Scoundrel Days

by Brentley Frazer

  —Um, yeah.

  —I’ve got to run. We’ll talk later. The door slams behind her.

  ——

  Adrift on a pointless ocean. The other two survivors have already resigned themselves to the fates: Despair shakes like a little old lady drinking milk on a train; Hopelessness at wrist readies a blade. Yuri comes home tonight late and fumbles with the lock. I get up to let him in. He falls in the door crying, drunk and confused. I try to console him. He won’t stop sobbing.

  Life hasn’t worked out so well for Yuri lately. His art gallery closed, the building scheduled for demolition to make way for some apartment buildings down on the river. His friend the painter Niko had some sort of breakdown after a man landed directly in front of him on the pavement one afternoon, a jumper from thirty storeys above. Then Yuri’s girlfriend started acting strange and distant, didn’t invite him to move in with her when he found himself homeless. Then, out of nowhere, right after he exited the stage at the Queensland Poetry Festival, not seconds after he finished reading an ode to his muse, she dumped him, right there, side-stage, on the riverbank in West End.

  Now, I don’t know what horror has visited him. I get him into a chair and make him a hot Milo on the stove and light a cigarette for him and he sobs:

  —Natalia, the girl Gerhard wants to marry. She died in a car wreck on the M3 this morning. Asleep on the back seat, man. Didn’t stand a chance.

  My heart broke a little there, for her beauty and her youth, and because, not three nights earlier, as I left an art exhibition at Soapbox Gallery and drifted down Brunswick Street, I glanced into Ric’s Bar as I passed, and I saw her there, leaning up against the bar, alone. She smiled and waved and I didn’t go in.

  ——

  Life works like that, one of the many paradoxes on offer. Soon as you let go, give up desiring something, it comes in abundance. Some sort of cosmic joke, probably. I say this to Eliot. Eliot lives upstairs with the art-dealer chick. He makes light sculptures for a living, installs them in cafes and strip joints. Since I moved in downstairs, we talk in the hallway. He needs an assistant. Pays me fifty bucks for a few hours’ work here and there. It pays for some weed. For a long time I haven’t had cash for weed. Smoking gets me out of the front room and away from watching the prostitutes and slipping into a Dostoyevskian depression. Eliot has a world-worn beatnik look; he has really lived. He has a street-earned charisma about him, too. Hanging out with him as his unofficial apprentice has me laughing most days – a good thing, probably. He lives hard, like William Burroughs junkie hard. He doesn’t do anything by halves. He doesn’t even smoke weed like normal people; he uses what he calls a rocket. We sit in my front room watching prostitutes clocking in on the corner.

  —Let’s smoke a joint.

  —Fuck that, he says: Let’s get stoned.

  —Yeah, I’ll roll one up.

  —Nah, man. Ya doin it all wrong.

  I laugh.

  —Ya got a cone piece?

  —Yeah. And I go and fetch the cone from a brass pipe Josef left on the picture rail above the kitchen door.

  —Gotta Coke bottle, with the lid still on?

  —Yeah … and a bucket, right?

  —Nope.

  He busies himself getting the cone through the lid by melting the plastic with his cigarette lighter and twisting the thread of the cone piece through. I don’t think I could do that with my girly poet’s fingers. Then, instead of cutting off the bottom of the Coke bottle to have bucket bongs like normal, he punches a hole in the side, down the bottom, with a screwdriver that he fishes out of his Tardis pockets.

  You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff he keeps in those pockets. On one job I near fell off a ladder I laughed so hard. He looked up at me from the floor, where he’d laid out these brass rails which go up on the brackets I’d screwed into the ceiling, and said:

  —You seen my hammer, man?

  —Nah, I replied, looking down at him.

  He stood, hunted around a bit, kicked some cardboard boxes, then started feeling his pockets, before saying:

  —Oh, here we go. And he pulled out a claw hammer.

  Another time, he pulled out a forty-centimetre stainless-steel ruler – not a flat one, either, but one of those that have a liquid level built into it. Damn things weigh a kilo.

  Now, he sits crumbling up some hydro we scored off some lesbians who live down on James Street.

  —To the sink! he says, leaping up.

  At the sink Eliot puts his finger over the hole in the side of the bottle and fills it with water. He screws on the cap, with the cone threaded into it loaded with hydro, gets out one of my cigarette lighters, sparks it up and lets go of the hole. The gravity of the escaping water pulls the smoke into the bottle.

  —Oh … I’ve heard of a gravity bong, I say.

  —I call it a rocket, man … kinda like main-lining the cone. See, when the little light goes out.

  As the coal fades, he makes a ding sound, unscrews the cap and inhales, hard and fast. He straightens up, pale, sweating, exhales and instantly fills the sink with vomit, in one barely audible yack.

  —Looks extreme! I say, hesitant.

  —Naw, man. Happens to me sometimes. Probably won’t happen to you. Trying to jam the vomit chunks down the plughole with his magically appearing screwdriver.

  ——

  This happens, when you come through slaughter and witness the symbiosis of ghosts. Comb the hubris of your collapsed universe and you will find a more effective self-definition. When I do battle with my demons and I win, I strut around like a peacock. I met a woman today who shooed away my bravado. I sat across from her and the space between us crackled. We met and I got lost in her right there. Her wit countered mine. I couldn’t shock her, no matter how hard I tried. She followed my brilliant one-liners with sassy-talk.

  Earlier today I ran into Jodie on the stairs.

  —Wanna earn fifty bucks? she said.

  —Sure. Doing what?

  —Stuffing envelopes for the next exhibition at my gallery.

  —Sure. Need anyone else? I said, thinking how desperately Yuri needs fifty bucks.

  —No. My assistant, my sunshine, will help us.

  And so I met her assistant: young, redheaded, stunning, noble-looking. She shook my hand and said Sunshine, and I said, You call yourself that? I’d never met anyone named Sunshine before, and the way Jodie had said it I hadn’t heard it as a name. She said I prefer Sunny, and then I stuffed my whole leg, boot and all, in my mouth and said, Do you have a real name? She said Yeah … Sunshine, and gave me this cute-incredulous look, like I had idiot stamped on my forehead, but in amusing lettering. I felt like my spine had fallen sideways when she told me her age. Like a nineteen-year-old would have any interest in someone seven years older than her. Sunshine: not even a metaphor for her personality and blinding wit, more an outright simile. She says:

  —A poet, huh?

  —Yeah.

  —Jodie told me.

  —I have poetic ambitions.

  She laughs.

  —You find poets funny? I say, mock hurt.

  —Not funny … pretentious.

  —Ouch! Real hurt.

  —I bet Byron rocks your universe.

  —Big fan!

  —Byron … Ha, what a fucken prat.

  —What?

  —I read him at uni. Nancy boy, foppish rich-boy blues.

  —Holy shit.

  —Truth hurt? She laughs again.

  What a laugh. Somehow, the timbre in her voice when her green eyes sparkle mid-chuckle, it makes me feel good, like when a bone cracks in your back after bothering you for weeks, or when you come in from the cold with frozen hands and you warm them over the stove as you make coffee, laughing about something with a friend you met on the street. I don’t even care that she diss
ed a hero of mine. She makes me laugh like I have never laughed.

  —How do you know Jodie? she asks.

  —Oh … ha. Years ago I used to hassle her to look at my paintings. Now I live downstairs from her and Eliot. I actually work for Eliot. How do you know Jodie?

  —She sells my mother’s paintings. I worked for her once before, and recently, totally by chance, I ran into her celebrating her birthday at The Beat nightclub, and she told me all about this new gallery space and offered me a job as her assistant.

  —You have an interesting name. Never met anyone called Sunshine before.

  —Blame my parents, bloody hippies. I grew up in a cult: the Hare Krishnas. You’ve heard of them, right?

  —Yeah, I worked for a dude who got kicked out of the Hares. He used to push speed on people all the time. He’d randomly hand it to you and refuse to take it back. Cash only, he’d say … dodgy dude!

  —Ha … interesting. Last night I took a truckload of speed. Haven’t slept … chopped off my tits. And yeah, Hares do that: give you something for free then demand payment of some description.

  —I grew up in a cult too. I know how they operate.

  —Really!

  —Sunny! cuts in Jodie: Watch out. Poets should come with a warning label, you know!

  —I can look after myself. Sunny laughs that laugh again, winking one of those emeralds.

  So Jodie brought Sunshine and me together, and we turned yet another corner in both our lives. Don’t look and you might find it. I sit across the table from Love now and I don’t smell Despair’s perfume anywhere.

  Later, we sit on the stairs in this rich apartment owned by the gallery partner. Sunshine asks me if I have a girlfriend, and I say Not really … just this chick I use as a bed-warmer, trying to shock her again. She replies Poor starry-eyed poet-ho, and I think I fall in love with her.

  I can’t stop thinking about her, seeing her occasionally on the stairs. Then I jump at the opportunity when Eliot offers me work as a general hand on the new gallery construction site. There I can see this angel every day.

  I don’t mind working, but it interferes with living. You always have in the back of your mind that you have to go someplace and get there on time. Working a menial job gets people looking forward to death, which results in the whole vicious cycle I’ve spent my life railing against. Commitments kill – I’ve come to this conclusion.

  Then of course you have the problem of bosses. I hate people who think of themselves as a boss. All bosses have a genetic predisposition to sadism. No one can put me in a box, and that pisses bosses off. They hire me for personal amusement, to try to break me, make me jump through rings like a lion at a fucken pony show. It’ll never happen.

  You have to fight to stay conscious in this crazy world. I lose myself and fall into a trance all the time. Rushing to work, troubling over the bills, crowded out by the music spilling from cafes and fashion stores. I catch myself, headlong on the path, and I slow, stop on purpose and get a coffee. Forget about excuses for the boss. Write a poem and smoke a few cigarettes, watch the people racing to their doom.

  Once, right after I got a job, the boss asked me to tell everyone about myself. I said:

  —Six feet tall, brown eyes – not poo brown, more mud brown – crap hair. I used to have some fucken out-there haircuts but now I keep it short … probably all the dyes and bleach and shit killed it. Skinny but not bony, more sinewy. I’ve got pretty bad teeth from living in gutters and garrets and only eating crap. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve come up five cents short when I’d kill to eat …

  —Ah … mate, I meant tell us about your character! said the boss.

  —Oh … okay. Self-indulgent, slightly dodgy, but loyal if I like you. I dig hats. I smoke too much and drink more than Bukowski. Easily distracted … I go off on tangents all the time. Ya know, they didn’t have diagnoses for ADD and autism and all that when I grew up. I had a girlfriend who said she thinks I suffer from a mild form of autism, or something … I mean, I do have repetitive behaviour patterns. I can’t sleep if I don’t write, and if I write I don’t sleep. I always get mighty distracted by beautiful women and other interesting spectacles. My parents taught me manners and put the fear of God in me, but I rebelled against all that and now, well, Mr Boss, I’d help myself to your wife, your wallet and your fridge without feeling at all terrible about it.

  Thankfully I don’t have to worry about Eliot firing me if I sleep through the alarm. Eliot knows I don’t even own a clock. Most mornings I rise early anyway, to try to make myself look like I don’t sleep on a discarded mattress on the floor of an apartment with only books as furniture. By the time Eliot trundles down the stairs and hammers on my door, I don’t answer because I’ve made it outside to the footpath already. Then I get to give him shit about running late, claiming I’ve stood around waiting for at least half an hour. The truth of it, though: I just want some Sunshine.

  3

  Out of nowhere came an invitation to the 1998 National Young Writers’ Festival in Newcastle, for me, Yuri and six other Brisbane poets. Both of us feel pretty elated. I have a bit of trepidation about travelling with Yuri again, though. Last festival we went to, after we swore to stick together to pool our cash, he abandoned me as soon as we arrived in Sydney, for the first offer of a couch that came his way. Niko lived down there then, and Niko said I couldn’t stay because his girlfriend hated me. I ended up in a shitty backpackers’ hostel, one where you sleep in a room with a dozen other stinking travellers, and the very first morning there I got caught smoking weed in the showers and got kicked to the kerb. Broke and alone, I had to cut out on my gig and go home early on the bus.

  Thing that bums us both out, though: while the invitation to this festival includes accommodation, it doesn’t include transport or alcohol. We mope around for a couple of weeks, trying to figure out ways to get some cash together which don’t include skipping our three weekly meals or cutting back to one pack of cigarettes a day. We put off accepting the invitations to the very last moment.

  Just as we lose all hope, Sando knocks at apartment two, 54 Harcourt Street. Sando has skills with computers, and lots of people have them now. He has a job working for a charity organisation fixing their PCs, or something like that, and as part of the job he gets a car. A good road car too: a Falcon. He says, even though he’ll get fired if they find out, he will drive all of us down to Newcastle for the festival.

  We drag him out right there. We hug him in the street, we light his cigarettes and pay for his drinks, and when he gets too drunk to walk, we leave him there, on the couch at Ric’s Bar, to sleep it off. We figure he’ll understand. No poet’s charity extends to other poets who can’t handle their piss. We agree on this, Yuri and I, staggering down Brunswick Street as the morning sun beats the crap out of the drunks sleeping it off on benches. Roaming the mercury-gas-lit streets, hungry for it, willing to crawl through a sewer for a fix, but I don’t know of what.

  ——

  Sando, strange waif of a man, looks a bit like Michael Hutchence, if Michael Hutchence really did wear clothes from a thrift shop. Sando has big sad eyes and a mouth way too sensual for a boy. Lots of chicks befriend him because he has an air of post-traumatic stress in his countenance, with a dash of vulnerability. He reminds Yuri and me of the poet Shelley. Not quite Byronic and dangerous enough to hang with us because we fear breaking him, though still a genius who deserves respect.

  But he surprises us now. He screeches to a halt in the no-parking zone at the front of our building and keeps his hand on the horn until we emerge, get our bags in the back and enter the car, and he opens it up on Brunswick Street. Points his nose to the road and tears across the Story Bridge onto the freeway south like he took lessons from Neal Cassady himself.

  Four of us in the back: Yuri, Masha, Rey and me. Yuri on the floor, legs all over him. Sando driving; Vesna, his girlfriend, riding
shotgun. I haven’t managed to smoke enough weed with my coffee this morning to straighten out from the LSD I shouldn’t have taken right before a road trip. Last time I did that, I spent three days on the highway jumping at shadows like velvet lizards. I curl up as best I can among the excited banter. They make jokes about Sando crashing on the freeway and killing the best of Queensland’s Generation X poets.

  I dream most of the road trip to Newcastle. Trying my best not to think about the slight indiscretion Masha and I had a few months previous because damn she does look sexy there smiling in the midday rays coming in with the overpasses’ strobe on us all contorted in the back. Honestly, I don’t know whether I only find her sexy because she has red hair like the chick I’ve fallen in love with. And damn! Did I just say I’ve fallen in love? Fuck love. Bitch has only ever pissed in my eye from afar. I hunch deeper into my envious pockets when I pass laughing couples kissing on park benches. It begins with lost hours in each other’s eyes and ends up with arguments about dirty dishes and bills. Young love turns into old devotion. Which poet wrote that? Surely some poet has written that down.

  Look at Masha and Rey now. It looks like love. Rey said he’d fallen in love with Masha the night we all first met her, at the Hub poetry reading. I kissed her first, under the stairs right after Vesna called me a misogynist arsehole. That night as I left, I found Rey on the front lawn, striding up and down, slugging from a bottle, mumbling to himself. You all right, man? I said, and he looked at me, crying. I’ve fallen in love with Masha. I didn’t believe Rey that night. Love at first sight: what bullshit, right? Then, of course, for the first time in, wow, I don’t know how long, I think of Candy.

  —Damn! I say out loud, and the whole car, which has fallen into silence, out of fear for their lives as Sando tries to put the accelerator through the chassis, says what? in unison. I dumbly reply, like a complete romantic frilly hanky of a human:

  —I’ve gone and fucken fallen in love. All the pain of my past doomed relationship slipped away when I met this woman and I only just realised it!