Head hurts

You wake up some days and your head hurts
Like none of the lights in your house work.
- Eskimo Joe, 2002

Some carpet stains are harder to shift than others. Like the particularly stubborn stain which was found on the carpet in our place at the end of Mountain View Drive, Goonellabah, on the morning of February 21, 1998. In a development as disappointing as it was unsurprising, the stain in question was me.

Brilliant Saturday morning sunlight screamed in through the dodgy ‘70s rainforest-print curtains which tried and failed to keep the world outside the balcony sliding doors out of our living room, and tried to jimmy open my eyelids with a crowbar. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my head fucking hurt. There exists no pain on this Earth like that which is entirely self-inflicted. I couldn’t blame the organisers of O-Week at Lismore's own Southern Cross Uni; I couldn’t blame McCarthy, the Duffer or Marty; and I couldn’t blame the gorgeous barmaid at Maggie Moore’s (Jessica?) who was mates with Marty’s sister and kept supplying us with three dollar Coronas well into the late hours even though the promotion finished at nine. I couldn’t blame anyone but myself.

Groaning like a harpooned whale, from the piercing ache in my head from the invading sunlight and from the dull throbbing in my side from passing out on the living room carpet - some kind soul, presumably Marty, had provided me with a pillow and blanket - I crawled towards the light, shaking my head to try and clear the fog that had descended. To be fair, dying dogs had put in more convincing performances of four-limbed locomotion, though the collapse and blackout at the end was as per program. The sandman flung another bucket of grit in my eyes and everything faded to black. Until an unseen hand reached down for me. An unseen hand with an unseen weapon. A weapon so unspeakably evil in its neurotoxicity that only a profoundly evil soul would be prepared to inflict it upon his fellow man.

McCarthy waved the open bottle of El Toro under my nose.

“You’re up,” he advised.

The contents of my stomach (wedges from Maggie Moore's and a poorly-thought-out kebab on the way home) made a mad scramble for the exits, as the waft of cheap tequila fumes stormed the compound. El Toro, that true Satan of spirits. As my internals lurched, I fought desperately against it. And won. Then I turned to my tormentor, and through bleary, bloodshot eyes, declared that he was a cunting fucking cunt-arsed cunt, or words to that effect. To that, he doubled over laughing on the couch, almost dousing himself in cheap nasty tequila in the process. At which point I would have willingly reached for a cigarette lighter and sparked the bastard up, best mate since age four or not.

“Sorry mate,” he almost wept with laughter. “If it’s any consolation, I feel exactly like you look.” If that was the case we were in even bigger trouble. He looked like shit.

I coughed colourfully. “Surely fucking not…” I indicated the bottle he was holding.

“Reckon we might have,” he winced, nodding. “When we got back here after the Powerhouse [Niteclub (sic), the only game in town after midnight] I have a distinct memory of someone busting out El Bull.”

“Which then threw the lot of us,” I half-smiled, half-grimaced. “Christ, tequila shots on top of all the other shit we drank - whose fucking half arsed idea was that?”

“Yours,” McCarthy said with a grin. Which explained his evil vengeance, to some extent. I’d busted out the Bull. I felt somewhat responsible for the current public health crisis.

“How’d we pull up?”

McCarthy prepared his battle report from the frontlines. “The Duffer is gone for all money, he’s crashed out on the couch downstairs in the garage.” McCarthy duly crossed himself. Phil was with God now. Before too long he’d be talking to him directly on the big white telephone. “Marty was smart enough to retire with Beroccas and a couple rounds of Vegemite toast when we got home from the Powerie. He’d had fuck all to drink though.” Which was McCarthy-code for anything less than half a dozen drinks. “Bill and Ben are back next door holding each other’s hair up while they alternate entries in this morning’s yodelling competition. It’s rather sweet actually.”

“And the girls?”

“What girls?”

“The ones we met tonight. Last night. Those friends of Marty’s sister, or whatever. Didn’t they come back here with us?”

“Nah… fuck I hope not, it’s a fucking sty around here at the best of times, they’d run for the hills,” McCarthy observed aptly. “Though you may be on with Jessica, the blonde one who works at Maggie Moore’s. Don’t know how you managed to keep getting cheap Coronas on your rounds, the rest of us were paying full market price…”

I grinned. “Gots to represent tha old skills, mah niggah,” I declared.

“If you say so. Coffee?”

“Most intelligent fucken thing you’ve said all day.”

So we recovered with a leisurely coffee on the balcony (armed with the darkest of dark sunglasses we could find - I considered looking for my motorbike helmet with the ridiculously dark visor but decided I couldn't be arsed) followed by the traditional not-so-leisurely 10.29am tear-arse rallycross sprint down to McDonalds for bacon and egg McMuffins, before they switched over to their inedible non-breakfast menu. I was pretty sure I wasn’t right to drive, but hey, it was an emergency. And by now, having been back in Lismore a good couple of weeks, the postie van surely knew its own way down the hill to Maccas for Saturday breakfast.

The postie van had replaced the Atomic Mandarin, the iridescent metallic orange '73 Torana GTR which I’d inherited from my older brother Matt several years ago and which had finally shuffled off its mortal coil, or more correctly its ignition coil. Followed by its gearbox, cylinder head, brake master cylinder and rear axle. The unofficial contest as to what would kill the Mandarin first ended up being too close to call (hold all tickets) while the Mandarin ended its illustrious career as an organ donor in a wreckers’ yard in Ballina, giving its life so other less fortunate LC-LJ series Toranas could live.

About all I’d been able to salvage had been the GTR badge and the red-and-black ‘Holley Equipped’ sticker from the rear bumper. Both gave an obscure kind of cool to the tail of the postie van, a mailbox-red ’89 Nissan Skyline wagon with the venerable RB30 three-litre six. Aerodynamics of a block of flats, but a true touring weapon. The engine and transmission worked seamlessly together like Joey and Freddie in the NSW Origin side, in a silken smooth wave of torque which ironed out any highway. The back end occasionally decided it wanted to overtake the front on wet roundabouts but that just added to the thrilling uncertainty of daily life, didn't it. The only thing crap about the postie van was its extremely crap nickname, ‘the postie van’, for which I blame the Duffer entirely.

Phil Duff was one of our flatmates at Chateau Dodgy, the rambling two-storey house we all shared at the end of Mountain View Drive, set almost diagonally into the Goonellabah hillside to the north of the main centre of Lismore. Phil was from Ballina, where his old man ran a marine engineering business, specialising in looking after the large fleet of trawlers which were based out of the mighty Richmond River. The Duffer was a man of contrasts. He was a strong and genuine Christian; at the same time he was oversexed to the gunwales and would have loved to have pounded the daylights out of every second woman he met, had his particular version of God permitted it. The resultant internal conflict was (a) a key element of his makeup, intrinsic to understanding his personality and (b) funny as hell to watch. He was the only male I’d met who not only freely admitted to wanking (to the point of declaring it to people on first meeting them) but cheerily kept us updated after a few drinks on what mental images were floating his boat at the time (predominantly involving Asian poontang, as it happened.) I can’t say we actually wanted to be kept updated, but there was never such a thing as Too Much Information for the Duffer.

What else. He was a true technophile (or technoPhil if you preferred), hugely into computers, expert on music technology and master of any gadget you put in front of him (to the extent that he’d know how to pull it apart in a way that would pretty much ensure against it ever being put back together in functioning order.) The contents of three or four PCs, in various degrees of disassembly and disrepair (though the Duffer preferred the term ‘upgrading’) were usually distributed randomly through his bedroom, tangled amongst laundry (clean and dirty alike), computer magazines, fantasy adventure schtick of the likes of Robert Jordan and David Eddings, and a seemingly endless, self-replicating, perennial ground cover of drumsticks - new and shiny beech-white; old, dented and broken; or somewhere intermediate on the life cycle. Yes, gentle reader, Phil was a drummer. Which explained his ‘other’ nickname, the one which was the basis for the email address he never managed to check or answer because all his computers were in bits on the floor - Drumphil.

Phil was doing music at Southern Cross Uni, intermittently, along with another of our flatmates, Marty Monster. Martin di Biagini came from the rolling hills to the north of Lismore, up around The Channon. His family had a farm up there, growing bananas, avocados and macadamias in the rich, rust-red volcanic soil of the area. His grandparents had come over from northern Italy in the late 1930s, arriving just in time to be deposited into internment camps for the duration of WWII. They didn’t seem to bear a grudge - it was better than the gauche wankery of Il Duce’s Italy, even if the train services weren’t as punctual. Marty’s old man was what we educational professionals (ha!) would now call ESL, as in English as a Second Language - in those days it just meant he only spoke Italian when he first came to school, ate salami and pecorino on crusty ciabatta instead of cheese and vegemite sangers on white, and got called a wog a lot. Marty Monster was universally renown as a good guy. He was generous, honest, self-affacing and considerate, and, well, nice. The sort of nice young man that any girl would be proud to take home to meet their mother. Unfortunately for Marty, most girls our age weren’t yet looking for someone to take home and impress their mother, as much as they were looking for cocky, charismatic bastards who could show them a good time, like, um, me I s’pose. Even more unfortunately for Marty, though we cajoled and encouraged, he couldn’t find it in himself to behave badly enough to become a skirt-chasing, piss-sinking, hell-raising bastard. We tried, but he was too well brought up. Lapsed Catholic. We never gave up though.

What Marty was, most definitely, was a fucking brilliant musician, with the ability to play pretty much any instrument he picked up, and any song he listened to, just by ear. A lot of nights we’d jam together in the roughly sound-proofed garage downstairs, which we’d converted to a stylishly downbeat bachelor pad, with a couple of shabby old couches, an ancient, massive, wheezing beer fridge, a rickety old pool table with worn once-green felt like a fifth-day SCG wicket and the most bizarrely asymmetrical ‘roll’ in all of Euclidian physics, our busted-arse guitars and amps, the Duffer's kit, and of course the requisite number of FHM girlie posters and calendars. After McCarthy and I had bored everyone shitless with our own three-chord compositions (or decompositions, as was more appropriate) about chicks, drinking, sport, politics and other rank stupidity, and after getting him drunk enough, Marty would finally get the confidence to play us some of his own songs, which were really amazing - nothing like ours, much more melodic and cleverly resolved, like a good Crowded House single, or so Phil used to say. (Later we figured his stuff was more in the vein of Ash Naylor from Even, but we only realised this after we started hearing Black Umbrella on the radio later in the year.) The Duffer used to pride himself on the broadness of his musical backgrounding, and he listened to a wide and eclectic variety of stuff, from Pantera to Parliament to Pearl Jam to Pink Floyd. It was enough to ‘P’ anyone off.

As to how we all ended up together in the first place, it was typical small-country-town stuff; Phil’s younger brother Duncan knew The Jeff from playing soccer - they were in the same team at under 19s level - and they were pretty good mates, which is how the Duffer and myself were introduced in the first instance. Marty kinda came along with Phil as a job-lot as they were mates since first year when they started SCU Music together - they were in third year by now, though Phil had failed a few subjects and was nominally second year - and had lived together for that time. Anyway, our meeting was for the best. It resulted in the most entertaining sharehouse I’ve ever been part of. And some other stuff too I guess.

So that was Chateau Dodgy - the Duffer, Marty, myself and McCarthy, plus our scruffy neighbours Bill and Ben (the Pot Flower Men) who were around often enough to qualify as surrogate flatmates. Bill and Ben, it may surprise you to know, were a pair of ragged loons from Brunswick Heads who used to smoke vast quantities of Nimbin’s finest, in which purpose they were doggedly assisted by the Duffer (much to the despair of his best mate Marty who was pretty vehemently anti-drugs.) I think Bill and Ben were arts students. That may just be a vague assumption based on the observations that (a) they smoked lots of drugs and (b) they both worked at Kmart.

As for me, I was doing a DipEd at Southern Cross to try and get some sort of employability out of my science degree from UQ, having decided that slaving away in a genetics research lab was demonstrably not my forte (and not even sure how I ended up doing honours in a genetics lab, since I’d gone to UQ to do Chemistry - path of least resistance again I guess; I found biology easier and more interesting, particularly because it was full of hot women.) My former research colleague and housemate Dr Cletus, who’d just gone on to start a PhD in the same lab we both did honours in, seemed to thrive on getting paid peanuts to work like a fucking monkey, but I was never dedicated enough to the ‘personal glory’ and ‘intellectual challenge’ of science (or so it said on the recruiting pamphlet.)

Actually, SCU orientation week being the week before that of UQ’s O-Week, my old uberlegend flatmate Dr Cletus and a few of our hardy lunatic mates from Brisvegas had made the trip down to Lismore for the big occasion and I think it was his fault I’d ended up kipping on the floor on the morning of February 21, 1998. Marty said he definitely heard me loudly and unfavourably submit an unsolicited character reference regarding “that bastard inbred ginger fuckstain from Mount Morgan” at around three am that morning, largely on the basis of finding the immovable form of Dr Cletus crashed out on my bed. At least he didn’t have a yodel thereupon as per our neighbours.

“You know what the scariest thing is?” McCarthy observed, contently digesting two bacon and egg McMuffins, and giving resoundingly flatulent updates on the progress of digestion every few minutes.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Last night was the warmup. Tonight’s the fuckin’ housewarming.”