The assistant director called “Roll it” and Phillip—done up in lime-green makeup and a pointy cap—began slinking toward the camera for the umpteenth time. “I’m bent and distorted,” he sang, “Like a gnome I’m contorted, Time beats the soles of my feet, Like the canvas of a drum …”
Then we heard the gunfire.
“Did it hit the lens?!” the record label’s bottom-line rep screamed. Phillip’s ditzy girlfriend, Kerri, vomited. Meanwhile, Doug Lang, the cinematographer and an old friend of Phillip’s, kept the camera rolling, catching footage of my insufferable roommate Stuart face down on the floor, blood gushing from his neck and chest, splattered on his dirty jeans and worn-out Nikes. Phillip tore across the street to a milk bar (the Aussie equivalent of a New York bodega) to call the cops. My mouth was frozen in an oval. Colin slipped his arm around me; it took me awhile to grasp that he was talking to me amid the mayhem.
“I said your visa’s a year expired, right? Get out of here!”
“What?”
“The police will want to talk to you. Go back to the house! Your visa!” It was Sunday—the next tram might have been an hour away. We heard the sirens coming, and Colin handed me the keys to his panel van. I’m a native New Yorker; I can hardly drive from the left side of a car, let alone the right side of this bizarre vehicle. My heart raced as I merged on to Nepean Highway. The car was a sweatbox from the scorching February sun, but who was going to search for an air-conditioning button when it was hard enough to remember which pedal was the brake and which was the petrol? A lane of cars honked at my lack of road skill.