Phillip threw his green silk shirt off into the sea of faces. A girl sausaged into a glittery seventies-style tube top caught it and proceeded to suck his sweat out of it. Above us, on the enormous screen, the camera zoomed in on her mouth. “Look up,” Mick-O motioned with a drum stick. I craned my head back. In the past week and a half, the girls of Buffalo and Syracuse had done crazy things when it came out that we were sleeping a few doors down from Michael Hutchence. But this attention-seeking girl took the fucking cake. I laughed my head off in front of 90,000 hysterical people. The camera caught me doing that, which caused a second eruption of laughter from the Carrier Dome. It was the end of our set, and I was sweaty myself.
“Thank you, Syracuse!” Phillip hollered after a not-quite-thundering applause, like he’d done this for a thousand years. For the not-so-unexpected reprise, we played a cover of “House of the Rising Sun” we’d rehearsed in Buffalo; Angus thought Phillip’s ballad we’d always played last in Australia, “My Heart,” didn’t have enough punch. On our final exit we heard an impatient roar: “INXS! INXS! INXS!” A Carrier Dome official with a harelip escorted us back to our dressing room.
“Bugger me sideways,” I said. Mick-O laughed in obvious agreement. Memorial Auditorium was huge, but the Carrier Dome was the most terrifying place we’d ever been in.
“How were we?” Mick-O asked Angus after we’d reentered the dressing room.
“Overall pretty good, though everyone should’ve been more animated. Phillip was the best, the way he took command of the whole stage. We’ll have to work on things before you get to Madison Square Garden. That’s the show that matters, right? Colin, you can’t stand with the bass in one spot, Americans love action, show business, mate. The best moment came when you laughed at the girl eating Phillip’s top, that was excellent.”
“How was I?” Mick-O said, plopping himself on the sofa.
“Fine,” Angus said, like Mick-O didn’t even register. Two pretty girls were calling out to Phillip from the door; he leaped over to sign their autographs.
“How did you girls slip in here?” Phillip asked, sickly sweet.
“We work on the concert board,” the leggy black girl said. She had blue eyes I could see from where I was standing. I didn’t thinks blacks could have blue eyes.
“The promoters give the concert board backstage passes if we help with the clean up,” the other girl, blond with major mascara, added.
“Which one do you think he’s gonna fuck?” Mick-O said half asleep, wiping the sweat off his face with his sleeve.
“Neither,” Kerri said from the corner, and Phillip spun over and put his arms around her. She shot Mick-O a bloodcurdling look; he was fucking lucky his eyes were closed when it came his way.
I poked my head out the door to see if we could get ice for the Cokes. A small black-haired girl sat on a stool to the right of our dressing-room door. She had a clip-on yellow security pass and her head in a book. A little chunky, but cute. Amazing white skin, like a China doll.
“What are you reading?”
“Poems by Baudelaire,” she said, unfazed. I walked towards her to see if she was really reading Baudelaire, like a mini-Rachel. She was. She looked almost smug when I did that.
“Can you get us ice, Miss Baudelaire?”
“That’s Ms. Baudelaire to you.”
“I stand corrected,” I said.
She called to Harelip and asked him to arrange for ice.
“Did you like our show?”
“Didn’t see it. I had to stand guard outside your room.”
“But you couldn’t stop a flea. How much do you make standing guard over me and my sweaty mob?”
“Five dollars an hour. We have work-study grants to help pay for our tuition, and Dressing Room Guard sounded more interesting than last year’s position. I do the basketball games, too, you know.”
“What was last year’s job?”
“I was the mimeographer in the philosophy department.”
I laughed, but there wasn’t the slightest curl to her lips. Andrew Farris from INXS walked out of the band’s top-billing dressing room to go to the toilet. The security girl pointed to him. “I recognize him from the poster. What do you play in the band?”
“I’m not in INXS,” I said, “I’m in the opening band. Tall Poppies?”
“Tall Poppies? That’s a dumb name.”
“Tell me about it. What’s your name?” I asked.
“Nadine.”
“That’s pretty. What are you studying, Nadine?” I felt like a fucking pedophile or something—I was at least a dozen years older then her—but she had me pretty intrigued.
“TV,” she said, “I’m a sophomore. I don’t have to choose a minor yet, but I think it’s going to be philosophy.”
“A friend of mine named Rachel once studied TeeVee here,” I said, parroting Nadine’s twang, “and physics—yeah—in this uni, I think.”
“What’s a yoo-nee?”
“University, sorry.”
“Rachel your girlfriend?”
“No, a friend. Which do you like best—TV, or philosophy?”
“TeeVee. But I like Wittgenstein a lot.”
I had no idea who the fuck she was talking about. “Right, he’s one of my favorites, too,” I said, and she seemed pleased.
“Where are you from in Australia? Sydney?”
“No, Melbourne.”
“What’s that like?”
“Pretty stuffy. Lots of old houses. Where I live is good though, St. Kilda. Good music and food.”
“Are there Australian saints?”
“Saint Kilda?”
I laughed. “Yeah. Saint Kilda, Saint Mel, Saint Vegemite.”
“I don’t think it was an unreasonable question.”
Her lack of humor made her even cuter. “Why don’t you come in here?” I asked, pointing back towards the dressing room.
“I can’t, I’m supposed to stand guard.”
“But I’ll give you twenty dollars an hour to talk to me.”
She came inside with her book. Mick-O now had his clothes off and was splayed arse up on the sofa.
I threw him a towel. “Mate, think you can keep it on for a minute?” I saw the way the room was looking at me. Thank God Hannah thought Kerri was too crass to be friends with, or Hannah would’ve been in for a telltale report. They looked shocked at the lapse of Mr. Morality. Too bad only Phillip knew I was the diabolical mastermind of their whole fucking trip to the States in the first fucking place.
“This is Nadine,” I said, trying to look like I hang out with American teens on a daily basis. “She’s our security guard.”
“Hi, Nadine,” Angus said, a perverted Uncle Ernie. “I’m Angus, Colin’s manager.”
“Are you from Aus-trail-ya, too?” Nadine asked.
“No,” he said, “I’m not from Aus-trail-ya, I’m from Australia.”
“Stop making fun of me,” Nadine said, wrinkling her little nose. It was divided at the tip, like a backside.
“Got a live one,” Angus whispered in my ear.
“Give us a break, mate,” I replied.
I got Nadine a pizza section from the food table.
“Are there any Welchs?”
“What the hell is that?”
“Grape soda. Catering always throws in a few Welchs.”
I took a sample sip when she got one off the table. Foul.
“You know a place where we can go to talk privately?” I asked.
Angus was closely monitoring our conversation. “It’s good for you boys to go out with INXS when they’re through. You three have got to become friends with them—you’ll get more gigs that way.”
“Not tonight,” I said, and my security guard led the way to a beat-up red Volkswagen.
“I might lose my work-study for this,” Nadine said, inserting her key in the ignition. She drove me to the car park near her dormitory. “Freshmen and sophomores aren’t supposed to have cars,” she said matter-of-factly. “But my Dad gives a shitload of money to the school.”
“That’s good, I guess,” I said. “I thought you had that job to pay for your tuition.”
“Well he told the chancellor I needed to develop a work ethic, so they let me take a school job.”
Nadine signed me in at the front door of Dellplain Residence Hall. Upstairs on the sixth floor, her roommate was stretched out on Nadine’s bed, reading a book.
“Shit! Nadine! You were at the concert.”
“Find anything interesting in my journal, Dawn?” Nadine said, expressionless.
Her roommate left the journal on the pillow case and darted out of the room in shame. Nadine closed the door and pulled closed the curtain that separated the two sides of their dorm room.
“Nice girl,” I said.
“I hate this school. It’s so bourgeois.” Her room had no decorations except for an enormous movie poster of A Clockwork Orange over her pillow, with a knife towards the viewer—pretty scary face to face.
I was going to ask her more about the movie, I’d been meaning to hire it. But within a few seconds she had her shirt off and leaned towards me with parted lips.
“Hey,” I said, “can’t we chat first?”
“You want to talk?”
“Yeah.”
She opened her tiny refrigerator and pulled out a tangerine. “You want some?”
“Sure.”
She started to peel. “Am I too fat?”
“You’re not too fat, you’re a button. But I like to ease into things.” She fed me a segment.
Nadine studied my face; she looked so disappointed that I gave her a kiss.
“What’s on your mind, Nadine?”
She ran her middle finger along my groin. “Can I give you a hand job? That’s not too intimate. I’m good at that.”
I was afraid saying no would scar her sexual confidence for a real boyfriend. I unzipped myself, and she pulled my cock out. She spat a globule into her palm, rubbing her hands together for a second, and then squeezed every inch until I was hard and my head was swimming. Here’s the rub, as my Aunty Grace would say: even after her adorably “expert” hand job, I couldn’t come.
“It’s only a dick,” Nadine said awhile later, defeated.
“Listen. That was terrific. You were so gorgeous there. I’m the old man, exhausted from the concert.”
“If you say so,” she said, looking away from my eyes. I pulled her near me to massage her shoulders. She had a strawberry mark right under her neck, which I quite liked and kissed.
“I’m getting that removed this summer. It’s so ugly.”
We fell asleep on her tiny dorm-room bed.
The limo dropped us off in front of the Hotel Roger Alexander. I was in awe. There was an actual buzzing sound to New York City. I had a list of places I was chomping at the bit to see: the Dakota, where John Lennon was shot; the Empire State Building (if I could view the drop from an enclosed spot); Central Park; and Café Wha?, where Hendrix had first played—even though Rachel had said it was a humiliating tourist trap now. And Rachel! I was going to see Rachel. First thing I did was ring her. I was revved up for a great conversation, but I was nervous that Hannah would come up. I didn’t know how Rachel would take that.
“Hello. None of the Ganellis can get to the phone right now, leave a message at the tone,” an older man’s voice said. I was sure she had said in her one postcard that her parents were now pensioners in Florida.
“Rachel! It’s Colin. I’m staying at the Hotel Roger Alexander on Lexington Avenue and I would love to meet you as soon as you get a chance. I haven’t heard back from you, Bitchface. Ring me immediately, or I’ll say your middle name on stage, ’cause we’re opening for INXS at Madison Square Garden in a week, can you fucking believe it? Phillip and I are doing interviews this week, and we’d love to see you and hang out with you. You’re gonna be my guide, right? We have a fucking limousine! I can get you front row tickets for my show. Ring me at 555-1870—I’m in room 1204. I ran to Safeway before I left, brought you Iced Vo-Vos and coffee-in-a-tube, for old times sake. I’ve missed you.”
I felt pretty bad afterwards for saying “fucking” because on second thought maybe her parents were there after all. I was just organically ranting like we did back in St. Kilda.
“Did you ring Rachel yet?” Phillip asked, after checking out our room.
“Yeah.”
“Great, I’d love to see her, I kind of miss her, you know?”
“Me, too.”
“Are you going to tell her about Hannah?”
“Not right away. Anyhow, she’s no doubt going out with an intellectual jerk and she’s too humiliated to tell me.”
Three days later, I still hadn’t heard from Rachel, and I took a taxi down to her flat. A man with a hound held the door open for me like I lived in the building.
“Vinnie, you didn’t get the terrier?” another passing neighbor with a frizz hairdo asked.
“I should have. This one keeps sniffing up syringes. I’m returning him Monday before he gives my whole family AIDS.”
I got out on the sixth floor. There was no answer when I pressed Rachel’s doorbell. I pressed a neighbor’s bell. She cracked open her door, and I spoke through the chain. “I’m looking for Rachel Ganelli? I’m a friend of hers from Australia. You wouldn’t know her, would you?”
“Cookie,” the wrinkled woman in a tracksuit said, “there’s no one in the building I don’t know. I haven’t seen Rachel the past week or so. I heard her come in once though—would you like a pencil and paper for a note?”
“That would be great.” She gave me some tape and I left the folded message on the door.
RACHEL, IT’S COLIN! DIDN’T YOU GET MY MESSAGES?? THE POPPIES ARE PLAYING MADISON SQUARE GARDEN IN 3 DAYS. I’M AT THE HOTEL ROGER ALEXANDER UNDER MY NAME. I WANT TO SEE YOU!!!
I left her the pair of tickets Angus had given me for her. I took a taxi back to the hotel.
A reporter from Rolling Stone—the real one, the American edition—was in Phillip and Angus’s room finishing up an interview with Phillip for the magazine’s Random Notes section. Then Phillip had to ride over to a radio station with Angus. I intended to go, too, but Angus said they only wanted the lead singer.
I was disappointed. “I guess Mick-O and I will have a look around the city.”
Around midday, Mick-O and I walked over to the Citicorp Building, a place I’d heard a woman in the hotel lift raving about that morning. “The public atrium’s marvelous,” she’d said.
We were staring at the people in the atrium, eating pizza from this shop called Alfredo’s-To-Go. Everyone walking by looked drop-dead amazing. I was sure every other woman was a movie star.
I was getting worried about Rachel. What could I have done to offend her? Had she wanted me to write her more often?
Mick-O and I continued over to Bloomingdale’s, and I bought a bottle of Smoke, the Ivan Stanbury fragrance that Mum had asked for.
“It’s modeled on a turn-of-the-century French salon fragrance,” the salesgirl said.
“I’m buying it for my mum,” I said.
The salesgirl sprayed some on my palm so Mick-O could have a sniff. “Don’t you agree that his mother will just adore it?” she asked Mick-O.
“It smells like Mortein,” Mick-O said. Mortein is Australian fly-spray.
“Is that an Australian fragrance?”
“Yeah,” said Mick-O. I had to smile.
I made sure to get the perfume wrapped in a box with a Bloomingdale’s label on it; then Mum could show her American gift to her neighbor Caroline. Mick-O laced up a ninety-five dollar pair of Air Jordans in Men’s Shoes (it would have been three times as expensive in a Melbourne shop).
Then Mick-O bought a hot dog on the street and twisted his face up after one bite.
We went back to the hotel once more, and Mick-O put on the TV. I finally understood what “cable television” meant, because there were an unfuckinbelievable number of channels to choose from. Angus had bragged to INXS’s manager that he had ordered sex channels for his boys, the perv; but I have to admit it was pretty interesting to see these low-budget commercials with naked girls. The weirdest one was “Dial 970-PEEE—the extra e is for the extra pee”—a golden shower phone line. Mick-O almost had a convulsion laughing at that. I took the channel changer from him and put on the New York City news. Wild crimes were reported one after the other: a prostitute shot in Brooklyn, a trial for a grandmother who shot her fourteen-year-old grandson’s drug dealer; a retarded girl raped in a deserted McDonald’s.
Phillip and Angus knocked on the door when they got back from the radio station. Phillip wanted to bum a clean pair of socks; the two of them were getting ready to go to a dinner party with the EMI executives. Angus didn’t want me to go. He felt that they needed to develop Phillip’s identity more with the suits.
“Angus seems to know what he’s doing, mate,” Phillip said. He took my socks with him out the door, leaving me with the looming prospect of an another dull evening with Mick-O. Still no word from Rachel. I decided to take a cab by myself to Café Wha?, which I found out was on MacDougal Street. I should have listened to Rachel.
There were a million celebrities in the Madison Square Garden audience, friends and fans of INXS. Angus had a list of most of them from the Garden management. Kylie Minogue, in her standard Madonna-rip-off outfit, was in the plum seat, front row center, courtesy of Michael Hutchence. There were supermodels seated there, too. Mick-O was rapt, he had a collection of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues. The first few rows were cordoned off from the rest of the crowd by black twine. According to Angus, there were four security guards on the ground level checking VIP names. He knew for sure that the President of MTV and the head of EMI Records, and their respective entourages, took up most of the second row.
I tried not to process Angus’s “helpful information” until after the show. I tried to keep cool and thereby sexy, swirling a glass of Coke in my hand, focusing on calming scenes from back home. I thought about more old neighbors, the Crawleys, who kept scores of crazy pets in their yard in Seaford. They had six cats, five dogs, a cockatoo, and a pony. And those dozen frill-necked and blue-tongued lizards that their kids had caught in central Australia—lizards, which Mum had said, were illegal to keep, like kangaroos and koalas. But the Crawleys kept them anyway in a wired pen and fed them mashed bananas, and eventually they escaped. Two weeks later Dad saw one of the lizards at the local milk bar out front, sitting on the handlebar of one of the parked bicycles.
I was safe in this stupid lizard world, with a half hour to get on stage, when Mick-O came over to me with an equally dumb grin. “There’s an old bag outside who says she needs to meet you.”
By the door there was a tall woman—about sixty with obviously dyed-black hair—in jeans and a bright pink top. She wasn’t bad looking, but I wasn’t going to say that in front of Mick-O. “I don’t know who that woman is, how did she get past security?”
“I spoke to her,” Mick-O said, “she seemed harmless. She said someone at one of the radio stations gave her a press pass because she had an important message for you.”
I walked over.
“Can I help you?”
“Are you Colin Dunforton?”
“Yeah, I believe so—”
“I have a message for you, Colin. An urgent message from Rachel Ganelli.”
“Rachel? You have a message from Rachel? I’ve been trying to reach her for a week—”
“Well, she couldn’t make it to the concert—she’s otherwise engaged—but she wanted me to give you this note.”
I took an envelope from her.
“That’s it, I guess,” she said. “She made me promise to give it to you and leave—what are mothers for but to order around, right?”
“Wait,” I protested, but Mrs. Ganelli was already out the door. I was about to follow her, when Phillip introduced me to a fat wanker he seemed to know from the dinner party. The head of EMI Records.