The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny: A memoir

by Meshel Laurie

So anyway, there it was flashing away in the corner of our little flat in 1998. I wandered over and hit the button, having long since given up on hearing anything more exciting than a frantic plea to cover a brothel reception shift somewhere, or my mother droning on about the fact that we hadn’t spoken in months—but was delighted to hear the smiling, self-conscious voice of Dave Taranto asking me to consider coming out of retirement and doing a gig at The Cheese Shop.

  Dave Taranto and his Cheese Shop is a lovely but long story I shall attempt to condense here. The Cheese Shop was something we would call a ‘brand’ today—a description Dave would’ve thought both crass and hilarious; he would’ve raised his thick eyebrows very high when he said it. It was a radio show on Triple R and a Wednesday night comedy gig at the Prince Patrick Hotel in Collingwood, but unlike every other gig in town—and as far as I know, in the country—it was strictly curated by Dave, who invited performers to come and work there. It was the home of the edgy comedy for which Melbourne was becoming internationally famous. When I met my friend Linda in the meat-rompers, chasing live crickets, it was at The Cheese Shop; it was also where I also saw Judith Lucy and Fleety trying out new material, the Scared Weird Little Guys joining forces with Lano and Woodley in a supergroup they called Plop, and many other underground wonders besides.

  On one memorable night I saw bizarre British comedian Chris Lynam do his famous ‘firecracker up the bum’ routine, singing ‘There’s No Business Like Showbusiness’. It’s on YouTube if you’d like to see it for yourself. The Prince Pat was a fairly small venue in which to light a firecracker in any cavity, and I remember feeling the heat from it on my face, which gives you some indication how close I also was to his bare arse and hand-cupped genitals.

  Dave used to come to The Espy to scout for newbies, and invited me to perform at The Cheese Shop in early 1996. He had a big Christmas show every year in which he gave the first bracket to his three favourite discoveries of the previous twelve months, and in 1996 that honour went to me, Wil Anderson and Alan Brough.

  So there I was in my lounge room in 1998, feeling forgotten by the Melbourne comedy world, when one of its kings was on my answering machine trying to coax me back. I was really touched that someone as respected and busy as Dave would even notice I wasn’t around, let alone take the time to call and encourage me to have another go. It was a massive vote of confidence, but I was feeling so low that not even Dave’s support was enough to get me motivated again. I did the gig a fortnight later. It was okay, but I was out of sorts, even nervous. I was grateful for the opportunity, but it didn’t exactly reignite my passion. I suppose it was easier to retreat back to my world of drugs, prostitutes and disappointment. My mind was cloudy. Days and nights and weeks and months were rolling over me like grey waves. I really wasn’t sure I had the energy to pull myself out, and decided to postpone trying.

  I next saw Dave out and about during the Comedy Festival in 1999 where I was punishing myself by seeing the shows of comedians I’d started out with. I was not performing at all, in anything. People kept asking me what I was doing now—the most painful question in the world for a performer doing nothing. I made them laugh with stories about the brothels, but oh God, it hurt.

  One memorable night I ran into Rove at the bottom of the Melbourne Town Hall steps, which were bustling with Festival-goers and performers. He was accompanied by a group of people I didn’t know, who were kitted out in torn black clothes, piercings and dreadlocks. ‘I see you’ve brought Killing Heidi along!’ I said jokingly, although no one in the group found it at all funny. In fact, they all reacted really weirdly and just sort of shuffled away.

  The following night, at my local 7-Eleven I realised why as I flipped through the current issue of Rolling Stone. They were Killing Heidi. They were a properly famous band at that time. How the hell did they know Rove, my old Espy buddy who was doing something at Channel 9 which I never got to see because I was in brothels? I was as impressed by Rove’s new friends as I was crushingly humiliated by what he and they must’ve thought of me. I really wasn’t living in the same world as Rove anymore, and it made me feel like a big, dumb clumsy idiot who might as well have stayed a loud fat girl in Toowoomba.

  The Killing Heidi incident was also awful because it happened in front of my number-one frenemy, whose enjoyment of the moment was palpable. She loved it when my joke fizzled and I looked like a loser on the Town Hall steps, then danced like she’d won The Price is Right showcase when I told her about the Rolling Stone discovery. For years she took great pleasure in telling me about the triumphs of some of my old crowd with whom she remained close, and I was desperate for every devastating detail.

  Dave Taranto, Cheese Shop proprietor, with his lovely assistant Janet A. McLeod in the back room at The Espy, 1995. (Photograph—Peter Milne, courtesy of M.33, Melbourne.)

  I pretty much gave up on the whole 1999 Comedy Festival after that, but I stuck my head in one more time about a week later and ran into Dave Taranto in pretty much the same spot at the bottom of the Town Hall steps. He and Greg Fleet were attempting to corral a Labrador they’d found roving the streets. We chatted for a while, but they were on a mission to find the dog’s owner, Greg was supposed to be on stage, and I was off to pine for someone else’s career, so we parted ways for what would turn out to be the last time under such carefree circumstances.

  Dave was diagnosed with a massive brain tumour a couple of weeks later, and given six months to live.

  Paul McCarthy—most recently infamous for playing Kevin Rudd in At Home with Julia—was a dear friend of Dave’s and has a beautiful tribute on his website. It includes video of Dave’s last appearance on stage, during which he and Brian Nankervis kicked off the ‘Cheese Shop ’til You Drop’ gigs in 1999, which was a sort of ‘living wake’ that lasted for three days and was topped and tailed by the guest of honour. Dave was nothing if not a rebel with a taste for the dark side of comedy, so it was no surprise to those who knew him that he would want to stand on his stage and laugh in death’s face, even as it embraced him.

  There was a total fire ban the day Dave was cremated, five months after those last gigs, which everyone agreed would’ve made him laugh a lot. His girlfriend Kath wore a bright red dress, someone sang something heartbreaking, and the speakers did their best to laugh through their tears. I distinctly remember seeing one of my great comedy mentors Dave Grant there, so handsome and dignified, and wishing I could hug him for comfort, but being too embarrassed to talk to him, because I knew he’d ask me what I was doing now and I couldn’t tell him I’d given up on comedy.

  Dave Taranto’s funeral was just a few weeks shy of the new millennium, which loomed large for everyone I’m sure. I kept thinking about what I thought I’d be doing by the year 2000, when I was a kid, and it seemed like such a long way away. I thought I’d be married, with kids of my own, rich and successful. I was one for four—but unlike Dave, I was still in it.

  There was so much talk about all the things Dave had going for him, all the stuff he was in the middle of, all the stuff he’d have done if that bastard tumour hadn’t got him . . . It made me feel pathetic. Perhaps it was my first brush with my own mortality. As a child I’d seen ‘old’ people die—but Dave wasn’t old, he was my friend, and his life was over. He’d done everything great he was ever going to do. Had I?

  I was 27. I was sleeping all day, wrangling prostitutes all night, and hustling drunks out of dollar coins.

  I was ready to have another go at life. It was time to give myself another good kick up the jacksie and make this life of mine happen—again!

  THE WHORE IS BORN

  Comebacks are hard, particularly when you went away because no one was interested in you anymore. It’s not like I was Betty White and everyone was pumped to have their favourite Golden Girl back in the pack. Mine was more of a Jana Pittman comeback in which everyone smiled warily, and wondered how long it’d take me to get distracted by my own greatness and blow another opportunity.

&n
bsp; It’s one thing to show up in a town where no one knows you and to capitalise on their curiosity and hunger for newness. It’s quite another to ask them to look again when they clearly got a bit bored with what they saw the first time. I had to be so much better than before, work so much harder, and I had to live down whatever arse-holery I’d perpetrated by being really grateful, all the time. I had to pay my dues.

  Secretly though, I was all about claiming my rightful place. I might’ve been humbly eating a few shit sandwiches, but I was always aware that when I had my shit together, there was no better stand-up than me. I knew in my gut that I could do all the other stuff my contemporaries were doing, and that I just had to be ready when my chance came back around.

  I swore off drugs once and for all. By self-medicating my anxiety and depression, I’d made them a lot worse and I knew it. I also tended to lose quite a bit of time to drugs, and time was becoming a big issue again. I thought I was playing catch-up back in the Toowoomba and Brisbane days, but that was nothing to the time pressure I was facing by Christmas 1999. A cursory glance at the familiar names in the TV guide told me how much ground I had to make up.

  I had to write a comedy festival show and it had to be great. That was the fast track to returning to the comedy industry in a meaningful way. I could slog away doing suburban gigs for years without anyone noticing, but a good festival show would get everyone’s attention immediately. So I set about writing the show about the sex industry that everyone said I should write. My old mate Toby Sullivan came up with the title, The Whore Whisperer, and he and Lyndal McIlwaine went on to co-produce four sell-out seasons of the show with me out of their lounge room in East St Kilda.

  Even though the first season in the Melbourne Fringe festival of 2000 was a big hit and sold a lot of tickets, I knew it was still a bit clunky, so Wil Anderson and I sat down together in the back room of a pub one Saturday afternoon and mercilessly edited the script until it was bulletproof. I wasn’t taking any easy options this time around. I was determined to do everything in my power to make it the best show it could possibly be.

  The script we put together that Saturday was the version I performed in sell-out seasons at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2001, the Edinburgh Fringe festival 2001, The Adelaide Fringe festival 2002, and for three weeks at the Sydney Opera House in 2002. That’s not the story of Wil’s generosity I told you to look out for earlier, though. This is.

  The Whore Whisperer was absolutely doing the trick by the second week of the Comedy Festival. That season was produced by Token off the back of its Melbourne Fringe success, it was selling tickets and getting great reviews—almost everything anyone could ask for. The missing piece dropped into place when Karen Koren, artistic director of Edinburgh’s famous Gilded Balloon fringe festival swept into town shopping for acts. Toby, who’d been running the Melbourne Fringe festival when I’d met him in the mid-90s, organised for Karen to see our show and sure enough, she offered us a place in the Gilded Balloon’s 2001 Edinburgh Fringe line-up.

  She was even generous enough to offer us a co-production deal, which included a flat for the month of the festival, and a living allowance of £55 a day. We crunched the numbers in Toby’s lounge room and realised I’d ‘only’ need to come up with $6000 to cover my airfares, flyers and sundry expenses to keep my home in Melbourne ticking over for a month. (Here’s where we need that yet-to-be-invented, internationally recognised sarcasm font.) ‘Only’ $6000—but at least I had just over three months to pull it together!

  It may as well have been $6 million I needed to raise. I’d sold some tickets but I was still living very much hand-to-mouth, and back on the dole for a couple of months of the year. Toby went over it and over it, but there was just no way he could get that number to budge, and there was no way I was going to be able to pull it together. We accepted defeat pretty graciously, really. I was sad I couldn’t take Karen up on her offer, but genuinely chuffed she’d thought me worthy of making it. I resolved to think of it that way from then on.

  In the meantime my frenemy was chatting with Wil Anderson, who always took a keen interest in The Whore’s progress. Wishing he could go himself, but grounded by his job on the Triple J Breakfast show, he asked wistfully how preparations for Edinburgh were coming along. She told him (gleefully I suspect) that it was all off because I couldn’t afford my end of the deal, at which point he insisted upon loaning me $6000. I was thrilled, of course, but mostly really embarrassed. (I told Wil I’d pay him back within six months and I did. Somehow I’m always better at repaying money than saving it in the first place. Luckily for me, he is not.)

  Wil had been nominated for the Best Newcomer Award at the 1999 Edinburgh Fringe and I’d been jealous as hell. Even if my career hadn’t been in the doldrums, I don’t know that I’d have been happy for him. Whenever I heard other people’s good news in those days I immediately wished it had been mine, and then got really pissed off about the unfairness of it all. There wasn’t much room for generosity of spirit in my life then, which is why Wil’s offer embarrassed me so. Not because he’d made money and I hadn’t, but because he offered his to me so freely, and I knew that had the situation been reversed, it probably wouldn’t have entered my head to do the same for him.

  Wil’s cash was in my account within two days. Toby turned it immediately into plane tickets, a month’s rent on my flat in St Kilda, flyers and little pink promotional matchbooks, which held condoms instead of matches.

  Toby and I boarded my first international flight to Edinburgh via London on or around 1 August 2001. I was a complete goofball, as you tend to be on your first trip overseas. I called my mum from a payphone in Heathrow and she and I just sat and marvelled at the fact that I was sitting on the other side of the world while Toby waited patiently nearby. He knew not to wander off because I was so scared of getting on the wrong plane or something that I was liable to scream his name in panic if I couldn’t see him. When we arrived in Edinburgh we had to sit in a park for an hour until our flat was ready for us. Toby was furious, but I was still amazed that I was ‘overseas’ and kept saying things like, ‘the clouds look different here, don’t you reckon?’; ‘The seagulls sound different, don’t you think? Listen Toby, listen!’ Oh God, poor Toby.

  I pulled it together and set about trying to fit in and act normal, like I had in Melbourne after the Socialist conference. Pretty soon I was scurrying around Edinburgh’s old town like I belonged there (or so I told myself), handing out flyers and restocking our little condom-filled matchbook displays. They were very popular around town.

  We sold lots of tickets, scored a four-star review in The List (which is very good), and ate our share of terrible Scottish food, including a ‘pizza supper’—a frozen pizza deep-fried and nestled on a bed of chips. Once I saw a ‘chef’s special’ that comprised a baked potato with a filling of chips. And I read a menu in a Chinese restaurant that specified that none of the meals they served came with chips. I’ve never met a chip I didn’t like, so I was in my glory. Scotland Forever I say!

  Sex workers came out in force in every town in which I performed The Whore, and Edinburgh was no different. I scored a guided tour of a few Scottish brothels, which were very similar to ours, and some impromptu sponsorship in the form of an envelope with a hundred quid in it left anonymously for me at the bar. A short note said it was a thank-you from some of the local working girls, which was very touching. I’d spotted them from the stage, as I always could. Real prostitutes couldn’t help but nod and elbow each other in the ribs at the very least while laughing. Sometimes they were so obvious, and loving the attention of the rest of the audience, that I wondered if they picked up any trade on the way out of the venue.

  The girls and trannies about whom the show was written came to see it in Melbourne and loved it, which was very important to me. I was worried they’d feel exploited, or just think it was shit, but they were thrilled and sat in the audience beaming up at me like sisters. It was written with so much l
ove for them, which I think was a big part of its success. I almost completely ignored the bad bits because you can get those in any movie, book or Four Corners episode on the subject. I only had an hour and I wanted to devote it to the ones I loved.

  Performing in Edinburgh is a terribly expensive exercise, and I knew I’d be broke when I got home, so before I left I organised to cover a few reception shifts in a brothel in Carlton as soon as I got back. So that’s where I was about a week after my return, on September 11, 2001, when all hell broke loose, and I was watching it live on the little TV in the girls’ room. I know that was a pretty hectic night for everyone, but you should’ve tried watching it with four Filipino hookers, convinced we were about to be invaded, but still managing to whinge about how quiet the night was turning out to be, customer-wise. I tried to reason with them by reminding them there was some fairly compelling telly on the go, but they were having none of it, accusing me of not sounding friendly enough on the phone.

  The lovely man who ran the place had to sack me soon after, because I’d sprung one of those girls stealing from him and she had therefore refused to work with me. Not only was she was a good little earner, but he knew the others would probably follow her if she went somewhere else, so he had no choice but to sack me. That excellent example of brothel logic was to be my last experience in the sex industry. The Tranny parlour I loved had a change of management and was shut down, and I finally realised that working anywhere else was a massive drag, and not in the good way.

  The show it inspired put me back on the comedy map as planned. I had my confidence back, my performance skills were well honed and I was getting a lot of work. Adam Richard and I were dividing up most of the MC work around Melbourne between the two of us, which meant I was gigging a couple of times a week, and I was starting to be flown around the country to do gigs and little bits of TV. I did stand-up on Rove’s Channel 10 show a couple of times, and a few episodes of The Glass House—Wil, Hughesy and Corinne’s show on the ABC.