Your Mother Would Be Proud: True Tales of Mayhem and Misadventure

True Tales of

Mayhem & Misadventure

EDITED BY

TAMARA SHEWARD

& JENNY VALENTISH

Some names and details have been changed

to protect the innocent.

First published in 2009

Copyright © Allen & Unwin 2009

Stories are copyright of individual authors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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‘Riders on the Storm’ and ‘Love Her Madly’ by Jim Morrison

© Hal Leonard Corporation.

Contents

A Few Words Straight Up TAMARA SHEWARD

AND JENNY VALENTISH

Jim Morrison and the Deev Shelf EMILY MAGUIRE

Nicole Kidman Was My Girlfriend GREG FLEET

One Night in Jena MIKE NOGA

The Horse Whimperer BRENDAN SHANAHAN

Go to Your Room! TIM FERGUSON

Lucky ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

How Not to Finish Something DAN LUSCOMBE

How to Turn Your Sons into Hommoseckules ROBBI NEAL

Herbal Tea with Kylie JESSICA ADAMS

Go to Your Room! KATE LANGBROEK

Legendary Trip JOE DOLCE

Cringe Carousel Chronicles SHALINI AKHIL

Beers, Beards and Bashings CHRIS RYAN

Devil’s Lullaby LOENE CARMEN

With Friends Like These ERIN VINCENT

Go to Your Room! LUKE GOWER

My Life as a Fluffy Boy BARRY DIVOLA

The Inspiration of the Nation TAMARA SHEWARD

Leave No Sandwich to Curl Upwards TIM ROGERS

Had a Skinful JUSTIN HEAZLEWOOD

Lessons Learned MARK WILSON

Anatomy of a Stitch-Up JENNY VALENTISH

Go to Your Room! KEISH DE SILVA

One Night in Heaven CLARE PRESS

Better Out Than In ANGUS SAMPSON

Case of the Ex CLEM BASTOW

I’d Like to Thank the David Jones Makeup Counter

SARAH WILSON

Go to Your Room! DAVE LARKIN

Potential KELLY FOULKES

Confessions from the Graveyard Shift ANDREW G

My Arrest DOMINIC KNIGHT

I Hate You, Demi Moore ALISON URQUHART

Go to Your Room! SUFFA

After All, You’re Just Talking Meat MIA TIMPANO

The Banter Clause LINDSAY MCDOUGALL

Mrs Williamson the MILF PAUL CARTER

Memoirs of a Has-Been TV Reporter LIBBY-JANE CHARLESTON

Brad and the Manzel Room MARK GABLE

The Greatest Love of All RICHARD BERRY

Laundry TUG DUMBLY

Go to Your Room! KATE MILLER-HEIDKE

When Once is More Than Enough RACHAEL OAKES-ASH

The Time I Saw an Indie Superstar’s Vagina JAKE STONE

Settling for It ANDREW COX

Not Exactly an Armchair Ride to the Top NICK EARLS

Go to Your Room! AUSTEN TAYSHUS

Lo Importante, Importa MATT ZURBO

Taping One for the Team JULIA WILSON

I Stole Gene Simmons’ ‘Pussy Line-Up’ K.K. JUGGY

How to Blackmail by the Stars YASMIN BOLAND

AND KELLY SURTEES

Go to Your Room! ANDREW BOLT

Go to Your Room! CATHERINE DEVENY

Billy the Bottle LAWRENCE MOONEY

Father’s Day, 1982 JULIA ZEMIRO

Don’t Be So Negative ADAM ZWAR

Nothing Exceeds JIMMY BARNES

Go to Your Room! REX HUNT

The Time of the Great Pegging BELINDA LUKSIC

Volkswagens Float but the Excuses Don’t SHANE JACOBSON

The Enemies of Rock ’n’ Roll STEVE KILBEY

Go to Your Room! CHRIS TAYLOR

Leisure Suit Lisa in the Land of Lounge Lizards LISA PRYOR

Show Business LEIGH REDHEAD

About the Authors

A Few Words Straight Up

If your kid’s not in this book, then Ma—you’re doing all right!

Like all good ideas, this project was conceived at the pub. Having recently met, your editors were making up for lost time, racing through past indiscretions over chilli vodkas that were, sorry to report, not claim-backable at tax time.

In between recountings of public nudity, public idiocy and mother-bothering woefulness, we discovered that both of us—at opposite ends of the world—had written autobiographical tales entitled ‘Confessions of a Smut Peddler’, recounting our individual stints writing for stick mags and flogging marital aids.

‘We could fill a book!’ we guffawed, spilling valuable ‘inspiration’ all over the table. Several wet ones later, we had a moment of clarity: if we, a couple of relatively normalish people had plenty of salacious tales to tell, imagine what we could dredge up from the freakishly talented and rightfully famous?

Despite us having a bout of the collywobbles (would anyone really come out publicly with stories they’ve hidden from their loved ones—and in some cases from themselves—for no fiscal reward?), all of our contributors prostrated themselves enthusiastically for the cause: cracking open cans of worms left, right and centre, and flinging the squirmy bastards about with no pause for remorse. Occasionally we were sickened and appalled—and at times we had to beg household names to tone it down—but throughout it all, we never stopped laughing. We bet you won’t either.

Bravery, candour, knee-slapping goodness and all royalties going to worthy charity the Mirabel Foundation. Actually, Mum, if your kid is in this book, maybe you should be proud.

Tamara Sheward and Jenny Valentish

JIM MORRISON AND THE DEEV SHELF

Emily Maguire

It all started with Cleo magazine. At fifteen, I bought the magazine every month, not because I gave a crap about sassy office-wear or sex tips for women in their twenties, but because looking at super-thin fashion models helped me stick to my near-starvation diet.

I had recently started at the local high school, having failed utterly at making the grade—socially or academically—at the prestigious selective school I’d attended for two years. At my old school, I was the fat girl who lost weight, turned into a slut and failed half her classes. At my new school, I was the hot girl who had left her previous school in mysterious circumstances. Some said I’d been expelled for drinking in school hours; others had it on good authority that I’d had to leave to escape my possessive older boyfriend. The kids in my year wouldn’t have accepted the boring truth—failure and sadness and a desperate desire to make a new start—any more than I would have shared it.

So, this one night, I was sitting up in bed in the granny flat that used to house my actual granny but which, since she’d moved back to Queensland, had been gifted to me. I was flipping through the new Cleo, and smoking to quell the hunger pains and cover the smell of sausages drifting down from the house. I was annoyed because this month’s issue had a focus on men’s style, which meant a good proportion of the fashion spreads were of thin men and therefore of no use to me at all.

I was about to give up and pull out my old copy of Women’s Weekly with the feature article on anorexia when I saw him. There, in the top left-hand corner, taking up less than one eighth of the page but filling my vision and rocking my world, was a shirtless man in charcoal leather pants. Dark curls hung over his forehead and the look in his eyes made all my muscles contract.

Above the photo it said, ‘Jim Morrison of the Doors’. Below the photo it said: ‘The only man who could get away with leather pants has been dead for years.’

In the space of thirty seconds I went from being hungry to horny to a tragic figure whose only true love was dead.

Within a week, I was an expert on Jim Morrison and the Doors. Within a month, my flat was a shrine: Jim posters on every wall, Jim’s poetry books scattered across the floor and Jim’s voice coming from my tape-deck at every moment. I also bought a Doors live-in-concert video, but since I had to go to the house to watch it, I mostly just gazed longingly at the cover on which Jim’s hips were cocked at an angle that made me quite faint. Once a fortnight or so, my longing would become too painful and I would enter the house, nostrils squeezed shut against the smell of food, ears deaf to the questions of my parents and the taunts of my siblings. I sat ramrod straight and silent while watching the video, then the second it was finished, ran back to my bed to recover.

My new best friends, Suze and Fiona, were sceptical about my grieving widow act. Looking at the pictures on my walls—all of them topless, one of them featuring snail trail and a pelvic bone—the girls suggested that maybe this was just lust.

‘He is kind of sexy …’ Suze offered, scrunching up her nose.

‘If you like dead guys,’ Fiona said.

‘Or old guys.’

‘Or guys with long hair.’

‘And weeds growing on their chest.’

I was deeply offended. Jim was undeniably sexy. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that this wasn’t about sex. This was true, deep, committed love and I would prove it.

Jim Morrison was influenced by William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud and Aldous Huxley, and so, instantly, was I. My English teacher was so impressed by my reading that he began to bring me books from his personal library. At my old school—which was run for and by nerds—this kind of thing would have marked me as part of the elect, an über-nerd, if you will. Here, though, it was so outrageous that no one knew what to think. An overheard conversation:

‘Didja hear about Emily and Mr Jones?’

‘Nuh. Ew! What?’

‘She borrows books from him.’

‘Huh?’

‘I know. He brings in books and she takes them home to read them and then she brings them back and he gives her more.’

‘Fuck me.’

‘I know.’

My French teacher, too, was impressed with my dedication to her subject. I told her and my parents that my new enthusiasm was due to my desire to spend a year working as an au pair in Paris after I graduated. Only my closest friends knew my real plan: to visit Jim’s grave at the Père Lachaise cemetery where I would (like all the other Jim tourists) leave him a bottle of whisky and a lit cigarette, after which I (unlike all the other Jim tourists) would be filled with his essence. Thus filled, I would move into the building where he died and become a famous poet, returning to his grave each day for fresh inspiration.

But all that was years away. Reading the books he read, planning to one day sit next to his headstone, these things were not convincing anyone that Jim and I were eternal soul mates. All I had achieved, actually, was better marks in French and English and a reputation as a dag who listened to late-’60s soft rock. I needed to step things up, to really prove my commitment to my man.

I should explain a little more about the granny flat. It had been built on the back of the garage by the previous owners and consisted of a bedroom, a kitchenette and, down a short flight of concrete steps, a bathroom. When my nana lived there, she transformed it from barely habitable to downright homey. She lined the kitchen cupboards, fixed the toilet and shower and polished the floorboards. She bought a funky retro secondhand fridge, a single bed and a desk. And she painted the nasty old fibro-board walls a beautiful dusty blue and the skirting boards and picture rails a delightfully contrasting shade of peach. You know in Calamity Jane how Katie Brown and Calamity sing, ‘A Woman’s Touch’ and turn that grimy cabin into a dream home? That’s what my nana did to the granny flat.

So, Suze, Fiona and I were sitting in my adorable, lovingly renovated flat and I was trying to explain to them that I wanted to live my philosophy, and they were not understanding me because I wasn’t really being very clear, since, you know, I didn’t actually have a philosophy so much as an urge to have sex with a dead rock star which I wanted to explain away by pretending to believe in all the stuff he’d believed in.

‘I just want to do stuff that, like, shows people how false their world is. Like, how they cling to material goods and, um, reputation and stuff instead of accepting reality.’

‘Huh?’

‘Like, life is pain, you know? And people need to learn to accept that.’

‘I guess. Got any Diet Coke?’

Frustrated, I went to get Fiona her drink. And there in the kitchenette, pushed back in the corner of a cupboard behind the Vegemite-jar glasses and orange plastic picnic plates, was a can of gold spray paint. I don’t know who put it there or why or when, but the instant I saw it I knew how to convince my friends that I was serious.

‘Out of the way,’ I yelled at the girls, who were slumped against the big, bare, beautiful blue wall. As they leaped to the safety of my bed I began to write, as big as my arms could make it, the most profound statement I could conceive of: SHIT HAPPENS.

‘Oh fuck,’ said Suze.

‘You are going to get killed,’ said Fiona.

A wave of nausea hit me. I ignored it and ran down to the bathroom. OPEN THE DOORS, I sprayed, already imagining how I’d explain about Aldous Huxley’s doors of perception to visitors and they’d be so impressed at how well-read and insightful I was. Back up the stairs, I hit the kitchen: SO BE IT, I wrote in the space above the sink (not realising I was quoting a Christian Slater movie rather than a Doors lyric).

I stood back and took in what I’d done. Terror and guilt gushed through my guts. My parents trusted me with this place. They were sad, I remembered, that I wanted so badly to be out of the house. They were distressed at my desire to get away from them and my sisters and brother. But because they were worried that saying no would result in me eating even less and dropping out of another school; because they were generous and supportive and selfless, they’d agreed to let me have the solitude and privacy I so desperately craved. I had screwed up, big time.

Then I looked at Suze and Fiona and their faces obliterated all my doubts. They were fucking sold.

By lunch the next day I was a legend. Everybody knew what I had done to my granny flat walls. More importantly, everyone knew I lived in a granny flat.

The other thing I should mention about the flat is that it was on the edge of a corner block and it had two doors: one faced the living-room window of my parents’ house; the other faced the side street. The latter, I was absolutely forbidden to use.

My poor trusting parents. Over the next few Saturday nights, while Mum and Dad thought Suze, Fiona and I were having girly slumber parties, half the school plus a fair number of random hot boys we’d met around the suburb slouched through that forbidden door with armfuls of booze and drugs.

Suze and Fiona took charge. While I sat on my bed pretending to read poetry, they sat by the open door, ready to greet visitors and tell them they had to whisper—if a male voice reached the house, it was all over. The only other rule was that anyone smoking drugs had to do so in the bathroom, which was below ground and had no window facing the house. This was obviously the best strategy with regards to parental detection, but it also worked to keep the smoke away from me. If anyone asked, I’d say pot made me sleepy, but the truth was I’d never even tried it, having been scared off by its reputation for causing ravenous hunger. I stuck to binge-drinking vodka. It rarely stayed down long enough for my body to absorb any calories, and it killed my appetite for the entire next day.

It was after an extended session in the smoky bathroom that Suze came up with the idea of collecting souvenirs of all the bad-arse stuff we did. I would say it was a typical stoner idea except I was the one who decided that our souvenir collection needed its own shelf.

While I constructed a dodgy bookshelf (scrap wood from the garage balanced on nails half-hammered into the wall), Suze made a sketch (biro on lined foolscap) of a freckle-faced kid giving the finger. Fiona drew two speech bubbles: ‘Screw You’ and ‘Eh-he-he he-he’, and made a heading, THE DEEV SHELF.

The first item was obvious: the gold spray can. Filling the rest of the shelf would be a challenge. Thing is, we weren’t very bad. We were middle-class girls living in the Bible Belt of Sydney’s western suburbs. Our parents were kind, generous and hard-working. We had shiny hair and nice clothes and good grades. We wanted to be above it all, but without actually giving any of it up.

So it was that one of our first exhibits consisted of three plastic baubles stolen from a Christmas tree while shopping for expensive gifts at the upscale mall in the next suburb. Another early piece was a dice taken from a board game at a house party. Then there was the single plastic daisy plucked from a narrow Sizzler table vase into which we had stuffed seafood salad. The ceramic sugar satchel-holder beside it was not taken for its own sake, but as a reminder of the night we filled a restaurant salt-shaker with sugar.

As witty and original as the acts that provided these displays were, the souvenir that best summed up the spirit of the Deev Shelf was the cleaning check card we took from a plastic sleeve on the back of a public toilet door. The card was 10 × 15, pulpy beige cardboard with faded black lines. It was useless to everyone except the cleaner who needed a place to scribble her initials, and it contained information of interest to no one except the cleaning supervisor. It was tacky-looking and worthless, and its absence would cause—at most—minor inconvenience and befuddled annoyance. Deev to the max.

While the room-vandalising and petty pranking brought me and my girlfriends closer, I was feeling further away from Jim Morrison than ever. I had, reluctantly, admitted to myself (though not to Suze and Fiona) that this was, after all, probably just lust, starting as it did with a photo of snaky hips in leather pants rather than opaque free verse set to electronic organ music; but acknowledging this truth did nothing to make it go away.

If anything, I felt more frustrated. I would have been willing to work it all out with one of the nice boys in brand-new metal T-shirts and carefully ripped jeans who filed into my room every weekend, but they were as bold with us girls as we were with crime.

Until Joseph. Joseph was in our year at school, but he hung with the real tough kids, the ones who stole cars instead of cleaning cards. He was tall and lean with black eyes and shoulder-length hair, and before he showed up at my door I had never even heard him speak.

‘Hey,’ he said, picking at the front of his holey Metallica shirt.

‘Hey,’ we all said, as if criminals in skin-tight jeans and steel-capped boots visited us every night of the week.

‘Um, you can come in but you need to whisper, okay?’ Suze said.

Joseph walked past her. ‘What?’ he yelled, looking right at me. I was gone.

Joseph had the beef-jerky physique and haughty demeanour of a rock star, and I can’t honestly say which attracted me more. When everyone who cared about me told me that he was no good, I thought it was because they were jealous or small-minded. I had yet to learn that—contrary to every John Hughes movie I’d seen—not every gorgeous bad boy is a misunderstood loner with a heart of gold. Some are, in fact, sub-literate, selfish arseholes with anger-management issues.

In that first rush of lust, though, the only real flaw I could see in Joseph was that he thought the Doors were shit. Worse, he said such nasty things about Jim Morrison that I was forced to take down my posters just so I wouldn’t have to see him spit ‘fag’ at them every time he walked through my door.

If Joseph had known that the whole time we were together, Jim’s Girl you gotta love your man was on a loop in my head, he might have realised that he should have been sending flowers to the man’s grave instead of insulting him. As it was, though, I had to keep quiet about my dead love in order to keep my flesh-and-blood boyfriend by my side.

With the posters down, Joseph turned his scorn on the Deev Shelf. It was, he said, ‘fucking embarrassing’. The stories I told him about the fun Suze, Fiona and I had collecting each item were met with yawns. My friends and I, he said, were ‘babies’ who would probably cry and wet our pants if we were caught stealing one of our silly trophies. When I failed to react to this, he stomped one of the Christmas baubles to smithereens.

A month or so after Joseph and I had started going out, Suze and Fiona presented me with a fresh Deev Shelf display: a crumpled Milky Way wrapper. I was sceptical, alluding to the many such wrappers that lined the streets between their houses and mine. I mentioned also the bag of snack-sized chocolate bars that Suze’s mum kept in the cupboard over the fridge, and the ready supply of Milky Ways at the 7–11 down the end of my street.

‘Yeah, that’s where we got it. We nicked it,’ Suze said.

I looked at Fiona, who nodded.

‘And what? Ate it?’ The disgust I felt was, of course, totally about the common thuggishness of stealing chocolate to eat and not at all about the fact that nothing solid had passed my lips that week.

‘Yeah, but only so we’d have the clean wrapper. It’s legit, man, totally in the deev spirit,’ Suze insisted.

‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘It’s a 30-cent chocolate. Joseph stole a frickin’ microwave last week. Got bitten by a guard dog and everything.’

Suze and Fiona exchanged looks.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ they both said, but there was something and we all knew it.

Three months into our ‘relationship’, Joseph stopped talking to me. Well, he’d never talked to me much anyway, so it was more that he stopped turning up at my flat and ordering my friends to leave. I was devastated, not just by the rejection, but by the way it poisoned everything else.

My Doors tapes, in particular, were ruined forever. When Jim called on me to Ride the snake, I could only think: great idea, look where that got me. ‘Love Her Madly’ made me especially angry: All your love is gone, Jim sang. So sing a lonely song / Of a deep blue dream / Seven horses seem to be on the mark. Huh? What do I do now my love is gone? Seven horses are what? Jesus, did the man ever listen to himself?

Suze and Fiona began to come around every Saturday night again, but now we kept the side door closed. We were bitter about men, the way they changed a room just by being in it, and the way they made bright things seem dull and beloved things less precious. We were especially bitter about the way all these changes remained even after the man had gone.

We knew we couldn’t change it all back, so we started over. We repainted the walls and hung new posters. We played Salt ’n’ Pepa so loud my dad actually started to come down to the granny flat to yell. We spent some weekends at Fiona’s house and some at Suze’s, and admitted relief at not having a stream of boys knocking on the door, demanding entry.

And one night we sat up until dawn, slowly dismantling the Deev Shelf. We reminisced about the laughs we’d had as we reverently wrapped each item in newspaper and placed it in an old school bag. It wasn’t that our deev days were over, we promised each other, but that our future acts of rebellion would be so large that not even their symbols would fit on a shelf.

Postscript

I did eventually visit Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris. Sadly, I did not absorb his essence but I did inhale the urine and patchouli stench of several stoners who had set up vigil there. Suze is now a teacher at our old high school, where she marvels at the similarity of teenaged emo poetry to Doors lyrics. Fiona is mother to two adorable munchkins who, if they’re at all like their mum, will be marvellous human beings except for one year of their lives in which they will be unbearable little brats. We are all still deev to the max.

NICOLE KIDMAN WAS MY GIRLFRIEND (OR HOW TO GET THROWN OUT OF NIDA WITHOUT REALLY TRYING)

Greg Fleet

For a brief period in 1984 Nicole Kidman was my girlfriend. I’ve told a lot of lies in my life, but this is not one of them.

1984 was a bore. The very LA Olympics were on and George Orwell was proved wrong. It was, in fact, many years before Big Brother was watching us and, more disturbingly, we were watching Big Brother. At the end of the previous year, my studies at the National Institute of Dramatic Art were brought to a premature halt when I was told that my services as a star-in-training were no longer required.

I remember being called in to the office of the head of the acting department, a man whom I admired and, years after his death, still admire. He fixed me with his steely grey-blue eyes and told me that, after much inter-staff argument, they had decided to let me go. I can’t recall the exact words but it went along the lines of: ‘Something, something, inability to improvise, blah blah blah, something, something, heroin addiction, blah blah blah.’

I had never experienced rejection quite like it. Usually I could blame rejection on someone else’s lack of vision, but this time it sat roundly on my head like some ugly inflatable crown of shame (a feeling I would get to know intimately over the next twenty-odd years). It felt alien, like I was some rare and foreign exotic jungle bird.

‘How does that make you feel?’ he asked, in a tone that implied he expected a smart-arse reply as opposed to a heartfelt one.

‘It makes me feel like a toucan,’ I responded, picking surrealism as my weapon of choice. Drug psychosis was clearly starting to affect my chances of making it in Hollywood.

He continued to stare at me. What was that look on his face? Sorrow? Boredom? Lust? No, no, none of those. It was … it was … confusion! Suddenly, it hit me like a blinding flash of pure white light. This was my chance. I had a ten-second window of opportunity to change his mind. To redeem myself and prove to this man that when he had chosen me above thousands of others to attend his historic place of learning, he had chosen right. I could save myself and I knew how. All I had to do was break out the Fleety magic. Act. Act like … an actor. Like the chameleon I knew I was. Bring it on. Start by throwing myself around the room like an emotionally devastated Scarlett O’Hara, then get up menacingly and threaten him like Brando. Next, lighten the mood with some Alan Alda / early M.A.S.H. hijinx, seguing into some Christopher Walken-esque remoteness before ending with a show tune, finishing on one knee, arms spread wide like a slightly less racist Al Jolson.

And to this day, I know it would have worked. But I didn’t do it. I just sat there.

You see, I had been brought up ‘well’ which, among other things, meant never showing desperation and, above all else, never, ever stooping so low as to actually fight for something you believe in.

The ten seconds passed and the window of opportunity slammed shut in my 21-year-old face. It was over.

‘What will you do now?’

‘What?’

‘What will you do now? What do you want to be?’ he asked, real sorrow dripping off his words like so much spilled honey.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m going to be an actor’s actor. Kind of like Robert De Niro mixed with Robert Duvall … you know?’

He clearly didn’t ‘know’. He winced. He winced like I had reached across the desk and sliced open his cheek with a box-cutter. An image I began to obsess about.

An awkward, ugly silence ensued. The air was thick with it. Like breathing in cottonwool. Cottonwool mixed with regret. Thankfully, he spoke.

‘I guess there is always the comedy thing …’

The comedy thing? What the fuck was he talking about? I had no idea what he meant. Comedy was for idiots. I was a great actor. Like Al Pacino or Ralph Richardson. This was getting too weird, even for me.

Our relationship was over. We were no longer relevant to each other. I stood to leave and I thanked him. It must have been horrible for him to have to tell me that stuff, and I felt sorry for him. I thanked him and he thanked me. I don’t know what he was thanking me for.

When I walked out of his office and into the Randwick sunshine, I knew that something crucial and terrible had just occurred. A feeling of great loss and sadness descended on me like a feeling of great loss and sadness. I managed to stuff down these thoughts with the realisation that my girlfriend was getting paid at four o’clock. We would have strong medicine that night and anything that hurt would cease to matter.

Now, about Nicole.

Early the next year I was back in Melbourne and had begun to act professionally. I got three jobs in rapid succession. First as spear-carrier with the Australian Opera, then as the dynamic ‘Delivery man 2’ in Prisoner, and then as the bad influence on the good kid in a terrible TV movie called Matthew and Son. The person who played my girlfriend was a young actress called Nicole Kidman. Okay, okay so she only played my girlfriend … but I did see her naked. Once. Oh, so now you’re interested. Read on.

Nicole played my girlfriend and the two of us were singled (or doubled) out by the reviewers as young stars of the future. I spent most of the shoot smoking bongs in the trailer with the young, now-retired, male lead. A guy who exploded his own career in truly spectacular style. It was while going to smoke said bong that I encountered the nude Nicole. The trailer was half wardrobe trailer, half bong-smoking relaxation trailer. I barged in for the latter just as Miss Kidman was at the crucial point of the former. Now, please remember that this was not post Oscar-winning Nicole of The Hours fame; it was more your poodle-haired Nicole of BMX Bandits fame, but hey, it was still ‘our’ Nicole.

She had taken off all her character’s clothes and was yet to put on her own.

Naked.

Tall and pale and naked.

I was shocked. She was pale and quite beautiful. Kind of luminous. If she was embarrassed, it didn’t show. What’s to be embarrassed about? That would be like being embarrassed because you owned a Monet. She drew the curtain that ran between us. Slowly. Without once breaking eye contact with me. She had a certain look of confidence on her face.

‘Hey, sorry Nicole … I just came in … for a bong … Do you want one?’

‘No. I don’t smoke bongs.’

‘Yeah … No …’

‘Thanks anyway,’ she said. God—all that and polite.

I backed out of the trailer. I needed to take in what had just happened.

Outside, what stayed with me was not her admittedly impressive nudity but the look on her face. It was a look that said: ‘I am going to be a huge star.’ I felt sorry for her. I mean, what were the chances of both of us making it big? Pretty fucking small. And my destiny in Hollywood was all but assured.

She had looked so sure. How could someone be so sure about something that just wasn’t going to happen? How could someone so smart and so beautiful be so deluded?

She left the trailer and got in a cab.

So deluded.

There was something in that trailer. Something important. I went back in. Something important … Where was it? There! The bong.

As I fired up my umpteenth cone for that day, I heard Nicole pulling away in her cab.

So very deluded.

ONE NIGHT IN JENA

Mike Noga

Being an in-depth description of the final death throes of a four-month tour across the wilds of Europe in which our heroes, the Drones, face yet another medieval turret in which to off-load their 700 tonnes of equipment; Dan loses all manner of patience and tries to kill their vastly incompetent Spanish tour manager; a karaoke competition is won off the back of copious amounts of alcohol and a Guns N’ Roses classic (thirty drunk Germans truly believing that this is the best thing they have ever seen, thanks to the kind of determination that only occurs when the lure of a Southern Comfort hamper rears its ugly head); and finally, a hotel room party turns into a padded cell of insanity when Mike, Dan, Gaz and Fiona finally, and completely, flip.

All this in one night.

Jena, Germany, 20 June 2007

Four months. Four long months. It’s surprising what the body can handle. A steady diet of cheese, bread, cigarettes and beer. Ten-hour drives every day scrunched into a tiny ball in the back of a van the size of your standard couch. An average of four hours’ sleep a night.

Your body eventually accustoms itself to this funky rhythm, which on an average day goes something like this: wake up in strange hotel room in Bratwurstlick, Germany, after what seems like shutting your eyes for fifteen seconds; force down breakfast of cheese, bread and various cold meats; stuff yourself and your luggage into van; sit in unnatural proximity to band-mates inside little white motorised prison cell for anywhere between eight to ten hours; arrive at venue anywhere between three to four hours late; load a preposterous amount of equipment onto the stage, which is usually located about five kilometres from where the van has been parked; soundcheck; head backstage to dine on a banquet of bread, cheese and beer; wait; wait a bit more; play show; try to drink oneself into some degree of oblivion; pack up the equipment you have come to despise; load van; arrive at Der Schreckliche Deutsche Entkernen Hotel; collapse onto bed furnished with gargantuan and exceedingly uncomfortable pillows; close eyes; open eyes; repeat.

The mind, on the other hand, is a different beast altogether. Trying to keep it occupied with an iPod or your favourite Peter Carey novel is like trying to convince a child that Fluffy is just having a long sleep, and that when he wakes in the morning, Fluffy will have gone to a beautiful place full of giant balls of wool and fresh fish on silver platters. The kid knows.

The mind can sense the end of a tour approaching in much the same way as your bladder senses you are nearing home and applies full pressure as you steer your car into the driveway. And when the mind senses the approaching conclusion of a four-month expedition, it does what any right mind would do—promptly collapses in a heap on the floor and loses its shit.

We were nearing the end of what we now jovially refer to these days as ‘the tour’ when regaling our friends with hilarious anecdotes over a few beers. Telling tales of muggings in London, robberies in York, various near punch-ons with our dim-witted Spanish tour manager, nervous breakdowns and motor-vehicle breakdowns, all in between fits of laughter, pats on the back, and satisfying looks of awe and amazement from our friends and the other one hundred or so people who usually gather round our beer-garden table to hear these sordid tales of life on the road.

The light was definitely at the end of the sixty-gig tunnel as we yanked our ever-reluctant and complaining van into the carpark of Rosenkeller, Jena, in the north of Germany. We were instantly presented with one of the most heinous load-ins experienced so far on this travelling circus. The venue was located in the bowels of a medieval shopping mall, and band access was a hair-raising descent down a tiny cobblestone staircase that wound its way five storeys through some kind of turret—not ideal conditions for hauling a 100-pound bass amplifier and various pieces of bone-crushing apparatus with the remaining energy our withered little frames could muster.

At the conclusion of the load-in a headcount was taken and, much to our amazement, we learned that everyone had survived. Not a bone protruding from skin to be found. Exchanging looks of pride, we slung ourselves onto the stage to begin the painstaking process of repeating over and over the word ‘two’ into various microphones, and inevitably arguing in broken German with the in-house sound engineer over amplifier levels and playing times. Believe me, Nazi Germany