Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer

by Justin Sheedy

  Buying Steve a cold beer then stepping into the band room, the hot evening outside wasn’t even dark yet though it was dark in the band room and cool at floor level with dry ice fog glowing ultraviolet purple and Bela Lugosi creepy organ music wafting. As your eyes adjusted you could make out other people in the room, then more and more, the stage spotlights flashing on as up onto the stage strode five musicians. All five of them had 60s wrap-around sunglasses, four with bright green wigs, one bright purple. They blasted into songs off their latest album, Destroy Dull City, their set then featuring songs right off the Ugly Things compilation including, unless I hallucinated it, Ugly Thing itself. And in that moment I was handed conclusive proof that the 1980s as a cultural decade did indeed suck. For if it didn’t, the 60s renaissance I was now witnessing wouldn’t be happening as it wouldn’t be necessary.

  And the Psychotic Turnbuckles weren’t just musically awesome; they were theatrically hilarious too, taunting each other between songs as if rival terrorists of cool and ranting about being world championship wrestlers in exile — hounded from their hometown of Pismo Beach USA due to psychedelic scandal! The Turnbuckles were ‘Jesse the Intruder’, ‘El Sicodelico’, ‘The Grand Wizard’, ‘The Spoiler’ and ‘The Creep’ and at half-time between sets stayed in full character as they moved amongst the appreciative crowd.

  I enthused to their singer, ‘Jesse the Intruder’, how watching his band was like seeing The Creatures themselves up on the stage…

  ‘But Lo!’ he countered. ‘You do! Through us do they Live.’

  With no truer word ever uttered the Turnbuckles went on for their second set, with it commencing something I had never seen before, let alone been physically part of…

  SLAM DANCING.

  Entering into this activity, I had the instant sensation of never having felt so ‘as one’ with complete strangers. This was because the brief yet glorious 80s crowd phenomenon of ‘slam dancing’ involved you being bodily flung against other crowd members whom you would then bodily fling back then get flung again yourself but the whole time your fellow slammers would physically save you from hitting the ground or from too serious impact, all the time slamming you but keeping a smiling eye out for you as everybody wanted everybody else to be okay so that the crazy slamming fun could continue.

  Violent kindness. That was Slam Dancing.

  Without words you were saying, ‘You’re a complete stranger, I have extreme trust in you and you in me and we’re proving it. Isn’t it awesome.’

  Boys

  * * *

  Your late teens. The pinnacle of youth. You are on the verge of becoming a man. Yet still a boy. Into the bargain, as a teenager you are (as now conceded by Medical Science) temporarily chemically ‘mad’. Mad between your ears, despite all your noblest intentions.

  By this age, you’ve known some bad times already, been crushed, been hurt. But you are strong. And too gloriously inexperienced to be cynical or hesitant. You are at your sexual peak. You think you can do anything. As a result, you try to. Boys are brave. They have balls.

  You know it was just a dream you had, the one of you as a happy little kid running into a noisy room full of other little kids at a long party table brimming with treats of every kind except for the stern voice that says down to you, ‘No; not for you,’ you then looking up at the voice, biting a disappointed lip, then looking back to all the other kids at the table and trying to understand.

  It was just a dream, now you’re wide awake, you’re still a boy and everything is still possible. Maybe it’s not, but you sure as shit don’t know that yet. You, son, are so filled with positivity you could come back from the dead. And in some ways you already have. What you’re made of is resilience. The sort David Bowie sang of in his song Boys Keep Swinging and which Mick Jagger celebrated in Jumping Jack Flash.

  You’re a boy. The whole world expects so much of you. Though not half as much as you expect of yourself. You want the world. But most of all you want to please your mum and dad. And make them proud.

  Boys.

  I can see their faces: the kindest boy in the school, the smartest, the toughest, even call-you-a-dipshit smiling Tony Basara: Boys. Here’s to the bravery of Boys.

  The Vocational Guidance Counsel

  * * *

  A giraffe at a high-speed ceiling fan expo will back me up on the point that, in life, there is nothing like being precisely where you shouldn’t be to make you feel like getting the fuck OUT. You’ll get eager agreement on this from the lone elephant at an ivory hunters’ and fanciers’ convention, as you will, for that matter, from the single whale still alive in Japanese coastal waters.

  As for ‘vocational guidance counsellors’, I think I’d always assumed them something used by people with no idea of their ‘vocation’ in life therefore needing guidance towards it. As for me, I had at least a general idea of where I’d like to end up in life: somewhere utilising the things I’d proven good at to this point such as art, the written word and facing large numbers of people. So I never saw a vocational guidance counsel or, though I had recently seen one on television. As played by John Cleese in an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus…

  Across his vocational guidance counsellor’s desk he reads out to a tragic ‘bean-counter’ type (played by Michael Palin) the results of his vocational guidance ‘personality test’ which reveal the man as five pathetic types of dull and boring, thus rendering him perfectly suited for a career in Accountancy. Though the poor soul then protests that he already is an accountant and is desperate to become a lion-tamer instead, his nauseating lack of personality and backbone demonstrate on the spot that there is indeed no other place for him in life than as an institutionalised cog in a faceless machine. The vocational guidance counsellor then turns to the camera in documentary exposé style, appealing to the audience to witness and appreciate the hideous human consequences directly resulting from a career in Accountancy.

  Okay, so Accountancy was only one component of the uni degree I had just begun, albeit a key component. It would not be my future career per se.

  However…

  My new degree’s First Year subject of Financial Accounting felt just so distant from anything I would ever get my head around as to seem the first thing from Outer Space that had ever landed on my homework desk.

  To me, ‘dropping out’ was an equally alien concept. An unthinkable act that Other People did. Presumably lazy, maladjusted people. Right now this unthinkable act felt to me alarmingly like common sense. And so it was that under the light of my desk lamp very late one night in my seventh week of my Bachelor of Business degree I closed my Financial Accounting text book, turned off the lamp, and went to bed having dropped out. I knew it would freak my parents clean out of their skins but it had to be done. At least, unlike for Riverview, they weren’t paying any fees for my uni (which in 1987 was still free in Australia), so nothing would be forfeited, and that was something.

  Or so I hoped it would be seen…

  ‘Darling… Darling, it’s time to get up; Uni-ver-si-teeeee…’

  I looked up at Mum from my pillow and said it clearly, calmly: ‘I’m not going today, Ma; I’ve dropped out.’

  Her reply came just as clearly, though not quite as calmly…

  ‘Are you on DRUGS?’

  That night, a Friday night, the phone rang, in the earpiece, Steve’s voice: ‘How y’going, mate?’

  ‘I’ve dropped out of uni.’

  ‘…Shit! …How come?’

  ‘It wasn’t for me, Business. It just wasn’t for me.’

  ‘No,’ breathed Steve. ‘I never thought it would be. I wasn’t going to tel you that; it had to come from you. How’re your folks taking it?’

  ‘Well,’ I strained, ‘give them about ten years and I think they’ll be talking to me again.’

  ‘Sooner than that, mate,’ Steve chuckled. ‘They’re not stupid, y’know… Anyway, I think it’s a good thing. Yep. This is good. There’s something better for you
, Juz. Something out there for you.’

  ‘Thanks, mate.’

  ‘No probs. And believe me, Juz, this isn’t the end of something; it’s a beginning. We should go out and celebrate.’

  ‘How about Pluto?’

  ‘No, Surry Hills, actually. There’s this new club I think you’ll like. Opening night tonight!’

  ‘What sort of club?’

  ‘You’ll never believe this, Juz, but it’s a Go-Go club.’

  ‘Here in Sydney?!! You’re shitting me.’

  ‘I shit you not. I’ll pick you up.’

  The Plastic Inevitable

  * * *

  On busy Cleveland Street, Surry Hils just up from the Elizabeth Street intersection, the club was in a long and still-running venue called ‘Hanna’s’, from the front door a great long line of people right up the block itching to get in. Steve said the name was taken from Andy Warhol’s ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitable’ mixed art, music and dance exhibition of 1966, and as we got closer and closer in line to the club’s entrance, the music coming out wasn’t just good, it was glorious: song after song after song including not just the better-known 60s classics like Stepping Stone but rare gems that only 60s nuts like Steve and I knew such as Linda Sue Dixon by ‘Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels’. The closer we got to the entrance, the harder I had to fight not to dance like a fool just standing in line!

  But then we were at the door, in the entrance, and paying our admission fee. ‘WELCOME,’ shouted the smiling young woman behind the counter, and inside The Plastic Inevitable we were.

  It was PACKED, to the direct right of the entrance walkway a serious-faced DJ spinning and cueing vinyl LPs and singles on his twin turntables, to the left of the walkway a female go-go dancer in a vertically-barred go-go cage on a raised square

  podium. She wore knee-high black leather boots, a mini-skirt of psychedelic multi-colours, a black halter-neck top, a ‘bee-hive’ hairdo, false eyelashes and had powerful thighs. Beyond and below her was the dance floor proper, people grooving as one to the swamp go-go stomp of Green River by ‘Creedence Clearwater Revival’, on the people and on the walls light-projected spiral patterns plus slow-moving bubbles and waves of intersecting colours — blue meeting red making purple meeting green.

  There came a slap on my shoulder. ‘Dear Juz!’ beamed Max Van Cleef. ‘What kept you?! This is Juzza Heaven! ’

  ‘On Earth, my friend… How’s Medicine?’

  ‘Awesome. And you?’

  ‘I dropped out of Business.’

  ‘Thank GOD,’ returned the smartest boy I’d ever known.

  But now the music wanted to possess me and I let it.

  Stepping down onto the dance floor, it was as if the toe of my winkle-picker boot pressed the Play button for Day Tripper by The Beatles, its John-Paul-and-George unison guitar riff with Ringo’s manic tambourine sending butterflies up my limbs. My arms now slow-motion whips, my body snaking from head to toe, I felt as if the go-go dancer in her raised cage was dancing down at me though assumed I must be imagining it. From song to song to song I felt in subtle and splendid control of my body’s movements at a thousand miles an hour, channelling through them every ecstatic nuance of every moment of every song that I knew so well, the ones I’d never heard before like long-lost friends I never knew I had but they knew me!

  Towards the end of the night, I approached the DJ booth and leaned in to the man.

  ‘This has been brilliant,’ I yelled. ‘You play the best music.’

  ‘I know,’ he smiled. ‘A good opening night!’

  ‘And your go-go dancer’s amazing,’ I said, ‘but you know they had male go-go dancers too in the 60s…’

  ‘Of course I know; I’m a journalist.’

  My eyes narrowed at him. ‘I’d like a job here.’

  ‘Show me what you can do,’ he said without missing a beat.

  I returned to the dance floor and did so to the next song, then returned for his verdict. The song had been Nowhere To Run by ‘Martha and The Vandellas’, one of the most compellingly go-go danceable songs there is and you might say I nailed it. In fact, with the kind of crystal certainty that each of us has maybe once in a lifetime I knew that the manager of The Plastic Inevitable would this night be hiring a brand-new go-go dancer.

  ‘Right,’ he smiled, ‘I’ll pay you $10 an hour, you get free drinks and a guest list for your friends on the door.’

  ‘Fine by me.’

  ‘Then you’ve got yourself a job.’

  With that the girl go-go dancer bustled up to us, her face aglow. ‘WOW!’ she loosed. ‘WHAT A FUNKY BOY!’

  And that, dear reader, is verbatim. Also exactly how I got my first job out of school.

  The Grim Reaper

  * * *

  The mortal fear of the age had shifted.

  Whereas all through the 80s the threat hanging over our heads had been one of nuclear apocalypse, this had recently been displaced by the fear of a terrible new disease that was sweeping the planet. It was something called ‘AIDS’, standing for ‘Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome’. At the time it was generally considered in developed countries like Australia to be a ‘Gay’ disease and was latched upon by many religious conservatives (also by those devoid of any Christian or human compassion) as God’s revenge on homosexuals. Indeed it instilled a sense of moral high ground in those of such foul prejudice.

  Given that he was now a med student, I asked Max Van Cleef about the new ‘plague’ and he assured it didn’t discriminate between Gays and Straights. It was caused, he explained, by the ‘Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection’, or ‘HIV’, which was transmitted in blood from shared intravenous needles, also from mothers to unborn babies (something most tragically rife in Africa, he said), as well as being transmitted sexually. Indeed, the popular perception of AIDS being an exclusively ‘Gay’ disease was about to be shattered. Or, more specifically, bowled over…

  April 1987 saw the release of the most confronting and controversial advertisement ever seen on Australian TV to that point and possibly ever since. Commissioned by the Australian National Advisory Committee on AIDS and devised by Australian ad whiz-kid and arguable genius Siimon Reynolds, the ad became known instantly as the ‘grim reaper ad’. Designed to revolutionize Australian public awareness of AIDS as a genuine ‘epidemic’, i.e. not just something affecting the Gay and drug-using communities, the TV advertisement opened with a highly convincing ‘grim reaper’ complete with scythe appearing out of the mist, the ghostly ‘harvester of the dead’ figure from ancient mythology picking up in its skeletal hand no less than a bowling ball and bowling it in the direction of the camera, i.e. at the mainstream TV audience. The spectral bowling ball then struck and knocked down ‘human bowling pins’ including all sections of the wider community: mums, dads, young people of indiscriminate sexual orientation, children, babies, even the aged. Complete with a ‘horror movie’ voice-over to drive home the awful details, the over-the-top register of the ad made it a massive success in its task: It caused a sensation, as a result it worked, changing the Australian mainstream attitude to AIDS on the spot and forever, the ‘grim reaper’ also becoming an instant cultural icon of the decade.

  Max explained AIDS in clinical detail for me too: You didn’t die from AIDS, not directly; you died from normally survivable diseases like Pneumonia due to your body’s ‘immune system’ being fucked, as a result your body being unable to fight the Pneumonia: It was all about the ‘immunodeficiency’ part of AIDS and its HIV infection. So wear a condom, said Max. Going without one, he said, once led to marriage. Now it led to a fate worse than death, worse than your own death, that is: and that was killing someone else.

  I remembered the first public advertisement I had ever seen on the subject of sexually transmitted disease and it was a far cry from 1987’s ‘grim reaper’ commercial: In 1979, on the red-rattler train home from primary school from Eastwood to Epping, it took me a few moments to realise what I was looking at, this psych
edelic-coloured poster glued on to the window of the train’s internal and heavily manual sliding doors. The poster featured, right the way around its border, illustrated cartoon figures of nude women chasing nude men chasing women chasing a man chasing the single apparently ‘gay’ man in the whole poster. In the middle of the poster was the illustrated face of a fashionable young man and young woman looking moderately concerned though still in psychedelic colours, the superimposed question being: ‘Would you know if you had VD?’ This stood for ‘Venereal Disease’, something which hadn’t been terminal in fifty years and which by the late 70s was so common as to be considered a badge of honour, even ‘trendy’ in young and fashionable social circles.

  In 1987 VD was no longer. It was STD. It was AIDS. It was HIV.

  Now fucking was fatal. The most natural urge in the world. A killer.

  The 1980s…

  Such a wonderful time to be young.

  So relaxing to the soul…

  The First Ever Call Centre

  * * *

  It certainly felt like it…

  Today, even modest call centres feature a light-weight headphone/microphone set, computer screen and keyboard per member of staff. Central to this current set-up is the efficiency of the computerised system by which phone numbers are selected for contact according to required population demo-graphics and failed-call-attempt auto follow-up. These days call centre staff do not even dial phone numbers; they click with a mouse on highlighted lines presenting phone numbers to them on a computer screen.

  In 1987 you got an ashtray on a scratched wooden desk on top of which was a telephone, telephone book, biro and pad. Though — razzle freaking dazzle — it wasn’t just any old ‘dial’ phone but one of the brand-new touch pad phones! Oh yes, nothing but the very latest technology, the state of the art, though as a result of having to balance the telephone hand-piece between your shoulder and ear so as to simultaneously smoke a cigarette and write with the biro you did get a sore neck after a few hours. As to any ‘efficient system’ of telephone number selection, it was whatever page you ripped out of the telephone book whose numbers you then worked through in any order you felt like and which, if engaged or not at home, you called back if you could be bothered.