Despite the ambos not being able to tell me anything I did manage to earwig a few things while I was with them in the pub, and the bloke from Newcastle who was retiring didn’t really give a stuff because he was getting out anyway.
Among other things, he told me of a sure-fire cure to the heroin and junkie problem. Unfortunately, it’s too practical and I can’t repeat it here. Plus it might upset a few bleeding hearts.
But he did tell me a bit of a story about doctors he didn’t like. Not your friendly local GP, but smartarse interns in hospitals, just out of uni, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and full of their own importance.
The veteran ambo had pulled a body out of a car smash and took it to hospital. He went in and told the intern he had a body in the ambulance, could he get it out of the road.
The budding Dr Kildare tapped the ambo with his stethoscope and said, ‘I’m the doctor here. I’m the one who signs the certificate and says whether they’re dead. Not you. Okay?’
It wasn’t a bad show in front of the nurses so the veteran ambo copped it sweet. He just wanted to get back to saving lives. He just didn’t have time for all the bullshit.
A week or two later he pulls two more bodies out of a car wreck, goes to the same hospital where the same doctor is on duty and says the same thing to him. The ambo would by this time know if someone was dead or not.
But again he gets, ‘Didn’t I tell you before I’m the doctor, not you? I’ll say whether they’re dead or not. Can you get that into your head?’
Not being able to say anything the ambo again cops it sweet. Not long after that, he gets called to an industrial accident. A decapitation. A worker got hit in the neck by a slab of steel which took his head clean off.
The veteran ambo took the body to the hospital knowing the same intern was on duty. When he got there though, he took the head out of the plastic bag and placed it on the corpse’s feet.
Then he walked inside and very politely said to the doctor, ‘Excuse me, I’ve got a bloke out here who’s been pretty badly hurt in an accident, but I’m not sure if he’s dead or not. Do you think you could come and have a look?’
I thought I’d leave the column there because not long after that I left the ambos to their partying. Besides, it was his day, the old bloke who was retiring. They didn’t want me around hearing things I’m not supposed to.
One thing I try my best to avoid is repeating myself. However, if it’s more than a year since you’ve written about something, I don’t see why you can’t reiterate the subject without boring the tits off your readers.
I’ve already done a column on cigarettes, but they’ve been bobbing up in the news more and more lately. I’ll stick by what I previously said about cigarettes.
They stink and I reckon anybody who smokes has got rocks in his or her head. But this column isn’t necessarily another diatribe against smokers. Even though they can be a pain in the arse, I feel a little sorry for them. They’re being ripped off by both the government and the cigarette manufacturers in what I consider is a nice little conspiracy. A definite collusion between the two.
So this time I’m not completely ripping into the poor, silly smokers.
This is about tobacco.
Different things have brought cigarettes to my attention lately — apart from seeing butts squashed out everywhere you walk and ash all over the tickets in the TAB.
Los Angeles State Prison was one. You should see this place — it was built to hold 15,000 inmates and is holding 22,000, mainly blacks and Hispanics.
In July it’s going smoke-free and as most of the cons smoke, they’re expecting riots.
This could prove interesting watching. Thousands of horrible cons going through nicotine withdrawal. There’s nothing like a good riot on the TV news and the Yanks pull off some rippers.
My publisher now has a smoke-free building. You can actually walk through the dungeons there without squinting all the time. Airlines are starting to go smoke-free. All you need at altitude is for some dillberry to drop a cigarette butt in a bin full of paper towels. It’s not as easy as it used to be for the smokers to walk around dragging on a dotch. Though you can still ruin your health and your clothes till all hours in discos and bars. But soon some barperson will put in a claim for a work-related sickness and that’ll finish that.
The thing that caught my eye though, was the book Modern Merchants Of Death by Tim Hewat. Tim is an ex-60-Gitanes-a-day man hired by the cigarette companies to do some spying for them. Instead of spying, Tim did a big dump.
He writes: ‘It makes one focus a good deal more sharply on what smoking is all about, on what a killer on a mass scale it really is, and how outrageous are the benign attitudes to the slaughterous trade adopted by the transnational tobacco companies.’
Tim’s book doesn’t quite parallel the conspiracy I’m coming to. But being an ex-smoker like Tim, I have an empathy towards smokers and how they’re being discriminated against. Uncle Bob understands. You just gotta have that dotch. Not every now and again. About every five #$@&* minutes.
To expect you to clean up your shit after you and not blow or let smoke drift in non-smokers’ faces is a big ask. Smokers have got rights. Rights to stuff up their own health and everybody else’s too.
The best thing about cigarettes though, is all the crap they’re wrapped in. There’s saltpetre, nitric something or other, and about 20 other poisons the cigarette companies put in the low rotten things to make them burn.
Still, like I said, smokers have got rights, they pay heaps in taxes and still manage to make millions for the tobacco companies.
But what is a cigarette smoker? He’s nothing more than a drug addict — addicted to nicotine, and in a bad way. Some are worse than others. Same as smackies gotta have a hit of heroin, cokeheads gotta have a line, mullheads like a cone, crankheads gotta do some speed … smokers just gotta have a dotch.
The young idiots think it’s image. They’re just trainee addicts. After 10 years of forking out around $30 a week to give yourself lung cancer, then you’re an addict. And all addicts need help. Yet all nicotine addicts can do for their habit is to buy increasingly expensive packets or cartons of cigarettes.
Why shouldn’t chronic nicotine addicts be allowed to grow their own tobacco? Just a nice little plant where they can fill a pipe or make a roll-your-own, enough to ease the craving.
There’d be less pollution, no butts all over the place and the poor nicotine addicts would save a fortune. Plus, they wouldn’t be sucking in all that poison from the chemically-treated papers and tobacco the cigarette companies sell.
This is where smokers are being discriminated against.
It is discrimination too. If you’re an alcoholic you get counselling. If you’re coming off coke you get that plus medication. If you’re a low-life heroin addict robbing old ladies or hawking your fork and spreading AIDS, they’ll give you methadone and put you on a pension.
Yet the poor old smokers get zilch.
The smoker is being bled dry by the capitalist vampires running the tobacco industry and being discriminated against by the government. And if there’s one thing I hate it’s discrimination. I might be racist and a sexist, but I’m not a tobacconist. It stinks.
It’s a collusion forged between the tobacco companies and the government because the tobacco companies are terrified they’ll lose money.
Look at it this way and tell me it’s not a rort. I can grow my own vegetables. Does this send the farming industry broke? My mother’s been making her own jam for years. Did this cause a crisis at SPC?
If I live in the bush I can have my own eggs and eat the chickens. Have my own milk and, if I want to, slaughter the cow and fill the freezer full of meat. I can have sheep and knit my own jumpers. Does this make the wool industry any worse off?
I can brew my own piss, make it as strong as I want, the type I want and share a bit around. Are home brewers sending the breweries broke?
I can’t distil my own spirit
s, but that’s mainly because of health and safety regulations. Though I’ve worked with plenty of migrants who get a little co-op going and make their own wine. Especially these Portuguese blokes I worked with once. I don’t know of any wineries going to the wall.
You can’t manufacture your own heroin or cocaine but I reckon if the government ever works out a way of making money from the mullheads it’ll soon be legal to grow your own pot.
But the poor bloody cigarette smoker gets shafted by both the tobacco companies and the government and turned into an addict at the same time. Yet if you get caught trying to grow tobacco, even to help your addiction, it’s an unbelievable pinch.
Something like a $6,000 fine and three years gaol. Why such a heavy pinch? It’s only a plant and it’s not an illegal substance.
You don’t have to read Tim Hewat’s book to know why. I wouldn’t mind acting the bush lawyer here and wondering if some smartarse barrister put this to both the tobacco companies and the government what the answer would be?
There’s collusion there and there’s definitely some sort of a case for conspiracy. And there’s no way it’s not discriminatory, against people addicted to nicotine, the good old smokers.
Whatever the end wash-up, I couldn’t give a stuff about cigarettes. I don’t like the mess, the smell, what it does to my clothes or health.
But smokers are getting a hard time at present, apart from the expense. There are more restrictions all the time, it’s getting harder and harder to dotch around other people and it will only get worse.
Non-smokers are starting to win the battle. Consequently the tobacco companies are spending a fortune on lawyers and advertising defending smokers’ rights. Which they should, they can certainly afford it.
Personally, I don’t deny anybody the right to smoke. But I am curious as to why the tobacco companies won’t allow smokers the right to grow their own.
For months now I’ve been promising myself a 10-speed bike. I’ve had one and they’re great. My present model, however, is in the backyard, rusting away with weeds and vines growing through it. It’s a photographer’s delight.
I ended up getting another one — flat tyres, rusty with a ton of junk all over it. I don’t know what it was worth but it ended up costing me about $1000.
After nine years up here on the beautiful Central Coast, scrimping, saving and being arrested and gaoled, I decided I needed a break.
I was two books in front and, apart from the constant pressure of writing this column, I didn’t have all that much to do and I actually had a little bit of money in the bank.
But, after sitting around picking my toes for a while, the writing bug bit me and I knew I had to do something. I needed new fields to conquer. So I thought I’d have a go at writing a play. There’s an earn in it if you’re successful, plus the prestige of being a playwrite as well as an awther and I figured after writing a 300-page book, penning 100 pages of waffle and dialogue would be as easy as pissing the bed when you’re drunk.
I’ve got a book of Neil Simon’s plays, which I perused and came up with a plot — stealing a few of Simon’s ideas. Never be afraid to steal other writers’ lines and ideas. There are plenty out there nicking mine, besides, imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
The only problem with my play was instead of being in New York it was set in Sydney, and to get this wobbegong together would mean moving down there for research. I couldn’t afford to rent a flat and I’d be flat out staying at the People’s Palace let alone the Sebel Town House while I got it together.
So I went for the old ‘share accommodation’ rort. There must be people out there who have done it. I have, heaps of times in the past and you know what to look for.
Just don’t go for the ones that say ‘broadminded person required’. This means you can expect to see two giant dykes washing their overalls in the bath and cutting their hair in the kitchen.
Or some bloke going out the door wearing a wig and a dress and when you come home one night he and all his mates are porking each other in the living room dressed up as sea-scouts.
But you find ones to suit your needs. And where else could an old Bondi boy live? So after checking out six lemons I found one. Right on the beach with great views, security building, garage and pool — $110 a week. My room was about equal to what a junior officer would get in a Soviet army barracks but the kitchen was right on Campbell Parade with a top perv on the chicks walking past, and the landlady and Megadeth, my fellow boarder, seemed amicable enough.
Bright lights, big city, Bobby baby’s back in town. I paid my bond and moved in.
All the time I was looking for a flat the weather was fantastic. The day I moved in a monstrous storm hit and it never stopped raining for a week.
The first night I spent in a mouldy sleeping bag on a mattress that felt like it was full of riverstones and just as cold. I got an electric blanket and a doona the next day but it was still cold and raining and my play was set in Sydney in Spring. The TV in the flat was ordinary with bad reception and being number three in the pecking order meant no 7.30 Report, Four Corners or Murphy Brown.
Plus there was no stereo and it kept on raining. By week two this was becoming as inspirational as one of John Hewson’s speeches in Parliament.
But there was one small ray of sunshine. The garage was huge and full of junk and when I was fossicking around for another mattress, what should I find?
A 10-speed bike. An old French Gitanes — covered in rust, it had been laying there for years. The landlady didn’t know it was there, Megadeth didn’t know anything about it, so I took it to a bike shop in Bondi Junction and got it done up for $125.1 was like a Viking in Valhalla.
It finally cleared up for two days so I went pedalling around my old hometown. And hasn’t Bondi changed? And don’t the motorists in Sydney love you?
In Terrigal, when I walk out the front all I see are a few magpies walking around and sometimes a kookaburra sitting on my letter-box.
In Bondi, it took me 10 minutes just to cross the street. Forget pedestrian crossings. Drivers hate them almost as much as they hate you on a pushbike.
But I cruised around while the sun was out. Bondi’s sure changed in the past few years. It’s now sort of super trendsville at one end and sleaze at the other. The old Astra Hotel, where they used to drag the junkies out of the brascoes with picks hanging out of their arms, is gone.
Apart from the Bondi Hotel, you don’t do pub crawls any more. You do cappuccino-with-a-twist crawls. Bondi’s now all coffee shops and alfresco restaurants or trattorias. They’re all very ‘okay-yar-darling’.
The Italian one where the Astra used to be is good but I would say the yuppie mecca would be the Lamrock Café, right on the corner of the street I grew up in. That’s the place to be seen with your cellular phone in your Bottega Veneta briefcase. Wearing your Giorgio Armani sunglasses, Hugo Boss silk shirt and Redealli jacket. Or your Giorgio di Sant’Angelo dress, Betsey Johnson black stockings and Reena Pachochi earrings. While you eat soya noodles, Kiwi fruit sorbet and sip champagne with cranberry sauce and peach schnapps.
If that doesn’t turn you on, you can drop some ecky then shoot down to the Bondi and dance to house music at 1000km/h.
I bought an old stereo down from Terrigal for the flat to play my zydeco tapes and the landlady her Black Box and Madonna collection. Then the other boarder, who I nicknamed Megadeth because he never had the band’s T-shirt off his back, hit it with Anthrax, Atomic Dustbin, Motorhead etc., till the speakers looked like a couple of old safes after Darcy Dugan had blown them.
But I persevered with the weather and settled back ready to write the next great Australian play. That’s when it all fell in a heap. I got pissed one night, forgot my pin number and the machine kept my card, leaving me broke. The clutch went in my car leaving me stranded in Terrigal — ‘We’re doing our best mate but the part’s gotta come up from Sydney.’
Then, when I get back with my spare typewriter and tab
le all keen as a bean, the landlady hits me and Megadeth with the good news. She’s not renewing the lease. She’s found greener pastures and she’s moving on. We could do our best. The Salvos, the Matt Talbot home, the garage if we wanted or we could take over the lease for around $2500.
We got two weeks to make up our mind. I’d barely moved in, put up with the lowest weather imaginable and almost sent myself broke. And now, on the threshold of becoming a famous playwright, I’m out on the street.
They’re all right, Australian sheilas. Don’t you worry about that. But, as me and Megadeth said one night while we were drinking away our pain, what the landlady did to us will be on her conscience for the rest of her life.
So as I write this I’m being turfed out of my Bondi digs a lot poorer and definitely no wiser. Back to the beautiful Central Coast after roasting all the local coppers and slagging the local beauty queen.
But in times of trouble, I’ve always got my mate Wally who owns the hot-dog shop down at Peppers to fall back on for a bit of solace.
I was in there the other day having a coffee and showing him my new 10-speed. I couldn’t tell him the whole thing in Bondi had fallen in a huge pile of shit. I just said I’d decided to move back home.
Wally looked at me. Looked at the bike, shook his head and said: ‘Jesus you’re a lucky bastard, Barrett. That’s gotta be the best bike for the money in Australia.’
I worked it out. Seven weeks at $110 a week, plus the $125 to get it done up and several grapefruit sorbets, cappuccinos and bottles of Acacia at various bistros in Campbell Parade.
He’s gotta be #%*&! joking, hasn’t he?
If there’s one thing I hate and will not condone it’s cruelty to animals for entertainment or profit — especially native fauna, but it goes for anything.
I saw something on TV the other night that just about made me spew. A bunch of redneck Seppos somewhere in Texas got a young black leopard that had been bred in captivity, took it to a clearing, let it out of its cage — then shot it.
So What Do You Reckon? Page 15