day, depending on how much mony he'd scammed, then 5 years of methadone, then Buprenorphin for the next 10 years. When I focus on the facts of such a habit I'm shocked, I've never shot up drugs even once, it's obviously driven him mad and turned him toxic. He's now lying to all his hagged junkie friends that it's me who started the harassment, that I've also been a junkie and a drunk in my early life, and most of the braindead believe him because they've got to justify their own stupidity. 

His ex-girlfriend and ongoing beard, Maya, messaged me to come to a wake they were holding in a nearby park to mourn the passing of some fellow deadbeat substance abusers who had died a few years ago, in my mind it was a bit late, and an exercise in "virtue signaling" to bullshit each other what caring, magnanimous souls they are.

I replied, "You've got to be kidding, what a mob of hypocrits you are, terrible role models in your egregious drug habits, enabling the destruction of your so-called "friends" by encouraging, giving, taking and selling skag to these "good friends", especially the poor creature who lived next door to me and who made me privy to the nasty goings on in her life, Ursula." 

"You pack of mourning arseholes were particularly abusive towards her, referring to her in obnoxious terms, relating how you couldn't bear her and what a shitbag she was, and now you say you're mourning her, two years after she was given a hotshot by another junkie monster. What a pathetic joke! The creep you're all protecting, Bawl Vasselino, sponged her life savings off her for many hits of smack, I heard her crying day and night, "Give me back my money!!!" and you're so fucking braindead you believe his lies and allow him to assassinate me like a rabid lynch mob!"

One-brain-cell Maya shat her pants and is now squawking about the "horrible message" I sent her. A quick reversal of the facts, now I'm the bad guy who's doing all the stalking. I can't really be shocked, this is the modus operandi of weak, callous, dumb humans, indicative of the flawed human condition, not everyone a waste of space, but very much substance abusers fit the bill, they who have killed off billions of their brain cells in their long addiction. That's the sad thing about the brain-damaged, they don't KNOW they're brain-damaged, in their sluggish, ditzy minds everything is peachy keen, yet they can't rub two rational thoughts together. 

One nasty result is they "gas-light" anyone who they decide to victimise, who gives them a reality check and relates the truth of the matter. I'm the mad one, I'm the one saying nasty things, I'm the suspect monster committing destructive acts because I'm mean and rotten at heart.

Few of this abusive gang have ever had a real job while I've been a Registered nurse for much of my life. None have achieved anything like me, I've won world prizes for my art, my films have shown all over the world, my art and designs have sold in many major cities, and now my third book "Punk Outsider" is taking off with the hip cognoscenti giving it rave reviews, and these zombie-like failures are jealous. I've been arrested 7 times on civil disobedience charges in the struggle against the proto-fascist, environment  vandals of the LNP and this rogues gallery of dope-heads, for all their saber rattling, have done nothing but fart in their manky beds. Yet I'm the "wanker!"

Fuck 'em, I'm walking away from them, I never want to see them again. I don't know why I ever associated with them in the first place, I thought we were all "artists" together. What a pathetic joke, losers and users the lot of them. I actually tried to help them, for years employing them, promoting them, giving them a space to operate, what a fucking waste of time and humanity. Like a rabid sewer rat this creep Bawl Vasselino, to return the favour, has tried to spread his bubonic plague of lies. I'm the liar, I'm the drunk, I'm the drug addict, I'm the "bastard" What an arsehole. Few junkies get past 50/55, very few reach 60 if they keep up with their bad habits, their body rots and their brain goes toxic. He's 58, bloated, bald and red-faced, he'll be dead soon, but not till he inherits the family 3 million dollar house and blows that up his arm. And I continue to eke out a living in social housing.

I'm reminded of those movies where paranoia rules, the original "Gaslight" with Ingrid Bergman for instance or "1984" or Kafka's "The Trial" where most of the passing crowd or the whole of society is trying to surveille, control, brainwash, drive mad a protagonist, who in return resists, fights back, refuses to believe or give in to the accusation that he/she is the criminal, just for existing, for being a thinking individual, for caring and trying to help instead of exploiting and fucking. 

I watched one such horror/sci-fi shlock the other night with Christina Ricci called "Distortion." She moves into a high-class, cutting-edge techno-controlled apartment house and soon starts to think the tvs, computers, security cameras etc are trying to brainwash her into doing something really nasty. She is conned into killing a small child, an elite band of technocrats thus proving they can make someone both believe in and do something horrible, the opposite of their true nature. Thus humanity in its entirety can be controlled. In fact, under attack are the elements of "humanity" we hold dear, soon to be gotten rid of by the fascists taking over the world. 

Kindness, democratic freedom, individuality, resistance to cruelty, clear thinking, empathy, all such qualities are to be destroyed or distorted, that's the goal of cruel billionaire Overlords. And it's happening right now in dictatorships around the world, very much in the putrid air here in Australia with the undermining of our freedoms, the cruelty shown the poor and vulnerable, the trend towards militarisation and war by the so-called Liberals, though Laborites fall in line also. Sometimes when a mob is yammering about your badness of character and the need for your demise you don't have to be paranoid that maybe their accusations are true, it's more likely they are fascist-media brainwashed, drug fucked brain-damaged morons and weak, vacuous, system suckers, taken over by an alien force as in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." ("Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean THEY'RE not after you!")

Bawl Vasselino constantly bullshitted to me how he would fight the nazis, how he would stick up for me and protect me if THEY came for me. In actual fact he is a neo-nazi, he's acting as if under the command of our murderous Overlords, he'd like it if I was disappeared, he'd be willing to snitch on me to the Pigs if he got the chance, he's a weak, empty shell of a man, like a Gollem sent out to destroy rebels. He's never gone on a protest march, never handed out an anti-fascist pamphlet, never written a revolutionary song, always grimly silent, (for fear of giving himself away), hardly ever smiles, just hisses at his mirror while he re-arranges his bad comb-over. The big shock is that he's human also.

This is my last word on the matter, in time I will forget him and all the rotten apples I've met along the way, humans so greedy, selfish and stupid they got enmeshed in a horror nightmare called "hard drug" abuse. Many of them didn't have abused childhoods, they're just weak links in the human chain. I've nursed them, I've helped them, and I got kicked in the teeth for my troubles. The human race is doomed, in a hundred years we will be extinct, from sheer perversity. How good is the human condition? Goodbye junkie/alcho shock-troops, you'll disappear into a puddle of your own shit and vomit! Ha, ha, ha!

Order my illustrated book from tobyzoateshotmail.com

Or from Pass-Port Store and Gallery Oxford Square Darlinghurst

78) Betrayal.

I just broke out of FaceBook gaol and can now tell the world of my stalker’s harassment. FB cut off their nose to spite their face, they did me a big favour by banning me for a month as they gave me a break from their terrible digital addiction. I’ve been able to breathe the fresh air of non-participation in what often works out to be a public lynch-mob of human disaffection, social alienation, political assassination and artistic bombast.

I’m being stalked by a monster who insulted me continuously online with the brain-dead tag of “wanker” in comments on every one of my posts, particularly those to do with my art and my latest book, “Punk Outsider.” I’ll call him Bawl as he was always bawling over something or someone. When I finally flipped out at his insults and replied to his put-downs, as he knew I would, I was accused of bullying him and thrown into gaol, such is FB’s moronic algorithm. 

For 30 years this creep declared I was his best friend, he praised my artistic efforts to the heavens, I was the best thing since they put holes in Swiss cheese. And I fell for it, when I thought I was impervious to such sycophantic flattery, he’d snuck up on me like a huge, hungry leach and has been sucking up the little charisma I had, because he doesn’t have any. In fact he has sub-zero attraction for anyone, no matter how scraggy his female suckers are, as inside his shit-bag bulk he is a truly ugly man.

In my world view one of the worst acts of flawed humanity is betrayal. It is the default response of the weak, unstable, deranged and mean. Like most of us, some worse than others, I have been plagued by betrayal my entire life. My father betrayed me as a child, beating me and my mother mercilessly. My acquaintances throughout my youth and journey into adulthood betrayed me because of my supposed “sissyness.” Society in general tortured me due to my queer sexuality, I was unable to keep a job, rent a room or sustain a loving relationship. Politically I was betrayed by a system that favoured the rich, the elite from “good" schools, and by our cruel, neo-fascist leaders who seem to enjoy trashing the poor, the worker and the different while lauding and rewarding the rich and the conforming. My stalker knew all this and twisted the knife in my back even harder.

Betrayal smacks of not just sadism but also jealousy, a truly nasty emotion. So many flakes suffer from it, resenting anyone with talent, anyone who achieves beyond expectations, anyone who lifts themselves from the gutter and contributes their heart to the world. Or they’re so full of themselves, it’s all they can see, other’s troubles and struggles uninteresting and invisible to them, for they are creepy sociopaths. 

For the 3 years after I was falsely accused of armed hold-up by corrupt pigs in 1993 I went to several of my “leftie” compatriots to get help, people I’d been arrested with in civil disobedience actions on their direction and in their company. These political stunts were put on my criminal record and the pigs used them as proof of my criminal character. After 7 seconds of my pleading for assistance from my "leftie" comrades I was blown off in mid-sentence, their backs turned on me, I was not a cause celebre, I was merely a nobody working-class fag. This cut me to the heart.

Yet of all these betrayals a recent one has been the most devastating, the shock of it worse than a broken leg, a police-frame-up or a comrade’s indifference. I had this “best friend” for 30 years, he came every Thursday night to take me shopping, to laugh and chat over a cup of tea, and play guitar beside me many times when I had a story-telling gig. Every Thursday he came because that was the day he habitually went to the chemist to get his dose of Buprenorphin, an opioid he was addicted to so that he could avoid heroin. He’s been doing this for around 12 years, before that it was methadone, and before that he was a wicked skag junkie for 25 years. He’d shot up once to three times a day for all those years; think about it, the amount of poison flooding through his system truly turned him toxic, compared to me who has never shot up even once!

He’d told me on many occasions that every time a junkie nodded off he/she killed a million neurons, and every time they had an OD they lost seven million neurons, thus they were brain-damaged and, sadly, didn’t even know it. He had one of the most boring speech impediments, saying at the end of every sentence “you know what I mean?” He had the most nauseating of habits, he constantly picked his nose and dropped the bits of snot onto my lounge-room floor as he blabbed an interminable diatribe against society and everybody he knew. I had to vacuum the floor where he sat after he left. It made me ill and I was dying to tell him to stop it only his bulk and irascible nature intimidated me. 

He particularly had it in for the three women he’d had relationships with in his life, constantly telling me what bitches they were, their stupidity, their thieving the horse they’d scored together and the money they’d stiffed from him, their behaviour equal to the three evil Macbeth witches. Maya, Hellen, and Cursula, they were all to blame for his downfall.

I’d stupidly introduced him to Cursula as I knew both of them were lonely and needed a good fuck. She lived next door to me, her door faced mine and she always left it open so that I could hear whatever was going on in her flat. She had been sexually abused as a child by her hippie mother’s deadbeat boyfriends and was a psychic mess. She soaked up abuse like a sponge, life wasn’t normal unless some toxic male was emotionally torturing her, and Bawl was the worst of them all. After three days of fucking him she confessed she had thirty thousand dollars stashed, from an inheritance, an art’s grant scam and from selling her methadone.

He must’ve thought, “Beautie mate! This’ll do me, I get a juicy fuck any time I want it, she’ll wait on me hand and foot cooking and cleaning up after me, and I can get my heroin stone as much as I want for the foreseeable future.” They then proceeded to shoot up two to three times a day for the next few months till all the money was gone. Then the abuse set in with a vengeance. And I could hear it all through the open door and thin walls.

His verbal attacks were atrocious in the extreme. A girlfriend was sitting with me one day and heard it all and she snarled to me, “That guy is a total bastard! Do you hear what he’s saying to her? I will never talk or even look at him again! What a monster!” 

An example of the tirade, which I reported in my story, “Under Northcott”, is “You fucking cunt! You’re fucking evil! No wonder I don’t want to fuck you any more! You’re a piece of shit!” She’d whine in response, “Oh Bawl. I only suggested you have vegemite on your toast instead of jam. And give me my money, you owe me thirty thousand dollars! GIVE ME MY MONEYYYY!!”

I got to know Bawl’s family. He had no childhood trauma that I could fathom. His parents were peacefully in love his whole life. They never spanked him even once and gave him everything he wanted. Their house is, in my eyes, palatial, in a quiet dead-end street in Lane Cove by the river, a virtual paradise. He went to a “good” school, even though it was Catholic. He had a wonderful elder sister, intelligent, kind and loving. But it seems they all enabled his spoiled brat behaviour

I myself had the most traumatic childhood imaginable and still got on top of it, it possibly even made me stronger. I absolutely eschewed hard drugs. He knows all this, and still he put the boot in.

About seven weeks ago he’d come on Thursday night for our usual chat and shopping outing, after he’d had his opioid dose at the chemist. We got on famously such as best friends do and at Aldis he bought his weekly bottle of Bourboun, several bottles of wine  and looked forward to the beer he drank at home on top of all this, getting drunk till dawn, every night. The only difference from any other night to that night was he had a bag of his mother’s leftover painkillers. He offered me some valium which I gladly took as an occasional pill did quieten any anxiety I felt, and I duly thanked him for it. He then offered me some Oxycontin, a very heavy opioid that junkies chase relentlessly all over the world as it’s as overwhelming a stone as heroin. I refused it in the strongest terms as the one time I was given a pill of the shit in St.Vincents hospital after my bone-graft operation I was violently ill the entire night.

I suspect he “busted” that night, years off the heaviest of drugs and he couldn’t resist trying just one pill for old times’ sake, then gobbled up quite a few on top of the alcohol and Buprenorphin, a truly deadly cocktail. I’d told him that I hadn’t slept for 3 days and was exhausted. I finally fell into a deep sleep but at 3am I got 3 phone calls which woke me up but which I didn’t answer as I was too zonked out to lift a finger. 

Then in the morning the abuse started. I got a stream of text messages, “You wanker! You cunt! You never say thank you! You never ring me and say, "Hi how you going!" You’re just a bastard wanker!” No god, anyone would think I was his boyfriend, yuk! (I couldn’t think of anything worse.) He kept this up for two days, on the third day I got the message, “Kreep!” I replied, “Have you gone mad? Have you got back on the gear? You’re still a junkie loser after 35 years!” And I was put in FaceBook gaol for bullying him!

He’s probably running around to his old junkie mates and muso connections telling them I’m “a wanker, a cocksucker and a traitor.” No god knows what I’ve done to set off his madness except I have been told that substance abusers often turn on someone close to them to blame for all their failures. 

This is a guy who blew his prospects out his arse when he was 25, never achieved anything, sits around plucking at his guitar thinking he’s Segovia and that the greatest contribution he has made to the world is “pling plang plong!” He’s never initiated one project in all his life, never written one song, never cut a record off his own bat or produced a music gig. He always raved about standing up to the LNP, Christian crusaders and neo-fascists but has never gone on a protest march, printed and handed out flyers or even commented on their online propaganda in FaceBook, not one comment!

I’ve given him paid work in my films and gigs, put him in front of large audiences, promoted him on my flyers and posters. He’s never given me one dollar in paid work, got me the poster job for the music gigs he’s been included in or the CD covers he’s been the session musician for. He’s never had a real job in his life! (Oh yeah, he worked behind the counter in a sex shop for a year, great career.) He’s bludged off Social Security and women his entire life, I doubt he’s ever paid rent, and he ran home to mummy and daddy at the age of 42 where he got free rent, electricity, food, phone and car because he couldn’t cut the mustard out in the real world.

I’ve worked as a palliative care nurse, sitting with hundreds of dying patients for 50 years, with time off when I collapsed from the hard work and sadness of it all. I’ve won 2 world prizes and two Australian prizes for my films. I’ve had many art shows, wall-papered Sydney with my posters, written and published two books, a comic book and many short stories. And this bag of sh#t says I’m a wanker! What a nerve, what madness! 

I can only wonder if he’d found out about the portrait I’d written of him in my latest book “Punk Outsider” though it hadn’t actually come out at the time of his flip out. I’d told him about what I’d said a few years ago when I’d first written it and he said, “That’s OK, that’s what literature and free speech is all about, honest, raw existence.”

To prove how much I trusted him I’d given him the key to my front door and he’d often stayed at my flat when I was out of town. I’d told him where I’d hidden my stash of money that I’d saved over the years from hard work, art sales and gifts so that if I died suddenly he could use it to pay for my funeral. He committed one last ghastly act of betrayal, out of sheer insanity and meanness, a poisonous character he’d hidden inside his overweight bag of shit carcass so that most thought of him as a ”nice, quiet guy." He let himself into my apartment, the only other person with a key to my door, knowing when I wouldn’t be there, and he went for the money, for sure. He knew that would totally destroy me and I couldn’t prove he’d done it.

But I intuited that’s exactly what he’d do so I hid the money somewhere else where he couldn’t find it though he tore the place to bits. Actually I put it in the bank. It must’ve made him furious, he’d been planning on stealing my life savings and having a binge on heroin big enough to kill him, and I kind of wish he’d succeeded. Instead, in a fury, he went to a painting I’d recently created, which he knew I treasured and which I’d already sold, and he slashed it with a knife, destroying it. This is what a vicious maniac he is and probably always was.

If he thinks he can destroy me he’s so far wrong as to reinforce the fact that he is an idiot. I’m way stronger than him, he’s always been as weak as piss. I’ve overcome obstacles, monsters and disasters way more problematic than that sloppy schizo. I’m strong, I’m a warrior, I’m an achiever, everything he’s not. He’s possibly trying to destroy  book, jealous I’d achieved something yet again and he’s achieved nothing, ever, but it’s not possible to destroy "Punk Outsider." The cat is out of the bag, it's gone across Australia and the world, many reading and giving it hot reviews. It will go on to be popular Australian underground Beat literature, I’m sure of it. I’ve always been confident about my talent, it’s why I keep going and put so much effort in. 

I've read 3000 books, seen 12000 movies, witnessed 1001 genius musicians, met and interacted with 49000 people and been around the world 21 times. I've practised writing and drawing, over and over 3 million times. As a late developer I've mulched it all down into one style. Thus I'm going to create interesting art, I hope.

When I begged some “non-friends” to help me promote my books, to buy and read them, they’ve gone silent, they won't help me. I can’t understand why, they wouldn’t wish much of my life on a dog. I’ve reported it many times in my stories, what a struggle, what pain, ignominy and exclusion I've experienced. They couldn’t give a shit, how dare I, a queer bum, write books, create paintings and produce animated musicals, it's just not cricket! This is not a sob story about poor me and dickhead "THEM!" This is simply fact, it‘s why I’ve called my latest tome “Punk Outsider.”

I wonder if it’s not jealousy that causes these “non-friends” to be resentful, unhelpful, naysayers? Jealousy is such an ugly emotion and Sydney particularly suffers from it, full of middle-class kids who for all mummy and daddy’s money can’t come up with cutting edge goods. No matter, I have plenty of true friends whose nature it is to be kind, loving, helpful, just one of them is worth all the fuckwit armchair intellectuals and politico-heroes whose banal activities and flat, old biddy style make hip punters' eyes glaze over. 

Oh yeah, vacuous narcissism is what Bawl accuses me of: after asking me what dramas I’ve got myself into this week and me spilling my guts he says, “Oh you’re always talking about yourself!” 

Yeah well, he’s a boring, mean-spirited loser. I’ve asked those in the music scene if they know him and I draw blank faces, “No, never heard of him.” What a claim to fame, art-slasher! And what a scumbag, achieving a life-long drug habit and spending much of his stoned time rearranging his pathetic comb-over hair-do. Surprise, surprise Bawl, you're a bald, pathetic old man, your rock star days are not only over, they never really ever happened.

I’ve reported him to the police, we’ve gone through the videos the Security guards here in Northcott take with cameras on every building and doorway and we’ve caught Bawl the monster entering my flat. They’ve asked me if I want to press charges and I’ve said, “No, only if he comes near me again.” Actually, I’d like to slash his ugly face like he slashed my painting. I can paint that work again, he can never repair his twisted soul. He’s a weak coward and would be sitting at home, getting drunk, shit scared the cops will come knocking at his door at any moment. Fuck the fat slob!

To all you artsholes, celebrity boot-lickers and faux activists sneering right now, I’ve left a telling, entertaining record of crazily splendiferous visions and razor-sharp observations behind me and you can suck it up. Thank you to my many true friends who have stuck by me, you have been worth living and struggling for. And Bawl, you might gaslight me all around town but many are awake to you sociopathic ugliness, they've noticed you never smile. 

Those fools you've lied to don't know that it's you who weekly told me abusive stories about you, otherwise I'd know nothing: how Maya was a thieving junkie who sent her friends broke; how Leslie Dimwit is an ugly old drunken whore he wouldn't fuck with a 10 ft pole; how the guys in his band are hopeless, talentless bores; how the band leader Brontosaurus is a desperate old wannabe who's come late to music and croaks like cane-toad roadkill; how Squashty Hughes is a lousy performer, so ugly you'd think she was a guy in drag. Yes you fuckwits, this is what stoic, stern, stolid, sullen, silent Bawl thinks about you. He's so toxic and overweight his heart will give out on him or he'll have a stroke not long after he turns sixty, that much drinking and shooting up will have to have its destructive effect, they'll find him dead in the morning. Good riddance to bad rubbish I say!

If you enjoy my scabrous tales read the best of them in my latest book, order it at tobyzoates@hotmail.com

Punk Outsider.

PUNK = queer street-delinquent, jail bait.

OUTSIDER = on the edge of the herd, vision questing.

Follow the misadventures of anti-hero Arthur as he’s propelled by outlawed desire down the roiling gutters of Sydney in 1977 and on to the 1990s; from Darlo and Pyrmont Squats to The Gunnery; from the anti-nuclear riots in '77 to the LGBTQ riots in '78; from the rock dives of Frenchs to the Trade Union Club and Selinas Coogee Bay; from The Prisoners' Action Group storming the prison system to nuns storming a "Right to Life" rally; from outrageous Situationist stunts to a filmmaker’s soul-destroying quest; from Callous Park Asylum to Northcott Suicide Towers; from the Piccolo Cafe on the Cross to Mad Max in a Homebush quarry. Attempting to heal his flawed human condition, he overcame the obstacles thrown his way and achieved an exhilarating life. Hoping to be a cutting-edge artist and movie star he ended up an ignominious Punk Outsider. 

I, Toby Zoates, kept up my courage and wrote my urban myths inspired by:  “7 Poor Men of Sydney” (Christina Stead); “Sex and Thugs and Rock ’n’ Roll” (Billy Thorpe);  “Tales of Ordinary Madness” (Charles Bukowski);  “You Can’t Win” (Jack Black);  “The Swimming Pool Library” (Alan Hollinghurst);  “The Thief’s Journal”  (Jean Genet);  “Down and Out in Paris and London” (George Orwell).

No god, what an obstacle course I’ve run to produce this, the 2^nd book, “Punk Outsider”, in a planned trilogy, “The 7 Lives of the Punk Poofy Cat.” (The 1^st being “Vagabond Freak.”) It’s been 42 years of making notes, writing short stories, researching, interviewing, sketching, rewriting it 49 times, editing it with an eagle’s eye, to and fro with the printer to get it as near perfect as possible. And still it has 70 typos, I must have passed out, cross-eyed and exhausted at the end and managed to fuck it up. So I've hand-corrected the first 200 copies making it a "REAL PUNK" artefact with squiggles throughout to reinforce the fact that the stories are about a struggling artist, and it has 44 graphics to prove the artistry and illustrate the story. Here it is if you feel to dive into it! I should have also suggested the book is "interactive", the reader to have a red ink biro ready to correct any typos that I missed, (and there were plenty.) But in my confusion I didn't think of this creative idea and thus lost the chance at a true DIY participation.

It’s an illustrated roman a clef, picaresque NOVEL… an historical document but with names changed and events conflated as to time and space. In parts it’s exaggerated, confabulated, modified, obfuscated, dreamed up to make a point. But at the same time IT IS MY personal story, about being an anti-hero, queer, flawed, inexpert, foolish; a tale of surviving as an impoverished, unconnected, outsider artist... others have better stories of hanging with VIPs, mine are about the streets, the downfallen, the mad and the dysfunctional: violent humanity with all its wounds on show.

"Punk Outsider" is selling well and getting rave reviews from the cool cognoscenti. The book launch was particularly successful, Yuta played suitable Punk guitar wildly. I'm sure you will all be happy for me, it's been a very difficult achievement which I'd planned many years ago, looking far ahead. (Everybody who bought the book has been a great help, it's kind of like crowd-funding to enable a project only you get a book, which is the project!) It's a mash-up of various genres: alternative history, political diatribe, social realism, queer confessional, artist's manifesto, Pulp crime, horror movie, dark comedy, rock journalism, desperado's diary and pauper's suicide note.

Every story regales the reader with a variation on violence, from the State/[police, street gangs, homo-bashers, messianic cult-leaders with their conversion-therapies, would-be muggers, ratshit nurses, my anti-hero himself who greets violence with violence. But in a rigid class-structure of neo-liberal high capitalism it's the overarching System that perpetrates, enables, institutionalises violence upon those at the bottom, the streeties, and those climbing the shit-heap: in our world violence has become the norm, I call it "the violence of poverty."

The protagonist of Punk Outsider is unapologetically queer, his life-long sense of alienation was what led him on his many misadventures, fun stunts and egregious behaviours. His queer sensibility flavours the entire book, his queerness is what truly propelled him into a life of being a Punk Outsider. 

Thanks to those true friends who stood by me, helped to promote the book, shared my achievement on FB and are sincerely good souls. They are kind, generous, with not a mean or jealous bone in their bodies. Such angels are: Branston Lee Pickle, Eulalie Moore, Damien Minton, Caroline Turner, Johnny Sigurd, Bronwyn Reid, Vittorio Bianchi, Susie Evans, Brian Allen, Kay Glass, Stuart Coupe, Devina Bedford, Brad Rees, Kathleen Matterson, Yuta Matsumoto, Wendy Joy, Stephen Jones, Sandra Gobbo, Joshua M Griffiths, Anne Morphett, Jim Anderson, Dianne Minnis, Nick Henderson, Ken Davis, William Brougham, Michael Organ.

It's not been easy being a Punk Outsider, arrested 7 times for civil disobedience, trespass and obstructing the Law, and rejected by self-important legends in their own toilet breaks. I've made 7 films which won 2 world prizes, and my films have shown all around the world; I've had 7 one person art shows and contributed to 21 group art shows; my designs on t-shirts and skate-boards have sold in many major world cities; I've created 700 paintings and drawings and sold 300 of them, cheap so anyone can afford them; I've given 49 live performances and published 3 books, (all the while working as a registered palliative care nurse.) 

And yet I get trashed and live in ignominy. I was pushed to the edge but also I went there voluntarily, for that's where the most fun, love and knowledge is to be found. Oh yeah, I won Best Trash Film in the World award at Freakzone, France in 1996, alongside Japan, whose film was Zen atomic satire genius. I guess there's something cool to being trashed. It's red-hot PUNK.

If the armchair intellectuals and acclaimed art/political heros ignore it then it didn't happen, but it did fucking happen, BIG TIME. I guess that's Australia for you, most on the chain gang, or with the job of whip master, are resentful if someone seems to be getting an extra crust of bread or above their station. So thank you my friends for easing my way, the best benefit of being a Punk Outsider is my work remains punchy.

I'm a boy from social housing, from no elite school or with social connections, yet I've been around the world 21 times, and danced abandoned in 700 nightclubs across the planet, while a circle of dancers formed around me whistling and clapping. To think I was rejected from entering the Nat Art School in 1982. Thank NO GOD, they would've fucked me! I was accepted into the Uni of Technology Sydney, a much better school, where I majored in Writing and Text Studies. 

My life has been so exhilarating that my eyes often roll back in my head in ecstasy, in this infinitely beautiful universe I am exultant. And I'm not finished yet, I've already written the third book in my trilogy, "Public Enemy Number 7" but will wait a year before I release it, if I ever do as it was too damned hard to realise this last book. I have to get "Punk Outsider" well and truly across first if I can. So dear phantom reader, keep safe, stay cool, be kind, unwind...

Order my book at tobyzoates@hotmail.com

or at The Bookshop Oxford Street Darlinghurst,

Caught at The Catcher.

 

When I was 16 in 1966 I was quite aware I was queer in a society that criminalised my sexuality, thus I was an outlaw, fringe-dweller, renegade, maverick, freak, outsider, stranger, I was alienated from the world of the time. I searched for somewhere to belong, my community, a sanctuary, and being pop music-mad I found such a place in a rock club. In the ‘60s music venues were called discotheques because they spun records of the latest hits in between the bands. My first rock club was called The Biting Eye, in Little Bourke Street Melbourne. I’d hung out the front with a gang of Sharpies, (Skinheads), threatening to bash the Mods inside. When the Mod boys came out to confront us I fell instantly in love with their long hair, paisley shirts and striped bell-bottomed trousers and quickly transformed into a Mod boy, growing my hair till it hung in my face, buying Carnaby Street gear and taking shelter inside that psychedelic rock’n’roll cavern.

The Biting Eye was managed by an Italian family who also ran a pizza parlour called “Papa’s Pizzas” and for the first time in our lives we partook of this delicious culinary delight, pizzas with olives and anchovies. Top bands of the time played there such as The Loved Ones, Jeff St. John and The Purple Hearts, it was funky way before funk became the style to reach for. But those were sexually conservative times, teenagers were restless, under the thrall of their parents, starting to break away from puritanical, suburban dreariness, and ever so ready to fuck. Two patrons of the club, teenage lovers, had been caught having sex by their parents, the police were called, they were sent to trial and convicted of carnal knowledge. I was already doing the homo beats and lived in terror of being caught in the “act of perversion.”

Early 1967, I turned 17 and word was out of a new club that had opened in Flinders Lane up towards Spencer Street Station. The Catcher, a converted blue-stone warehouse, with two floors, painted a gothic black. Two would-be rockers reported that when they approached the joint, rock music blaring so loud it could be heard a block away, they freaked out, considering it the dirtiest, creepiest shithole, telling each other, “I’m not going in there” and they turned back and went home, the wimps. The first night I attended the warehouse I marched straight in, I didn’t see the grunginess at all, if I did I approved of it, nor did I find it dangerous, on entry into the dark interior, immersed in ear-shattering electric guitars, I was in my element, home at last.

It was created and managed by a Primary School teacher, Graham Geddes, who was very hip, cool and ahead of his times, a visionary, creating the space to be a playground for teenagers, to get them off the streets and surfing pop culture. When the police accused him of sheltering three teenage escapees from penal institutions he replied, “I’d rather them inside having fun than outside getting into mischief.” The interior decor consisted of black walls with wrought iron beds and plastic mannequins hanging from them, a cafe with counter and chairs to the side, an office at the front, an upstairs room that was full of manky couches and mattresses strewn upon the floor. This dark room was known as the Gobble Room with much illicit teenage frolicking, not that I experienced any of it, shyness and shame of my sexuality was the only fear I experienced in the joint.

A photographer, Ron Eden, hung 12 inch photos of club members from the ceiling and the bands played from a waist-high stage at the back of the ground floor, with a raised platform behind the band upon which beautiful girls moved rhythmically to the beat of the music, the Tamla Dancers. The hottest, wildest, hardcore rock bands of the time played there. Gerry Humphries and The Loved Ones, Lobby Loyd and The Wild Cherries/The Purple Hearts, Malcolm McGee and Python Lee Jackson, Running Jumping Standing Still, Jeff St.John and the Yama, Doug Parkinson’s Focus, The Adderly Smith Blues Band and the house band who played nearly every night the club was open, Ray Petrie and The Chelsea Set. When Max Merrit and The Meteors played all the other bands in town would hurry to finish their sets and rush over to catch the rock/blues maestro as his band was considered the “band’s band.”

Because The Chelsea Set was the House Band they played every night the club was open and Sundays as well, with movie screenings as added attraction. We teens not only became friendly with them, we adored them, particularly their lead singer, Ray Petrie; he was iconic in our mindset, the epitome of style, grace and good looks. I for one fell in love with him from a distance, he was not only the ants’ pants, I wanted terribly to get into those pants. I was too shy and in awe to approach him, he had a mob of groupies always hanging off him, particularly some extremely handsome boys, who I didn’t feel I could compete with. The Catcher sometimes arranged outings for us, one was a Sunday trip to Mt. Kosciosko and the snow fields. Hoping to stand out in the crowd and earn Ray’s attention I flung myself into a bog of mud, then walked about looking like the Swamp Thing, and indeed Ray was highly amused, declaring I was a cheeky character and giving me a hug. I was chuffed, hoping possibly I was now a member of the “IN crowd.”

At times the police infiltrated the club to spy on the teenage shenanigans: on questioning the girls they concluded they were there for immoral purposes, at 3am they found them lounging about on the floors, making love in dark corners and asleep on the tables. Some were refugees from the Children’s Court, and their boyfriends were known teenage criminals. The cops reported some girls were as young as twelve and the average age of the crowd was seventeen, my age, a time when I was discovering freedom and independence. I had run away from my home in West Heidelberg with a sixteen year old, long-haired rock drummer and we rented a cheap flat in Richmond, finding jobs as clerks at the Victoria Barracks on St. Kilda Road. Not everyone enjoying the space was criminally minded or attracted to drugs, most had come for the music and the camaraderie, an outlaw edge merely providing an extra frisson.

“Fiendish drugs” such as methedrine and benzedrine pills were readily available, either pilfered from many a mother’s dieting medication or from forged prescriptions foisted upon naive chemists. I never got into speed in any big way, taking one or two pills for the night’s dancing while some of my friends took twenty at a time and got holes eaten into their brains. On a raid, Senior Constable Bruce Huxtable was shocked by all this debauchery, he was determined to stamp out teenage violence, there were fights inside the club and brawls outside. A number of arrests were made in the area for offensive behavior and indecent language. I myself got in a fight late one night when a gang of redneck thugs attacked us after they stumbled out of some illicit pub, drunk as punks. To scare them I picked up a traffic stanchion and waved it in their faces like a light-sabre causing them to run for their lives, much to my surprise.

The cops discovered that the mob of burly bouncers had criminal records for assault and offensive behavior, we couldn't care less, they were needed to keep the unruly, acting-out teenagers under control. This was an era when we truly felt a new world was dawning, we were proto-adults and could decide our own destinies, even if it was a destructive one. I was determined to get a life, to live out my dream of adventure and accomplishment and I wasn’t going to let drugs, the cops, the crims or the sex get in my way. Bisexuality was somewhat fashionable, a few boys dabbled, I was one of the few who came fully “out of the closet” yet I couldn’t crack onto any of the hot boys, even in The Gobble Room, as the very act of homosexuality was till taboo amongst that Mod set, for all their flamboyant mannerisms. Or maybe I was just too shy and paranoid.

The lead singer of The Chelsea Set, Ray Petrie, was gay, even though he had a girlfriend and had got her pregnant. Late in 1967 I had broken up with my sixteen year old boyfriend, who was straight, and I ended up living with an old queen, Ruby, in South Yarra. One night, while we were relaxing in the lounge-room, the door was flung open and in walked Ray with this old Greek man who had picked him up at a traffic light. I got quite a shock and so did Ray on seeing me. There was a horrible room in the house that all of Ruby’s friends used as a fuck room, with towel and lube ready to go. Ray and I got on like a nightclub on fire, talking about the Catcher and the gang, while the old Greek prick looked on and became angrier by the minute. He signaled to Ray to get going and my rock’n’roll hero regretfully went to the fuck room with him and for half an hour got fucked stupid.

When he came out he was red with embarrassment and I was red with annoyance, we arranged to meet at a pub the next day and I knew I could win my dream boy as a lover if I wanted. I sweated on it for a day, pissed off that Ray had the bad taste to go with that uptight mug, a fat arsehole who had sexually harassed me for months and who I had rebuffed every time. Contempt for the whole affair set in and by the time Ray rang me for the appointment I was seething with resentment and I got Ruby to answer the phone and tell him I’d gone out. I missed out on experiencing pleasure with a guy I admired and I regretted it for the rest of my life, (for Ray fled back to England in 1969 and worked for the fashion magazine, The Face, styling the male models. He instigated The Buffalo look, based on the "rude boys" of Jamaica which became the rage in London, Boy George being one its most famous proponents. Ray died of HIV in 1989 at the age of forty.) I do have self-respect and I wanted him to know I was no easy lay like the rest of the groupies who swarmed around him; still, I guess I was just an uptight fool.

Back to the Catcher, it was open all night and the bands were considered the “hardcore end” of the rock’n’roll spectrum though again I didn’t see it, it was simply the style of music I loved, fast, loud, growling voices, wailing guitars and thumping drums. The club became more notorious as the months wore on, as if it were a vampire’s lair situated in the dark, deserted, desolate end of Flinders Lane. A music reporter commented, “The surly, sociopathic element of the rock music crowd slouched around a bare room listening to the harder and wilder of the music scene; very Malcolm Maclarenesque Punk ten years early with a not so different soundtrack.” The Truth scandal rag had shock horror headlines for months claiming The Catcher attracted an anti-social clientele.

I met my best friend for life there on the dance floor, 16 year old Gel O’Reilly, she didn’t take drugs, smoke, was chaste, and didn’t even drink coffee, she was the favourite of everybody. She was the type that would walk up to a stranger, befriend them and natter on till she learnt their life story. She was friends with many of the bands, the boys all wanted to get their hands on this bright British virgin but she didn’t give herself to any of them, even the hottest rockers, she preferred to dance the night away with queer boy me, dancer extraordinaire. And it was Gel who filled me in on the intimate side of Graham Geddes, hanging out in his office with him and the IN Crowd, me being too shy to venture within that inner sanctum.

Mr. Geddes was married to a woman named Sandy and they had two kids, he was only in his late twenties or early thirties so not that much older than us mob. He lived in the Dandenongs, at Olinda, a long drive home. As a Primary School teacher it was quite risky for him to run this rock club, for those were the days when teachers had to swear an oath not to take on a second job, they were to be dedicated to teaching alone. In the morning, while many of us raucous teens had “mildew parties” in some punks’ flat to come down from our speed trips, Graham would offer to drive a few teenagers home if they lived along his route to the Dandenongs. Sometimes he would take a gang of them in his pick-up truck for breakfast, Gel included, to MacClures coffee lounge on St. Kilda Road.

Gel told me that not once, in any way, did she get the barest hint that Graham Geddes was sexually interested in the girls, he was not a predator, it was not his secret agenda; she was very canny about these things, talked to all the girls and none of them ever reported hanky panky from Graham. He was the real thing, a renegade, hip teacher, only concerned for the welfare of his teenage wards, to steer them from a life of crime or desperation towards a future of contributing to society, in a fun, creative way, whether through music, dance or fashion. He opened a fashion shop up near The Biting Eye which he named The Gobble Shop, a tiny premises which managed to contain a coffee lounge, hairdresser, poster designers’ workshop and small disco dance floor. It was a hang-out for budding fashion designers and, along with others, I would buy my materials from nearby warehouses and bring them to The Gobble to be made into shirts, suits and dresses by resident tailors while we raged to the latest hits from The Beatles, The Yardbirds, The Stones and Jimi Hendrix. It was total immersion in pop-culture, we even sang the latest hit song to each other, “To Sir With Love.”

Because of the scandalous headlines from rags like The Truth Gel’s mother decided to take a look at The Catcher one Sunday afternoon, bringing her nine-year old daughter Imelda with her. She was greeted at the door by a bouncer, Kerry, and when she told him the purpose of her visit Mr. Geddes came out and took her for a tour around the club, showing her everything. She was quite satisfied it was a safe and well maintained place for her daughter Gel to while away the night hours within and she left in high spirits. It was reported in The Truth that week that a mother was seen dragging her 12 year old daughter out of The Catcher in high dudgeon, to which Kitty O’Reilly wrote a letter of harsh criticism of the untruths the paper was spreading, her daughter was nine and she’d gone on an inspection tour and was satisfied it was a safe place of musical enjoyment for her 16 year old daughter to patronise. The Sunday of her visit had the usual film screening event, Hitchcock’s “Psycho” or “The Birds” with the house band, The Chelsea Set, also playing, and Kitty thought it was all lovely.

As the club tottered towards 1969 and into the early Seventies, the notoriety became too wearisome for smooth and easy management. The Masters Apprentices last concert with their original lead guitarist, Rick Morrisson, happened there, he passed out on stage because of his one lung disability, having lost the other in childhood, and was carried out on a stretcher, causing him to retire from rock music. Some of us moved on, to other clubs, other climes. I started training as a registered nurse and thus unable to get the times and days needed for discos. I became a hippie, hung around Carlton, helped build the first vegetarian restaurant, Shakahari, and forgot The Cathcer, having escaped with my health and sanity still intact. Others of my peers got into heroin and I lost sight of them but Gel and I have remained best buddies into our old age. The Catcher closed sometime in 1970, just as I was hitching off to Ourimbah rock festival in NSW. It seems Mr. Geddes was uptight with the troubles thrown his way just because he ran a haven for teenagers, he might’ve even lost his teaching job, and his marriage to Sandy fell apart, he became somewhat cantankerous in old age, yet managed to run a successful antique business in Malvern for the rest of his life.

As I noticed on the FaceBook site, “Sebastions, Berties, The Catcher and The Thumpin Tum”, many of us Catcher mob have managed to stay alive into old age, and fondly remember the club and era as one of the greatest of times, when Mods flourished and Soul ruled. We loved the friendship, the phenomenal bands, the dancing and yahooing, it was basically the beginning of the youth revolution, teenage independence and an Australian rock/pop music renaissance. It was such a joy to live through, it gave me the strength and confidence to go out into the world, handle anything that was thrown at me and achieve my life-goals. I slept on the streets and beaches of India for four years and then the squats of inner-city Sydney for 12 years, and you can’t get a wilder school of hard kicks in the teeth than that, and much of my education was caught at The Catcher.