Shot down in flames

Ain't it a shame
To be shot down in flames...
- AC/DC, 1979

For his part, Sam McCarthy was returning home from four years in Sin City at the Uni of NSW, with a BA in journalism and communications, and his tail between his legs. He’d managed to secure an entry-level journo position with the Northern Star, the local Lismore paper, while myself and the other lads lived off part-time jobs and the meagre offerings of Austudy and/or Dadstudy. Even though Marty and Phil were the actual music students and we were just mucking about (with a capital F) on the sidelines, McCarthy and I had already started to ‘write’ a fair number of songs together - in the loosest possible sense. One of them, the previously discussed Our Year 12 Formal Etc, sticks in the mind because of the vitriol which informed McCarthy's choice of lyrics. I guess I hadn’t really appreciated it at the time - he didn’t express his true mindset through his emails from Sydney to Brisbane, and everything seemed cheery on my occasional visits down south for drunken and shambolic weekends, or his trips northward, or catching up at home in uni holidays or the like - but McCarthy ended up quite bitter about the scene surrounding his circle of friends in Sydney, if not Sydney itself. The pretentiousness, the superficiality, the fact he didn't meet the dress code even for going down to the shops to buy the paper. I guess like my late brother Matt, he was doing an Arts degree, and ended up flatting with a bunch of drama students in the end (apart from Super Dave, his venerable drunken offsider from college who was doing chemical engineering, and these days earns wheelbarrows of cash as a industrial process consultant) which meant the people surrounding him were predominantly primadonnas and drama queens (of both genders.) I think - well, we all know, he wrote a song about it after all - that the superficiality really got to him in the end, not only with the drama queens but with the general atmosphere surrounding life at UNSW and Sin City at large. He wasn’t from Knox or Riverview or Joeys or any of the other wanky GPS private schools, and his social standing plainly suffered as a consequence. As I always told him, he’d have been better off in Brisvegas. Sure they’re all a bunch of Queensland yeehaa fucks, but it’s a much more relaxed pace of life. And ‘cause it’s warmer, the chicks wear less, which is tops, ay.

There was more to it than that, I knew, but I hesitated to bring it up, unless we were both drunk (which was most nights at the moment; we put on five kilos each in the first three weeks of living together, on the back of too much beer and the influx of dietary shite that goes along with - kebabs, pizzas, breakfast at McArse et al) and even then I waited for some leading statement from him first. Like the following, mumbled very late the previous night apropros of not much, other than far too many beers:

“Dude don’t ever fucken go for an ethnic chick, Angus, they’re more fucken trouble than they’re worth. Trust me I fucken know what I'm fucken talking about. What was I fucken talking about?”

This rather broad and sweeping (and drunken and illogical) statement had some sort of reasoning behind it. He’d fallen for an ‘ethnic chick’ and it had caused him a lot of distress. They’d become fast and firm friends in their first year together, doing journalism and communications at UNSW, on the basis of a lot of common interests - how often do you find a girl who actually knows something about music, Formula One AND European football, three of Uncle Sam’s obsessive interests? - as well as a shared, rather corrupted, sense of humour. They stuck together loyally, enjoyed each other’s slightly warped world view, appreciated the other’s lunacy as a valuable survival mechanism in a world of superficial wankers and delusional self-promoters (otherwise referred to the UNSW Humanities Department, and the eastern suburbs of Sydney at large). In truth they were both outsiders, among the incestous Sydney private school cliques which dominated the student population at UNSW. She was originally from Melbourne, having moved north to escape the equally incestuous ex-private school student cliques of the flagship Melbourne universities, not to mention the overbearing, domineering influence of her old man.

Her name was Magdalena. I can’t spell her last name and neither can you, so go fuck yourself.

From the early, sketchy reports I’d started to receive from the southern capital in early 1994, she sounded awesome - tall, feisty and gorgeous. McCarthy had always had a thing for tall brunettes - don’t know the reason why, any more than I could explain why the Duffer was utterly, utterly obsessed with Asian chicks - and Lena, as he called her (same pronounciation as me, with an imaginary Y) was quite a catch. I had to see this for myself, coming down at Easter in the extra week’s mid-semester break which UQ had over UNSW (in your face, New South freshers!) and going out on the town - or at least to the pubs within staggering distance of campus - with McCarthy and Lena. It made an odd melange of folks, with his degenerate rural bogan mates from college (such as Super Dave, Cuntstable Care, Dogga from Wagga, and the King of Seed, Gorgeous George Valinsky) overlapping with their odd circle of art student acquaintances. Anyway, as it turned out, Lena and I got horrendously drunk together on dirt-cheap vodkas at the decrepit old UNSW unibar (two fifty - bargain!), slagged off all the bands we both hated (REM, Smashing Pumpkins) and all the Euro football teams who sucked (Juventus, Man U), and declared each other best friends for life. She fuckin’ ruled, thought I. So did McCarthy, the difference being with him that he was clearly interested on more than a strictly platonic basis. I had my hands full tending to the friendly natives up my way.

Things went well for a time. Then Lena, now comfortable in her new Sydney surrounds, started dating. The problem was, she started dating guys who weren’t McCarthy. And kept doing it. Even though, for all her incisive knowledge about music, football, motorsport and other matters of great import, she had very poor - no, make that fuck-off appalling - choice in men. She basically dated a bunch of egregious cocks, and she did it right under McCarthy’s nose, for years. Something I’ve struggled to excuse her for since, in truth. And he copped it, and smiled about it, because he was her friend. He was supportive when things started out, and consoling when they went irrevocably pear-shaped. And silently hopeful in the times between, but to no avail. His life amounted to the first half of a rather shithouse Hollywood romantic comedy - the bit before the loyal, quirky best friend finally beds and/or weds the gorgeous, feisty but romantically misguided heroine - on endless loop.

So he did what any guy would under the circumstances. He struck out on his own. Chased his own quarry, but with limited success. You see, McCarthy was too much of a thinker, and not enough of a doer. I always felt he needed a bit more damn-the-torpedos idiot bravado about himself, like your correspondent (emphasis on the ‘idiot’ bit, of course). But he had too high standards and too low a threshold of personal humiliation. When it came to women and nascent relationships therewith, he thought, planned, considered, deliberated, agonised, and finally pretty much talked himself out of it, before a shot had been fired in anger. He would exhaust himself mentally and end up flagging the whole thing, lacking the tactical nous and self-confidence to forge onwards.

Oh, and there was the small matter of his best friend being a tall, dark-haired, volumptuous vixen who was perfectly capable of scaring off any other females interested in sharing his time and resources. By my maths, McCarthy’s prospective candidate girlies never seemed to hang around long after they’d been introduced to Lena. I’m not sure Lena even knew she was doing it, but subconsciously at least, she was undermining McCarthy’s efforts with her own ingenious, subtle, devious, below-the-radar brand of mind games and social intimidation. It’d evolved as a killer self-defence mechanism which had helped her survive, and indeed thrive, for six years at an all-girls private school populated exclusively by the most vicious teenage alpha-bitches in the state of Victoria. And she wasn’t about to stop now. Probably didn’t know how to stop, even if she wanted to.

Of course, I didn't exactly help the situation, from my position on the northern front. In my first year, I was at a co-ed residential college with a very relaxed attitude to carnal etiquette; courtesy only finding out he’d been accepted into UNSW fairly late in the piece having chopped and changed his uni intake preferences at the last minute, McCarthy had ended up at an all-boys college run by psychotic ultra-right-wing Catholics with a line in professional misogyny (that’d be Opus Dei, for anyone who stayed awake through the Da Vinci Code) meaning girls weren’t allowed anywhere beyond the entry foyer for fear of spreading cooties or unplanned pregnancies or something. I met a lot more girls in a lot closer quarters, and thanks to the lessons of Operations Nerissa and Sophie, I knew a lot more about how they operated, and how to best operate around them. Or at least to fudge along agreeably. The last thing McCarthy needed of a Monday morning was another email from me telling him about some new girl I’d met. Of course, it was usually the first thing he received. I wasn’t backward in claiming my successes, dammit.

Was it cruel? Probably. But who else was I going to tell apart from my best mate? And it wasn't as though I needed to embellish too much. Even by my own fairly hopeful standards things were going awesomely, helped a tad by taking on board my new mate Mad Mick's advice on women: “Fuck all this relationship shit, just get 'em slashed and feed it to 'em, ay. They'll thank ya for it.” Mick had raised the casual (very) short-term relationship to an art form, as near as I could tell, based on a handful of simple ideas: ride a motorbike, look cool, be funny, don't say anything stupid, and buy a lot of drinks for a lot of girls. Not that (a) he didn't get shot down in flames regularly - he did, but his motto was go in hard, early and often - or (b) buying girls drinks was even necessary at college, at least during O-week - we were practically swimming in free piss. College events were very boozy and very messy. Those still standing at the end of the afternoon's merry-making were rewarded with the chance to go double-or-nothing in Alcohol Poisoning Bingo by heading into town for yet more piss.

I'd ended up in the leadership group of the small but loud contingent of first-year collegians who'd survived the all-day drinking sesh that had been college tabloid sports day during O-week - seemingly a pisstake of all the pathetically twee school sports carnivals we'd endured as young 'uns, though the jocks among our number didn't seem to understand the joke, despite the fact the points system was weighted heavily in favour of the teams who drank the most and made up the most offensive team chants. (We won, borrowing heavily from Derek and Clive.) Captain of the girls' team - or at least loudest of the girls who were left upright - was Belinda, a five-eleven alcopop disposal unit from Ipswich with tangled blonde hair, a remarkably filthy mouth and a scholarship from the Queensland Academy of Sport having been an all-schools state rep for netball and basketball. We only made it as far as the RE in Toowong, but it was far enough for Bel and me. We decided we liked each other and hooked up with a vengeance. Didn't even make it home. She jumped me on the walk back to college - we ended up in the little park off Gailey Road, having nasty midnight thunderstorm park-bench sex with Bel screaming loud enough to wake half the suburb. To be fair, counting the lights as they came on in the surrounding houses was how I managed to delay long enough for her to get off. Which, luckily for both of us, was before the cops turned up. A bit of an eye-opener for this wide-eyed country boy, but I was determined to learn fast.

Bel had moved onto someone else by the end of O-Week - we stayed friends and occasional fuck-buddies for most of the year - but then again so had I. I didn't have to look far. Emma lived in the room next to me - yeah, another girl-next-door thing, I was collecting them apparently. Emma was a nice girl from a nice family who'd gone to a nice school and had a nice boyfriend who she always talked about, seeing as though she missed him so very much after he'd gone to ADFA in Canberra. Except that Nice ADFA Boyfriend was a nice Christian lad who didn't believe in sex before marriage. And Emma... kinda did. Or at least did after six Subzeros or a couple rounds of Goon Of Fortune. We had a fun kind of flirt-fight thing going on, like the characters in the other type of romantic comedy to the one McCarthy had ended up in (there's only two types of romantic comedy, as everyone knows.) Emma liked me because I made her laugh. I liked Emma because of her laugh - it was completely unrestrained and unashamed, completely the opposite of her unless she'd had a few - and because she dressed up in a blood-stained nurse's costume for our Bad Taste Night (there was a news story at the time about nurses and junior doctors fucking up and killing patients in the Qld health system) and because her ample charms was busting out of it in much-appreciated places. Later that night I helped her out of it, and was amply rewarded. Of course, I was hugely unpopular in her world for days if not weeks after, all of the above being Totally My Fault. Until the next time, of course, after a particularly messy college formal dinner where the house chardonnarse had gone straight to her head...

I mention these two because they made me fail a Physics mid-semester exam. Here's me, studying away happily (read: in significant pain and wondering why the fuck I was doing Fucking Hard Physics For Engineers And Shit when I could be doing Piss Easy Physics For Life Science Muppets - it was around now I was considering switching majors from chemistry to biology) on a Thursday night for a Friday 8am exam - the fuckers - while everyone else is out Having Fun - the cunts. Anyway, it was nearing ten and I was thinking about breaking my arm in the desk drawer and seeing if I could get special consideration - when I heard a firm knock on the door. It's Bel. Very, very messy from her summer netball team's breakup drinks which had kicked off much earlier in the afternoon. I don't even think words were exchanged. They didn't need to be. In moments we were naked, or near enough for what we had in mind, and Bel was in my lap, back arched, reaching for the stars, her faux-diamond belly stud sparkling in the low light of my desk study lamp. Twenty minutes later, she left with a smile on her face. Didn't even stay for a cuddle or a talk about our future. I felt so used.

Around eleven. I'm staring blankly at the practice exam questions, waiting it to turn into something useful, like the answers, or a six of Uncle Teds. Another knock on the door. Emma. She'd been out for dinner with some other college girls at Castelli's, a cheap-but-serviceable Italian place in Indro, but I'd heard her come in around a quarter to ten - stumbling over various obstacles in her bedroom, indicating that many vinos had been harmed in the making of this production. But here she was, still clearly wide-eyed and awake, with a point to make, judging by the fierce intent in her eyes. Kinda grey-blue, since you asked. Flecked with electric sparks.

"If you're going to fuck the hell out of that Ipswich skank, do you mind doing it so I don't have to fucking listen to it?"

She stared at me. I stared at her. I grinned a little. She pushed me backwards, enough to slam the door behind us, grabbed the neck of my T-shirt and kissed me like she was trying to win an apple-bobbing contest. She tasted of cheap white wine and marinara sauce. Castelli's did a great marinara sauce. The rest of the subsequent seafood course wasn't quite as tasty, but I figured it was a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

For a nice girl from a nice school etc, Emma was such a hypocrite. Firstly, she was from Gladstone, which ain't a hell of a lot less shit than the 'Switch. And secondly, she hadn't been annoyed by the noise from Bel and me (OK, from Bel.) She'd been... distracted by it. Very, very distracted. And having been driven to distraction she'd found herself obliged to deal with her distraction in ways that her good Christian upbringing completely forbade. Ways which she went on to describe in detail, and then demonstrate on request.

Good times.

What were we talking about? Yeah, McCarthy. So he's up to shit. Can't get no satisfaction, can't get no girlie action, his female best mate is subtly busting the ends off his Cupid arrows for him and his male best mate is sending him emails along the lines of 'A funny thing happened to me on the way to failing my Physics mid-term...'

(Fuck it, I'd have failed it anyway. May as well go out in a blaze of glory. Transferred to Muppet Physics immediately afterwards and scraped a credit in that.)

There was another girl down in Sydney who he seemed to be close to, but she sounded like a lot of work, even compared to Lena, her erstwhile flatmate. Rebecca was an adorable little redhead from the North Shore (a Pymble Ladies College alumnus as I recall, but she was forgiven for that). She’d buddied up with McCarthy and Lena through the arts course at UNSW - she was studying drama, and had some lectures in common with the journalism students, particularly in first year. She’d been a child actor, starring in dance and drama groups (more than once in the lead role of the musical Annie - typecast by her hair, she used to complain) as well as kids’ TV and the odd ad campaign, and rather self-evidently had rather too much attention paid to her when she was young. This was my opinion, formed on the basis of McCarthy's initial emails, well before I’d met her. Then, on my next visit south, they introduced to me to her, and like pretty much everyone who met Rebecca, I thought she was awesome, a livewire, a bundle of energy, affection and insanity who had to be seen to be believed. I also recognised, like pretty much everyone who met her, that she was far, far too much hard work to engage with on anything other than a platonic level, and we decided to be mates, which we’ve stayed to this day. At least until I suggested in print just then that she was a lot of hard work, which will get me well and truly shunted off her Christmas card list.

Anyway, back to Lena. As we’ve observed, she was a bright kid, except when it came to men. Jeez-arse fargen Christ, the men. Or, more accurately, the boys. For although Uncle Sam tended to keep his romantic entanglements to himself, not looking for advice from mates or self-appointed experts (or both, in my case), Lena ran her relationships by committee. Made up of herself, her sisters (one older, one newer, equidistantly spaced at three year intervals), her female schoolfriends, her female uni friends, selected ex-boyfriends (those still considered friends), and a Mr Samuel David McCarthy of Evans Head, NSW. And, almost without fail, she chose Poorly. Not with the committee members, but with the prospective Mr Rights, who were all pretty way Wrong in anyone’s estimation. Not that Uncle Sam could freely point this out, given that early-on in any relationship she wouldn’t hear a word against anyone she was seeing, regardless of whether they were Joe Average or Joe Stalin. Lena was (and remains) supremely stubborn, headstrong, and unswerving in her opinions. And those are her redeeming qualities.

The year 1997 brought both the final years of all our degrees (well, my first round of same) and the onset of the cultural phenomenon known as 21st birthdays. Lena’s and McCarthy’s birthdays were relatively close together, both being March kiddies. As such they had joint 21st drinks in Sydney for their uni friends - which unfortunately I couldn’t make it down there for, as it was only my third or fourth week of my honours project in the lab, and I figured fucking off to Sydney inside the first month of full-time lab work wouldn’t create the best impression.

Lena’s family then threw her an enormously overblown 21st bash in Melbourne at the start of the Easter break. Courtesy the Austudy loan supplement our favourite Uncle was able to fly down with her for the event. “Now I understand everything,” McCarthy said later. He now felt that he knew why Lena was so strong-willed et al. He met her father, you see. What a bastard. But, obviously, she hadn’t inherited his sense of humour, or total lack thereof. Where she’d developed that was a mystery, but he suspected her wild school friends (and Agnieszka, her even wilder younger sister) had something to do with it.

In turn, Lena had joined the fleet of student-owned motor vehicles (led by McCarthy in his ’88 Camira wagon - build quality of a Latvian pacemaker, but it hauled well and handled even better) that toured up the Pacific Highway to McCarthy’s parental home near the shores of the ocean of the same name.

His 21st was a considerably lower-key event. Not even in the same octave, actually.