He Died With a Felafel in His Hand

Keiran

I once shared with some guys and this very, very strange woman. She had this really violent, ongoing and intermittent affair with a truckie. She used to beat the crap out of him after drunken nights out. Took to him with whatever came to hand. A chair, a claw hammer, anything. That was, of course, in between one night stands. You’d be watching the Sunday program on TV and the bleary-eyed Beast (as we called her) would wander out to vomit off the verandah. Then, about ten minutes later she’d boot out the latest guy in her clutches - a different guy every weekend. We tried to warn them but they wouldn’t listen. They’d ring constantly and turn up with flowers.

Derek the bank clerk replaced Andy the med student. He didn’t build his tent in that particular flat, he actually had a room there. The tent came later. He was a funny little dude. Went to the toilet about eight or nine times a night. Thought this was normal. Wondered why he never bumped into us the same way he bumped into the members of his family all the time at home. Derek didn’t have much in the way of a life back then. He’d put in eight hours at the bank and come home to arrange his collection of travel brochures. He read travel brochures the way most people watch television. All his money went into saving for the trip he’d take at the end of the year and all his energy went into planning that trip to the smallest detail. So even with Derek in the house there was never too much money around. We seemed to survive week to week, but there were plenty of moments when the bills outstripped our income by an impossible margin. One week we had twenty dollars between the three of us, so we bought two family-sized jumbo cans of Spam, a bag of onions and some beer. We fried up the spam and onion, made this big ugly mess and ate every mouthful because we were so hungry. I investigated a rumour that IVF programs paid twenty dollars a pop for semen donations but found it to be baseless.

We split from that flat in December. Derek the bank clerk was off to Japan for a month. Tom and I were off to minimum wage holiday jobs and our parents’ homes to save the thousand dollars we were allowed to earn before the government cut off our $37 a week Austudy grant. And our yearly $2.10 travel allowance. The flat we took the following February was, as I mentioned, a two room affair. Hence Derek’s tent in the living room. When the bank transferred him he asked me if I could arrange to move his miniature Indian village. I said sure, and threw it off our third storey patio an hour after he’d driven away.

Martin the paranoid wargamer replaced Derek the bank clerk, but only for two weeks. Martin would ask you to play wargames with him four or five times an hour, becoming increasingly moodier as the refusals mounted up. He was also a pig. Tom caught him messing up the lounge room just after it had been cleaned. Scattering Mars bar wrappers and soiled underwear about like fertiliser pods in a promising garden. When we hinted that he wasn’t welcome anymore, he accused us of trying to poison him, just like his previous flatmates. We actually did consider poisoning him, but he was a runty little specimen and it proved easier to frog-march him out the door and toss his stuff off the patio, where it joined the pile of mouldering tent debris.

Taylor the taxi driver dropped his swag in the space left vacant by Martin’s sudden exit. It was kind of cool having our own cabbie. He had an account at a strip club in the Valley, a basement firetrap with cracked mirror balls and one slightly hunch-backed topless waitress whom Taylor was courting with the few lines of Shakespeare he remembered from high school English. They served meals in this place and he’d drive us into town at three in the morning for video games and greasy food binges. Things ran smoothly until the landlady came around for an inspection. We knew she was coming and had hidden Taylor’s stuff away as there was only supposed to be two of us living there. But she was a sharp-eyed old biddy and when she saw the three neatly lined-up pairs of differently sized shoes she tumbled to our scam. She was pretty cool about it. Said we could stay, but we’d have to pay full rent for three people. That was never going to happen so we loaded our minimal gear into Taylor’s cab and split for that old reliable share house bolthole. Our parents.

STUNNING

DECOR

CHOICE

Share House Artefacts : Number One

Brown Couch

AAAH, LEISURE!

Trip to the snow this year?

A little snerkelling around the Reef? Maybe some time on a genuine homestead?

Yes these are all fine ideas.

But have you ever considered the Brown Couch?

Our special four seater model comes with a complimentary set of Paisley Pillows, an Old Newspaper and a Remote Control for the TV.*

Why waste valuable time and money when everything you ever wanted in a holiday is available in the LUXURY and CONVENIENCE of your own living room.

THE BROWN COUCH.

FIRST CHOICE OF THE CHOOSEY.

* TV sold separately.

Three

THE BEAST

PJ’s life revolved around Cold Chisel, karate, beer and babes. He was a country boy. Loved his fish fingers. Favourite recipe: three deep-fried fish fingers on fried bread with fried cheese and two fried eggs, still runny, forked open and covered with tomato sauce. You could eat three of those suckers and stay within the tightest budget. Of course if you did get through three, your heart would explode and you’d die.

Milo’s life revolved around his car, his mum, beer and the Buzzcocks. He had a weakness for generic brand meat pies. You couldn’t trust the bastard with shopping duty because he’d come back with twenty of these family size Woolies Own bowel-cramping horrors. Milo won the house competition for not changing out of his jeans. PJ and I dropped out at four and five weeks respectively, but Milo, who liked the feel of rotting denim – “It’s like a second skin!” – was pronounced the champion at ten weeks and told to have a bath or leave.

It was an all-male house.

A house where I claimed as my own a gorilla pube I found on the soap in the shower. Must have been at least thirteen inches long. The guys were impressed but insisted they could do better so we nailed a board to the wall and mounted our curlies for a couple of weeks. I seem to recall this as a time when even fewer women than usual graced our happy home. We were deeply into the ‘men without babes’ thing, which is a terrible thing. Maybe the worst. It’s like living on the Planet of the Dogs without leashes or rolled-up newspapers, a sanction-free zone, where you can go deep and really find your own hostile imbalances. You want to know what living in Dogworld is like? You can see it fully realised in redneck wonderlands like Townsville, where PJ came from. He loved to get drunk and curse off that place. An abbatoir town with a really bad vibe. A masculine vibe. A lot of death and sadness. They kill a lot of beasts up there. Some mornings you can hear the low moaning of the cattle before they’re taken up into the food chain. I can strip it back now, see a thematic unity there, a ripeness of the male spirit, like time in the wilderness or the smell of raw pollen. The strong will consume the weak and they won’t bother cleaning up after themselves. The thing about guys, the only thing really, is that guys just don’t care. It’s our little secret. Ask any girl who’s ever lived with a herd of us. We’ll never wash up, we fart in polite company, and there is absolutely no point in dumping your problems on us because all we want is a regular feeding time and someone to play with. Want another secret? There isn’t a guy alive who hasn’t at least tried to lick his own balls. And just as with a dog pack the truly serious rivalry was reserved for mating season.

Pete

One day someone in our house used the washing-up brush to clean the toilet and then put it back in the sink. We found out about it six months later – we thought it was gross but as the brush had been through the sink about two hundred times since then, we didn’t figure there was much we could do. Not Mick however, he went and bought a whole new dinner setting and cutlery as well and never ate off any of the house crockery again.

PJ and I met her at a B&S Ball. To be fair, he beat me to her. I spied him putting the moves on two girls in the dark recesses of the lobby and decided to ruin his chances. It was a little game we played, popping up at the other’s elbow at the worst possible moment to raise the subject of girlfriends, boyfriends, AIDS tests, whatever. But when I cut in, I found one of these girls was a stunning Italian babe with thick dark hair, white skin, eyes you could drown in. A woman to inspire murder. PJ and I circled each other like caged wolves all night.

PJ asked me what I thought of the Italian girl over chocolate milk and cheeseburgers at the traditional post-ball Hungry Jacks breakfast. I said I loved her. He said I loved the girl he was going to marry. A coyote howled somewhere in the distance. We turned one of the paper puzzle mats upside down and drew up the rules of engagement. Total sharing of intelligence. No holding back. No lying. No back stabbing. No chicanery. Guy who gets the first date gets a clear run. The loser retires from the field and runs around the house three times with his underpants on his head. No problemo.

I signed off on this program and immediately set about cheating. My younger brother had helped organise the Ball and possessed the only ticket list, which I quickly obtained and destroyed after a quick scan for Mediterranean female names. PJ and I had both been so drunk we had no idea who we were hunting, but when I saw ‘Sophia Gennaro’ on the list, it all came flooding back to me. I found her home number in the white pages but her mother answered. After twenty-five minutes of cross-cultural diplomacy I found out that Sophia had gone to work. When this happened three or four times I started to panic. I knew PJ would have his finders out in the field:

In fact, he came at me two days later and asked flatly if I had Sophia’s phone number. I lied, said no. He smiled. “Well I guess I win mate because I got her number and I called her up and I sent her a dozen roses and we’re going on a date this Friday.” I kicked the cat twelve, maybe thirteen feet across the room when he left. Went into a black funk for two days. Friday afternoon, I couldn’t take it anymore. I borrowed twenty dollars off Milo and trundled off to the pub to mooch about in the Happy Hour. When I got to the bar, PJ was sitting there, and my heart contracted. I was thinking She had to be there but the joint was empty and I went over and fronted him. “What’s the problem,” I asked. “What happened to the big date?” He looked at me blankly for a second. “Oh right. Sorry, JB. That was just bullshit to throw you off. I only spoke to her today. She’s got an Italian boyfriend. Mario.” He rolled the name ‘Mario’ out around a mouthful of cheap scotch and party ice. There was nothing for it but to get pissed together and bitch about poofters. I only saw Sophia once again after that. Sprawled over the bonnet of a Jaguar wearing a sash which read Miss Motor Show.

Shortly afterwards, PJ got engaged at the student Rec Club and moved out. He stood on the bar to make the announcement and, since he was up there, flopped out his chopper for everyone to admire. We had a succession of dud flatmates through PJ’s old room. First up, we had the closeted, colour-blind, seven foot male nurse who’d eat a kilo of chips and Twisties while dinner was cooking. He’d have a few bites of Milo’s Home Brand meat pie and throw the rest away. But if you didn’t cook he’d get shitty. We replaced him with a council worker called Ray who lived on lentils and boiled offal and shed his hair in huge, fist-sized clumps. He built model tanks and little soldiers. He was a fool for the things, would spend months painting each little figure. Visitors would be introduced to his little men before being treated to the matted clots of his hair in the sanitary areas. Ray made way for Malcolm, who couldn’t get it together to rinse the sugary bran crap out of his personal set of Charlie Brown breakfast bowls. God, that really bugged me for some reason. Don’t know why. I tried everything – returning the bowls to the cupboard unwashed, leaving them in his bed under the doona – he moved on after I brainsnapped and smashed one on the road in front of the house.

Milo

One morning I heard yelling at the door and dragged myself out of bed. By the time I got to the front door you were closing it and standing there in your dirty stained Y-fronts. Nothing else. You hadn’t shaved for three or four days. Your hair was everywhere, you hadn’t had it cut for months. These Mormons knocked long enough to disturb your sleep but you didn’t bother to put anything else on. And you’d sent them on their way with a prolonged blast of un-Christian language. It’s one of the great disappointments of my life I didn’t get up in time to see their faces.

JB: I don’t remember that.

The next freak in this carnival side show was Victor the Rasta. I have no idea what possessed us to take him in, some misguided liberal sympathies most likely. Victor liked to carry these big joints of meat round the house, ripping the flesh from the bone with his teeth and leaning into visitors’ faces with gobbets of ham trailing out of his mouth. He had no respect for the already tenuous grip of our all-male household on domestic order and hygiene. You’d wake up in the morning to find the house littered with empty pizza trays, old spare ribs, chicken carcasses, beer bottles and salami rind. You could clean them away, but they’d be back the next morning. He’d play the stereo all night and bring friends around for nitrous oxide binges. They were dentists. They once bought a tank of the stuff, figuring that at a hundred bucks for the tank and fifty for a refill it was a bargain. They got this thing at midday and had sucked it dry by four o’clock. They’d fight over who got the hose, punching each other to get at it then sucking on the tube till they passed out. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll get into a binge as quickly as the next man, but there is such a thing as dignity. And flaking out under a blanket of old pizza boxes isn’t even close.

After tossing Victor out and passing his details on to Immigration, we interviewed an angry woman, who fled upon finding the Champion Pube Board hidden behind the shower curtain, a Haitian girl on the run from a mad flatmate – she kept her used toilet paper in a bucket. Said the sewer people wanted it to control her thoughts – and a muscular Christian, who assured us that knuckle push-ups were an excellent way of avoiding temptation.

We still thought of the empty room as PJ’s at this point. Nobody had stayed long enough, or lodged in our affections firmly enough to displace him as its spiritual owner. Share house veterans will be familiar with this, but the rest of you can think of it as the Dead Beagle Syndrome – the tendency for subsequent pets to suffer in comparison with the original and best. Outstanding flatmates can place a spiritual lock on a bedroom for up to a year after everyone who knew them has moved out.

“Oh I don’t know about putting your Liberty print chair in there. That used to be Damien’s room … No, I never met him but … you know … he dabbled in the black arts.”

We finally offered PJ’s room to McGann, a travelling American in his mid-forties. He was one of the fittest men I’ve ever lived with, in much better shape than Milo and I, who were at least twenty years his junior. He canoed three hundred miles every week. We wondered what possible excuse he had at his age for living with the likes of us. I took him for one of those guys you meet in share housing, one of those guys who’s a bit older, done far too many drugs, very untrustworthy, kind of dangerous around naive young women, able to project a certain mystique and play, within his limitations, the ageing rock star of the share house circuit. He claimed to be on the run from a bad divorce in the US. Said he’d come to Australia to complete his education while doing some travel. His story moved about a bit under fire. Some days he’d be studying English Lit, on others a PhD in American History. He was studying something and getting all sorts of grants for it, but you could never pin him down on the details. Suspicious? We thought so. But who cares? It was plausible, we’d had enough interviewing for one year, so we took him on spec. We wanted the bills paid. McGann wanted a place that was ‘cool’, and didn’t come with any ‘hassles’. He hinted that his last house had been very ‘uncool’ and the flatmates were very fond of ‘hassling’ him. We shrugged, not realising that he was coding a message for us. If you’re seriously looking at doing the share housing thing, you’ve got to learn to decipher the codes. In Sydney for instance, a ‘broad-minded’ house is either gay or gay friendly. In Brisbane, houses located in ‘green, leafy suburbs’ will have a bucket bong pretty much continually fired up in the living room. For McGann, a cool house with no hassles was one that didn’t look sideways at his huge appetite for commercial sex, and didn’t mention it around his fat girlfriend, Amanda.

Wayne

The Decoy lived in this West End house that was pretty rank. They were always smoking cones and getting the munchies. They loved the Decoy because he’d make popcorn to a special American recipe with heaps of salt and butter. A friend stayed over one night, smoking cones and stuffing his face with this popcorn. He crashed on the couch with this big moustache of butter all round his mouth. When Decoy came down in the morning this guy was still asleep but clustered in a big black beard around his mouth were all these cockroaches, eating the butter.

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