Pub hanging just sitting down blues
Drinking a beer, got a feeling for a wine
Yeah, got the pub hanging, sitting down blues
Oh yeah, there’s a perky chick, making time
Just sitting, waiting for a dime to dine
Sooner, no later, a sandwich or a pie
Sigh, just sitting on, but I’m not alone
I’m with you, but I’m still feeling those blues
Right to my bones, right to my thighs, the blues
Oh the blues, Oh God got to escape this scene
Hit the door make the street, blues after me
Falling like the Melbourne rain, oh no,
Yes, just got these pub hanging, sitting down blues
Yeah, oh yeah, no matter, I’m with you, yeah oh yeah
So make me lose these blues, these pub hanging blues.
Revel Cooper had taken Balga to the Swanston Family Hotel where the art students and their models hung out. Revel was at home there and popular. He sat at a table crowded with young folk as he regaled them with stories from his homeland. Sometimes these were mysterious; at times erotic, and at other times homesick stories of when he had been a small kid. Balga listened to these campfire yarns and sipped on his beer. He wasn’t an artist and felt out of it. Indeed, he clung closely to Revel and so missed what was happening in the rest of the pub. He didn’t even go off to any of the parties as he always had to get to work in the morning or to St. Kilda for a different scene. Thus he missed a lot, but now he felt that he was an artist and readily agreed to accompany one Saturday afternoon Adrian to the Swanston Family Hotel which was where the Bohemians of Melbourne hung out. It was in Russell Street almost opposite the Victorian Art Gallery which had the arts school that Revel had attended.
Students and models were there, but Revel was a felt lack. Balga felt sad at not hearing the sound of his cheery beery voice. Adrian soon got lost in a conversation and the lad wandered about the pub listening to snatches of talk about things he knew and more about things he didn’t know. With Revel he had felt a connection, but now, apart from his dark skin, he might have been one of the younger blokes and no one even stared at him. He stopped near a folksinger with a round freckled face and an old guitar on which he strummed chords as he said that he had written a hundred songs all in the key of C just to see if it could be done. He then began to sing the Rock Island Line which Balga knew wasn’t one of them. He had heard it at Adrian’s from the Huddy Leadbetter recordings.
The joint was crowded and as he was standing there watching the chord changes, someone bumped him. He looked down onto the dark hair and then the fair face of a girl smiling up at him. The song ended and the bloke put down his guitar to swallow his beer. Balga asked the girl if she wanted a drink. She agreed to a red wine and followed him to the bar as he went to get it. As he passed her the glass, Balga introduced his self and said that he was an artist.
‘Hey, the way you were watching the fingers of that guy I would have sworn that you were a folksinger,’ she exclaimed after sipping at her wine. ‘So an artist, well, I’m a model.’
‘You must know Revel Cooper,’ Balga replied while wondering if her form was among the ones Revel had left behind.
‘Naw just got in from Sydney, that’s where I’m from. My name’s Ross short for Roslyn,’ the small, round dumpy girl said with a smile as if there was some joke attached to it. ‘As I’ve said I’m just down from Sydney and staying with a friend until my next move which will be, I think back to Sydney.’
‘Never been there,’ Balga smiled back because she radiated a warmth and friendliness that made him like her.
‘You have to dig it,’ she replied. ‘I’ll show you some of the hip places, like the King George just like this pub, but the Cross is where the action is.’
‘Oh, I don’t know when I can get away. You know I have a job.’
‘I thought you were an artist.’
‘Painting doesn’t pay the rent.’
‘Modeling does though. Maybe you could model. You’ve got the body for it.’
‘Better a folksinger. People seem to like that stuff and I’ve been practicing a bit. A bloke I know showed me some simple chords too, but I want to go beyond that and into the blues.’
‘Well, youth is the time for experimenting, for finding out what you’re capable of and then doing it. Yeah, man, just do it and be damned with what it does or doesn’t bring!’
‘I think I’ve lost the urge for change,’ Balga said with a shrug.
‘Oh come on, when you are old is the time to be steady, get married and have kids and all that when you’ve beyond thirty.’
‘Well, just on nineteen, just a few months ago though it seems years ago now,’ Balga said scowling as he remembered his brush with the law.
‘Gee, you’re really old aren’t you,’ she replied with a mischievous grin. ‘Well, what about me, can you guess my age?’
She looked about eighteen and so the lad added two years and said “twenty.” He had guessed right or she agreed with him to be agreeable or to be older, whatever. Balga bought her another glass of wine and talked to her about art and in the fashion of the pub complained that the artist was the true outsider.
‘Aren’t we all,’ she queried.
‘Not all,’ Balga replied, thinking of the people at work, but then Nancy and Jonesy came into his mind and he amended it to most people. ‘Maybe we are all suffering outsiders,’ he went on, considered what he had said and had to add, ‘but some of us are more outer than others who are more inner.’
‘So we are all different?’
‘Well, yes, but there are degrees of difference.’
‘And sameness,’ she replied and their conversation went on like this until six o’clock came and they were turfed out into the street. Balga looked for Adrian, but he had gone off. He thought about The Roundhouse, but that place didn’t really start until after eight and as St. Kilda wasn’t safe for him to hang in, at least he thought so, he suggested that they go to Carlton for a plate of Spaghetti and a glass of red wine at an Italian club that he had discovered one night when ignoring the sign saying “members only” he walked in hungry and was served with no problems at all.
‘Sure, sure,’ she agreed and they walked up Russell Street past police headquarters and into Lygon Street. After their spaghetti it was still early and he asked her if she want to listen to some sounds at his place.
She replied: ‘Only if you can get us a bottle of this fine red red wine here.’
Balga hadn’t tried to before, but well, there was always the first time and he went to the counter and asked the bloke there who said “yes” as long as it didn’t come from the club.
‘Never been here in me life,’ Balga said with a grin, pocketing the unlabelled bottle in his deep duffle coat pocket.
‘Got one,’ he told Ross as they went out into the evening. It was about seven thirty and they could have gone on to the Roundhouse and with wine too. He suggested it to her and she immediately agreed. As they walked to the tram stop, the girl took his hand and it felt like the most natural thing in the world. They scrabbled aboard the tram and sat hand in hand. “So corny,” Balga thought, but he was glad and at peace with the world as the tram took them along St. Kilda Road and pushed them out beneath the giant face laughing at the guys and chicks of this world. It was then as they hesitated before crossing over to the jazz club that a car slowed to give them the eye over. Balga froze up inside. His hand fell from the girl’s.
‘Beatnik scum,’ a familiar voice muttered distinctly and the car moved off.
Balga breathed again. It had been the Kingston demon and, and he gave a nervous grin, he had not recognized him, or had he?
Ross looked up into his face and asked what was wrong. ‘I felt, well, a dingo crossing my path and stopping to sniff at my scent’, he replied feeling that his disguise had been sprung.
‘You kidding or just mystical,’ the girl retorted.
‘Let’s go and dig that jazz,’ Balga said and skipped across the street. She came after him and they went up the stairs.
It was a trad jazz night with a singer, Judy Jacques wailing the blues. The couple sat in a dark corner at the back and finished the bottle as the night passed until eleven when the snugness came to an end.
Outside, the night was cool, but the sky was clear. The big face went off and they walked along towards — oh my God, Balga thought Fitzroy Street and who might he meet there? The lad thrust on his dark glasses and picked his way along like a blind man so that Ross laughed and led him along.
A few coffee shops were still open along the street and one of them was where Steady Eddy hung out. It must have been the wine because suddenly Balga decided to go and meet his old mate.
‘Let’s go in there for a coffee. We have enough time before the last tram goes to the city and then it’s an easy walk to my pad.’
‘Sure, that wine was the best,’ the girl giggled.
Balga flung the door open a bit too dramatically and marched in. He was feeling like one of the locals though he didn’t look like one. The lad stopped in the middle of the floor and spun around. No Steady Eddy and he felt like a stranger as he went to the counter and ordered two expressos and while waiting he asked the bloke what had happened to his star customer.
‘That one,’ the counterman sneered. ‘Haven’t you heard or read about it in the papers. They want to clean up St. Kilda, make it fit for, well, blokes like you. That Detective Kingston took him and his girls away last night.’
‘But he’s as bent as any cop can be. He’s the vice in the vice rep St. Kilda has.’
‘Maybe, but he doesn’t deal it on the street, does he?’
‘He’s a cop,’ Balga replied and took the coffees back to the table where Ross had sat.
‘I dunno,’ he said to himself, ‘I dunno.’
During the sipping, Balga could feel the counter bloke’s eyes on him as if he was trying to place him. It made the lad uneasy he was glad to get out of the place and its memories.
‘Poor Eddy,’ he thought as they got the last tram out of St. Kilda. ‘Steady, Eddy, he done gone away, stretching out the time, another day the same old cell, oh yeah,’ he sang quietly to himself.
‘You feeling okay,’ Ross asked him.
‘No,’ he said, ‘no, I dunno,’ and he shrugged. The world wasn’t grand, but a blues tune sung by a lonely black fellow in a lonely hotel room waiting, waiting, oh no, for the police to come and handcuff him away. Oh no, not again,’ he sang softly to himself.