The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny: A memoir

by Meshel Laurie

  They were great guys, but the house itself remains the filthiest building I’ve ever set foot in, even though I’ve found myself in some pretty crude doss houses over the years. It was owned by the father of one of the future doctors, and he, the son, was the third brother in the family to live there while at uni. All of their stays had overlapped, so there had never, in at least a decade, been a big, moving-out clean-up. People just moved in and out constantly, exchanging keys and bonds and paying rent to the senior brother in attendance.

  They were adorably domesticated in some ways. We had chooks and a cat, and we used to all sit together at night and watch the telly. It was just the gentle, low-key environment I needed at the time. They liked to share food and food shopping, so we’d pool our money (they’d always put in more than me, but never mention it), and wander down to Coles on a Saturday afternoon when they started marking down the meat. We’d compete elbow to elbow with a hundred old ladies for slimy sausages and slightly browning chops, then all week we took turns cooking and washing up. In between we’d squeeze the dishes, pots and pans and cutlery inside the one glass-doored cupboard by the window.

  What we never did was talk about the darkness below—the many years of Brisbane’s best black mould, building upon itself inside every kitchen and bathroom cupboard in the house. The carpet produced tumbleweeds, there was a visible layer of grey dust resting atop every communal surface, and it would not have been unreasonable to wear thongs in the shower, as one would in any overused and under-serviced amenities block. It was a disgrace, there’s no two ways about it, and I just put it down to living with boys, which I’d never done before. In a house shared by girls there is generally at least one well-trained domestic goddess who’ll do all the cleaning in return for the right to bitch about it incessantly. That frankly is a trade-off I am happy to make, but it does go to show how much of the subtle loveliness of living with those boys I didn’t appreciate at the time. There was no bitching, about anything, ever. No one bailed me up in the kitchen to whisper hateful complaints in my ear about someone in the lounge, oblivious. No one exploded in a premenstrual hissy fit of tears, threatening to move out and take their microwave with them. There was no drama. There was mould though. And to be honest, there was a little bit of boredom, so when I heard of a room going in a share house in which a girl who’d gone to school with a girl I knew from uni lived with a bunch of other girls, I jumped at it. I was lonely for a frenemy.

  The all-girl house was a pretty rough joint. It turned out that the resident domestic goddess had moved out just weeks before I moved in, but she had left behind a timber day bed with a thin, vinyl-covered mat on it. That was my bed. If you think that’s tough, you should’ve been there the day she arrived unannounced with her brother and his ute to claim it! That was a real low, I remember. One of those moments where you just sit on the back steps and cry about how truly shit your life has turned out to be. No bed, no money for a bed, and then the wooden plank I’d been sleeping on was repossessed. I don’t know how long I sat on the back steps, but eventually I did what I always do, which is accept that there is no one to help me, and that I have to sort something out myself. Eventually I rang St Vincent de Paul, and bless ’em, they brought me over a second-hand bed and mattress the next morning, so I only had one night on the floor.

  Obviously Vinnies helped me that day, but when I say I have no one to help me, I mean that I always have this awful feeling that I could sit on the back steps and cry all day long and no one would ever come and put their arm around me and tell me they’ve solved my problem for me. It’s made me very independent and resilient, but it’s also created a sort of hole inside me, and a resentment. I never feel particularly proud of sorting out a disaster on my own, but pissed off actually. I suppose it goes back to the not-daddy’s-girl complex.

  Anyway, there was definitely no one around to help me in this particular share house, which delivered unto me a frenemy who set a new benchmark for the species. She was a tortured teenage alcoholic who’d battled a serious eating disorder, then fallen pregnant to a man she loved madly, but who’d encouraged her to terminate the pregnancy, and then broke up with her not long after she did. This poor girl was a mess and was well into the habit of self-medicating with cheap red wine by the time I moved into the bedroom next to hers. She was followed around and fawned over by a boy with very rich parents who’d have lost their minds if they’d known anything about her. They had already commenced discussions with other families from their old country about potential wives for him to consider; the only consideration he was permitted was which one he’d agree to marry. There was no way in the world he could even introduce his parents to his real love—the frail, chain-smoking, red-wine-stained girl he adored—let alone ‘date’ her openly. That suited her, because it meant she didn’t feel obliged to have sex with him.

  She was very far down the road of addiction and depression and thrived on the rejection of his family. It confirmed that she was low, and joined the list of reasons to drink and starve and self-destruct. I loved her, in the way you love a neglected animal as it slowly lets down its guard and allows itself moments of loving you back. My frenemies up until that point had been aggressive, take-no-prisoners power-bitches. But this girl was a classic wounded bird. She was always so nice to me, and craved my company more and more. I thought she was the best friend I’d ever had. And when I timidly told her I was thinking of volunteering at the community radio station 4ZZZ she encouraged me to go for it.

  Triple Z really made me feel like I was back in the land of the living. If drama school had made me feel like I’d found my tribe, Triple Z made me feel like I’d busted through the looking glass to the parallel universe of my dreams. It was (and still is) run out of a busted-arse old building in Fortitude Valley in the seedy centre of Brisbane, and was a haven for dole-bludging bohemians of every age and persuasion. Joints were shared freely in the studio, and Brisbane’s hottest young bands like Powderfinger and Regurgitator were regular visitors. I know because I was on reception and loving it. It made me feel useful and sort of skilful, not unlike my computer class at TAFE, which was being put to good use on recepo I might add.

  Once, someone forgot to show up for a pre-recorded interview with none other than Dave Graney, and I was yanked from my post on reception to fill in. I’d never actually heard of Dave Graney ’n’ the Coral Snakes when I arrived at the station that morning, although I became a big fan later. ‘You know, “Too Hip Baby!”’ they kept saying to me as they crammed me into the voice booth. I was too ashamed to admit I didn’t know ‘You’re Just Too Hip Baby,’ although it’s since become one of my favourite songs, and I invoke its chorus whenever I encounter a bad review or a gossip columnist. ‘You take a feather from every bird you see, you never fly. You’re just too hip baby.’

  Not only did I know nothing about Dave Graney, I’d never interviewed anyone in my life, and there was no Wikipedia or the like that today spares everyone a lot of embarrassment. I’m sure Dave Graney realised all of that, but he was a beautiful gentleman. I spent a lovely couple of hours working with him years later on Spicks and Specks, and again decided against reminding him of our first encounter.

  I was well chuffed with the Dave Graney interview and decided to do the new announcers’ course, which was much less formal than it sounds. I learnt how to operate the buttons, and started practising on ‘mid-dawn’ shifts, during which I was all alone in the building and on the air from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m. It was gruelling, but great fun. Eventually after about three months of that I scored the Saturday night shift—mostly because everyone else wanted to go out, I guess, but I have always preferred working over socialising.

  I was assisted on the Saturday night shift by a girl I kind of knew, who was also a big Doug Anthony All Stars Fan. She heard Judith Lucy was coming to town and contacted the guy at the Sit Down Comedy Club for an interview. This other girl was really straight and took her law degree pretty seriously, so I ended up meeting the gu
y from the Comedy Club to tee up the interview. (I was too shy to actually do the interview, so my friend did it by herself.) I ended up hanging out a few times with that guy, Fedele Crisci—and even though Fedele has given me the shits a few times over the years, I have to say he encouraged me to give stand-up a go. He was opening a second room—an open-mike night at a place called Famous Bob’s Steak House, which is where I did my first stand-up gig in March 1994.

  I had never in my wildest dreams thought I could ever do stand-up; I had too much respect for those who did. There was nothing in my upbringing to give me the idea that people like me were capable of such things, which ironically is true of most comedians. Comedians tend to be people who’ve had the wind knocked out of them as kids, in one way or another, but I didn’t know that back then. I thought what everyone else thinks—that you must need a lot of self-confidence to be a stand-up comedian.

  I certainly didn’t have any. I was an overweight, nobody, drug-casualty, dole-bludging loser. I didn’t even have a car anymore. Having driven it until it wouldn’t go, and having no funds or prospect of funds to make it go again, I’d surrendered it to my father, who wanted to give it to my sister. (He didn’t come to get it. He sent a man and a truck and I stood out in the street watching him winch it aboard and look down on me like the piece of shit I was sure he’d heard I was.) No, I didn’t see myself as the self-assured, urbane sophisticate I assumed real comedians were. Rather, I decided to do a stand-up gig because I thought it would be one of those things I could look back on later with some pride. A #yolo kind of thing.

  I wrote five minutes’ worth of jokes and rehearsed them, whispering to myself in my dark bedroom for about two weeks. I just kept thinking about Wendy Harmer, about her command of the stage, about her posture, her eye contact, her facial expressions, the way she used all of those things to own the room, and I built all of those things in, right there in my darkened room.

  On the big night, all my friends came down to Famous Bob’s to cheer me on. There were maybe a hundred people in the room in total. It was free to get in, and was a steak house in real life, so a lot of those people had no idea they were an audience at a comedy night.

  I stepped up onto the little stage in the corner, purposefully pulled the microphone out of the stand as I’d seen Wendy and Rachel Berger and Judith Lucy do so many times before, gazed around the room for a moment, then launched into my first joke. I can’t remember what it was, but I know it got a laugh and I was off. My timing was good, my preparation was paying off, and most of my jokes were funny when milked with plenty of facials. I was completely in the moment, which was panning out exactly as I’d planned—until a drunk old man in a cowboy hat perched on a stool to my right yelled something at me.

  It wasn’t particularly nasty, but the room suddenly fell silent. The audience held its collective breath in a reaction I must’ve felt ten thousand times in my life since: they were suddenly scared for me. So much of stand-up comedy is ensuring the crowd that you are in control, that they are going to have a relaxing, fun time, and that nothing awkward or horrible is going to happen on that stage to make them feel embarrassed for someone. Just like an ice skater’s first wobbly ankle puts spectators on edge, praying for the routine to end, so too a heckler tightens the sphincter of the comedy fan.

  The closeness of my heckler actually helped me that night, because I could hear him clearly, and by moving my head out of the light slightly, I could see him. I could see that he was smiling and just having fun, so without thinking about it, I smiled and responded to him in the same harmless, cheeky way he’d addressed me. The crowd roared with relief, and egged us both on as we bantered tit-for-tat for a minute or so. Instinctively I knew I didn’t have any jokes as exciting as that spontaneous encounter, so I thanked the crowd and got off my little podium. My first gig was a good ’un.

  I knew, that night, that I was a comedian. I couldn’t quite believe it as I loved and admired comedians so much, but I knew it was true because the whole process had come to me really easily, more easily than anything ever before. I felt like I already knew how to do it, which is another thing I’ve only come to understand recently—but more on that later. (I love it when people do that in books!)

  When I say it came easily to me, I don’t mean I could just jump up and think of funny things to say all night long. I’m not Billy Connolly! What I mean is that writing and performing came easily, but I still invested a lot of time in both. From then on I did at least one gig a week, performing anywhere that would have me (and always for nothing), wrote new material constantly, and rehearsed day and night. My frenemy marvelled at my commitment. She was struggling through a degree in psychology (??!!!??), and declared I was more studious than she was. She glowed with pride when telling other people about my comedy, which I found incredibly moving. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been proud of me.

  My frenemy was more supportive and complimentary than anyone I’d ever known, but things around the house were kind of crazy/chaotic/drunken/dramatic/tortured. The front door stopped shutting one day, and no one got around to doing anything about it, so wild animals, and possibly a few domesticated ones, sifted through our kitchen bin at night. My little mate, who was falling-down drunk most of the time, decided she was in love with me which was just about the last straw for her ‘boyfriend’, who was desperately avoiding meeting the young lady he was supposed to be preparing to marry. On top of all that we had a visit from the cops one night over a copy of Boyz n the Hood that had never been returned to the local video shop (I swear this is true). The videotape had become lodged in the VCR some time before I’d even moved in, and the entire machine had simply been unplugged and placed in a linen cupboard. The machine was handed over to the authorities, who seemed happy enough with the outcome, although it made me particularly nervous as I knew there was a similarly ill-gotten copy of Dogs in Space on the premises too. Everything was nuts, but I was devoted to my little friend. I forgave her when she cried and threatened to move out with her microwave. I forgave her when she spent the rent money on booze. I even forgave her when she told her parents I’d spent it, ensuring they sneered at me every time they dropped by to check on her.

  All the original girls had moved out, leaving just the two of us, and we kept renting rooms to people who quickly realised we were nuts and promptly moved out. As every housemate moved out, they demanded their share of the bond from the person moving in to take over their old room, which is like a share house pyramid scheme. By the time we were evicted—even after we’d paid the rent that was owing, and even after I’d spent days in there alone trying to clean the accumulated filth of about twenty former tenants off the venetian blinds I’d never even noticed before—the real estate agents kept the entire bond. I had another cry on the back steps and then somehow found us another house. For every swing, there’s a roundabout they say, and although I don’t really know what that means, I know I was thrilled and flattered when we were joined in our new digs by my favourite friend who’d disappeared from uni. I’d really loved this girl, thought we’d be besties for life, and here she was ready to move in and make it happen.

  I’m sure anyone on the outside looking in would’ve seen three silly girls playing house who’d be lucky to see out their six-month lease. I was trying to create a family. I was so desperate for stability, for a support network, and I was relying on these two equally lost young people to provide it for me. My BFF and I were on the dole, smoking pot again, juggling loser boyfriends, hanging out at gay clubs and I was learning to be a comedian. I thought we were having a really cool time—but out of the blue she disappeared again.

  She and her parents had been in the kitchen searching for teabags during what I thought was a visit, but later that afternoon I returned home to find that she’d driven back to north Queensland with them. Not a word to me, no goodbye, not even a note. She’d just walked out, which not only left us in a mess rent-wise, but also devastated me personally. Perhaps it was the
fact that her parents wanted her home with them so badly that really upset me—made me jealous, I mean. However I still think I deserved a goodbye. Sonia was nine when she hadn’t said goodbye, but this girl was an adult who’d chosen to run away from me while I was at the shops.

  God, what a horrible person I must’ve been to deserve that. I had a bit of a cry on the back steps and invited her cousin to move in. The rent problem was solved, but I don’t think I’ve ever really trusted a friend since.

  My little drunk frenemy had been suffering some jealousy of her own since my old uni friend had been around. I must admit I’d probably paid her a lot less attention, so by the time it was just us again she wasn’t interested anymore. Her ‘boyfriend’ had stood up to his parents and became an actual boyfriend, so she didn’t need me for comfort, or for anything. Suddenly I was very lonely again. We all moved out of that house, and she never paid her share of the bills, which were all in my name and took me months to pay off.

  I moved all my stuff into my parents’ garage and asked if I could stay there a couple of days a week for six months. I got that stinky old bus to Brisbane to do gigs every weekend, surfing friends’ couches, and back to Toowoomba every Monday. My parents had moved house by then, so I was actually surfing a couch at their place as well. It was all pretty cramped and uncomfortable, and truthfully I was a bit hurt about the fact that there was no bed in their new house for me. It was unreasonable given my avoidance of them, but still, it seemed harsh at the time. Mum said they hadn’t expected me back and my father scoffed at the idea that a 21-year-old would think there should still be a bed for them in their parents’ home. He’d been asking when I was moving out since I was fifteen.

  As awkward as it was, by not paying for rent or utilities I was able to clear my debts once again, and start saving for Melbourne. I decided two grand would do it—although I hadn’t bargained on meeting a truly generous woman, who didn’t know me from Adam but helped me anyway because she believed in my talent and just felt like it was the right thing to do. I was so desperately in need of kindness right then, and she provided it in spades. That fabulous lady was Julia Morris.