The more a guitar gets played the better it sounds. I don’t know the scientific reasons for this. The sound gets in the wood. Say you had a hundred new Fords from a factory. After ten years, each would have its problems—some in the boot, some on the axle. Same with a guitar. Every time the string vibrates, the wood vibrates. But the beauty of a guitar is that over the years it develops a warmth to it that a new guitar doesn’t have. Andy Summers always used a ’63 Telecaster, even when he was at the height of his career with the Police. I saw a photo of it in Musician. The paint’s chipped off, but he said in the interview that it sounds better every day. The only trouble is that you have to keep getting it fixed.
It took two years to sink in that Rachel and I had a wild rapport going, a perfect timbre that comes with time. After I had spent months hanging out with her, the girls I met at gigs and parties seemed like space cadets. If I even shot the breeze with one of those tarts, Rachel would rail into me about my lack of self-respect. I knew she was jealous though, and it made me feel good.
• • •
I’d been away for the weekend; my Uncle Jack had remarried up in Swan Hill. By the time I returned, Phillip and Stuart had already selected Rachel for Simon’s old room. Phillip ran an over-the-top houseshare ad with the word abutting in it. I’d had to laugh. He wrote it with a thesaurus, the way he wrote his song lyrics. Rachel called it a Mary Poppins ad, which she said meant that its oddity was a magnet. It’s still in my black organizer:
Financially sound, artistically and musically attuned f. 22–30 wanted to share with 3 m. musos in an only slightly dilapidated house. St. Kilda. 60pw. Working fireplace in bedroom, abutting trams, groovy shops. No New Agers. Phillip/Colin/Stuart 510.1070.
I’d written the ad the time before, and we’d gotten Simon, who never took a shower. So I kept my mouth shut when I saw Phillip wanted a girl. Like he didn’t have enough girls from the shows. The “abutting” ad attracted sixty responses. We’d gotten three inquiries when I wrote mine—Simon, and two astrology nuts.
When I rang from Swan Hill to check on the response, Phillip explained his decision not to wait until I returned to fill the room. He didn’t want to lose her.
“She used to work at a New York radio station. Who knows who she knows? You’ll like her, Colin. She tells stupid stories like you.”
“What does Stuart think?”
“That he likes her smile. He’s not getting any these days. Probably wants to dip his wick.”
The night I returned, Rachel had moved in only hours earlier. I went into the living room to say hello. This quirky, leggy Yank with a black ponytail was splayed out on the sofa like she owned the place. She looked so American in her jeans and T-shirt. Her eyes were deep brown and followed you everywhere, like Stuart’s. I had never met an American before, except for the odd tourist asking for street directions, and a wanker with a square American jaw who once needed blueprints “by yesterday” at the print shop. I couldn’t believe that she was going to live with us. She could have been a movie star the way I felt. Though I didn’t act that way of course.
“G’day,” I said, “I hear you’re my new flatmate.”
“Hi. I’m Rachel.”
“Colin. Love your accent.”
“You’re the one with the accent,” she teased. “That’s a movie line, I think. I can’t remember which one.”
I thought of an anecdote that might sound half intellectual: when I was little, I’d believed the American accent was the TV accent (or the telly accent, as my family called it then), and that shows were made in in Australia. Hollywood, where they made the cowboy movies, would be up North maybe, near Brisbane and the Coral Reef. But one day when my family was watching a cop show, a news presenter had interrupted with word that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, like his brother. Robert Kennedy was running for President of the United States of America. A diagram of Kennedy’s head was shown as was footage of him collapsed on the ground with blood streaming out of his ear. The news presenter had been handed an update: “Robert Kennedy, I’m told, won’t live.” My parents’ reactions and the tears of the people on the screen amazed me; Mum mistook my staring for terror. “Don’t worry Colin, it’s far away. It’s in America. It’s happening on another continent.” It was the first time I’d heard the word continent. I began to realize that Australian meant distance from power and for the most part, from cold-blooded violence.
“How long have you been in Australia?” I said instead.
“About three weeks. I stayed at a hostel for a week, and then I moved in with someone I met waitressing while I found a place.”
That amazed me. I could never do that. Shift countries, get a job, get someone to let me use their house as a crash pad.
“What are you reading?”
“Some stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle. He’s pretty hilarious, ever read him?”
T what? I hoped she didn’t see me redden. “No.”
“I’ll lend you the book when I’m done.”
“Great. Want to join me for tea?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll fix us some then.”
“Thanks.”
I went to cook the chops I’d just bought, and the mint peas in the freezer. It was odd that she didn’t even offer to help. So comfortable on her first day in a new house. An alien being. I brought out a plate for her.
“Here’s your tea, dig in.”
“Oh, thanks,” she said, looking baffled, “but weren’t you making tea? I ate dinner before with Phillip.”
Tea is the Aussie word for dinner. I explained that to her. I felt like I was from the sticks or something. There she was from New York, and here I was offering her chops and mint peas when all she wanted was fucking Earl Grey. She offered to eat the meal, but I said don’t be silly and knocked on Stuart’s door to give it to him. Again, this was before he had a habit.
In less than a year Stuart began seeing that tart Melissa Rizziola, a dancer and a junkie who frequented the Greyhound Pub. Melissa got him hooked up with a shady, drug-abusing crowd whose personal hygiene was more than a bit on the nose. The few times I met any of them over at our house, I disinfected the couch after they left. Not like the band scene is a hall of saints, but shit, we’d put out a bona fide album. We worked hard to have the little slice of the musical Melbourne pie we had. And the one unbreakable band rule was no drugs, with the exception of a little pot now and then. We weren’t Christian maniacs, but being in a band is a job.
But it was a normal thing to do in the early days of knowing Stuart, giving him the leftover chops. He basically kept to himself outside of rehearsal. Stuart was someone I didn’t think about much.
I read this exotic American’s T. Coraghessan Boyle book that next weekend—a funny writer but he’s a bit too much of a smart-arse for me—a couple of good stories. But I kept that to myself.
“Tell me about your childhood,” she said later that week during a commercial. I didn’t think she really wanted to know anything as boring as that. “Where did you grow up?”
“Seaford. It’s down the Peninsula.”
“Is it a nice place?”
“Not really,” I said. Phillip interrupted with a funny story about the captain of the ambulance corps who had a drinking problem. She left me alone.
Not long after Robert Kennedy’s death we moved out to Seaford, a few kilometers from Frankston. Close to Melbourne, Frankston was a rough, small city, chockablock with working-class poms, English immigrants. Seaford was small, too, but a distinct step up to lower middle class. It was quieter and less developed, almost a country town. My mother’s big selling point to my father was the nearby beach. Aunty Grace and Uncle Patrick, parents of my cousins Liam and Anna, had moved to this outermost edge of suburbia when Uncle Patrick was offered a job managing one of the resort hotels further down the Mornington Peninsula. The local development was so recent that cows grazed in the field past the public golf course.
Aunty Grace said she liked it, and furthermore the affordable house next door was up for sale. Mum convinced Dad to move from our flat in Richmond, even though he would now have to commute an hour to the clothing shop he managed in Melbourne. Dad had thought moving next door to Aunty Grace was rabbit warren-ish, and at times our part of the block did feel like one big house. This really good kid, Cormac Kennedy, and his mum and dad lived on the other side of us—far flung from the American breakout achievers of their family tree. Cormac was five when I moved to Seaford. He watched me from a go-cart his dad had built for him. There were a good three years before he would begin dying of leukemia, when he would give me his beloved Cadbury wrapper collection. Mr. Kennedy often claimed that he had the same great-great-grandfather as John Fitzgerald.
Rachel grew up in the most exciting city on the planet. Why would she want to hear anything about my ho-hum childhood? I maybe even worshipped her that first month, especially her brains. Every now and then I identified another glitch in her personality, but it was inevitably minor, like the way she skimmed books she didn’t have the patience for. That really gave me the shits. The house was a five minute walk from the St. Kilda library. Rachel was always reading, or at least checking books out. She flipped through masterpieces like my mum did with those romance novels she bought in the supermarket. But with her in the house, I did read more than I ever had with Simon in that room, for what that’s worth. Rachel checked out Crime and Punishment during one of her “I’m slipping behind” fits. “A guilt literature moment,” she owned up a day later. “It’s too subtle for me, you’ll get more out of it.” She was right. She had the attention span of a teenager. If she couldn’t finish a book in one or two sittings, she wouldn’t read it. She’d give it to me, The Snail. I’m no bloody Einstein but if I’m going to bother to read a book, it’s going to be a meaty one and I’m going to savor it like good wine. It took me forever to read Crime and Punishment, but I remember everything. Nothing happens for the first million pages, according to Rachel. But in my opinion it’s the lingering details that make it great. Raskolnikov is the main character, and Porfiry is the inspector who knows that Raskolnikov has committed a double murder. But Porfiry doesn’t have enough proof to dob him in. Porfiry uses reverse psychology, slowly closing in. He warns Raskolnikov that he knows he is guilty as fuck and tells him that he will surrender one day. His steadfastness drives Raskolnikov fucking crazy.
The reason Rachel and I grew closer was that we had shopping and toilet duty together. Stuart had the rubbish and the sweeping, and Phillip washed the dishes and organized the rent. I thought for sure that Phillip and Rachel were getting it on. That first month, Phillip had her sipping the green tea his yoga teacher sold him and rubbing his pressure points, like the back of his ear and the two cavities in his neck. He once moaned so hard that his new girlfriend, Kerri, just through the door, thought they were having sex.
Phillip and Rachel had both gone to uni to study film, and could trade annoying references. But when we were rolling the cart down the pasta aisle it came out that she didn’t think Phillip was all that bright. I was secretly relieved, although I also couldn’t believe that I had a daily relationship with a guy who wrote such bullshit lyrics. I enjoyed Phillip, but there’s no denying his lyrics were dated and rang hollow. I put my foot down once or twice, like when he used a rhyming dictionary to pair platypus with Oedipus. Even the band name was straight out of the eighties: the Tall Poppies. Everyone around this time had one-word names like Nirvana. Or over-the-top names like My Friend the Chocolate Cake.
Rachel liked Phillip well enough even if she didn’t like his words. No skin off her back if she lived with a handsome bad lyricist. After a year, enough time with Phillip to pale anyone’s view of him, Rachel had a repertoire of hilarious comments about his sickly sweet breath, the jar of peanut butter in the medicine cabinet which, he said, let him get a closer shave, and the overpowering patchouli he dabbed on instead of cologne—he’d bought ten vials at an Indian spice shop. But she never went for blood. Phillip amused Rachel. He was a cartoon character for her. He was a hack, but he wasn’t lazy. Phillip was our Captain Kirk, a kind idiot we could make fun of, who kept life easy for us by making the decisions, such as which day we had to write out the rent checks. By then, Rachel’s venom was reserved for Stuart.
“Why can’t we kick Stuart out?” Rachel was forever whining.
Rachel could laugh Phillip Harvey off. But as band members you’re married to each other. I could hardly justify to myself why I joined, let alone stayed, in this bubble-gum band in the first place. My taste runs a little harder, pop with a sprinkle of dissonance.
A customer had needed a gig poster printed. I filled out his order form. Phillip Harvey. Robe Street, St. Kilda. Phillip had flat ears you couldn’t see when he stood directly in front of you. His body was disproportionate—his legs, muscular like a huge frog’s legs, were too big for his frame. But girls never saw that. Girls liked his red lips and violet eyes and big shiny smile. He smiled with confidence, a good-looking man.
“I’m a muso, too,” I’d said, casually. “You know anyone who needs a guitarist?”
“No, but hey, you know anyone good on bass? My bass player and keyboardist are moving to Sydney next month.”
“I play bass, too,” I said a bit grudgingly. Playing bass or drums is the only way to join an established band. Everyone wants to be up front with the guitar or singing.
“Yeah? Bass? Where have you gigged?”
“I was in Ursa Major, towards the end of the band.” (A bit of a stretch. I played with them for one week before they broke up, for one show, two years after they had their number one Australian hit.)
“Yeah? I’ll try you out. I got a new drummer three weeks ago. Stuart. He’s an insane drummer—learned everything in a day. I’m thinking of reforming the Poppies as a three piece.”
“Worked for the Police.”
“You want to jam?” Phillip asked.
“Better than playing in my bedroom with the door locked.”
A whole swag of friends was over at his house. It was Bourke Street in his living room. He’d even converted the garage into a soundproofed rehearsal studio. Phillip’s offer was a tidy little package: a whole new house and social set if I joined his band. And I needed to break from my houseshare; my flatmates at that time hadn’t spoken to each other in a month, ever since Nigel had a threesome with Helen and Justine. Justine had gone down on Helen, not part of their arrangement. I’d heard Helen screaming at Justine about her indiscretion, and Nigel had happily clued me in on his sexual adventures at the pub. The household tension back at Imperial Avenue was hard to stomach, plus how come I wasn’t invited?
This mysterious singer Phillip could make his mob laugh. He had stacks of old Warner Brothers cartoons on tape. He did spot-on impressions of Foghorn Leghorn and Daffy Duck.
That very first day I came around his house to jam, Phillip left the room for a minute to get some firewood from out back. I asked his new drummer, Stuart, who seemed like a quiet, watchful type like me, what he did. Phillip had said that Stuart had moved into the Robe Street house two weeks earlier.
“Me?” Stuart looked startled that I’d asked him. “I do construction out by Preston.”
“You go up on scaffolding?” I said. “I’m afraid of heights.”
“It’s nothing once you puke the first time,” Stuart said, almost red. He seemed like an okay bloke.
“You pay the rent yet, Stuart?” Phillip said, resting down an armful of logs.
“I’m getting my check tomorrow,” Stuart said defensively, unsure why he was the sudden center of attention.
“Thath no exthcuth. I’m thick—I’m thick and tired of your exthcuthes.”
Stuart laughed. He didn’t have money trouble then. He saw now that Phillip was only going for the Daffy joke. Everyone was having such a good time. I moved in.
Four years later I’m on stage with Phillip Harvey, options severely limited, and I’m still his flatmate. What the hell else was I going to do? In Melbourne, the chance of landing a major label deal is slim unless one of your band members is a uni student. Crowd is everything to the A&R reps, not to mention the club owners. If you’re older, you’re not about to pull in twenty-four beer-guzzling classmates with girlfriends to an unheated Richmond pub in the middle of the winter. Two good things I’ll say about Phillip. He had enough people coming to our gigs. There were always heaps of nurses from the ambulance corps; he was like Hawkeye with the nurses, which never sat well with Kerri.
And Phillip did get us a record contract, although with Shock, not Mushroom or EMI. In Australia, though, you don’t get jackshit for mid-size representation. Crowd-pulling was too depressing for me. I left the people stuff to him. I felt like the Poppies’ gun-for-hire, sleeping in the house, showing up for rehearsal twice a week with the bloody bass.
Then came that summer day, the day after New Year’s 1992, when managing the print shop and strumming four strings for the dedicated local crowd didn’t do it for me anymore.
Rachel had her shift at the Dog’s Bar, and Phillip had his ambulance video job. I’d added days to my New Year’s holiday because it was use-it-or-lose-it time. I heard noise in Stuart’s room. I figured either he was rooting some bush pig, his horrible term for his pick-ups from the pub, or outside his window there was a possum in the tree warming up for a full-blown screech.
His door was near the kitchen, and on the way back from fixing bread and jam, curiosity got the best of me. I opened the door, and Stuart let out a yelp.
“Don’t kill me! I’m going to pay you back!”
I got raspberry jam on the sleeve of the Money Talks, Bullshit Walks T-shirt I’d somewhat adopted from Rachel; her brother had sent it over from the States wrapped around a gift salami.
“Mate—what the hell is going on?” Recently, Stuart had been acting weird, the few times he bothered to come home. Phillip was even thinking of giving in to Rachel and kicking him out. He thought Stuart’s habit was getting too deep to turn the other cheek anymore.
“You scared the shit out of me, Colin,” Stuart whimpered from atop his homemade loft. I could see his stringy brown hair sticking out from his sheet. He had a cricket bat in his hands. The room stank of cigarettes. Our big fat cat, Hector (Phillip’s really, but Hector loved Stuart), was in his usual state, curled up under the loft on a dirty old jumper. One of Stuart’s skinny legs hung over his loft’s edge, vibrating in fear.
“Stuart, what’s happening? Calm down and tell me.” I was always the one Stuart trusted—lovely honor that was. Turns out he thought I was sent to kill him. Jesus. Said he owed money to “people.” I kept trying to assure him it wasn’t that bad. But he was strung out. I tried calming him down, but he kept saying it was the end, that if he had a way of getting away he would. It saddened me; he was never the most articulate guy in the world, but he was, as Phillip had promised, a terrific drummer. In all honesty, he was a better musician than Phillip and me combined. Stuart was part of a group, not trying to steal the show with ridiculous overplaying, the way his replacement, Mick-O, did sometimes. He understood that rhythm should be seamless, like a Möbius strip.
But Stuart wanted to hang out with Melissa, sniff or shoot whatever she had, forget rehearsals. We decided to boot him out of the band. He was a low-key guy, but even so, particularly passive about his dismissal from the Poppies. Was it his cry for help? It was so strange that I told Phillip that we should let him live with us as long as he kicked in for the rent. Why kick him when he was already down? He had it hard enough as it was; he was from a common-as-dirt housing estate out near Airport West. And Rachel told me Stuart had bragged that his father was killed in Vietnam, picking up a baby stuffed with a grenade. We both felt sorry for him, that he was reduced to a lie like that.
“You can just tell he’s trying to compensate for his lower-class childhood,” Rachel had said, doing a lax job attacking the mildew in between the shower tiles.
“His father’s probably a boozer on the dole,” I’d said, taking over the brush and showing her how to really scrub.
Those last few months it had surprised me that Stuart always made his rent. He’d been fired from his construction job for not showing up. I didn’t dare ask how he got the money, though my mate Gary (who was a cabbie that year) swore he’d spotted him hanging around Fitzroy Gardens hustling swishy old men. I didn’t want to hear it.
“Get some sleep, Stuart. You’ll feel better. I’ll give you some Panadeine.” I gave him four tablets. Panadeine is Panadol with added codeine—I get shocking migraines. (Rachel always bummed two Panadeine off me for her period cramps. She couldn’t believe the stuff was over-the-counter.) Four’s enough to knock you out for hours.
Since Rachel and Phillip were at work and Stuart was zonked out in misery in his room, I retrieved my locked metal box from my closet. That’s where I kept the tapes that I was too embarrassed to play when anyone else was around. I also stashed important papers in it: my birth certificate, my Swinburne diploma, and the Cadbury wrapper collection Cormac Kennedy had given me the month before he died. Cormac had been ridiculous about keeping those wrappers; they attracted bugs for the first few months I’d had them. But they meant so much to him that I never threw them away. He said that he had twelve of the twenty-two different kinds. Caramello, Energy, Cadbury Dark. There was a little painting of the inside of each wrapper on the front so Cormac could see beforehand if he would get a cherry filling or an almond one. I was about thirteen when he died. It was pouring, and the spouting was full of gum leaves. My father, wearing a purple Speedo and a shower cap, had climbed the roof to dislodge the mess. My parents were laughing at Dad’s absurd outfit, and I was angry because, well, he looked ridiculous, and the way your dad looks matters when you’re thirteen. Anyone could have seen him half naked up there. And then we heard a wail, and Dad climbed off the roof to see what had happened. But we knew. Cormac Kennedy had died. And my mother rang the ambulance as Cormac’s father sobbed in my Speedo-clad father’s arms. Fuck. He was around eight. I’d promised to finish off the collection for him, but I only got around to adding a Fruit and Nut wrapper a few years later.
There were no more noises from Stuart’s room. From the locked box, I took out my Peggy Lee tape that I’d almost worn out. I put on a bit of Peg. My life was at a standstill. I was blue as I’d ever been. I recently found out that Peggy Lee is still alive, in a wheelchair. But I used to tell Mum back in Form Two—around the time Cormac died—that if I was on the scene, Peg would never have committed suicide. Listening to her every word, I was sure that she’d offed herself. And I knew that I could have loved Peg right. I had Peg’s life figured out. She’d needed someone to indulge her, to make her laugh at her self-obsession. The day is long, I’d have told her, but you’ve got such a voice. “Let go, Peg,” I would mouth as I came into my hand.
We were going to shoot Gnome in three weeks. I knew that Phillip would take charge. He even had his mate Doug Lang doing camera work. A Phillip number, like the time he’d offered to videotape Mick-O’s British grandfather at the old man’s nursing home talking about the World War, and spent fifty minutes confusing the ninety-one-year-old bastard with questions about the wrong war.
The gnome outfit Phillip wanted to hire for the film clip worried me. Another doubtful decision. And where was that going to get us? I put on my headphones so I wouldn’t wake Stuart.
“Is that all there is to a fire?” Peggy sang.