Then he told her to put her clothes back on, had another quick look at her throat and wrote her out a script for some antibiotics.
The woman picked up her prescription, looked at the South African doctor and asked: ‘You knew all along all I had was a sore throat. Why did you make me take off all my clothes and embarrass me like that?’
The doctor said: ‘I didn’t really mean to embarrass you. It’s just that I’m getting a leather lounge delivered this afternoon and I was just trying to work out the best place to put it.’
Now that’s what I call offensive. But then again, what would you expect from a redneck mob of bastards like those bloody South Africans?
Sydney’s Kings Cross — it’s rarely out of the news.
Fred Nile’s always vowing to clean it up. Several unfortunate backpackers were burned to death there.
It’s been the site of various murders. Whenever Hinch and his ilk in the TV media are stuck for a beat-up they always send a crew up to film the molls, or the street kids or someone spaced out on drugs.
Personally, I always gave the place a wide berth even when I lived in Sydney.
I’m not into shooting up heroin, I’m too lousy to pay for a root, and as for those street kids I’m convinced in most cases a good boot up the arse and 12 months in the army would soon stop them sitting around feeling sorry for themselves.
But every city has its red-light or seedy area. You know what’s there and if you don’t like it, keep out. Too bad I suppose if you happen to live there, but you can always sell up and move somewhere else — like St Kilda or Fortitude Valley.
Anyway, the Kings Cross Festival was on a couple of weeks back and, as Sunday afternoon on the Central Coast is about as exciting as a bread queue in Russia, I thought I might meander down and take a look.
You never know, I might even find something nice to say about it. Though I declare, equivocally, that if ever I gave anyone or anything a compliment I’d ask for a receipt.
I turned into the main drag smack-bang into the crowds and the action, and believe me there was no shortage of voyeurs like myself.
The first thing that caught my eye was a Salsa band and a whole lot of scantily-dressed couples ripping into some dirty dancing. I managed to elbow some kids and women out of the road and wriggle up to the front. I was about to get a photo of a sensational pair of purple knickers when the band stopped for a break.
I missed out there so I joined the swarming masses.
The crowd was a mixed bunch — pretty much like the stalls cramming the side of the road.
You could get acupuncture and acupressure. Natural perfumes and oils. Super powers — personal powers that bring stability in a world of change. Don’t ask me what that is. Shades of the Paddington Bazaar. Heaps of T-shirts. I saw a ripper with ‘I Am Not American’ written on it in English and the same in Arabic above.
I ended up buying two Fourex T-shirts for a couple of those Seppo sheilas I still write to.
There were the usual trinkets and junk jewellery, sexy lingerie and even bonsai plants.
Good ol’ Greenpeace had an information stall. There was a team of Japs sketching people for $10 and a horde of them standing in front of an orange juice machine staring in wide-eyed amazement as the machine split and juiced an orange about every three seconds.
I guess when an orange costs about $6 in Tokyo you could understand why.
And while on the subject of the Japanese … Wasn’t it nice of them to slaughter those 600 dolphins the other week? They are a bunch of bastards, aren’t they? But don’t worry, they’ll be getting theirs this month. And remember. You read it here first.
I didn’t notice a heavy police presence as I strolled around — apart from a bunch of Bob Geldof and Sinead O’Connor look-alikes drinking piss near the fountain, where 2MMM had a rock band playing loud enough to be heard at Wompa Gate, the crowd in general was quite well behaved.
There were even some old ladies walking around holding balloons on sticks. I saw a bloke in a snake outfit who I recognised from the TV show The Money or The Gun, and shortly after the great man himself, Andrew Denton, zipping through the crowd looking like Mickey Mouse on speed.
I bought another T-shirt and a poster from a charming lady running a stall for the Griffin Theatre. It still didn’t seem like the Cross to me though. But I was getting hungry so I thought I’d try the various food stalls.
At the first one some bloke was stirring what looked like a pile of charred ambergris while he smoked a cigarette and the sweat dripped from his nose to sizzle in with whatever it was he was cooking. There were things in it that could have been raisins or, on the other hand, the local rats could have been eating extra well.
I settled for a satay stick at another one and was about to take a bite when, at the back of the stall, I saw his partner sitting in the gutter smoking a cigarette while he poked pieces of chicken or fox terrier on the sticks accompanied by about 6000 flies. I’m not particularly against multiculturalism but I’m definitely against botulism. I ended up buying a kransky on a roll that was so salty if I’d have died from eating it, I reckon I would have been dead six months before my body started to decompose. I brought it up all over some poor bloke retrieving the aluminium cans from a garbage tin. He never knew what hit him. That was enough for me. I hit the toe for the pub where I’d parked my car.
I don’t quite know how to sum up the Kings Cross Festival. But one little cameo I saw said it all.
A fresh-faced girl selling plastic flowers while right behind her some moll is propped in a doorway hawking her fork. Artificial flowers. Artificial love. Is there a moral there? I don’t know. But it was an aberration that went with my indigestion.
I have been to about three funerals in my life. My father’s, my grandmother’s and the service for a builder on the Central Coast because he and his widow were okay.
Personally, I hate the bloody things. They’re even worse than having to go to court. I’d rather be out getting drunk with some mates.
Brad Mayes was one of the most horrible drunks I knew. He was obstreperous, uproarious and the original goodtime Charlie.
He loved to laugh and was one of those rotten types who aren’t happy unless they have you laughing too.
I don’t know how many times I’d walk into a pub and Brad would have a beer in my hand before I even had a chance to get to the bar. Brad loved a cool one almost as much as he loved his friends.
I grew up with Brad in Bondi.
His father was a legendary sweep from Tamarama Surf Club and surfer from the era when half-a-dozen blokes out at North Bondi was a crowded day.
Jack ‘Bluey’ Mayes pioneered surfing films in Australia and discovered half the surfing spots up and down the NSW coast that today’s surfers take for granted.
Naturally, it rubbed off on Brad. I turned off surfing at Bondi when it started getting too crowded, became a ‘lid’ and joined Tamarama Surf Club.
Brad powered on and became a champion surfer around Australia in the ’70s.
He won a heap of contests and there wouldn’t be too many surfers around Australia who didn’t know Brad.
Yet the contests weren’t all that important to Brad. He just loved to surf. He was one of those weird blokes that would even give you a wave.
Brad hated my books.
Often I was on the end of a clout round the ears, a beer-spilling bearhug or a slap on my sunburned back from the drunken big pest, when he’d spot me in the pub and demand to know why the next one wasn’t finished.
There’s even a story going round about when he was a beach inspector at Tamarama. He’d got to a good part of The Godson and someone ran up and pointed to a poof going out to sea in a rip, screaming his lungs out.
Brad looked up over the railing, nodded and said, ‘Yeah I see him. I’ll get him as soon as I finish this page.’ And continued reading.
Brad was a legend in his own way — a legendary drinker and eater. His numerous surfing treks to Bali and
the eight-course meals are legend. A dinner date with Brad was Brad ordering two T-bone steaks for himself, then eating half his girl’s too.
And on the social scene everything was giant. You didn’t go out for a drink. You went out to get giant. You never woke up with a hangover. You just got too giant the night before. A raging party with music going all night was just simplified as giant. Then you got up the following morning and went out in three-metre surf for two hours.
Of course, all the sheilas hated Brad too. But they always do hate tall, good looking blokes with a ton of personality.
As well as Bondi and Tamarama, Brad was beach inspector at Maroubra.
Then he drifted up to Byron Bay and started shaping surfboards (about the same time as I drifted up to Terrigal and started shaping stories) before he drifted back to Sydney.
After that I’d bump into him and the team every now and again but not as often as I wanted.
To my absolute chagrin though, the last time I saw Brad I played him wide.
He was getting married in Terrigal. He’d met that special person, they were in love and he’d had enough partying and was keen to settle down.
He had work lined up, her parents were giving them a house in Terrigal and things couldn’t have looked rosier.
The night I saw him he was in his mate Wally’s hot-dog shop in Terrigal.
Brad and his girl were up there getting all the wedding arrangements together.
Naturally, he was a bit giant and as soon as he saw me he started to roar.
After getting belted I backpedalled out, said I had to meet a mate upstairs in the bar and I’d see him after.
When I came back Brad and his girl were out in the street still discussing the wedding arrangements.
In fact, they were discussing them that passionately the cops were called.
I left them to it and went home happy to know an old mate and now a family man was moving in just down the road.
Then you’re home one night and another mate rings up with one of those phone calls that are the last thing you want to hear.
Brad had gone out for a final fling on the Tuesday. His girl found him on the Thursday with the phone still in his hand. They were supposed to be married on the Saturday.
Brad’s uncle, Leon, had died from a heart attack. His father had a triple bypass. Brad was 37.
What can you say? I suppose I could eulogise and steal other writers’ quotes and say something like:
The dead are like the stars by day,
Withdrawn from mortal eye.
But not extinct, they hold their way,
In glory through the sky.
But I got a feeling Brad would tell me to get fair dinkum.
A few old sayings about Bondi people would be more appropriate.
‘You can always tell a Bondi girl, but you can’t tell her much.’
And: ‘You can get the boy out of Bondi, but you can’t get Bondi out of the boy.’
Well, they just took the boy out of Bondi and he’ll be sadly missed.
I just hope the bloke upstairs likes a drink and a laugh. Because I’ve got a feeling it might start to get pretty giant up there from now on.
Especially when Bondi Brad and Fat Larry from Maroubra get together.
A fellow writer buttonholed me in a pub the other day. She said her last book went okay, she’d finished another one and she’d done a marvellous interview for some literary segment on the ABC.
I replied good on her, she sounded like she was doing all right — better than me, in fact, because I never get interviewed on the ABC and I’m an awther of some repute.
To which she replied, that’s understandable — after all the rotten things I’d said about the ABC, it was a wonder they didn’t come around to my house at night, throw dead cats on my driveway and let my tyres down.
She was implying that I do nothing but bag them. When I drove home to the senile coast, I must admit I sat and pondered on this for a while.
Was I that rotten to Aunty? I don’t really think so. For sure, I dumped on a couple of their so-called ‘stars’ who I thought were suffering badly from delusions of adequacy: like Trish Goddard and Tania Lacey.
And I did take the horsewhip to a bunch of old hens on 2JJJ who couldn’t lay any more.
But not the ABC in general. For me to bag the ABC as a whole would not only be churlish and ignorant, it would be biting the hand that fed me.
I’ve done parts in movies on the ABC; always remembered my lines and greatly appreciated the work at the time.
The ABC makes great telemovies. Though when you’re working on them you think they could build another Great Pyramid of Cheops in the same time, but they always turn out okay. Scales Of Justice, Police Crop, Mail Order Bride, Lizard King, just to name a few.
Which channel discovered Minder, the best show on TV? Sesame Street, Beyond 2000, Dr Who and Yes Minister? First-class viewing. If it wasn’t for Four Corners, Bjelke and his cohorts would still be in power in Queensland.
Half those so-called stars getting absolutely ridiculous salaries started off on the ABC: Robbo, Carlton, etc. … Doug Mulray got his break on 2JJJ; the chosen one of course is in a class of his own supreme magnificence and eminence — Molly Meldrum, another Godhead created by the ABC …
Naturally, they have to flum a lemon now and again, like Jane Singleton. And all the dykes and the marxist feminists who can’t get a bloke anyway have got a firm foothold in there, as have the horses’ hoofs and the holier-than-thou, anti-racism bores who make it almost impossible to wear a white shirt these days without being called a racist.
Unfortunately, these tea-guzzling slugs have a penchant for burrowing their way into cushy little jobs in the public service — they’re so entrenched you’d have had more chance of getting Rudolf Hess out to Spandau than moving any of them.
However, that, along with the social security system, is just something we poor workers have to put up with.
And what channel gave us Selwyn Sprogget, arguably the greatest mind of our time? Time and time again I have prostrated myself towards Mecca and implored almighty Allah: Why doesn’t the ABC repeat this show?
It’s a gas. It was on in the late ’70s, just about a miner in the north of England who rides his bike to the pub and says, ‘Eeh, magic!’
You reckon you’ve come across some dumb Australians? This Pommie makes Terry McCann look like a rocket scientist.
But they won’t repeat it. Which is typical of the ABC’s racist, Pommie-bashing, discriminatory attitude towards humour from the north of England. The northist, humourist bastards!
But apart from that and Jane Singleton, Aunty’s aces by me.
The other day I picked up an old copy of Playboy and happened to flick to those nude photos of the beautiful Madonna, which caught my attention because I’d just read a couple of other things about her.
It was reported in some rag she looks like coming to Australia for a holiday — lucky us — and then I read an article in People, showing photos of her minders punching up some poor photographer for trying to snap her while she was jogging in Spain.
One big moron in particular was trying to lay the boot into the unfortunate photographer while he was on the deck.
So I got to thinking about Madonna and, to be quite honest, Madonna gives me the shits.
That’s not to detract from the fact she’s a multi-millionaire entertainer who sells millions of albums all round the world. She’s an actress of sorts who’s starred in big budget movies like Dick Tracy, Desperately Seeking Susan, etc.
Her fans flock to her concerts in their thousands and go for her records in the discos. But personally, I wouldn’t cross the street to see her and, unlike that unfortunate photographer in Spain, there’s no way I’d risk having some gorilla do a bit of Balmain folk-dancing up and down my rib cage for taking a photo of the peroxided scrubber.
I admit I might be a bit out-of-date with today’s pop music and biased against Madonna from my days as
a DJ working in various pits on the Central Coast, when I used to have to play ‘Like A Virgin’ and that atrociously boring ‘Holiday’ night after night. So what I dislike about Madonna might look like nothing more than my envy of the woman’s well-deserved success. Not so.
Let’s go back to those nude shots in Playboy. Anybody out there see them? They’re in black and white, shot in a grotty flat full of cheap, daggy furniture.
Madonna herself looks about 20 — a whippy little body and nice firm tits.
But what about her minge? What do the Yanks call them? Beavers?
This is no beaver. This is more like one of those big, black bears you find running around in Alaska. I’ve seen a few teds in my day, but this is the daddy of them all. You could lose golf balls in it. Forget the map of Tasmania. We’re talking Queensland rainforest here.
A Mujahideen warrior would give anything to have a beard as good as that. I reckon if you threw a newspaper in front of it, it would jump up and grab it.
If Madonna’s going to do any sunbaking while she’s in Australia, someone’s going to have to explain the expression ‘bikini-line’ to her.
Then there are her armpits. They look like a couple of alpacas that drowned in sump oil. Possibly at the time Madonna was an earth mother or she might have been posing for an ad for Sunbeam razors or Makita weedeaters.
In future, if she’s not worried about fixing her lamington, she could at least do something about her Warwicks. If not, buy a pair of overalls, move to Balmain and learn to play the bassoon.
If those necrophagous feminists on 2JJJ read this they’re bound to accuse me of being sexist for talking about Madonna’s crinoidal crumpet like this.
Madonna’s a millionaire who poses for sexist photos. I’m sexist for talking about her bizzo, and the editor is sexist for publishing photos of it.
But by displaying this monstrosity isn’t Madonna ultimately contributing to my sexism?
So What Do You Reckon? Page 11