There's a pyromaniac on the loose at Northcott ghetto, for several weeks he/she has put a match to the mountainous garbage pile at the dumpsters 21 yards from my front door, usually on Saturday nights, a true Saturnalia with devils dancing in and out of the flames. The fire brigade should park here permanently, they're here every second night with false alarms and ice-zombie melt-downs, the shrieks, wails and detonations makes me think it's the end of the world, I hear it as I hide out in my bunker and sweat on the panic maybe crashing through my door.
My neighbour Eric the schitzo viking has been taken away by the police, after 21 years of howling till dawn, shitting in his pants and masturbating in front of little old ladies, someone's finally figured out he's socially inept and needs assisted care, they've put him in the caged yards of Caritas Psyche bin and he's not coming back, thank nogod. On the other side of my bunker I hear Cursula and Bawl express sorrow at his incarceration, they'll have no one to bludge cigarettes off, he was a perfect match for their retardation, he made them look good when they got together to natter bullshit saccharine humanisms, like they really care.
They still live their brain-dead lives on my doorstep, they can't sit comfortably in their flat because it's filled to the ceiling with the trash she's rescued from the burning dumpsters, and so I hear endlessly all the drivel they've got to bawl to each other. Cursula shouts to any zombie whose ears aren't plugged about her miraculous job interview, the first she's ever had, she's past 40 and a drug-daze has been her main occupation. Yet there was that one time she tried out at the Black Hole brothel on Elizabeth Street, when she'd heaved her vast breasts, that normally hung about her knees, up into a dirty corset and sat all night staring cow-like into the mugs of countless desperate punters and not even got a whiff of a job, looked upon with disgust so that she trudged home at dawn penniless and moaned loudly that it must be because they were intellectually her inferiors. "No!" I shouted from my bunker, "it's because you're a fat ugly slag!"
Yes, you guessed it, I've gone mad, from a life of being beat up, shat on, put upon and bullshitted to, surrounded, swamped and trampled by an army of misfit lumpens from the guttersnipe demi-monde. I've even been thrown out of the Lifeboat for Losers Cafe, the Pick Your Low Piccolo, for starting too many arguments, and there's no lower level of Hell to flee to, that Venus Fly-trap hothouse was the lowest. I've been very ill of late, my leg infection and anti-biotics making me so weak I can hardly walk and still I dragged my sorry arse up to the Dick-o-low Cafe naively thinking it the last refuge for the dispossessed and dysfunctional. Though I knew it wasn't the kind of place that would lend a helping hand, I was shocked at the relish taken at putting the boot in while I was down.
First Bobby Dogcart abused one of my girl-friends, calling her a smart-mouthed bitch and a drug-addict who was always bludging off everyone, a perfect description of himself and the opposite of her hardworking, generous soul. He kept on and on till I screamed I'd throw my coffee in his face if he said one more bad word to her. All of Roslyn Street tuned into the drama as we were sitting at the tables outside, a hundred eyeballs popped at me and once again I was the loudmouthed villain in the endless melodrama that was the Dick-o-low Cafe.
The next day was Good Friday, always a bad day for me, and Vitto had a fit trying to rip his gift Easter eggs from Knobby Israel's clutches declaring they weren't for old regulars, they were for the newbies who he was still honeymooning with. I pissed myself laughing till the retarded assistant cook rushed out from behind the counter and for no good reason picked on me, calling me a free-loader, a bludger and why don't I get a real job like him frying eggs and baking tasteless cakes nobody wanted. He demanded I fuck-off, while Vitto stood there like an Italian hobgoblin and let his employee abuse me, a regular of 30 years patronage, who'd gone through every high and low with him, when he'd been bashed, robbed, sacked, raided, insulted and abandoned I'd stuck by his side and fought off the demons with him. As far as free-loading goes, I've done a lot of artwork to promote his dump and never even got a free cup of coffee for it, that's how tight he is.
I think senility is taking over the old fairy, he's slaving away till the point of collapse and in fatigue taking out his bad moods on us loyal regulars, I suppose because he feels safe in so doing, and I can wear his insults gallantly, but not get evicted by his half-wit assistant. The ditzy old queen is gonna drop dead behind the stupid coffee machine and we just have to put up with his grumpy mood swings, that's the way he is, an old turtle stuck in his shell. He insists the cafe needs him 24/7 when I've got the sneaky suspicion he's a millionaire, with property all over that he could sell off and live like a king for the rest of his decrepit days, but instead he cries poor and eats the left-over scraps his customers leave on their plates, like he's stuck in World War 2 and the Nazis are over-running the Italian neighbourhood. I'm absolutely livid, the cold abuse has built up over 30 years till the feral cook's insults are the last straw that broke my much humped back and I'm never going back to that black-widow spider's lair. I feel like the djinn released from the grimy, old bottle, I'm free, free at last!
(I was reading Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion" and got riled up by a few of the cafe's regulars who were shocked I would read such offensive propaganda, for atheists are the devil's footsoldiers! Charles Gropin, like a pontificating pseudo-intellectual windbag, tried to convince me religion has only brought beauty into the world and certainly never caused any harm, those twin towers in New York would've fallen even without the Moslems and Christians hating each other! He's just trying to get up Peter Pumpkin's bum, who comes across as a brainwashed religio-maniac, together they're composing an aria of Mary Magdelene's love songs to Jesus, it seems Charles would sell out all history and ignore "gay" oppression just to please his obsessive lust object, Peter. That medieavil leftover superstition, God, still rules the lower levels of Hell, especially at the Pope-mobile Cafe, and I just don't think I can take such moronic nonsense any more. I've been driven MAD!)
I'm now reading "What Happened to Gay Life?" by Robert Reynolds and it makes me realise I'm not the only disaffected old queer bemoaning the lost funkiness of Sydney, distressed by the fading of a Utopia I'd struggled so hard to head towards. I think I'll even quit Sydney, for me it's become like a purgatory of no-hoping disillusionment, sucking me down into depression, a glitzier version of the old convict colony of masters, slaves and overseers, everyone stripping flesh from their fellows backs to get on top of the shitheap, afraid the next fellow might get there ahead of them. Everyone feels to be in a panic, shoving each other out of the way, desperate to hang onto what they'd worked so hard for but it all slipping down some gurgle hole of religious terrorism and economic and environmental collapse. Anyway, Social Darwinism suggests old flakes like me should be discarded in the race for survival, I'm just taking up space.
Maybe Darwin town will provide a new start for me, or at least a change of air, and if I want to find out what "a hole" really is, there's no better place, it's like a frontier town out West and I'm a cowboy refugee from the Brokeback Cafe of Kings Cross. I need a change of life, or it's suicide if I remain stuck in my bunker, I've had Sydney and Sydney has had me!!! But do I have the courage to flee the false-security of my bunker and start all over again? Who fucking cares? Goodbye cruel world! If my body is found comatose in my bunker like a catatonic shitzophrenic then you know I've gone off to live in the future.
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