Still Riding on the Storm

by Robert G. Barrett

  And why not? If they didn’t it would not only be unheard of but unconstitutional as well. God bless the flag. And God bless the United States of America.

  So after a gutful of violence it was time for a gutful of booze and boogie. And where better than the Cock ’n’ Bull at Bondi Junction to see The Cockroaches. And what a top night it was for a paltry $5 a head. I like The Cockroaches and so did Mrs Doubtfire. We both got drunk and got down and bless my soul if we didn’t get back up again. The Cockroaches are a top pub band. There’s eight of them and they all look like the boy next door only with heaps more personality. The punters around us were all singing and dancing and cheering, so I know it wasn’t just me and Mrs Doubtfire having a good time. And why not?

  ‘Permanently Single’ is a great song and for a good old, foot stomping rock ’n’ roll you can’t help yourself when they play ‘Kiss You Tonight’. I only wish some of those myxomatosis-diseased morons on radio would check bands like The Cockroaches out and play some of their songs. But not a chance. Why play some good Oz rock when you can slop out Billy, Elton, Johnny and Mariah. I’m sorry, I almost forgot to mention The Eagles and Jackson Browne. After a sensational night of boogie Mrs Doubtfire and I jumped into a taxi where she took me home and … tucked me into bed.

  And now here it is. The news some of you have been waiting for. This is my last column for Nine to Five. Apart from all the other strife I’m in, my work load has caught up with me. I’ve got places to go and people to see. A movie to get together, a range of T-shirts to organise, another Les Norton novel to write and a book tour coming up that will take me all over Australia. But it’s been fun the last few months.

  However I have noticed one thing going by the letters that come in. There are still some serious-minded boofheads out there in the community that can’t laugh at themselves. What a shame. But to them I just say, don’t worry. If you can’t, somebody else will. And if they don’t, I know I’m a special.

  Adios, adieu and dat’s all he wrote.

  BOWLING FOR BUKOWSKI

  A lot of people ask me, write to me, buttonhole me in coffee shops and shopping malls wanting to know who’s my favourite author? Who’s my favourite Australian writer? Who’s my favourite novelist? Well, to be honest, I don’t read many novels. I read mostly biographies or true-life stories such as Keith, Hey You in the Black T-Shirt, A Stone Alone, Bomber, Alphaville, etc. I liked Colleen McCullough’s novel Tim. It had me sitting on the beach in my banana chair crying my eyes out. I’m on a first name basis with Colleen and she autographed Tim for me as her ‘bucket of tears book’. She wasn’t wrong. Tim Winton is a very good writer and I enjoyed his novel The Riders, even if there’s a hole in the plot you could fly a squadron of 747 Jumbo jets through. But Tim got away with it and that’s the main thing. There was a terrific writer living in Australia named Paul Mann, who is now living in America. One of his books was called The Season of the Monsoon, set in India. It was a well-documented and fantastically descriptive book. But Paul’s only problem was he could never end a book. Monsoon was no exception. It fell in a heap in the end. If they’d have torn the last twenty pages out it would have been an absolute ripper. I’ve read a lot of Henry Lawson and Lennie Lower. Lennie was always good for a laugh. And when I was going to Randwick High School, I read a lot of Carter Brown, Larry Kent and Mickey Spillane — when you could find Mickey Spillane. And I enjoy most of Frederick Forsyth’s books. But all up, I don’t care so much for novels. Give me a good ballsy gritty book about the Mafia, bikie gangs, weird rock stars or crooked cops any day.

  This, however, doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t have a favourite author. There’s one writer, I’ve got every book of his I can lay my hands on. I’d read his old shopping lists if I could get hold of them. I even read his poetry. And I hate fuckin poetry, especially free verse. Except back in the day when young women would come up to me and say, ‘Are you Robert Barrett the author?’ My standard reply was always, ‘I’m not sure. Do I owe you any money?’ Then they’d gush and tell me how they wrote poetry. And I would say, ‘Really? Gee, that’s good. I love poetry. Why don’t you call round and show me some of your works?’ And I have to admit, after getting corns on my ears from listening to their absolute self-pity-ridden dribble while I loosened them up with a few glasses of cheap plonk, a lot of times this dirty old bastard would have his filthy way with these poor gullible women poets. But the bloke, the author I’m talking about, is the late Charles Bukowski. I love his filthy, base, semi-obscene, if-you-don’t-like-it-stick-in-your-arse style of writing. One book of his, Women, I’ve read ten times. And I’ll read it another ten times. It’s a complete crack-up.

  Actually, apart from Charles writing in the first person and me mainly writing in the third, the late ‘Hank’ and myself have a lot in common. We both had bad-tempered fathers, we’ve both had more than our share of street fights, we both served short stints in gaol for misdemeanours. We’ve both been flat broke. We’ve both worked rotten jobs for pricks of bosses, alongside blokes we couldn’t stand. I’ve had the bank wanting to foreclose on my house while the sheriff was at the door wanting to take my car and furniture. I’ve never slept on park benches. But I’ve slept in sandhills, crappy boarding houses and my car. I’ve never been a cigarette-smoking pisspot or bonked fat ugly hookers and been involved with women as crazy as the ones Bukowski did when he got famous in California. But I don’t mind a drink and I porked plenty of fat ugly girls when I was a young waxhead leaking testosterone all over Bondi Beach. And when I got established as a writer, I got involved with some of the nuttiest, weirdest women in Australia. If you want to know what they were like, trawl through some of my books such as Goodoo Goodoo or The Wind and the Monkey. If you find a crazed woman in them, you can bet she’s based on one of my ex-girlfriends.

  So apart from similarities in our lifestyles, what is it I like about Charles Bukowski? Put simply, his honesty. He’s an honest writer. He’s not out to impress you or the critics. He’s not writing to garner literary accolades or grants. He just writes about what he sees around him and spices it up a little when he adapts it into a novel using his alter ego ‘Hank Chianski’. And if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Tell me, what author, particularly in Australia, could write about masturbating in bed, getting up, having a crap, cleaning the bowl because there’s a woman he’s trying to impress calling around later, going to the letter box, boiling an egg for breakfast then, after a glass or two of cheap wine or a few cans of beer, going to the races before coming home, drinking more cheap piss and writing about it all night? You wouldn’t be able to give the books away. But Charles Bukowski could. And make it thought-provoking and entertaining as well as funny. I could go on all day about my hero Charles Bukowski. But if you want the full guts on Hank Chianski, get a DVD called Bukowski: Born into This. It tells it warts and all and extracts a tear or two into the bargain.

  Anyway, after a life of cheap booze, cigarettes, flop houses, fat whores and no food, by the time he got rich and famous and found an attractive wife who loved him, Bukowski finished up with tuberculosis and leukaemia. Towards the end he wrote one particular book called The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship. In it, he just writes about his life in general, other odd things and observations of people around him. It’s great writing. Brilliant in its enigmatic simplicity, honesty and eye for detail. So, seeing as the last three years of my life have been an absolute shit fight, and in honour of the late, great Charles (Hank) Bukowski, I thought I’d write a story in his style. Isn’t imitation the greatest form of flattery? Be warned, though. It’s filthy, grungey and right in your face. But that’s the way I had to go if I was to nail my old mate Hank. Strangely enough though, during the third year of my shit fight, I’m certain I also nailed an old treatment for cancer that actually seems to work. So, grab a bottle of cheap plonk, some even cheaper cigars and a fat ugly hooker, and let’s go bowling for Bukowski.

  The shit hit the fan for me in lat
e 2008. I knew it would. It had to. Because everything at the time was going so good. I’d just recovered from bladder surgery and after three months of pissing rusty thumb tacks and oyster shells, I was now pissing like an urchin and loving it. I’d just finished another book, the extremely violent High Noon in Nimbin. So I had a nice fat advance royalties cheque sitting in the bank. The government booted my poor old mother, who absolutely hated me, off the pension, so I got her into a nice nursing home up here, took her miserable, pissy, smelly old moth-eaten shit of a cat that hated me as much as my mother, under my wing. Then, in the middle of a real estate slump, put an ad for her run-down, cat-shit-riddled town house at Maroubra in the paper and sold it in two weeks for a motza and no real estate agent fees. I used part of the money to pay off a house I bought at Shoal Bay when I spat the dummy and decided to mortgage my house at Terrigal and move up there, before I changed my stupid bloody mind.

  Then to top it all off, I changed accountants and got all my superannuation back and put it in the bank, two weeks before the financial crisis. Friends of mine lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I lost bugger all. So there I was, all cashed up, footloose and fancy free, out of debt and summer was coming on. Plus, instead of having to drive all the way to Sydney to get abused by the old girl, I only had to drive over to Kincumber, ten minutes away. Life was great. The only problem was the old moggy shitting, pissing and spewing all over the house. So I decided to kill the cat by sticking its head in a bucket of water.

  But I couldn’t do it just like that. What sort of a barbarian do you take me for? I had to make plans. Plus, if the old girl found out her loving moggie was missing, she’d change the will. So one dark and stormy night, I crushed up two Rohypnols, four Valium and four Ativan and slipped them in puss’s bowl. This knocked the old cat for a loop, even if it didn’t quite knock it out. So I picked it up and took photos of it on my office chair, on my bed, on my recliner, lying on the lounge, etc. All the time it just lay there stoned off its head looking up at me with these big, soft googoo eyes. In the end they got to me and I couldn’t do it. So the cat got a last minute reprieve. I took the photos over to Mum and she couldn’t believe how relaxed the cat looked and how it had settled in with me. That’s just the way I am with animals, I told her. Funnily enough, after her giant trip, the old cat and myself became friends. I’d just slip her half a Valium now and again and the old flea bag thought I was the best bloke in the world. Life was great.

  Then one fine morning, I was sitting on the brascoe, reading the paper amongst all the stink like any proud Aussie bloke. When I’d had enough and went to wipe my hairy fat blurter, I noticed blood where there shouldn’t have been. I didn’t like the look of it. But apart from a few pains in the gut now and again, which must have contributed to all the violence in High Noon in Nimbin, I was feeling pretty good for a grumpy old man. Nevertheless, I went and saw my local GP, who referred me to a specialist, who lined me up for a colonoscopy at Woy Woy Private Hospital.

  In I went, where I found I knew the anaesthetist, who I’ll call Todd, who used to live next door to me. Todd was a real good bloke, and everybody who knew him said the same thing. Nobody ever said a bad word about him. Which sort of gave me the shits in a way. I was hoping just one person would say, Jesus, that Todd’s an arsehole, I wish he’d fall down a manhole. But no such luck. So I’m yakking away with Todd while they’re prepping me and I have to admit, I like the buzz when they put you under. I always talk right up until the hammer comes down and in what seems like a split second later you wake up in another room. It’s like time travel. So under I go, I wake up and Todd’s wheeling me into the recovery room and I started joking with him again.

  ‘How was it, Todd?’ I asked. ‘Just a few polyps?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘it’s not. You’ve got cancer.’ Then good bloke Todd just walked off and left me.

  For all my tough guy writing and my sarcastic smartarse attitude, I’m a bit of an old sheila at heart. And to find out you’ve got cancer then just be dumped there like that, hit me in the face like a shovel. My happy, cashed-up world had just turned into a steaming pile of shit. All I could do was stare up at the ceiling knowing I was going to die. Finally the doctor and the nurse came in with long faces and the first thing I said was, ‘How long have I got to go?’ However, the doctor assured me it wasn’t as bad as all that. They’d found it early and they could get it all out. When did I want to have an operation? I was still in a state of panic and said, ‘How about right now? This afternoon. Tomorrow fuckin morning. Let’s go. I’ve got fuckin cancer.’

  The specialist lined me up with an oncologist at North Sydney Private Hospital, so I drove down to Sydney and met the surgeon, who lined me up for another colonoscopy. I paid a woman I knew to drive me down for that and afterwards I was assured once more that the cancer was in its early stages and he’d get it all out. I’d be in hospital a week, I wouldn’t need any chemotherapy and he’d perform the operation in a week’s time. I went home a reasonably happier man.

  I knew I was going to be pretty stuffed when I left hospital so I had to organise for someone to give me a hand when I got home and someone to feed and keep the drugs up to my latest best friend the old cat while I was away. A married couple who lived up the street said they’d feed the moggie and I arranged for the same woman who drove me to Sydney to help me out around the house while I recovered. I’d known this woman, I’ll call her Agatha, for a fair while and even took her out a couple times after her husband traded her in on a newer model. She was the most indecisive woman I’d ever met and used to rabbit on about ‘shit-for-brains’ — her ex — a bit too much. But she was still fairly attractive for her age and at least she was company, and I like to take a KFC (Kind Female Companion) out for a feed now and again. She also liked to whinge about how she never had any money. So I imagined Agatha would appreciate a nice easy earn and it might add a little joy to her life.

  Agatha drove me down to the hospital on Friday and dropped me off. I said I’d be in touch, I’d see her next Friday and she could use my ute while I was in hospital. Agatha split and I admitted myself into the cancer ward with the rest of the dead people walking. What can I say? The hospital was nice, my room was nice, the nurses and staff were extremely nice; even the food was nice. The only trouble was, I wasn’t allowed to eat anything. I had a lousy shit of a night with no sleep and waited for the big day.

  After a splendid breakfast of a glass of water and a brisk walk round my room, they loaded me onto a gurney and wheeled me down to the operating theatre. As usual I kept rabbiting away non-stop, yakety-yak, blah, blah, blah, right up to the off. A nanosecond later, I woke up in a big room with a drip in my arm, a stomach full of tiny metal clips, a catheter jammed up my old boy, and instead of an arsehole, I had a stoma — something like a strawberry sticking out of my stomach covered by a plastic bag — and I was in a shitload of fuckin pain. It didn’t take me long to find the morphine button and that’s where my trigger finger stayed till they wheeled me back to my room.

  If I thought the previous night was bad, compared to this it was a walk in the park. Instead of the nurses coming into pester you every hour, they came in about every twenty minutes. I soon figured out how to get back at them. No matter how much they prodded me jabbed me or tortured me, I used to thank them. Thank you. Thank you, nurse. After a while they figured out I was either a gibbering idiot or a nice old bloke. They all fell for the latter. I also figured out hospital beds and the gowns they make you wear were designed by the Nazi SS to torture any unfortunate Jewish people that finished up in the death camps. I defy anybody to tell me they’ve slept okay in hospital and they like the gowns. And that’s pretty much how I spent my time. Scarcely able to move, except to press my morphine button or hold my stomach, and praying I didn’t cough, laugh or sneeze. Mother rang three times to ask me how the cat was. A couple of events however helped to break the monotony.

  I got a mag on with a good-natured, young male nurse who said
he was thinking of writing a book about working in a hospital. I said that’s what I did for a living, gave him an autographed book and said if I could help him in any way, give me a yell. Ten minutes later I had a new, soft mattress on my bed and thirty minutes later he brought me in a recliner so I could relax in front of the window and enjoy the nonexistent view. But I could see the clouds and the sky and that was enough for me. The other event was my catheter. They replaced it four times, one doctor from parts unknown even managed to stick one in the wrong way around. But no matter what they did, I couldn’t piss. Whether the surgeon had gutted me with an old Bowie knife or something, I don’t know. But there was no way I could have a snakes without a catheter. So they arranged for another surgeon to give me a TURPS. I don’t really know what that is. But it’s supposed to open up your bladder or something. You should have seen the doctor who arrived to do the operation. He was dressed like an unmade bed, wore his hair in a smother and looked like the last time he’d done any surgery was during the Crimean War with no anaesthetic and Florence Nightingale holding the lamp. However, the dear old doctor said he could fix my piddling problem. But I’d be in hospital another week. Great. They starved me again that night, and late the next morning wheeled me down for my TURPS.

  As usual I kept rabbiting away till the off and when I woke up this time I had a superpubic catheter jammed into the left side of my stomach like a meat skewer. Catheters have a small inflated balloon on the end to give your bladder the impression you want to have a piss. And that’s how you spend your days and nights, feeling like you’re busting for a leak all the time. In the meantime a stoma nurse came in and explained my stoma to me and showed me how to change it by myself. They’re great things, stomas. They go non-stop, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, pumping out gunk that looks and smells like a mixture of wino’s vomit and pureed flying fox shit. One night I found out something else about stomas. They fill up while you’re asleep, then you roll on them and they burst. This happened to me one night. I had to call the nurses and I’ve never felt so embarrassed all my life as I lay on my bed covered in foul-smelling gunk while they cleaned me and everything else up. Poor bloody nurses. Don’t ever try and tell me they don’t earn their money. But the cancer surgeon said I’d only have to wear the bag for three months then he’d join me back up. I rang Agatha and told her I wouldn’t be out till the following Friday. Agatha ummed and ahhhed over whether she could pick me up on Friday. She had to go shopping. Maybe Saturday? Ring her back through the week. Terrific, Agatha. Where do I sleep on Friday night when they boot me out? In the fuckin lobby?