The Big Whatever

by Peter Doyle

  “We’ve had our dealings, Bill. I know you’re reliable. A man can make an advance to you and it’ll come back on time. I don’t trust your mate up there so much, but I trust you, and that’s good enough.”

  “So?”

  He lays it out: We take over the Oxford Street space. Abe will get us a liquor license, put in a couple of slot machines, maybe later on run a game out the back. We’ll keep the door and the bar, but kick back a percentage to him. It’s more or less extortion, in that we don’t have much choice. But the deal itself isn’t too bad, and the way things are going it could work out well for us.

  So in the new year we move. We call the club the House of Cards. We get the license. And Abe’s right, of course. It’s much easier to get a regular, big-spending R&R crowd to the Oxford Street place.

  We have to do some fixing up first: the old joint is pretty drack. A dance hall originally, up a flight of stairs. Thommo’s was there for a couple of years, it was a physical fitness gym for a while, then used for storage by the furniture shop downstairs. The old hardwood floorboards are split and worn, plaster is falling off damp spots on the walls. It needs rewiring. It needs a proper bar. But this just happens to coincide with the Alexandria electronics hoist. So we have our share of the readies.

  It costs a lot, but it gets done. Abe’s people work the bar. They’re ripping us off, but within reason. And we’re charging high prices. We have to pay proper bouncers now, and we have to kick back to the licensing police, the vice squad, the council, the health department and the fire brigade. We’re obliged to serve food – barely edible spaghetti bolognaise – for which we need a kitchen and a cook, of sorts.

  But still, by the end of the year we’re ahead. Just barely, but the trend is in the right direction.

  By then things are rocky on the home front. Eloise and I have more or less gone our separate ways – our mutually relaxed attitudes to foreign orders didn’t play out so well in the long run. In theory I still live at the big house in Woollahra, but sometimes three or four days go by without us seeing each other. I try to take the kids out once a week, and always sling some spondulicks into the kitty, make the mortgage payments.

  In her mid-thirties now, my wife still looks as impressive as ever with her billowing brown hair, her kaftans, her Black Russians. She affects the to-the-manor-born demeanour she learned when her dad Donny – then the licensee of a scungey Ultimo pub, starting price bookmaker, and occasional on-seller of stolen goods – sent her off to the very best ladies college on the North Shore, where she must have stood out at first, until she got properly tooled up for life among the upper crust. But Eloise understands the ways things really work in this town, did then and does now, and she backs me up when it’s needed without having to be prompted. Most of the time.

  When we’re stuck she comes down and pulls drinks or works the door at the House of Cards. Calls the punters “darling” in her posh voice, with the saucy inflection. She brings the kids along sometimes for an extra-special treat, just like Donny did with her when she was a sprout. “It’s good for the tots,” she says, “to see how their daddy’s money gets made.”

  Max Perkal is having a good time, too good. He keeps up there with purple hearts and joints, sometimes acid. Max with a bellyful of purple hearts and alcohol can play rhythm and blues pretty well, but anything non-musical he’s likely to stuff up. So when Cathy Darnley returns from Vietnam and starts dancing in a go-go cage at the House, there are emotional complications all round. Things move quickly.

  The House of Cards, under Abe’s protection and with the cooperation of various civil authorities, naturally becomes a bit of a drug market. Not always and not every day, but if you need to do a deal, the House isn’t the worst place in town for it to happen. You give the house a cut, of course. So when Max and Cathy pull their stunt, wise heads mutter that they saw it coming.

  The rip doesn’t take place in a house in Bondi, as whoever wrote the book has it – it happened late one night in the House of Cards, after closing. I wander in on proceedings, more or less as the book describes, maybe not buttoning my fly exactly, but kind of. A shot is fired, amid much drama. But no one actually gets hit. Which is not as big a distinction as you’d think, because a bridge has now been crossed: guns have been produced at a marijuana deal, and that’s a scary new thing.

  There is present, as the book describes, a motley gathering of heads and hangers-on, and the deal is indeed orchestrated by a doper of Greek extraction, name of Alex Politis. After everyone on the premises has been relieved of their drugs and money, the safe is emptied. Cathy walks out looking pleased and proud. Max is sheepish, shrugging at me as though it’s all out of his hands.

  And that’s the last I see of Max. Ever. I hear later that he’s in Melbourne, then later still that Cathy has cleared out, that Max is playing in some band. But by then I’m not inclined to go after him. I know there’ll be nothing to recover anyway. The nearest I’ll get to Max Perkal again will be two years later, standing by his casket at Waverley Cemetery while Marty Mooney plays “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” on tenor sax, and a couple of hundred aging beatniks, jazz-dags and stoned young heads whimper into their hankies.

  Back at the House of Cards, the night of the rip, I’m left with a safe full of nothing. My problems – or “the Troubles,” as I come to think of them – are about to begin. And in short order they will have me living semi-incognito in a sleep-out behind a falling-down hippie house in Balmain, driving a cab on the night shift, neck-deep in unmoveable debt.

  * * *

  I woke with a start. It was two thirty in the morning. The music from Terry and Anna’s had stopped. I got out of the chair and made another pot of tea. I wasn’t going to sleep much anyway. I sat back down, lit another cig and picked up the book. Just holding it gave me a strange and creepy feeling, like I was being watched. I recognised the feeling, of course, the old paranoia. But this was something more.

  THE JAM!

  I took a room at the George. The next morning I sought out the publican, a harmless-looking old cat. I told him I was supposed to be meeting a bloke named Stan who’d said he was a friend of his. He said he didn’t know who I meant. I looked into his eyes. Not a flicker.

  I bought the local papers. Nothing about a jail escape in New South Wales, nothing on the radio either. I went to the municipal library that afternoon. The Sydney papers came in at three. There was a story on page two of the Tele.

  An escape from Goulburn Jail last night. A bloke serving five years for armed robbery (the Commonwealth Bank at Bexley). Whereabouts unknown. Believed to be dangerous. But nothing, zero, not a word, about any cold-blooded murder in Bondi.

  I went to the milk bar and thought about my situation. The mob at the house had got rid of the Drew’s corpse after all. It’s harder than you might think – take it easy, my little ones, don’t ask how I know – but not impossible. Maybe Johnny stepped to the fore there.

  The drug rip was a bad scene, sure, and the boys back at that house would be spewing. But they were in Sydney, no doubt stoned off their dials by now, one way or another. I couldn’t see them coming five hundred miles after me, even if they knew where I was. So my resolution was: stay clear of Sydney, and with luck, further unpleasantness could probably be avoided. (Tip for hip ones: stay away for long enough and pretty much anything can be forgiven and forgotten. Hear me talkin’ to ya!)

  Cathy. Yeah, bad shit there. Cathy had been a mistake, as bad as mistakes get. Oh brother, she had powers, heavy powers, Christ knows what, white magic, voodoo, some twisted Vietnamese juju. Acid magic, too. LSD bestows weird and dangerous potencies upon certain souls, makes it so they can read minds, bend others to their will, even move matter by thought alone. I’ve seen all those things. I’m not for burning people at the stake and so on, but phew, heed me friends, don’t fuck around with the acid priestess.

  Strangely though, my thing for Cathy had gone. Pretty much. Which was further proof the girl had hoodooed me. Now th
e thrill was gone, the spell was broken, there was nothing in my heart but a big fat fucking ZEEEEEEEEROOOOOOO.

  The main thing weighing on my mind: I’d left Johnny in the hot seat. But if anyone in the southern hemisphere could slip out of knots it was our Johnny. And on the other side of the ledger, he still had our nightclub, which returned a handsome dollar – not that I’m into money, which is a capitalist mirage we’d be better off without – being as the Joker was party headquarters for an endless stream of American servicemen desperate for rocks-offedness and all manner of diversions. So yeah, when things quieted down I’d return, but meanwhile Johnny could pocket the whole take.

  The more I mulled it all over, the better things looked. I was in a new city. I had a car, a Hammond B3 (the sacred instrument of the electric gods, as revealed by their prophet, Saint Jimmy Smith), enough bread to cool it for a while, and a good chunk of hashish. I could feel the karmic current moving me. I had that tingle in my cells, a surge in the blood, that told me: Mel baby, something is about to happen. Have your wits about you, because fate just remembered your name and phone number.

  I needed to be prepared for untoward events, just the same. So that afternoon I went to a certain pub in South Melbourne, mentioned a certain name, a name I’d been given one time back in Sydney. No one knew the bloke whose name I mentioned. I waited around, but nothing happened. I went back next day, waited again, drinking just enough to avoid suspicion but not enough to get drunk. Eventually a hard old gaffer moseyed over, dropped the name I’d mentioned, and we had a nice little chat. Nothing was said outright, but later that night I swapped a wad of money for a clean .38 Special. Even if I didn’t expect to encounter Dutch Harry, or the Greek, or any of the Sydney crew, it was nice to know that if I did, I’d have some bargaining power.

  I checked out of the George the next day, drove down to Geelong, and took a room in a run-down but comfortable enough guesthouse.

  The weeks went by. I’d left Sydney needing a haircut, but I let my hair grow longer, grew a beard too. Killed time reading, smoking hash, practicing scales. It wasn’t too bad, especially with the good gear. A simple schedule: wake up, smoke something, go for a stroll along the beach. A bite to eat, mucho coffee, the newspapers, then back to the pad to practice.

  The dope was holding out better than the money, but no urgency with either just yet. I could’ve carried on this way for months. But with all that practice I was itching to make real music. And – more wise words from old Mel – it’s a thousand times easier to make money when you’ve got money than when you don’t.

  So one mild and mellow morning I packed the B3 into the station wagon, paid off the landlady and took my leave. I headed around the bay into Melbourne, all the way to St Kilda, put down a bond and a month’s rent on a furnished flat on an out-of-the-way block, stuck between a garage and a vacant warehouse.

  The place was one block back from the beach, but it had glimpses of the bay, and a lock-up garage, too. (Now hear me, brother and sister musicians: a lock-up garage is a must for those late nights when you get home too drunk or stoned to unload your gear).

  That night I hit the bricks.

  All right, hipsters, I know what you’re thinking – Melbourne! Trams and quiet Sundays. Glen Waverley and Moomba. Blokes in grey cardigans going home through grey streets to grey wives and grey kids. Industrial shithole or suburban death zone. Yeah, I know. Well, listen to your Uncle Mel, because I’m right here telling you, Melbourne that year was the funkiest town in the country. Nay, fuck that, in the southern motherloving hemisphere. Oh sure, the discotheques were dry, the pubs closed early, the streets were empty. And there was nothing like Kings Cross, with its clip joints and nightclubs and brothels, all existing solely for the extraction of dollars from the pockets of Yankee soldiers on R&R, which it had been ordained, MUST and could only happen to the non-stop accompaniment of funkful soul music, preferably played by one or another band led by your faithful correspondent and teller of truths, Mel ‘Wild Man’ Parker.

  But I digress. Melbourne didn’t do it that way. Down there it was hidden doorways and signs that said “For Madmen Only.” It was a crazy lodge, with secret handshakes and arcane signals. Nothing to see on the outside, but inside – madness and anarchy. Music, drugs and dancing to make Sydney look half-arsed.

  Three days later I’d hooked up with a jazz-fusion group called the Bright Lights. A lucky break. We were playing three, four gigs a week. Wild parties afterwards in ramshackle mansions around East Melbourne, terrace houses in Carlton, mad farmhouses out Eltham way.

  Within a few weeks I was also moonlighting with a rock’n’roll band called the Rods, playing suburban dances for greasy, leather-jacketed bodgies and purple-mohair, beehive-hairdo widgies who didn’t know what year it was.

  Theatre, too. Don’t be surprised, my darlings, Mel Parker is an initiate of the thespian arts. I got a gig playing abstract accompaniment to a nonsensical piece of theatre at the Old Bakery. Never worked out what the hell it was about, but the writer, a young guy known as “Spinner,” told me I wasn’t supposed to, I should just keep doing what I was doing.

  But it is ordained that such times can’t last. One night, as we writers like to say, I was playing with a little pickup jazz group in a St Kilda café. Standing outside, taking a break, a tap on the shoulder. I turned around: Stan.

  “Hiya, Mel.” He stuck out his hand. “How’s everything?” We shook. For my part, the handshake was not enthusiastic. But Stan’s was. He patted me on the back like we were old, deep friends. “Great to see you, bro.” And fuck me, he sounded sincere.

  Now, let me give you the mail on Stan. Last time he’d not been at his best, having just crawled, climbed and clambered out of Goulburn Jail. I for my part had been suffering a bad case of the Hume Horrors, so all I’d registered was a raggedy-arsed desperate in the back seat.

  He was a different character now. He looked lean and fast. His hair was short on top, longer at the back, in the Melbourne style. His eyes were clear, his gaze direct, ready for anything. He had on Levis, a red and blue striped T-shirt, both clean and new. There was another bloke with him, hawk-nosed, fair-haired, his head down, sucking on a cigarette. The back-up.

  Later on there would be all that talk in the press and on the radio about Stan and me and the others, and the shit we did. Every idiot journalist and politician in the country would come up with some crazy theory or other – international criminal conspiracies, the harmful effects of drugs and music and leftist politics, the rising tide of contempt for law and order – Oh brother, and they said we were out of our trees – and people cast around for a mastermind who was orchestrating it all. Well I’m here to tell you children, it didn’t happen that way. There was no master plan. One thing just led naturally to another. We thought we were paddling our own canoe, but we had no idea where it was heading until we were halfway over the falls.

  But mark my words: none of it would have happened if it hadn’t been for Stan. He had brains and he had guts, and he had something else, a quality I’ve only seen in a few people, something sweet and visionary that swept other people along with him. People wanted Stan around, they wanted to do what he wanted. He wasn’t some kind of Svengali character, though, despite what a certain fuckwit journo later suggested. He was the front man of the operation, but he wasn’t the leader exactly. He had no more of a grand vision of what was going on than anyone else. He was just having fun, going that one step further, upping the ante with each move, because that seemed the only thing to do. Not that I knew any of that outside the café in St Kilda that night.

  “You’re still at large,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Got to tell you. The George Hotel business. Makes me feel bad.” He shook his head. “We lobbed there, and it didn’t feel right – I saw a bloke drinking in the front bar, a notorious dog. So I split. We split, me and Cathy. She said you’d sort yourself out, and we could make it up to you later.”

  “Cathy?”

  Stan shook
his head. “She’s not with me now. Beautiful chick, but . . .” He lit a ciggy, looked around. “This is Jimmy.” We shook. Jimmy grunted at me.

  “Listen,” said Stan, “Let’s get off the street.” He bent his head towards a Fairlane parked around the corner.

  After we all got in, Stan said, “You want a toot?”

  I shook my head.

  He pulled a cap from his shirt pocket, tapped some powder out onto a cigarette pack, worked it into two lines with a penknife, put it on the seat between us. He rolled a twenty-dollar note and sniffed up a line. “Try that. Best speed you’ll ever have.”

  I hadn’t had any go-fast since that big night in Sydney. “No thanks.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’ve been taking giddy-up since before you lit your first cigarette. I know what I want and don’t want. Thanks anyway.”

  Stan grinned. “Munching the sponge from a Benzedrine inhaler? Aspros dissolved in Coca-Cola?”

  Jimmy snorted from the back seat. “Jiving to Benny Goodman records?”

  Stan chuckled. “This—” nodding at the line of powder between us, “is the new thing. But suit yourself.”

  Fact is, there’s always been some part of me, the seeker you might say, or maybe the idiot, that wants to change. Change up, change down, change fucking sideways. Doesn’t matter what, just . . . be altered. Oh yes, comrades, there was a crystalline sparkle to that white powder, and it was beckoning to me.

  “Gimme that.” I took the rolled-up note, leaned over, snarfed up the other line. It stung like a bastard, but a moment later I felt my scalp contract and my heart thumped hard. I felt goooooooood.

  After we’d shared a few silent moments, Stan said quietly, “Back then. You did the right thing by me.”

  “Ahh. Doesn’t matter.”

  “No, mate, it does. And now I want to do the right thing by you. Got a business proposition for you.”

  I WALK ON GUILDED SPLINTERS