Detours

by Tim Rogers

  The term was, I believe, originally a euphemism for making love, which suits me fine. I’m a big fan of both the act and what it purports to be a metaphor for – and I want to be surrounded by both of them, or stuck right in the middle participating in both, for the rest of my days.

  If we let this concoction reduce in the pan further, I reckon what we come down to is freedom. To be released from the strictures of work and of convention, and to act purely on the demands of our blood, imagination and desires.

  And if rock’n’roll is about freedom, then I’ve committed far greater crimes against its honour than being caught buying indoor plants or reading books on Percy Grainger. Because so much of my time making this music – this rock’n’roll music, which has given me a life – has been navigated by fear. And living in fear doesn’t resemble freedom whatsoever, no matter how many times you fall off your barstool.

  Until I was thirteen all I wanted to be was a footballer and a cricketer. From the time I was fourteen I wanted to be in a band. Not because I wanted to write songs or purge my soul of its daemons or even find an outlet for my burning creativity. I wanted to be in a gang – and I equated my desire to be in a rock band with a similar desire to be in the Hole in the Wall Gang from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. These handsome rogues got to do naughty stuff and get away with it. Drink around campfires and be ogled by admirers. Eat beans out of a tin and wake up in a new town every other day.

  I’ve often told a story about hearing a Rolling Stones record while getting my teeth drilled in a mobile dentist bus in Adelaide: it was the moment that lightning split me down to my roots, leaving me dazed but desperate to know how to make this music that thrilled and confounded me even more than sex. I went from being a kid who, in the words of my grandmother, would be given a tennis ball and then not seen for another week because I was consumed by throwing, running, kicking and hitting, to becoming a rather glum sort, spending any free hour holed up in my bedroom playing along on a cheap classical guitar to records that I’d save up for by working my many jobs, all of which involved pizza: whether it was the making of, the delivering of, or the cleaning up afterwards of.

  Everything suddenly had a soundtrack, which was helpful for someone in the throes of teenager-dom. For every wildly vacillating mood, there was always a record to accompany it. My brother, Jaimme, sought out the music scenes thrumming away in clubs and pubs just twenty kilometres from our family home in Castle Hill while I waited like a hatchling in the nest, agape for any titbits of information or records. He’d see shows every weekend, predominantly punk and hardcore – Massappeal, Hard-Ons and the Hellmenn were particular favourites – but he also went to raves and clubs playing high energy dance music. House never appealed to me, but Jaimme’s devotion to researching and purchasing music never failed to impress me.

  Jaimme and my best friend, Nik, would introduce me not only to the records but also to the performers of a small coterie of bands who tolerated the presence of three shuffling monosyllabists. My eyes would deepen in my head with awe as they’d chat with Ray of the Hard-Ons or Ollie Olsen of No. Hanging out and sharing records and stories with someone who actually played in a band that did gigs was unthinkable; getting my nose broken for the first time at a Space Juniors gig was like a rite of passage.

  Bubbling asunder, while obsessing over cataloguing riffs by the Ramones and The Replacements, Rory Gallagher and The Runaways, was an anxiety that initially took the form of unease, worry and sleeplessness that accompany any regular adolescence, and which exploded into a full-blown terror by the time I was seventeen. I lacked the insight to be able to explain what I was experiencing a few times a day, which was the sensation of being punched up from under the chin and landing ‘somewhere else’. Somewhere else I couldn’t explain, even now. But everything became very fragile. My skin felt as weak as rice paper. A gust of wind could rearrange my organs. Everything wonderful, sexual and visceral from the music that I thought was the key to heaven was suddenly a thing to be feared. I presumed it was a hangover from drug experimentation and a sensitive constitution, and that it would pass, like a kidney stone.

  At seventeen any dream I had of becoming a professional football player had long been put to rest as my daydreams dictated that the life of a globetrotting, drug-hoovering guitarist would suit me, at least physically: my frame hadn’t developed beyond ‘thin’, and acne had ravaged my face to the extent that hiding it behind a few dozen blustering windmill guitar moves felt right.

  But the freedoms that such a life offered (in my dreams) were reined in by nightmares, as my anxiety exploded sometime between finishing high school and hastily packing a box of records and ill-fitting paisley shirts and setting off for university in Canberra.

  From my comfortable position today, I see that leaving home and starting a degree I was barely qualified to do while I was ailing was not the smartest of ideas, but the foreign surroundings of university did afford me the opportunity to personify my anxiety. If the attacks were the enemy, its foot soldiers were the crafty, louche older students and faculty members whose sole purpose, I had ascertained, was to poison me. Anything served to me was tainted. I do remember studying Hamlet at school . . . but why would anyone want to poison a broke, barely functioning seventeen-year-old? Why that little delusion took up pride of place in my scone is any number of psychoanalysts’ guesses. At a party in first-year uni, my drink was spiked with acid – an incident that ramped up and justified my paranoia, but its true beginnings came from somewhere else I haven’t yet located.

  What I do strongly remember was strolling around my high school oval in north-western Sydney one afternoon, singing the song ‘Daydream’ by the Lovin’ Spoonful, and, without warning, being consumed by a dread as potent as it was unexpected. I couldn’t blame drugs or trauma. It was an odd time as my parents were divorcing and the house was left to us three kids to have week-long John Hughes film marathons and amateur drinking adventures, but the attack seemed to have no real genesis, and it killed my affection for the Lovin’ Spoonful to this day.

  I needed to find a villain to pin the blame on, and I soon conjured up an army of them. There was the baker, the waiter, the barperson, the sandwich maker and especially the gentlefolk who were mixing unnamed, harmful liquids into my margarine.

  I was so convinced of being a target that at university I would boil water for drinking two or three times, before cooling it back down in large pots in a closely monitored fridge. I made coffee in my little room on campus – in the charmingly named Toad Hall: $45 a week, ten rooms to each floor, communal kitchens – only once I’d scrutinised the brand and size of the vacuum-sealed bag. I would never eat anything that I hadn’t prepared myself, and then only if it was plain white rice. Or on special occasions, plain white rice with a dollop of butter. Chocolate was also allowed, but only if Dairy Milk and only the 400-gram block. And all degustation was undertaken in my little hexagonal room.

  Alcohol was allowed, though it was also closely monitored. For some ungodly reason the last dregs of a bottle or can of beer, that sweet little inch of mystery, was deemed to be a possible poison, so the litany of crafty, crappy excuses I’d use among beery, cheery company to explain why I was throwing away the dregs were a collection of lies best suited for an eight-year-old refusing broccoli. But drink was available, it was sometimes cheap, and it cast a warm, reliable blanket over the daemons waiting to claw at me again.

  Obsessions can be perpetual. And like a snowball rolling, my little obsession gathered momentum. While food and drink were the main suspects, soon all number of surfaces came under suspicion. Ink on my fingers from a newspaper was cause for alarm, but smudges from a music fanzine or magazine necessitated a shutdown of all activities. That’s because music was suspicious and nefarious, if not outright evil. The same imagination that joyously leaped to the snap of the fingers of the slightest beat could be reduced to hiding underneath a table covering its ears, at the mercy of capricious interpretations. I remember thumb
ing through a copy of the English weekly NME before going to see a movie called Dogs in Space on George Street in Sydney, and as those glorious opening scenes began, where a young Hugo Race jumps on the car of some passing thugs after they’ve given hell to a cowering Michael Hutchence, I fell into a well of panic as I became convinced the print was seeping into my bloodstream and I would soon be in the throes of another unplanned lysergic adventure.

  As if to script, my habits began to include counting: particularly involving the number eight when opening and closing doors, which messed with my hopes to be chivalrous to all and sundry. Any attempt to politely open a door for man or woman was scuppered by my need to count methodically under my breath beforehand, and compounded by a belief that surfaces covered in silver were breeding grounds for evil mites and must be approached by a stealthily covered hand. Long sleeves, which could be manipulated into mittens in an instant, were de rigueur. I have a wardrobe half-full of shirts and jackets with a distended right arm.

  It’s one thing to be ruled by fear and to set up an arsenal of defences that become daily rituals, it’s quite another for these to be noticed.

  I had become quite the expert at hiding my actions in company since the age of nine, when I acquired a skin condition that caused large red blisters to break out over my body, face and hands and eventually on top and on the underside of my eyelids. This followed a profusion of warts that had erupted on my hands the year before, which forced me to use a contorted writing style in order to hide them (the only time I remember my hands not being thrust deep inside the pockets on my Stubbies shorts). In hindsight, I imagine I looked like a warlock writing spells in his cave, or Fagan, bedevilled with a coarse appearance and wickedly paranoid aspect, but as a kid it must have just made me look odd. I airily explained to anyone who asked that it was the way I was taught to write when I lived in Kalgoorlie as a young boy. ‘That’s just how we did it, okay?’ Whatever my excuses for the blisters were I cannot recall. Possibly scurvy from my time sailing around the globe with my merry band of pirates.

  Back at home on a break from university, even when Dad caught me furiously scrubbing the shell of an egg that I was planning to crack open and cook – in an attempt to show him that I actually ate something other than plain rice – my embarrassment did not overrule my needs.

  But by nineteen, through theatre groups, I’d made some friends who I’d deemed unwilling to dose or poison me. They were too smart, funny and good-looking to regard me as anything other than a not-unpleasant oddity, though I suspected that when they invited me to Melbourne on a weekend trip for the hell of it, it was because I was borrowing my mum’s car that year for work and would be the willing taxi driver. Leading up to the trip, I knew I’d have to eat at some stage, and, gleaning my passengers’ bohemian ways (well, to me at that stage), I imagined there would be cafés and cheap, poorly lit eating houses with Eastern European fare and shared plates. Melbourne, huh? Plainly, that would . . . not . . . do. My solution, the night before leaving, was to bake a rudimentary damper of thoroughly sifted and examined flour, water and butter, which I could stuff in Tupperware and hide in the boot of Mum’s car.

  I badly wanted to be friends with this group. Not only were they attractive and intelligent, I suspected that they went to movies in a group, and probably had dinner parties which one day I could imagine myself attending – quaffing brandy while discussing French film and explaining away my untouched plate of moussaka on religious grounds (or something equally preposterous).

  As it turned out, the trip was not a great success. My position in the group was never promoted above that as driver, and their deeper connections as old friends and lovers left me understandably excluded. It was just a weekend, but knowing I’d have to fuel myself until my driving duties were done and I could find somewhere to drink myself to peace, I’d wake in the group house in Prahran and walk the couple of kilometres to the Yarra with my little Tupperware container of, essentially, baked glue. The river, the birds. A young man, his Tupperware and his glue-cake – daydreaming of a time when he could maybe be free of unnecessary fears and live in the world again.

  All of this somehow leads us to the piquant, and hopefully funny, part of the story as my daydreams of playing in a rock’n’roll band became reality. And really, what isn’t funny about a spotty middle-class kid attempting to play this glorious rabble of an art form?

  Jaimme and Nik were regularly seeing shows in Sydney while I was in Canberra, and making plans on those long post-show drives from the city to the Hills District to get a band together. When I finally conceded that it was impossible for me to continue studying law and working a few cleaning jobs (cleaning jobs!) while fearful of being in contact with . . . well, anything by that stage, I moved back home with my tail between my legs. To extend the zoomorphic metaphors, I had recently started a course of the anti-acne medication Roaccutane that left my skin as coarse as a crocodile’s.

  Rock’n’roll looked like a great place to hide. If only it wasn’t so grubby and evil.

  There are the practical examples of this evil. I had spent many years in sporting club change rooms, following my dad around the Goldfield Leagues of Western Australia, and then as an underwhelming player myself. Even so, there is no smell quite as noxious and pervasive as a microphone that is the property of an inner-city Sydney pub.

  I’d never planned to be a singer, never wanted to and perhaps never should have been, but I was the only one in the band who could get near a melody at that stage, and because I didn’t know you could buy your own microphone if you could afford it, I was compelled to wrestle with microphones that smelled, if not of hell, then its waste disposal unit. Of course the stench was only the companion of any number of life-challenging bacterium. The same breeds that clung to instrument cables lived in the carpets of venues, prospered on the chairs strewn around backstage rooms, and were the stealthy warlords of the humid, fetid breathing air trapped in any venue.

  The prospects for one with afflictions such as mine in this environment were not rosy, but just as sure as everything and everyone in whatever venue we were lucky enough to get a gig in was a threat and a potential enemy, somehow I was in love with making this music. We didn’t yet sound anything like we wanted to – that wouldn’t happen until much, much later – but we’d listen to records and see shows of the bands we loved, daydream of being able to make a glorious racket like they could, and I’d push on, with a can of aerosol disinfectant in my jacket pocket and large quantities of sedatives on hand.

  Cleanliness, I must add, wasn’t the obsession. It was more complicated than that.

  It was imagining what the flying organisms in the fetid air of vintage clothing stores, specks of discolouration in a corn chip, or the bitter taste at the base of a schooner of beer would do to me. I’m quite sure there are as many types of anxiety attacks as there are people who experience them. The ones I hear about often involve heart palpitations and sweats in non-extraordinary situations that persist as the sufferer begins to believe this can only end in a heart attack and death. Though death was an experience to avoid for as long as possible, my little attacks took a form whereby my thoughts would collapse and expand like bellows. I would become, for example, acutely aware of an inanimate object, which could be that crease of sculpture in my field of vision, and the origins of its creation. A chair would be ready to burst into action like a Terry Gilliam animation or Allegro ma non Troppo’s version of Boléro. It wouldn’t happen but bloody hell it was going to. The history of it would become something so overwhelmingly dense that I became obsessed with its creation process, and I would then become aware of my own creation and history, which over hours of panic and a heightened sense of looming catastrophe became dense, then overwhelming, and finally a very scary thing indeed.

  As our little group inexplicably got offered more shows and tours, the half-hour or forty-five minutes onstage became a refuge: it was the time of the day where all the little whispers went away and I could collapse
backward into flash and fury. On tour, however, there were hours to wrestle with and overcome. As we clambered into a Tarago van to drive 800 kilometres to the next show, I still stashed away my glue-cake and trusted Bundaberg ginger beer – but once the cake had run out, the days felt very long, until some free beer, unopened and rigorously inspected, became available.

  When we’d stay at people’s houses, which is what we’d do if the venue had no accommodation, I’d leave early in the morning and walk around whatever town we were in until sound check rather than make our hosts feel bad at my consistent refusals of hospitality and pathetic excuses as to why. As much as I was hating myself for being so tethered to my little obsessions, I guess from this distance the anxiety kinda kept me away from drugs for a while, gave me plenty of material to write about, and kept me rather thin.

  So here I exist with my little friend (let’s call him ‘Shithead’ for now) after years of being angry because of what I previously believed he had robbed me of, namely that decade or so when I was at his mercy to the point that I couldn’t enjoy the good fortune that had landed in my lap – the ‘spoils’, if you will, of being in a semi-successful rock band.

  My habits became worse – number counting was used for getting on aeroplanes, rituals before leaving or entering a room became as elaborate as they were exhausting – but after a time, maybe ten years, they ebbed until they were barely noticeable to anyone but the keenly observant. So it was maybe a decade ago that I immersed myself in the mucky freewheeling kinda living I felt I’d been deprived of, throwing any caution to the four winds. As someone who had found enemies in the passing motes in sunlight, to feel comfortable crushing and snorting up lines of unimaginable constructs felt very liberating. This feeling of liberty, of course, didn’t last, and ol’ Shithead came back with the fury of a spurned lover.

  These days I see the anxiety as a friend. An annoying, tactless one who I never call, but it’s probably saved me from a more narcissistic, self-involved life than the middlingly narcissistic one I’m currently enjoying. If I’d been comfortable in my own skin and not riddled with an odd assortment of obsessions and compulsions, I would have been, I can imagine, the worst kind of companion.