Scoundrel Days

by Brentley Frazer

  Now I can see where Candy gets her eternal-girl look. Nearly twenty-five but looks at most fifteen. Her driver’s licence has worn paper-thin it comes out of her purse so often. People give me disapproving glances in public. She makes me look like the oldest twenty-year-old in history.

  The panic has already set in Candy’s eyes. Me, I’ve never experienced gradual change. My life perpetually earthquakes underfoot, and Candy knows now this rubs off if you hang around with me. Not five minutes later they’ve gone to the pub to celebrate the reunion, but I have no intention of breaking my five days off, twenty days on alcohol rule, so I decline and sit down to do some writing.

  About an hour later Marie comes back from the pub by herself, undresses in the doorway and says:

  —I don’t think we need to tiptoe around the fact that I need to fuck, something serious.

  Here I go again, walking on edges.

  The next day John has already rented us a new apartment, given Candy a shitty blue Datsun 120Y and made it obvious he will live with us for a while.

  ——

  We move into a two-storey brick piece of shit in a building of twenty identical flats surrounding a slimy leaf-choked swimming pool. Two blocks back from Townsville’s main beach, the pool serves no purpose. Candy and I share a room with Marie. Blyth has her own room and John sleeps with his carton of beer on the couch downstairs. Blyth has made a successful application to join the air force, and she has a few months to party before she begins.

  Candy devises a plan to escape the family chaos she despises and enrols in a TAFE course for chefs. She reverses the Datsun 120Y out at eight every morning. John leaves the house at ten, when the pubs open. Blyth goes off to the beach to work on her tan. Marie gets into bed with me and we fuck until about midday and then go to Cafe Nova to hang out. We get home about four. If no one has beaten us there, we blow each other in the living room and fuck on the stairs.

  Blyth wants sex also, when somehow we end up alone. She says stuff like Let’s see how far we can go without actually fucking, and we fool around for a bit until we end up having full-on sex anyway.

  Lethe, your eyes effulgent from the fall, look tenderly upon me. I’ve lost so much already in this oblivion of lust and fury.

  Months of this.

  I know something bad will happen.

  Part Six

  Untitled Plane Crash

  ————

  O son! did you not ever go on your knees and pray for deliverance for all your sins and scoundrel’s acts? Lost boy! Depart!

  Jack Kerouac

  1

  We pull up outside Maggie’s house and she looks hell-pleased as she runs down the driveway. Stuffing her bags in through the window, she leaps in like her life depends on it.

  Out of the city now. The lights of Townsville disappear over the horizon behind us. Maggie uncoils her shoulders and breathes like a weight has lifted.

  Spinning down through the black in a crappy blue Datsun. Maggie holding my hand for the past two hundred kilometres, interlacing her fingers with mine, resting on the gearshift. I finally get the rusted-out crap-box of a car up into fourth, hovering around a hundred ks an hour as we roll down the ranges south of Townsville. Dark sets in and Candy stretches out, falls asleep on the back seat. Everything we own, we have crammed in. The interior of the car looks like a kid’s fortress made out of dirty laundry.

  I haven’t slept with Maggie yet. I met her a week ago, in a nightclub. She said she needed to escape an abusive relationship. I shared our plan to take off in the dead of night to Brisbane, to escape a generally fucked-up situation ourselves. She offered to put in for fuel.

  Then the headlights go out. Pitch black, travelling at a hundred ks an hour. Maggie screams, which sets Candy off. I pull over safely, swap a fuse, and we make it to Mackay right on midnight. We pull in to a bus terminal car park and settle in to get some sleep.

  As dawn comes with onions on the wind from some breakfast fry joint, I awake to a security guard tapping on the window with a flashlight. I wind down the steamed-up window and he gawps at Maggie passed out with her skirt up in the back seat, and then he gawps at Candy curled up in the front passenger seat with her tits sticking out of her singlet, and then he gawps at me rubbing my eyes and fumbling for a cigarette and says: Move it along, buddy, before the cops find ya with that half-naked underage chick.

  The girls wake as I start the car, and we roll out of there, heading for Brisbane.

  ——

  Candy doesn’t like Maggie. I told Candy I found our petrol buddy for the trip to Brisbane and Candy looked suspicious of her dancer’s body right away. But, as far as Candy can see, Maggie looks like the first and best option to help us get the fuck out of Townsville as soon as possible. Out of the blue Marie did her nut at me one afternoon, sitting around playing Dungeons & Dragons. Bolton had shown up with our old drummer Gil’s girlfriend’s sister, a real cute punk-rock chick named Bonnie, whom I can’t help but flirt with. Suddenly Marie starts screaming at me, calls me the biggest cunt on earth. She turns to Candy and says:

  —Brentley and I have had sex about two hundred times since we’ve lived here, and about a dozen before that.

  Then she rises. You can hear her arse drag on the carpet in the shocked silence of the room. She goes upstairs and bangs around while I try to decide whether I should chase Candy, who slammed her way out the door so hard the window cracked, or run fast in the opposite direction. Then Marie thumps down with a suitcase, goes out to the kerb, hails a cab and disappears.

  John gets home to find Candy a sobbing heaving mess at the front of the building and then Blyth comes back from the beach right on his tail. I have a huge fight with John, to the point where he takes a couple of swings at me and I dance around, not wanting to hit the papery old bastard, denying everything, saying Marie must have had a psychotic break because we’ve never had sex, certainly not two hundred times.

  2

  December 1992. Candy and Maggie and I roll into Brisbane in the wheezing blue Datsun. After scouring the newspapers at a cafe, Candy realises the two of us can’t afford a rental on our own. I see the telltale signs of a migraine swelling behind her eyes. Candy suggests Maggie rent with us if she has no other plans. We find a private rental above a family of Italians. A two-bedroom place with high ceilings and a large sit-in kitchen and a balcony overlooking a ratty lawn full of mower parts and broken concrete birdbaths.

  I spend a good few weeks trying to seduce Maggie. She leaves the shower door open a couple of times when Candy goes out. She lets me massage her through her underwear and play with her tits but slaps my hand away as soon as I lift the elastic.

  Josef shows up to find me living with Candy and Maggie opposite the train tracks in Bowen Hills. We have a merry time. For my twenty-first birthday my dad gives me a thousand dollars, which he says took him twenty-one years to save. Josef and I blow the entire wad getting drunk at The Beat nightclub in Fortitude Valley and getting lap dances at a strip joint called The Red Garter.

  When we get home that morning, Maggie has just arrived back herself. She goes out every night dancing to techno music. She looks like a club kid, she dances like a club kid, and she picks her moments like a club kid. Josef and I flirt with her, mucking around, trying to see up her skirt and shit like that, when suddenly she grabs my hand and sticks it right into her knickers and Josef’s hand and puts it on her tits. The precise moment she does this, Candy walks out of our bedroom all messy-haired and groggy-eyed and sees me fingering Maggie in the kitchen while Josef gropes her under her t-shirt.

  —Great, she says, turns on her heel and slams the door.

  Maggie goes into her room, comes out with a suitcase and leaves.

  ——

  At Chalice House cafe in South Brisbane a poet named Rey plays master of ceremonies and a rabble turn up for the open mic. I sit with an old artist named Graham w
ho reeks of rabbit-skin glue and a poet with a master’s degree in physics named Francis. A poet named Sando turns up every week and recites his Shelley-inspired verse, which gets my head drooping like a dead rose. Francis has only one poem and he only reads it when some new chicks show up in the audience, staring right at them. He has a tremulous voice which vibrates on the edges like double-bass strings. A poet named Rebecca gets up every week and reads poetry which gives me visions of someone pulling their intestines out of their vagina and stringing a harp with them.

  A couple of poets here look like they came in on the tail of a beatnik’s dog. Drunk, stoned, debauched poets whom I can’t get enough of.

  One poet named Damo keeps drinking right through to breakfast. He tells me a story about catching herpes from a chick he fucked on a bus he got on by mistake which took him to Darwin when he should have landed in Melbourne. He shows me a beautiful poem he wrote on the back of a summons for drunk and disorderly conduct (urination in public). He says he woke with three verses formed perfectly in his head. He tells me he had one hell of a night because he got laid and can’t remember it. Woke up with crunchy pubes, he explains. The poem on the court summons, written in a drunken shaky hand and covered in red circles from the bottoms of wine glasses and rubbed in cigarette ash, reads:

  He has a whole collection of these poems, written on things like needle-­exchange-program leaflets and beer coasters. A guy who lives like him could die at any moment, and he knows it. Fragile soul, beaten mercilessly by the third dimension, like a leather flower bud he blooms to suede. Real poets have no sword, no horse and no army. They face the Beast alone.

  ——

  I’ve started painting and visit Gilchrist Galleries on Brunswick Street at least once a month and show the art-dealer chick my work. She does this little oh god, him again forehead wrinkle as soon as she sees me. Candy and I consider ourselves in an open relationship. We have a few more girls in our bed, mostly suburban chicks who come into the Valley to experiment. Then Candy meets the artist Davson. She gets the idea from a friend at fashion school to do nude modelling for art students. She does a couple of jobs at the TAFE college and then along comes this famous prick.

  —He calls me his new muse, Candy gushes at me: Says he’ll pay me a hundred bucks an hour … five times more than the college art department pays!

  —Yeah, I mumble.

  ——

  I go along to Davson’s studio in the Valley to pick Candy up on the first night. I turn up early. He has a shop front, looks like temporary digs, the windows covered up with newspaper so you can only vaguely make out shapes moving around inside. I peek through a ripped corner and Candy sits there with all the modesty of a Babylonian-temple whore. Legs about ten metres apart, her shaved vulva and gleaming clitoris ring aimed at twenty drooling guys all pretending to draw her. One of the hottest women I’ve ever seen, sitting there, not just naked but on display, with the same amount of shyness as she has clothes.

  Candy gets rich quick, has an inch of fifties in her purse. We only pay eighty bucks a week for this run-down shop. It has just one room but extremely high ceilings, with French doors through to a miniature bathroom – a shower cubicle, a toilet and a vanity crammed in there. A tailor ran a shop out of here, on the second floor, from 1956 to 1985, the landlord said as he gave us the keys. The landlord retains a flat below us; we see him about twice a century.

  The inside of our flat looks like the Palace of Versailles, filled with expensive designer clothes and kitchenware, coffee cups and jugs and lamps and shit like that. Candy has a thing for non-utilitarian utensils. I bought her some flowers to put in one of her new vases and she put them in a Milo tin. What about the new vase? I said. You don’t put water in that vase! she shrieked as I carried it to the tap. You could serve me coffee in the bottom of an old cut-in-half milk carton and I wouldn’t give a shit – honestly, I wouldn’t, unless the coffee tasted like pus or something.

  I guess you could say her popularity with life-drawing classes and artists came as a blessing, though, not only because she bought me clothes and art supplies and a second-hand electric typewriter, but also because, when our Benny Hill look-alike landlord turned up one afternoon and told us he intended to tear down our building, we paid cash for a much classier rental, only two doors down on Bowen Terrace – a three-storey, art-deco, red-brick building named Ravenswood.

  3

  Josef returns from living with a black metal band in Lismore.

  —Shit got weird … fucken drummers, he says after I let him in and we smack backs. He rents our spare room here in Ravenswood, not that we need the cash this time. Davson throws so much money at Candy. The classes crowd as word gets around that Davson has captured a real-life Sheela-na-gig. I even saw a newspaper article about how popular his art classes have become.

  Josef coming back doesn’t lift the black slump that’s come over me lately. Lying in the dark, crying. Candy goes off to fashion school every morning and I stay in bed all day, or sit on the back steps smoking, watching crows shit on the concrete. A lot of people describe depression as an animal which creeps up on them and pounces. It doesn’t happen like that for me. My spectre sends omens in advance. Like light gleaming from the coin in a street magician’s fingers.

  Not light in a binary sense, though: you know, light and dark, war and peace, love and hate. I disagree with absolutely everyone in that last case. When Love turns her back, you’ll find Despair. My writing condition stops, like the tremors after days without whisky. Doesn’t incrementally fade or happily boil to death. Dries right up in an instant. All the time, before Despair comes to visit, I hear voices in my head. But they don’t bother me. Sometimes they cajole me, but most often they goad me into action. When Despair comes, she switches off the radio and gives me time to feel the world for a while. When she leaves, though, she lingers, like perfume in a hallway. Crawls out of me like those dark spirits in the film Ghost.

  The shadows lift a little and I manage to sit up straight at my typewriter.

  I compile all the notes and journals I’ve kept since way back in Greenvale. I type up a couple hundred pages of everything that’s happened right up until now, and my damn typewriter dies. Fucken electronic piece of shit Candy bought me from the Salvos. I stride out of the house and fume up the street, intending to hurl the machine through the front windows of the shop, and I run into the poet Sando, from Chalice House. I bitch to him, saying that right in the middle of a major inspirational maelstrom of writing my typewriter packed it in.

  —What ya writing? New collection of poems?

  —Nope … a novel.

  —What about?

  —Nothing … everything … life. About a boy who fears Love and desires impermanent possessions. I shrug.

  —Nutshell me the plot line, man. He squints through the yellow glasses he wears for dyslexia.

  —It has no plot … life has no plot.

  —I like that! You can use my computer to finish it if you want.

  ——

  I’ve spent the last month in Sando’s living room, hunched over his computer, transcribing so fast from my notes that I knocked off the Z and the O keys at one point. An Eiffel Tower of cigarette butts and empty takeaway coffee cups fouls up the desk. Whenever I burn out, Sando and I go and drink at Mellino’s cafe in the Brunswick Street Mall. Sando says:

  —You have a lot of girlfriends, huh, and you have threesomes and stuff with Candy.

  —Yeah.

  —How do you do that? I can’t figure out women at all.

  —I don’t think about it.

  —What do you mean?

  —You know how people say: it happens when you least expect it?

  —Yeah.

  —Well, stop expecting anything, ever.

  Just then I notice this dude I keep seeing everywhere. He hunches down as I stare at him. He has on a sky-blue suit, a chambray shirt a
nd a white straw fedora. He looks like a Smurf.

  —Fuck! I say under my breath and melt into an alcove.

  —What? says Sando, peering over those yellow glasses at me in the shadows.

  —That dude that looks like a Smurf … I see him about fifty times a day and he keeps staring at me.

  —What, a Smurf? Where? says Sando.

  I peer around the edge of the shop door and the dude has vanished.

  —Probably the acid, man, says Sando and he pats my shoulder.

  We see Vincent and his little babe of a girlfriend named Rose and an old wizened-looking woman walking down the mall. Sando has a relationship of some kind with Rose’s mother. Vincent’s poems always conclude with a thinly veiled metaphor about Rose’s cunt, so everyone listens carefully. Sando invites them to join our table. Before long I get into an argument with Rose’s mother because I say that I believe in total personal freedom. I just finished telling Sando and Vincent that the poet Yuri and I spent three nights and four days awake, drunk and on LSD, writing a manifesto called The New Decadence. We decided, Yuri and I, that destiny has decreed we have no choice but to embrace a life as dissolute as possible. Cursed by the Fates and born with the souls of poets in a time which regards us as redundant, and in a country which regards us, at best, as drunken wastrels, well, we’ll do what everyone expects of us.

  —Can I read it? Do you have an axiom? says Sando, putting a fourth sugar into his short black.

  —Yeah: total personal freedom. Lighting a cigarette.