LONE STRANGER
1) Reject From The Anything Goes Cafe.
Ok, listen up, if you want the nitty gritty on a deviant pilgrim's progress through the unchartered underground, keep reading. Take a trip on the wild side via the backstreets of Sydney, Paris, Amsterdam, Morocco, Delhi, Mumbai and Goa. Follow Arthur Farthing as he fulfils his heart's destiny and renounces the poverty of violence.
Here he is, reacquaint yourself with him, sitting in the window seat of the Anything Goes Cafe on Kings Cross Sydney staring into his coffee, spliff in hand, reminiscing on his past adversities and adventures, praying there’d be no more hazards and plenty of fun to come.
Arthur snapped out of his reverie when Vitto, the café’s barrista, screeched invective into his ear, telling him, "You bring drama like a dog brings fucking fleas, you'd fight with your own shadow!" Vittorio Bianchi was the tout for a freakshow café on Desolation Row so he'd know.
He’d first met Vitto in 1979 at Garibaldis Bar in Riley Street Darlinghurst when Arthur arranged a benefit show for the old Italian manager, Mario Abiezzi, as he needed some money to pay the rent. He enlisted Cabaret Conspiracy with the great drag artists Doris Fish and Jacqueline Hyde as M.C.s. He created a lurid, fluorescent poster with a cartoon of Doris and cabaret star Fifi L'Amour striding out of Kings Cross with a bunch of queers following in their wake and he pasted 300 copies of it on the walls of Sydney to advertise the gig. The heavy fluoro colours against a black background enhanced his ribald cartoon talent to a monotone Sydney and created quite a stir among local artists and within a year the style of bright fluoro images with heavy black outlines became ubiquitous.
Arthur found Vitto drooling over the table where he'd stacked some of the posters, hoping to sell them for one dollar each. (In 2024 they sell for $2000 and more if you can find one). Tight as a crocodile’s arsehole Vitto refused to part with a dollar and Artie told him to, “Fuck off!” That's kind of been the style of their love/hate relationship ever since. For forty years Artie’s been watching him as he's sung like a canary given the third degree, to any and every magazine, newspaper and pamphleteer that's shown up to interview him on his favorite subject, himself. Oh, and the celebrities he's waited upon at the Cat’s Whiskers Cafe.
The role-call of stars is endless, Marianne Faithful. Jeff Buckley, Geoffrey Rush, Chrissy Amphlet, Penny Arcade, Noah Taylor, Martin Sharp, Irving Walsh, squealing on and on to the media sob-sisters to satisfy Sydney’s celebrity addiction, forgetting all the mere mortals that were regulars and gave him his bread and butter. In thirty years of going there nearly every day Arthur rarely spotted a celebrity, they bought one cup of coffee every six months, hardly enough to pay for the juke box let alone anything else. It was amusing when the actor Richard Roxburgh showed up there to be interviewed by the winner of a Peace Prize because he was reprising his television show persona "Rake" with the Cool Cat’s Cafe as background. His character purportedly lived in a flat upstairs and many a flaky thespian, desperate for one second of fame, rushed to the café to sit slurping coffee and get their mugs on screen as a vindication of their showbiz travails. Arthur thought Richard was a jolly good fellow for publicizing the place but made sure he wasn’t around for the televising, hating to be yet another rubber-necker on public view.
Thankfully Vitto never forgets to mention his particular favorites, a gang of friends who regularly patronised the business to gossip and promote their shows, darlings whom Artie also loved such as Elizabeth Burton, godess of the Kings Cross strip clubs; Fifi L'Amour, gorgeous cabaret artist famous for her performances across Auz and Europe; Jeannie Lewis, inspiring folksinger and comrade in many international social struggles; Danny Aboud, outrageous drag artist and male hustler selling his donkey dick in New York; and Ayesha, the famous Les Girls Dragon Lady. But in all the years, no matter how many shows Arthur did or continuous support he gave to Vitto, he never got mentioned as another artist in residence. He was just one of the faceless nobodies who spent a lot of money there, helping to pay Vitto’s bills and buy his flat in Randwick. It's not so much that Artie wanted his ego stroked, he’d had a great life with enough limelight to satisfy his “hero in his own toilet break” narcissism. It just grated on him that show-biz stars are the only worthwhile humans in Vitto’s world.
There was a whole mob of deadbeats who gathered there over the last fifty years, many of them now dead in inglorious circumstances, though some are still alive and kicking, (or getting their arses kicked.) Yet in Vitto’s eyes they’re quotidian plebs, non-stars and monstars. Tramps, junkies, hookers, sluts, thieves, hustlers, paupers, painters, strippers, dealers, potheads, rockers, pagans, witches, maniacs, the entire crew from Nightmare Alley passed through that Hotspot Cafe. They fought, squabbled, philosophised, loved, smoked, drank and fucked, and kept each other company on lonely nights, forking out their last few dollars for the cheap lentil soup and bad coffee. (Vitto was notorious for using old, used coffee grounds.)
Oh, and let's not forget the quiet angels that sat among the demi monde but didn't blow their horns, yet are the real stars of "society": nurses, carers, teachers, pro bono lawyers, street musicians, single mums, low-paid cleaners. The place was a sanctuary for them to also rest their tired feet and get some attention, from Vitto and the unruly mob of deviants.
The Piccolo was often referred to as "the artists' cafe", sadly 99% of artists don't get famous, they die in penury. While Vitto lauded the phenomena of “the star artist” he often disparaged Arthur who had wall-papered Sydney with his posters, grumbling if Artie asked for a coffee on tick, “You bludger, you’ve never got a job!” Kings Cross had the reputation of being a "devils’ kitchen" for much of the twentieth century and Artie figured he should be grateful to never get a mention as a patron of such a disreputable "lifeboat for losers" cafe as Vitto’s for it would look bad on his non-career’s CV. Still, it's the thought that counts, every little bit helps in the promotion of a try hard artist.
He wasn't exactly a non-entity. In 2019 he shared an art show with the work of the illustrious Martin Sharp, (he of the Cream album cover and Jimi Hendrix poster fame), called "My City of Sydney." Both of them supposedly dedicating their lives to creativity. but otherwise they were opposites, Martin was born in Sydney into a wealthy family, went to an elite art school, was famous, heterosexual and his work wonderfully decorative. Arthur was born in Melbourne and from an extremely poor family, was rejected from that same art school, NAS, and was an ignominious nobody, unashamedly queer and his work politically cutting social justice commentary, (or so he thought.)
Arthur was sad that all those years of pleasure and pain had been wiped, forgotten, ignored by Vitto's selective memory. There was the time when the electric transformer for the area blew and all the bums sat with Vitto in the café’s gloom with candles barely lighting the dark for four days and nights, a storm raging outside, all of them freezing their arses off, this event forgotten by his celebrity obsession. Then there were those few times Vitto got dragged up to Kings Cross police station to be questioned and psychologically tortured by the pigs, accused of selling marijuana, while his bad-arsed crew anxiously waited outside, including Arthur, this never to be mentioned by him.
Farrrrrk, how many times did the pigs raid the cafe, locking all the potheads in while they searched everybody. There was the night they went over that "hole in the wall" cafe with a fine tooth comb, all the while the baggies of pot were hidden at the bottom of a large can of Nescafe that Vitto would stir with his sticky hands to fish them out. All of these contretemps Arthur only just survived yet he was written out of much of the café’s history.
He cried with Vitto when his Clayton's boyfriend, David, took his life-savings and squandered it on a truck which he then crashed and destroyed. David sold the wreck to buy a motorbike, then ran away to Queensland, the last time Vitto saw him he was disappearing into the sunshine with an Asian girl clinging to him on the back of the bike. Arthur hurt for him when a certain drag queen who lived across the road once took that same useless boyfriend home and Vitto stood under her bedroom window and wept as the lights in her inner-sanctum were turned on and off, on and off. David later confessed to Arthur that he stupidly thought she was a woman and when he edged into her bedroom she dropped her panties and revealed her peanut penis. He nearly fell over in shock and fled, stumbling down the stairs. Vitto needn't have thrown a tizzy, David’s lust went unsatisfied. David also confessed to Arthur that while living with Vitto he paid the rent by letting him suck his cock once a month. If David wasn’t in the mood and refused him Vitto would erupt in a fury, traipse out of the bedroom and kick his cat in the arse in the kitchen.
Arthur winced with him when a rough-trade Lebanese hunk named Tony slapped him across the face because he wouldn't give him fifty dollars. Tony was a hustler working the Fitzroy Gardens and it was curious that he thought he was owed fifty as that was the price of a cock-suck on the Kings Kross sex circuit. Artie was ready to rush upon the bastard and get his nose broken for the 7th time only Tony ran off knowing the whole Piccolo Café mob would jump into the fray and beat the shit out of him.
Arthur went to the movies with Vitto every Monday night for 21 years and boy was it embarrassing. He laughed out loud and called out insults if the acting was bad or the plot improbable, he shrieked to shatter glass at any form of violence as if he’d been punched-out himself, even the hard slamming of a door or a spit in the face had him squealing. One time, at a screening of "The Evil Touch", every time Charlton Heston came on screen with his bad Mexican make-up Vitto hooted with derision, a guy sitting behind us tapped him on the shoulder and told him to "Shut up!" He replied, "Fuck off!" and carried on laughing, ruining the movie for me as well.
When he let it be known that he longed to go back to Europe in 1994 to visit his old family home it was Arthur who put in the hard work, hiring the venue, (Les Girls), lining up the acts, creating the posters and pasting them up, handing out flyers, organizing the show on the night, him being one of the acts, and getting Vitto $2000 for his trip. It hurt when the old shit not only claimed it wasn't enough money, it really cut Arthur to the bone when some years later he announced from a stage in Redfern that it was Elizabeth Burton who organized the show for him. Artie didn't want any medals or gold cups, let Vitto keep them all. While he thought the Italian puto was an amusing character who had put in an inordinately long time sealed in a concrete box shouting "helllo" and “fuck you” from the doorway, Artie didn't see him as a saintly Mother Theresa caring for the down and out peasants, though he did look a bit like her.
Arthur had been bashed-up there 7 times, no kidding, once actually knocked out and dropped to the floor, on that "strange attractor" spot in the middle of the café, with Vitto screeching like a mother hen and trying to protect him under his wings. He had been arguing with a deadbeat named David Massacre when a Maori moron ran full pelt into the cafe and sucker-punched him, allegedly to protect his mate from Arthur's smart mouth.
There is a labyrinth of roads criss-crossing the globe that Arthur had restlessly trod with many oasis where he stopped off for a rest and friendly banter and the Piccolo Café was one of them. Various refuges strobed in and out of his conscious soul as if hurtled through parallel universes under a flashing strobe light, crowds of people leering up, seeking attention, recognition, respect and love. He let many pass by, forgot quite a few, took others to heart, the mystery of existence was unfathomable yet it was sweet people who gave it substance. Vitto wasn’t pure sweet nor wholey sour, he was unforgettable, like a white light luring one in from a red-lit maze.
He raged with angel care and devil angst, like most people, a crazy human, lonely while crowded, wise while confused, loyal though promiscuous with his favours. It hurt to hear him lionize a mob of fame-desperates while true supporters got short shrift, as they were quotidian, familiarity bred contempt, he only really liked those who visited once a year. He never really had a boyfriend and he resented his needy lust for men, he shouted to the world he could only love women, men were nasty, they urged him to sinful fantasies. Arthur was there the day in the Noughties when Cardinal Pell was brought in by Father Syn from the Catholic church down the street. Pell's eyes popped when he clapped them on Artie as if he'd seen Lucifer, then he turned his back on him and was introduced to Vitto. The old devil held out his hand and Vitto kissed his ring, like a good, somewhat deranged, lapsed Catholic, (Artie was reminded of the hallucinatory scene from "Rosemary's Baby" when the Pope kissed Satan’s ring).
Smugly satisfied that he'd received obeisance from the queen of Roslyn Street the theological monstar retreated with nary a look Arthur's way. After he'd gone in a puff of smoke Arthur rounded on Vitto and hissed, "How could you kiss that man's ring, you silly old poof? He’s a kreep, he hates queers even though he’s probably a repressed one."
"What can I do?” Vitto moaned, “I believe in God, and yet I don't, at the same time. I'm terribly conflicted!"
"Hmmmm... that sums you up," Artie thought. "We're all in a similar sinking boat, only each of us has a different type of leak."
