My Brilliant Non-Career as a Movie Star.

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As I am a heart attack waiting to happen, I want to write a set of tales relating my brilliant non-career in the movie business, like testimony from a deathbed, to tell the truth of my travails, successes and failures, and curse my detractors. For 21 years I slogged away at it, “in the gutter looking at the stars”, but being a working-class fag I received little respect and had no connections, I didn’t go to a good school nor belonged to any powerful clique, so I was definitely “pushing shit up hill” wanting to be in movies in the bureau-aristocracy that prevails in Auz. The following stories are my truth, believe what you will, I swear by them.

Recently a mate of mine was shooting a movie on Kings Cross called “X” and he’d given me a small part in it, I play an old skeeze night clerk at a seedy motel and I drool over a teenage prostitute for 15 nano-seconds of screen-time. 

At last my star-turn had come! I have spent much of my life hiding in the dark in cinemas, living out endless fantasies, my fondest being the rags to riches variety, guttersnipe makes big in Hollywood as a movie star. So from childhood on I was possessed with the idea that I would somehow get discovered and become a luminous star, and I did kind of, only it was a mon-star I became, which is awful, but a catalogue of injustices made me so.

 

As a kid I’d stand outside the Princess Theatre in Melbourne waiting for the bus, while inside a grand musical like “My Fair Lady” was being played, and I’d sing my heart out in a high castrato voice, hoping a great Maestro like Diaghilev would stumble from the stage door and discover me, and like Judy Garland I’d sing on the silver screen “somewhere over the rainbow”. It was across the road at the Comedy Theatre that the great Marlene Dietrich fell off the stage and broke her leg, drunk from the angst of being so broke she had to wearily strut her stuff in a hick backwater such as Melbourne. So much for superstardom!

When I was sixteen Mick Jagger came to town to star in Tony Richardson’s movie, “Ned Kelly”, shot on location on the outskirts of the city. I fantasized crashing the casting agent and scoring a bit part as a wild colonial lad, in one stroke participating in iconic movie-making and getting palsy with my masturbatory pop idol, Mick. Only real life doesn’t have sunny Hollywood endings, proletarian poofs like me couldn’t possibly put a foot in Movieland, that abode of demi-gods, I was a little nobody from the Olympic Village Housing ghetto in West Heidelberg, destined for toe-jam to grease the Beast’s machine, at best maybe dress dummies in the window of Myers Department Store. And I had no stage-mother to push me, no encouragement at all, so I chickened out of even trying.

In my teens I did amateur theatre in suburban halls then I fled to India and pranced about in Goa with a group of musicians warbling silly sci-fi rock operas. As I grew into adulthood I figured the best way of becoming a film star was to make my own movies and put myself in them. Little did I realise the can of worms I was entering into when I cracked the backdoor of the Auz Movie-house. As I sat at the Piccolo Café waiting for my call to attend the shoot for the Kings Cross sleazebag epic “X” I thought about all the twists and turns that brought me here, the open-minded, kind souls who helped me and the smiling vampires, soulless artsholes and talentless dicks who fucked me every time I tried to realize a brilliant idea. I am a mangy old alley-cat squalling from my dumpster at the injustices of the world, those who ripped me will say it’s all a paranoid, dyspeptic bastard’s crap, who gives a shit, the telling of it will be fun.

The first of my grand film projects was called “My Survival as a…Deviant?!” By 1978 I had grown cynical and rebellious, anarchic and surrealist, I was a punk and reveled in anti-cinema via the underground, at pubs and rock clubs. A good friend by the name of Glen Lewis put a super 8 camera in my hand and I stumbled around Sydney shooting willy-nilly, interviewing all the city’s deviant and lunatic fringe types, swinging a hand-held camera about, the frame shaky, out of focus, the mike attached to the camera with the wind ripping up the soundtrack, very punk and cinema-verite. I had overheard two sharp politicos discussing the social relevance of “deviance”, I flashed it was a fitting through-line for all the claptrap I’d captured on Super 8, all the misfits finding their space and fighting for it, all good signs of a quasi-democracy in pursuit of happiness.

I’d been told there was a fair dinkum cool chap in the Creative Development Branch of the Australian Film Commissar, and while loath to be co-opted by Government handouts, I needed a few thousand dollars to put the raw material together for a complete final print, uncouth though it was. I tippie-toed into the functional, concrete building in North Sydney and up to the Film Commissar’s offices, and was lucky that the first person I ever met in the rambunctious, cut-throat world of the Australian film industry was the rare one in seven who will help a hot artist rather than hinder him. Chris Tillum was indeed a sweet, cool dude who, on sight of the footage and the script, recommended I be assisted as best as possible to help complete the project.

By 1979 I had shot many hours of shaky home movies showing how I lived in those times, broke and harried, at the Pyrmont squats where I lived with misfits attempting Utopia but constantly under attack, and the deviant types I came across blabbing their dispossessed souls out, pot smokers, anarchists, a gay aborigine, a feminist stripper, a stream of cranks and renegades, and me the iconoclastic artist wandering in and out of frame, pasting up my scurrilous posters upon the walls of the city. This “Survival” film was very bad and almost unwatchable, but so was the life I lived, unslick, and what do you expect for three thousand dollars anyway, “Godfather Part 7”?

I guess the toughest part of the shoot was outside the rock club “Rags” on Goulburn Street, while I was filming deviant teenage past-times a gang of rednecks attacked a group of Punks who all ran back into the club leaving one little fellow to bravely fight off all the thugs. Without hesitation I placed my camera on the ground and ran to the melee, throwing punches at all the morons’ heads, breaking the mob apart in their surprise. I picked the Punk up from the road and dragged him back into the club before the fuckwits realized we had escaped. Up until then I was the fag outsider, now I was told I was the only guy with any guts and welcomed into the Punk fold. This was just the beginning of all the battles that would ensue in trying to make it in the elitist field that’s called ART. (I know, the Big Hero, but that's how I grew up, punching it out with everyone.)

To be anarchically outrageous, I premiered this Super 8 monstrosity at a benefit for the notorious criminal, Ray Denning, at Garibaldi’s Restaurant, to raise money for his various legal challenges, he’d had such a hard life and I was suckered into his claims of prison-guard brutality, and it seemed to fit with my theme of deviancy. (I was a member of ‘The Prisoner’s Action Group’, we protested the brutality of prison guards and managed to reform the gaols considerably, but in this particular instance Ray was lying, wanting revenge against the System badly.) I designed a fleuro poster of a giant cartoon Santa Claus, with half-demonic face and horns, descending upon my squat to crush us squatters pictured in photos in the bricks of my dockworker’s cottage. “My Survival as a Deviant?!” was a graphic title that grabbed the oddball crowd’s attention and the night was a rollicking success, most of the punters liked the film and thought it captured ‘deviance’ in the raw.

As the interviewer in this documentary I had put myself in centre-frame but in case I felt too cocky I got wine thrown in my face by a gang of grumpy feminist dykes who accused me of using a deadly serious, political cause for the furtherance of my bullshit, artistic career. My eyes stung mercilessly, the “I am a camera” maestro blinded on his first big opening. I knew there was a bucket of sloppy mop-water in the loo and I badly wanted to tip it over their ugly mugs but for once in my life I took the punishment and smiled bitterly. I had, after all, finally arrived on the Scene. I would’ve bet the association with the much maligned Ray Denning would tarnish rather than brighten my reputation with the world at large, and as I was from the gutter I knew I was going nowhere except back to the gutter, for all my delusions of grandeur.

By 1980 I’d shown the film in many rock’n’roll venues, squats, pubs, coffee lounges, wherever they’d let me, the travelling presentation all part of my performance art. The Daily Terror newspaper miraculously gave me my one and only good notice ever by reporting that the Creative Development bureaucrats had cracked a bottle of champagne on the film being passed by the Censor, declaring it had artistic merit, all to my amused befuddlement. I tried to get it distributed by an independent agent, but to my dismay the only renters were government offices like the Department of Mental Health, who used it as a treatise on psychiatric aberration.

Yet all this attention whipped up the movie mogul in me and I schemed to make bigger and better films, politically incisive, only with a fantastic edge of science fiction because I wanted to throw some colour onto the squalidness of social realism. Dreary real life had lots of fantasy in it to soften the hard edges, or so the confabulist in me felt, and so I worked hard to learn animation to use as special effects for my next big film project, “The Thief of Sydney”.

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Sorry to Be a Poof.

The Human Race.

The latest scandal here in Sydney is about a fat old politician, family-man and media savant, who just got exposed on TV news coming out of a GAY bath-house, made to confess that he’s been a secret homosexual living a double life for 25 years. He’s an example of how homophobia is ingrained in the ruling ethos, you can’t seek powerful, responsible, important jobs if you are homosexual, because the PEOPLE don’t like or trust them. (Or at least only the exceptionally brave and honest can, like the leader of the Greens, Bob Brown, but let’s face it, he’ll never be PM.) 

The Transport Minister is getting some sympathy for his unraveling because us out-front Queers have fought for fifty years for the right to exist, otherwise he’d be in much direr straights, like possible incarceration and loss of pension.

(I don’t feel sorry for the gronk, he’s let us carry the load of open antipathy while he’s been stuffing his seven chins at the public trough. Because I came out at 17 in 1967 I’ve been refused jobs, accommodation, respect, my potential curtailed, my health ruined and, worst of all, never able find love in a relaxed manner with a supportive lifestyle, (like marriage.) 

Imagine, a life without LOVE, the love that Hets prize so mightily as one of the great joys in a harsh world. He’s been on TV for years because he is incompetent in his transport portfolio and he should’ve known the Media are a pack of hyenas always sniffing for useless scandal. He’s damaged his political party which was already in trouble with the polls and we’ll get the uptight conservatives at the next election, really bad for “gays”. And he’s made his family more miserable as his wife is dying from cancer. He could’ve given his desires a rest for a year till the bigger issues ran their course, (yeah, I know, DESIRE doesn't work that way.) No argument, politics attracts only the smartest, duhhhhhh, he deserves his million dollar payout, while I starve!)

Thinking about the long hard road we queers have travailed upon I was reading the Sydney Gay press and I noticed the complaints of many ‘78ers, i.e. the old poofs and dykes who protested in 1978 demanding “homosexual” rights and got the shit kicked out of them by the cops. They were irate at the frivolous mind-fluff the Gay Mardi Gras Parade had devolved into, commercialized, plasticized and heterosexualised. They think it should return to its’ original sentiment of protest and fury over the worldwide relegating of homos to third-class citizens, and I agree, we should riot outside Parliament House, foreign embassies, right-wing media and multi-national corporations, always shaking up the status quo.

I was a ’78er and I’m still totally pissed off with the 2010 New Mardi Gras because I was nearly punched out by a security guard for trying to take a peep at “my” parade near the elite enclave at Moore Park. I have contributed much to my community over the years, getting arrested on important issues, writing, painting, filmmaking, on and on, rarely getting paid for anything, and that Saturday night of the Parade I was so broke I didn’t even have money for a cup of coffee much less a ticket to the elite compound or the after-party. Oh the ignominy of being a broken-arsed old codger and not a pretty, fashionable young thing with silicone in my chest, lips and brains!

I was born in 1949 and grew up a gay boy in the 1950s and ‘60s, getting bashed daily by neighbors, strangers, school-kids, teachers, even my father and brother, for being a squealing sissy, and as such told I had no future, was a deviant of such filthy monstrosity I should be executed or incarcerated in psyche bins to have my soul fried into imbecility. It was so tough it’s fucking amazing I not only stayed alive, kept my sanity and some optimism, but that I got strong, defiant and surfed the tsunami of hate thrown at me. I wonder if the young today maybe can’t relate to what a struggle it was for queers to be considered as human beings with rights and hopes, I was disenfranchised and disaffected, continually fucked over, raped even, and my potential limited to almost nil, it’s hard to “get over”, that’s why I’m half twisted, bitter, cynical, anarchic and punked out!

Read my stories in the anthologies “Edge City” and “Being Different”, see my films “My Survival as a Deviant”, “Darling it Hurtz”, “The Thief of Sydney” and “Virgin Beasts” and it can be glimpsed what my potential was, and why I’m pissed off at my starving ignominy while watching the vacuous ‘designer’ gays pout from their pedestals in the transient limelight. From ’77 to ’87 I got arrested protesting/trespassing/offending on many issues, the anti-uranium riots, abortion on demand, indigenous Australian rights, squatting/public housing, prisoners’ rights, queer existence, you name it I’d get arrested over it, then to pay the fines of my fellow shit-stirrers and myself I organized benefit gigs with me as one of the lunatic fringe performers. I designed, printed and pasted up the posters and handed out the flyers, all of it part of “the act”, my ART, the wild young artist who can’t be contained or co-opted, an enfant so terrible a cone of silence descended over me and my work and I was ignored and killed off.

But that’s how I wanted it. Fuck the “Art-world”, I operated outside it, from the Underground, with my community, eventually turning to photo-copiers for their accessibility, leaving no high and mighty original “master-piece” that the “high-art” vultures can get a hold of when I’m dead and iniquitously flog for a fortune.

A few weeks ago THEY had an art-show on ABC television called “Artscape” where THEY lionized the latest happening young larrikin lad, pushing him as the wild man of Aussie art and an enfant terrible because he drank a few beers as a teenager, yahooed about in fast cars and painted portraits of himself “out of it”: in the placid minds of the ABC aunties this made him a really dangerous fellow. His paintings are huge lumps of paint piled up like rainbow cow-patties and streaked about to look minimally like a melted face or a wrecked car, supposedly shaking our staid view of the world and hopefully selling for $50,000 a pop. I think he’s a tame act, a good normal boy with a wife and child to support, safe as money in the bank, his work could hang in any corporate lobby and not raise an eyebrow. No anarchist beatnik pagan punk zippie poofs need apply!

The State dictates what comprises Art, even wild anarchic Art, and names the bankable rebel to fit accordingly. The expertise is all just so much bullshit, High Art vs. low art, Art as a career, Art as an investment, all of it oxymoronic, ART is an old whore every hustler in the world has fucked and pimped. Those ABC biddies wouldn’t know an enfant terrible if he sat on their aesthetic faces, he’d always be out of their reach, like Zorro. Twenty years ago I disrupted a march of reactionary, anti-Gay right-to-lifers by having a kiss-in with a young stranger who had been protesting alongside me and it got on ABC television and shown every time the Station mentioned the fight for “Gay Rights”: anonymous is the only way this terrible child will ever get on State sponsored ABC TV. 

Recently my mural in Wooloomooloo has disappeared, probably destroyed, and it was a beauty, heavily satirical of uranium mining, the war industries and Govt/corporate marriage. If an artist is really subversive he/she won’t get lionized by the Establishment, that’s obvious.

I read that Justice Kirby thinks the Federal Govt. should also make a formal apology to homosexuals and lesbians, like THEY did to the Indigenous Australians, for the terrible treatment we’ve received from society over many generations, he wants a kind of “National Sorry Day for Gays”. I don’t know if “Sorry!” will do it for me, the damage has been done. Maybe a million dollars compensation would solve a few problems, like that gronk politician got when he stupidly fell off his bicycle in the parliament-house grounds, but there’s no such justice for us lumpen folk in this world.

Enough “sorrys” have been said, bureaucrats love symbolism, pulling the wool over our eyes with bullshit instead of action, I think THEY are still screwing the Aussie Indigenous peoples with THEIR paternalistic Intervention policies instigated in the Northern Territory, for all that THEY said “Sorry”. I want ACTION, like real equality in the hearts, minds and law-books of Society, or a few big riots to shake THEM up. “Sorry” to me is that I’m sorry I had to grow up a poof in a world that worshiped insane power, obscene money, vacuous celebrity, vapid youth, runaway productivity, the sanctity of the heterosexual family and a non-existent father God.

A few months ago some gay mates of mine went to a big ‘Folk Festival’ in Canberra that attracted 50,000 fans, many of them unsophisticated yokels from the countryside come in their cork hats and Sunday best to hear traditional Aussie music and sing along to “Kumbayah”. The “good folk” camped cheek to jowl in family groups and my mates squeezed their tent into the throng’s midst and proceeded to openly pash from one end of the festival to the other. They kissed and tongued and slobbered on each other, as Hets usually do without thinking, only two grown men in jeans and flannel shirts doing it was abominable exhibitionism and they were insulted, spat upon and ostracized for the five days they were there.

I thought they were very brave to be themselves in the face of a snarling mob, in fact they performed a revolutionary act, simply kissing to blow the uptight Collective Mind. All us homos should be pushing the envelope thus, out there in Society, letting THEM know we’re here, we survived, we’re partying on top of it, and we’re not going to GO into the shadows quietly. I’m sorry to be a poof in a fucked-up world but not so sorry it made me strong and a warrior for equal rights for everyone.

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The Mean Backstreets of Lismore.

Tribal Dancing at Sunset on Byron Beach Carpark.




















Nimbin Mardi Grass High Jinx 2010.










House Mural in Lismore - Goddess of Space/Time 1997.

















I needed to de-stress from city-living and so went up to the Nimbin Mardi Grass festival, always good for a laid-back chill-out time, and that's what I got. But I had to make it thru the mean backstreets of Lismore first, that cow-poke town in deep New South Wales where I stayed most of the time with my old girlfriend Sylvia. I will one day dedicate a whole story to Sylvia, the Wood Nymph, our adventures together have been many and wild, I met her in 1978 at a punk venue, the Grand Hotel, when she was 18, and it's been a lot of madness ever since, and I arrived to hear yet another horror story.

Please excuse that a lot of my stories are neo-Gothic, with our sappy sapient species I'm afraid that's how things pan out, (he knows that he knows that everyone else knows he's a bastard), but don't worry, I also find light in the darkness. Sylvia was in a restrained hysteria because only a few months earlier she'd had a frightening experience. Going downstairs late one night to fiddle with her 1001 second-hand dresses, suddenly from out of the shadows stepped a young man, naked except for boots and black balaclava disguising his face, he was masturbating his huge phallus in her direction to which she screamed and screamed the whole street down.

The pervert ran off, dressing himself as he went, she reported it to the Police and related to me in breathless whispers how they particularly asked her to describe the length of the guy's shlong. They caught the guy a few days later but not till after he'd terrorised the north coast on a rampage of rape and slaughter. Sylvia went to his court-hearing to check out what the guy looked like without his balaclava and hear all the nasty facts. Before he'd gone to her house he'd raped a young woman in Casino, and after he'd run from Sylvia's alarmed screaming he'd gone into town and hung about the Lismore Cineplex. When one of the teenage usherettes left work after midnight he followed her home and attacked her in her bedroom. She fought him off but he had a knife and slashed her up so bad she had to be hospitalised. He had a history of attacks against woman since he was 14, terrorising the whole of Byron Bay's hinterland for many years and now after this last heinous crime spree he's thankfully put in a cage for many years.

At the courthouse Sylvia was warned by a cop not to look at the perp because he was as ugly as "the elephant man" but when dragged before the magistrate she saw that he merely had a cleft-palate and broken nose, ugly features that perversely attracted her and she regretted that he didn't just approach her socially and ask for a fuck, she's constantly horny and as a 50 year old woman finds men don't see her as attractive anymore, for all the come-ons she gives off. (This is not black humour, just sad commentary on my civilization, if only these maniacs were sensible and put an add in the paper, "Male masseur available, women only, magic hands!" He'd make money as well as get his rocks off, but rationalism doesn't come into it, it's because he's mentally ill and not monitored by any health service that this terror trip went down.)

What grabbed my soul was the newspaper article about the whole affair, Sylvia being the star of the drama, the headline being something like "Woman Screams at Wanker". After detailing all the nasty acts, at the heart of the story she goes on to explain, "I'm afraid the mural painted onto the front of my house attracted the guy, it's of a naked cosmic goddess and it probably excited him and gave him the wrong idea!" I was flabbergasted, I'd painted that mural in 1997, (see pic above), and here it was held up as the reason a nutcase went on a sexual rampage, my art has achieved much over the years but this really was the pits!

The hot-griddle streets of Lismore took on a creepy edge, when I went to the cinema I looked at the usherettes with fond regret, I'll never take them for granted again. Everything shuts up by 10 at night, there's no food available except for the petrol station by the highway, when I went out for snacks at midnight I had to walk a gravel road thru dark parks where I kept seeing hare-lipped perverts behind every tree. At the gas station I found a gang of teenage Aboriginal boys ransacking the shelves, the security guard shitting himself and looking the other way. Every aisle I went down I found a black guy stuffing goodies down his pants, I was wearing a black jacket with arm tags, I looked like a security guard at first glance, they jumped, rushed about and ran out of the shop en masse and regrouped there. The last of them was with me at the cashier and watched me take my wallet from my pocket then, using me as cover, he also ran from the place clutching some snack, the cashier behind his glass wall saying, "It's got nothing to do with me!" That mob would burn the station down if any cop-types fucked with them.

I toddled out into the shadows munching on my Gaytime ice-cream and into the dark car-park, the teenage gang prowled around me in a wide circle making catcalls to each other, the noose on their prey tightening, me the queer white stranger challenging their territory. I've been in this situation a thousand times and I'm too old to play it out to see what happens, instead I walked backwards into the light of the gas station and then went in the opposite direction, the long way round. I heard their catcalls echoing amongst the gum trees as if they were chasing me, like a kangaroo I hopped it, up the silent backstreets, making it back to Sylvia's house just before I heard the gang rumble past, as a deadbeat old streetie I might've been Ok but I wasn't pushing my luck.

We made it up to Nimbin past the police blockade and had a great time at the Mardi Grass festival, like what's not to like? Great food from around the world plus wholesome home-made yummies that has us eating, eating, munching-out till our guts slumped and we lay like beached dugongs on a rug under a marquee at the back of the school-ground where band after electrified band played music to us, each musician better than the one that went before him/her, and all of it for free, it was wonderfully de-stressing for me. To take a break from the rock'n'roll we wandered into town to Daisy's dress shop where she played loud techno music from amplifiers in her doorway and we danced with the crowd in the middle of Nimbin main street.

We decided against going to the 'Doof' party under Nimbin Rocks because you had to pay to get in, and a good thing too, we got different reports about it, some said it was cool, with a high new age vibe, the 2000 crowd dancing till 9.30 in the morning. Others told us the vibe was hard and dangerous, they arrived to see a guy get hit on the head with a bottle, later on a Lebanese guy pulled out a huge knife and waved it about, it was taken from him and he was stabbed repeatedly with it, told the hard way, "Don't fuck around in Nimbin!" And then some poor 52 year old guy staggering away from the party, got run down by a car and killed up on the Kyogle Road, in Nimbin we were all saddened by it, it kind of brought the whole ambience down and reminded the organisers that they have to "Take Care!" But it involved alcohol, ironic for a "Pot Festival", and it could've happened anywhere, booze being the biggest killer of them all.

Sylvia Saliva.

Lismore Markets.

I was glad we stayed in town and missed the bloodshed, my modus operandi of staying in one spot and letting the whole parade pass by paid off, we had such a good, care-free time, even the cops were friendly, possibly told to smile and keep their hands off as the Festival attracted a lot of tourists who dropped several million dollars into the local economy. All the usual events took place, bhong throwing competitions etc, but the numbers were down this year, it doesn't have the frisson it used to, punters don't like the police presence. Half the crowd were from Brisbane on a day-trip to gawk at the freaks and the other half were international backpackers, other Aussies not giving much of a shit for Marihuana Reform, they've heard all the scare stories about psychosis, paranoia and lung cancer, that dam poisonous "Skunk weed" encouraged the flip-outs and demotivated zombies and has the Conservatives cheering in vindication.

What the hell? I just wanted release, relief, relaxation, I danced about like an old fool in the hot-spot of main-street Nimbin, I can't not move to that Beat. An old guy who looked like he'd been thru the Vietnam War as well as the Drug Wars leaned over and said, "Here, this will calm you down", handing me half a pill, it looked like Panadeine Forte so I swallowed it, stupidly. "What was it?" "It's an exotic psychotropic called Seroquel (?!). It's for shell-shock, some people have an adverse reaction to it but you'll be fine, I'm sure it'll suit you perfectly." "Great, I hope so," I replied hesitantly. I continued to dance jubilantly for another 2 hours feeling the psychedelic slowly course thru my nervous system and lighting up my inner space.

Then I felt the heebie-jeebies coming on and tried to lie down on a wooden verandah in the cold but the jitters set in, I twitched and shuddered, all my nerves on fire, especially my sciatic nerve, like electrified wire down to my tippie-toes that had me jumping and contorting, for 7 hours I had what might be likened to a kaleidoscopic epileptic fit, eventually sinking into fleuro-oblivion for a few hours, but kind of tripping for the next two days, it really zonked me, what the hell was it and why did I take it, am I getting more devil-may-care as I get older?

The party was soon over and we had to shred our plastic green garlands, Sylvie and I split to Byron Bay beach where we camped out and danced with the tribal-types to their bongos and guitars in the car-park at sunset. What sweet, grass-roots funkiness to shake the body in the golden twilight, and right in the middle of yuppie-wonderland too. Byron Bay is worth a longer visit, the beaches so splendid, I'd gladly stay there for weeks camping in the bushes with all the Ferals, only I bet there's a dark undercurrent here in Paradise, of despair and dissatisfaction, desire and frustration, the streets are mean everywhere when you have no money, no beauty, no fame, no sanity. Still there's the sunshine on the beach when the nightmare is over, and the beaming out of compassion from the green heart Chakra, that's something to warm up with.

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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.

Inglorious Bastards at the Comedy Club.

Okay, I only just got back from Melbourne without being burnt at the stake in the public square. As a mangy old alley cat I know I'm notorious for flip-outs so I hate to report one more, anyone bothering to read me has to wonder, "What the fuck is this guy's problem?" I can only say I'm one more ratbag on the bottom of the heap, while getting the shit crushed out of me I refuse to be pushed around anymore, especially by deadheads with their one cent worth of power.

I was with my best friend of 40 years, Geraldine, and we wanted to go out Friday night for a good time and we settled on the Comedy Festival that had taken over Melbourne for that week. We went to the Town Hall to book tickets and I should have been warned by the sight of the crowd, thousands of nice middle class citizens milling politely, not a punk, goth or skinhead in sight. There were hundreds of comedy acts on offer and we couldn't figure out what would be cool. A well-dressed, handsome young man touting for various acts advised me to go up to the Portland Hotel to see an act called "Neanderthal Brow", tho it involved a guy called Adam Jerk(off) I was informed it was dark and edgy and would suit me marvelously.

"Dark and edgy, hmmmm, we'll see about that!" I thought. So we headed up to Russell Street, magic site of my childhood wanderings, the hotel was 2 doors up from a cineplex that was once called the Barclay Cinema, Geraldine and I sat outside it for an hour after a wonderful meal at the hotel and I reminisced about the one time my mother took me, alone, to the movies to see "Breakfast at Tiffany's" all those years ago. (Maybe I was stressed without knowing it, I had come to Melbourne to spread my mother's ashes in the parkland behind her beloved football club's ground at Collingwood.) We then waited outside the door of the small club for a half-hour, I spotted Adam Jerk(off) preparing to go back stage, he narrowed his eyes when he spotted me and I gave him the punk sneer to see what reaction I'd get, apprehension was the result.

I had expected the whole second floor of the hotel would've been laid out for the comedy club, all of us sitting comfortably at tables with the bar handy nearby. But no, THEY had boxed off one tiny corner with prefab walls hung with black cloth and after paying $22 each we were herded into it. Before the grand door opened I overheard a six foot usherette moaning,
"I'm reading 'Lolita' by Nabokov and it's got too many words, it's too long, I can't go on, how could he write such a thick book?"
Her fellow pea-brained usherette said, apropos of nothing, "I thought she was a leftie but after talking to her I realised she's no leftie at all, she's just a bullshit artist and I don't want to know her."
Nogod help us, I thought, the Comedy Festival is manned by frustrated pseudo-intellectuals.

I didn't know what to expect, certainly not to be squeezed into a fire-trap box the size of my bathroom filled with smoke-machine poison and fifty desperate to be amused suburbanites. I was the first thru the door and grabbed a good seat on the aisle, ready to flee thru the exit if "FIRE" was suddenly screamed. The stretched-out usherette barked like Lolita's frumpy mother, "You'll all have to move over as others come in" and I decided, "Fuck that, I've waited hours to get this good seat, I'm not moving!" The gas chamber filled to capacity, the 9.45 starting time drifted towards 10 0'clock and I waited impatiently for the show to begin, the whole set-up was getting on my nerves and I longed to go home and blow a joint.

Suddenly Lolita appeared and demanded in a gruff voice that I move further against the wall for a fat gronk who had just shown up. I knew this one cent power monger was gonna try it on me and I instantly decided to let the demon out, if they wanted "dark and edgy" I'd give it to them, I was dying to get out of there and breathe fresh air. "No." I mouthed. "Move!" she grunted. "No!" I said a bit more forcefully. She waved her flashlight about like a truncheon, one of the lumpen sheep had rebelled, the nerve! "Move!" she snarled, the gas chamber Nazi furious to be disobeyed. "Why the fuck should I move for a late-comer!" I snapped in a loud ringing voice that stopped all conversation in the pressure-cooker comedy club.

Lolita's jaw dropped, her flashlight drooped and she rushed out the door, no doubt to complain to her fellow marshals that one of the herd was out of line. The fat gronk had squeezed past us and found his seat next to the black-cloth wall, he could be the one to burn if disaster struck. Finally the great comedian walked onto the tiny stage with the smoke machine and squirted a few more blasts into our stupefied faces, just to make sure we were suitably tenderized for his edgy act. But before anything else he just had to be a smart-arse, I could feel it coming and stiffened my resolve. "Before I start I'd like to ask, who was it who said, "Why the fuck should I move for a late-comer?" All fifty of the mob-mentality audience pointed at me and shouted as one, "Him!" The fat gronk chortled, "I was the late-comer, haw haw haw" and I cringed.

Skinny-arsed Adam Jerk(off) got right in my face and said, like a cop speaking to a wife-beater, "Mate, how could he be a late-comer if the show hasn't started yet?" I saw my chance for escape, this jerk was not worth one hour of my life. "Listen arsehole, your program said the show was to start at 9.45 and it's now 5 to 10 so he was fucking late!" The mob groaned like a hundred-armed monster, like I'm some uptight stickler for rules and facts. "Woh, you're not giving anyone a break tonight." He's Mister In-control. "Come on arsehole, get on with the act, it's really fucking boring so far!" "Yeah, I guess I'd better." "Yeah, you'd better, I paid $20 for this and it's shit!" The audience moaned, hissed and pissed their pants. This guy's about 25 years old and apparently his spiel is philosophizing about life and death, like what the fuck would he know?

He was stuttering, the herd were gurgling and Leftie the usherette rushed up to me and spluttered, "You're being abusive, we'll have to ask you to leave!" Great, just what I wanted and, shock horror, abuse at the Comedy Festival, unheard of! Oh how I loved giving them the Andy Kaufman treatment, get the audience riled up and baying for your blood, that was fucking funny. Above their howling for my demolition I snarled, "Life's too short to put up with this shit. I'm happy to go!" and they collectively screamed all the more for me to go. With great relish, annunciating the words with the full import of their insulting meaning, I shouted clear above the din, "You MOTHERFUCKERS!" and rushed to the door.

The mob cheered at my expulsion and above the roar, standing in the cheap-arse doorway, I shouted in a loud, clear, ringing voice a curse of Carrie-like magnitude, "I hope this club burns down on your fucking heads!" and I projected from my third eye into their collective thick mind the ghastly image from the end of Tarantino's last movie, "Inglorious Basterds", of the crowd of Nazis burning in a cinema while a Jewish girl on the big-screen cursed them to Hell. And they got the message, a collective moan went up to heaven, "Let it not be so." Fuck them, I was glad to stick up for myself, as an individual against the mindless mob and against the small souls who rush for their one cent worth of power because that's all they get in life, it's why they volunteer to be "ushers" and "marshals", (they don't get paid), they love herding the plebs about.

As I turned from the door Leftie the usherette hissed, "And I hope you break your leg on the your way down the stairs!" "Go fuck yourself!" was my poetic reply. I made it safely down the stairs only to run into Lolita bitching to the box-office drones, "There's some bastard upstairs complaining about the gas-chamber experience!" I snarled, "Just cause I didn't want to move at your rude orders you set the dogs onto me. You can all go to hell!" The handsome young man who'd misdirected me to the dump scrambled to the rescue, "You've been abusive, we going to have to ask you to leave!" "Get fucked, I'm already leaving dickhead!" How I love the dumbstruck look you get on officious robopaths' faces when you punk them out. I made it to the front door of the pub and the bouncer rushed towards me with his arms outstretched, I skipped out of his reach and ran off down the street, gulping in the fresh air with great relief, freedom at last!

My friend Geraldine was in shock, she's a very polite, well-behaved lady, she stayed for the show, much to my ire, I went home alone, fuming. I decided it was good she remained as my spy, to report on Jerk(off)'s show. She said his black humor spiel was not a belly-laugh fest, more a smile smile nicely at his incisive philosophising, but the gronk who'd come late had moved into my seat and howled inappropriately at every word, and I thanked nogod I'd left, I can't stand howlers. After the show Jerk(off) approached her and apologised for my breakdown, he hadn't meant to hurt anybody. She probably told him I was under a lot of stress and, anyway, had an enormous chip on my shoulder. Fuck that, I'd yowl like two cats fighting over a fish-bone if I met him on the street, he used me as an ice-breaker for his shit shot at fame-whoredom, and the really sad thing about this guy is that I was missing nothing by splitting quick from his show.

I know I'm just another bastard in the crowd, an anti-hero in my own toilet-break and I don't give a shit, hopefully I'll never see those people again and they certainly don't put butter on my bread. I'm usually a polite, diplomatic guy, will help any underdog, until I get backed against a wall, and then I take great pleasure in lashing my torturers with my acid tongue. Nogod, it was magnificent to let fly at a mob of mindless gronks, much better comedy than the smooth delivery of glib jokes most arseholes come up with, and I pissed myself laughing about it all night as I lay high in my bed.

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