You were such a cocky, successful winner when we were 16, but now you're just another sad fat prick sitting in the MCG high-fiving in self congratulation, as if it's YOU that had the skill and determination to play for Australia. It's the cunts with the bad haircuts that you've got to watch out for. There's never been a popular teenager yet who's done rat's with their life. It's the fucking dorks that give it a real go. Glenn McGrath got 5 for 50 that day.
- TISM, 1998
When I subsequently put my reading of the facts (you heard me, FACTS) to Nerissa, however, she didn’t back away from her position. The opposite. She was defiant. Proud, even.
“Well, what the hell did you expect?” she laughed, squeezing my arm with the hand that wasn’t clutching another glass of the house chardonnay, all ex-model sparkly teeth and Sunshine Coast tan. Or was that the other way around? “I was like everyone else then. Fucking clueless. I thought it was true love with Brendan. I was seventeen. Give me a break, for Christ’s sake.” She jabbed me drunkenly in the chest with an expensively manicured finger, her liquid-amber eyes burning brightly. “And don’t pretend you were some heartbroken little boy who was just used and discarded, Andy. You loved it and you know it, and you'd do the same in five minutes.”
I frowned, contemplating my position (or at least refining my comic timing.)
“Make it ten?”
Nerissa giggled uproariously again. She wasn’t shying away from eye contact now, and she was very much still a serious fucking babe. The years had been kind to her - it almost seemed a pity we were a decade removed from the original events. 
Pity, for other reasons, that we were at the Evans Head Bowling Club. Okay, so they’d renovated the function room. Okay, so the décor was markedly less vomitiferous and the carpet didn’t look like it’d been salvaged from the set of Don’s Party. But it was still the Bowlo, dammit. There were still dead things living in the beer lines and the bistro’s vol-au-vaunts were still made from animal entrails and vulcanized rubber.
As ten year high school reunions went, it had been pretty run-of-the-mill. Of course, having attended none before or since my own, I’m basing my frame of reference solely on the acclaimed Hollywood documentaries Grosse Point Blank and 
Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, but the fact that McCarthy and I didn’t get to (a) turn up in a thunderous Corvette with Fabulous Hair or (b) blow up a convenience store in a gun battle with a disfigured midget hitman meant that our own reunion was never going to cut it by comparison.
However, we didn’t have to go through the empty charade of having to make up interesting stories about what we’d been up to since Year 12. In fact, by and large, people didn’t even ask; it seemed to be fairly common knowledge, which was mildly gratifying positive reinforcement considering the shitfight that characterised Good Times in the Flange Gasket empire of late. Despite our apparently waning popularity (as our slimy record label A&R dude was disturbingly keen to remind us – as McCarthy pointed out fairly forcefully at the time, how the fuck does that help the fucking creative process, you fucking plastic cunt? – everyone here seemed to know what we’d been occupying our time with.
Actually, now that the hour was becoming late, the natives were becoming restless; the school social déjà vu, like the fake disco smoke from the dry ice machine, was thick, clammy and stank of something dead and worrying. Tonight's house DJ, clearly misjudging his audience, had laid on a veritable smorgasboard of old 80’s cheese, not realising we were children of the (early) 90’s, and despite calls for Pearl Jam, Nirvana and something called ‘Chili Willie’, he kept serving up the likes of Spandau Ballet, Human League and A-Ha, missing his target demographic by at least a decade. A riot and/or old-fashioned lynchin' had narrowly been avoided, but on the insistence of many of the pissed bastards here tonight, I’d had to call for backup.
Brother From The Same Mother, The Jeff, dependable to the last (and most importantly, on sober-dude standby) had answered the call. Before too long he was loping through the doors to the bowling club function room, as casual as you like, or as casual as you can be with the neck of an acoustic guitar in each hand. The Jeff acknowledged the crowd’s applause, nodded at my waved hand, and joined me by the stage.
“Here y’are, fat man,” he greeted me. “The factory Yamaha for yourself and the black Maton for McCarthy, the one he left at ours last weekend. Should be vaguely in tune,” reported Flange Gasket’s long-term (read long-suffering) guitar tech. Vaguely in tune was an improvement from The Jeff's usual standards of service. “Where’s our favourite Uncle?”
“You mean Uncle Ted or Uncle Sam?” I queried. 
Uncle Ted, known to its manufacturer as Tooheys Extra Dry, was being widely employed as Piss Of Choice among tonight’s attendees, largely as it was free. I’d gone off it a bit since the glory days, I had to admit. “As for McCarthy, he’s probably on the spade, I would predict,” I grinned. “Digging a hole big enough to bury himself in.”
“About time,” The Jeff figured. “Bit of a shadow of himself at the moment.”
I gave an assenting nod. A nice way of putting that the lad was carrying on like four-fifths of a complete fucking cock. “Stay for one?” I semaphored with the end of my empty Uncle Ted.
“Best not,” The Jeff replied with a knowing smile. “Keep me powder dry. So yeah,” he continued, “Beck wants to know if you boys will need beds made up for you tonight.” The knowing smile was quickly turning into a smug grin, the little bastard.
“Can’t speak for McCarthy,” I replied – taking the moral high road and needing sat-nav to help me find my way around, familiar as I was with it – “but I’ll be sleeping in my own bed tonight, I reckon.”
The Jeff’s eyebrows narrowed. You’d pay big bucks for that on Extreme Makeover, I thought. In his typical call-a-spade-a-spade way (particularly when referring to spadework), he decided to ask, “Weren't you gonna try and fuck that Nerissa Sutton?”
He must have noticed my Adam’s apple rise and fall like a guillotine. “She’s right behind me, isn’t she,” The Jeff added calmly.
I nodded conversationally.
He turned, nodded politely to Nerissa, and exited stage left as fast as his hairy little legs would carry him. Nerissa, returning from the bar with another Tedski for me and house chardy for herself, handed me my beer.
“Well aren’t you?” she ventured, not even skipping a beat.
I was about to offer a carefully-considered response but was collared by McCarthy, who led the way onto the stage. Given that the last performer had been chased off with coarse language and upturned bar stools, we weren’t overly confident. Actually we weren't overly confident full stop. Flange Gasket were currently taking a break from playing live - at the time we were struggling through the recording of our next, and as it turned out, final album - and we were rusty as fuck. We were obviously short of our backline, Marty and Phil - though the meteoric sales of Marty's solo album meant he'd be playing in the backs for no bastard, least of all the likes of us, pretty soon. Neither had we played to any of these people before - unless you believed the independent assertions of pretty much all present that they’d been to our early gigs around the North Coast. If everyone who claimed they’d seen us play had actually done so, we could have packed out Wembley on our third-ever gig instead of playing to two men and a dog at the Gollan Hotel. (Though to be fair, the dog seemed to really get into it.)
“Well,” I began, “you asked for it.”
Appalling PA, scratchy mikes, no foldback, lots of feedback - our front-of-house was rarely this good at our full band gigs. In any case we made the SHED (that’s Shit-Hot Executive Decision) to go unplugged. Hey, it'd been trendy back in 1993 too. Sticking with the theme of the night, we played a bunch of other people’s songs of the era - Crank-era Gurus, Pearl Jam, U2, Stone Temple Pilots, 
half the tracklist from ‘93’s Triple J Hottest 100 Volume 1 - not that our region actually got Triple J coverage until 1995 - and even cranked out our favourite completely obscure song from that era, Scatterbrain’s epic and transcendental three-minute rock opera Don’t Call Me Dude.
Later, under immense, asphxyiating pressure, we relented near the end, and played one song of our own, one of our earliest and most obscure recordings. The heartfelt lyrics, McCarthy’s, spoke of the superficiality and contempt which he endured from some quarters during his early years of uni in our largest and most pretentious capital. The riff, mine, was big and ugly, as you’d expect, shot through with Sex Pistols hooks - we’d been listening to Never Mind The Bollocks a lot the week we wrote it. I think McCarthy had it on high rotation on the living room stereo, in the house we’d been sharing with a few others on the Goonellabah hillside.
Paul McCartney once said the Sex Pistols were just another band playing Chuck Berry. At the time I thought “You boring old wanker” - but now I think it’s downright scary.
- TISM again, 1995
The point is, though, Paul was right, even if he was and remains a boring old wanker. You listen back to Never Mind The Bollocks Etc and all you can hear - well, all I can hear, once you set aside Lydon’s primally gutteral delivery - is Steve Jones’ thermonuclear Chuck Berry chops. Particularly on stuff like Pretty Vacant, God Save The Queen and the opening track which I can’t remember the name of. Old-school rock-and-roll riffs, played gloriously raw, heavily distorted and far too loud. Not so simple to do on a Yamaha acoustic designed for classical use, but that was why they were paying me and the lads the big bucks on the live circuit these days, or at least half price drinks and cab fare home.
“Mr Angus,” declared my suitably half-cut colleague-in-league in his swaggering stage voice. “Would you do the honours and crank this motherfucker up.”
The motherfucker in question was called Our Year 12 Formal Was At The Evans Head Bowlo, written by Young and McCarthy, copyright Gasket Goo Publishing Emporium And Recycling Depot, 1998 AD.
Private school at vast expenses, rural schoolin's just a joke
Private schoolgirls say we’re yee-haas, we ain’t got that North Shore style
Play the banjo with our toenails all the fuckin’ day long while.
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Can’t get no cred
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Been living in Sin City for four long years
Without so much as head.
Not saying I regret it, beachside childhood was our gain
Brought up by surf and sunshine, stolen six-packs in the cane
That world’s a world away from mobile phones and Daddy’s car
PLC girls just don’t buy it - never let me get that far…
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Don’t seem to impress
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Can’t get laid in this city
Unless you’re some prick from GPS.
[INSERT SOLO HERE]
City girls want a prefect with a Beemer and a suit…
I can drive a tractor, but does that get me a root?
Had their formal at the Hilton, or the QVB, or worse
Up on Sydney fuckin’ Tower - it seems somewhat perverse
Miss the girls from my old school days, didn’t care from where you came
Long as you brought the Passion Pop, and vaguely knew their name…
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
It’s not fuckin’ right
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
It’s superficial shite
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Decision time, alright
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Need to find a girl from a country town
Or it’s Oxford Street tonight.
“Hey. I’ve realised what seems different tonight,” Nerissa said.
We’d earlier agreed the most noticeable thing about tonight was that nothing had changed, everyone was effectively the same as they’d been ten years before, despite the success or failure of their subsequent lives. “Give me the boy to the age of seven and I will give you the man,” I’d quoted at the time, which seemed to impress her. At least she didn’t call me a kiddy-fiddler. My point being, lives may progress beyond high school achievements, but childhood personalities don’t. The jocks are still the jocks, the cocks are still the cocks, QED, in excelsius deo, pass the chips.
“What’s that?”
“Everyone here is just the same… except you guys. It’s just you two. I mean, it's not like you can help it. All the attention, all the confidence. You’re strutting around like you own the place,” she said, “because you do.”
I shrugged noncommittally, not sure I agreed. Didn’t reflect that well on me. Noone wants to be king of the kids.
“Particularly him,” she indicated over her shoulder to where McCarthy was in animated conversation with a particularly striking former classmate of ours, one an old version of him had carried a torch for over many years. “He’s turned into an arrogant little bastard, hasn’t he?”
“I couldn’t possibly comment,” I grinned, which seemed to close that line of questioning.
Things were wrapping up quickly. We’d had to finish up as the bowling club was closing. Any moment now I expected the ‘ugly lights’ to come on (as per 3.30am at the infamous Powerhouse Niteclub [sic] in Lismore, where we inevitably ended up most Saturday nights of ’98, our first year in Lismore after Sam and I bailed post-uni on life in the major capitals) to scare everyone out of the building, in the company of whoever they’d managed to hook up with. The analogy did occur to me at the time, as we wandered out of the front doors of the club, Nerissa under one arm, two guitars under the other. A brief chat with McCarthy had indicated (a) he wasn’t going to need that bed made up for him and (b) he wasn’t likely to be in a position to return his guitar tonight, so I’d collected it for him to take back. In fact he’d just set the thing down on a sideboard and flicked me a signal to grab it, barely interrupting his silken spadework to do so. It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered whether perhaps Nerissa had a point.
Outside, it was a cool, humid evening, the seabreeze salting the night air. Déjà vu all over again.
“You’re heading home?” Nerissa asked.
“Back to the farm,” I replied. “Jeff’s on his way back to pick me up.”
She absorbed this information. It seemed to take a little longer to sink in amongst all the alcohol. Then she grabbed me and kissed me breathlessly on the steps of the club, her chardonnay-flavoured tongue flickering defiantly in my mouth. She could have been more discreet, but didn’t seem that interested in discretion.
“I’m staying at my parents’ place tonight,” she began, her incandescent eyes signalling barely-concealed intent, “and I’m free all weekend.” She scrawled a number down on a piece of paper. “So, if you feel inclined to, shall we say, finish what we started ten years ago…” She pressed the paper into my hand. “You know what to do. Pretty sure you did then…”
And I would have. Trust me, I really would have. But for one thing, which I later explained to a frankly incredulous Jeff on the way back to the farm. Only a small thing, but it’d got my attention.
It was the photo of her husband and kids from her purse, which she’d proudly shown me not an hour before. She’d left them back at home in Noosa for the weekend - she’d told me all about 
how she and Marcus ran a trendy ‘modern Australian’ café-bar on Hastings St, quite the success to date. The twins, a boy and a girl, were starting school next year. The husband was a grown man and presumably able to fend for himself - if she strayed, I reckoned that was at least partly down to him for not meeting the requirements of the position (I'd admit to having used similar self-justification in the past, and I'd probably do again.) The kids, though, were another thing altogether. They had no choice. I wasn’t going to be any part of contributing to any potential screwing-up of their lives, even if their mother was.
Jeff considered this opinion and proposed an alternate theory.
“Not just too pissed to get it up?
“Ah, go and get fucked.”
Jeff laughed, and gave me a brotherly punch in the arm. “You serious? Fuck, man, that’s cool. That’s one of the the single most decent things I can ever remember you doing. There’s hope for you yet.”
“Now you’re just patronising me,” I remarked wryly. “Go. And. Get. Fucked.”
And, to no particular surprise, I received the same alternately derogatory/patronising rubbish from my dear sister-in-law Rebecca, once we got back to the farm and debriefed over a few more drinks - totally unnecessary in my case, judging by the massiveness of my hangover next morning. Thanks Jeff Beck, I love you guys.
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