The road

The road is fuckin' hard
The road is fuckin' tough
There's no question that
It is rough and stuff
It's the fuckin' road my friend
But it's the only road I know
When I'm lunchin' on a tasty boosh
Right after the show.
- Tenacious D, 2001

Eastern Europeans are a bit odd. I say this not to be racist, or insulting, or in any way offensive to any of the lovely people whose lineage extends behind the old Iron Curtain. They’re great folk, don’t get me wrong. They’re just a bit odd.

I knew this guy from college, we were camped in the same Physics lectures in first year. He was a Hungarian dude from Darwin. I don’t know why a Hungarian dude would be from Darwin, let alone why he’d come to Brisbane to go to uni, but he was and he had. Laszlo was his name, which inevitably got bastardised to ‘Les’ (or at a stretch ‘Les Murray’). His old man was a maths professor at NTU up there (now Charles Darwin Uni or something I think), and Les himself was a gun mathematician, having aced the NT equivalent of 4 unit Maths for the NT equivalent of the HSC the year before, and was doing a bunch of stupidly difficult calculus and algebra subjects at UQ. The thing about Les though was that he had a ridiculous memory, almost idiot-savant in its astonishing tenacity with irrelevant detail. For instance, he could recite pi to fifty decimal places. In fact, so bored was he with the pedestrian pace of first year physics, he proceeded to carve pi to fifty decimal places into the lecture theatre table where he habitually lost three hours a week of his life. This explained Laszlo’s other nickname in college: Rainman.

In the public eye, for your wacky Eastern Bloc personality types, I give you old mate Damir “Ten dollar for fish?!? I no pay ten dollar for fish!!!” Dokic. Not quite as batshit insane, but not a lot less hard-line, was Lena’s father Alex. He was a cranky, domineering bastard, the way a lot of self-made men are. I guess when you arrived in this country having crawled under miles of razor wire chased by dogs, with the rattle of machine guns piercing the air, you tend to take a dim view of anyone who hasn’t had to sweat blood and piss bile to get an even break in life. It also explained his vitriolic hatred of politics which leaned in any way to the left. Lena had once told me the full story, or as much as he’d been prepared to tell his offspring, about his hair-raising escape from Poland in the early ‘70s, through Czechoslovakia into Yugoslavia, staggering across Eastern Europe like so many others to reach the much rumoured ‘weak point’ in the Iron Curtain at what we’d now call the Croatian-Italian border. Weary and broke, Alex had escaped across the border into Italy stuffed in the boot of some guy’s Opel - whose professional line of work this was, and whose pockets were lined with Alex’s last $500 US. The smuggler, as it turned out, didn’t get the chance to spend much of it. Next time he tried it, he was stopped by border guards, his refugee payload hauled out, and the lot of them shot like dogs and dumped in a ditch.

Alex heard about the smuggler’s fate from the chatter among fellow Eastern Bloc escapees, in the relative safety of a temporary refugee camp in north-eastern Italy, not far from the airforce base at Trieste. The queue for refugee processing outside the US and UK tent embassies seemed endless, a seething serpent of human desperation - Poles, Slavs, Serbians, Croatians, Armenians, Bulgarians - lined up like pigs being channelled into an abattoir. The British and American processing queues dwarfed the one outside the engagingly shabby-looking canvas shanty which was flying the Australian flag. At that point, heading down under suddenly became a compelling option. Even more so when his application was processed by a striking-looking brunette whose Italian was endearingly tinged with an Australian accent, and vice versa. Alex’s Italian, like his English, was workmanlike and abrupt - he’d studied both as much as he could back in Krakow, given his intended escape route. Even so, he managed to charm Christina, who commented that with his university-educated background, he’d be very likely to be invited into the country. For her part, her internship at the Italian embassy was drawing to a close and she was heading back to Melbourne pretty soon. He said he’d look her up when he got there. Warming to his confidence, which would later be better characterized as insufferable arrogance, she said she’d like that a lot.

Their middle daughter also qualified as a lunatic Eastern Blocker, but at least Lena carried it well. She would have rejected any suggestion that she took after her father, but she’d do so in such a strident, argumentative fashion that it told the whole story. Her mother’s softer influence and ironic sense of humour modulated (salvaged?) her personality. Her father thinly tolerated fools, which is why he never liked McCarthy or me; Lena revelled in their company, perhaps as much to antagonise him as anything. Last night she’d told me that after bringing up three daughters, and enduring years of abuse (always psychological, rarely physical), her mother had finally left her father. Lena, surprisingly, seemed happy with this state of affairs; knowing both well, her take was that they both needed to be apart from each other.

“What about your sisters, how are they reacting?”

Lena shook her head. “Agnes is absolutely delighted. She keeps dragging Mum out to trendy cafés and bars, tries to get her to go out clubbing with her, it’s a nightmare. Jules, of course, is mortified. Probably more for the perceived loss of face in her social circle than anything.”

I nodded. Commercial property broker Yuliya (Julia), eldest of the three siblings, was definitely the most conservative, and closest to her father. “She’s Dad in a dress,” had been Agnes’ tart characterization. I liked Agnes. She was my kind of girl. Just how much my kind of girl she was, I’d never actually admitted to Lena. Let’s just say it involved Lena’s fancy-dress 25th birthday, a PVC nun’s habit and a hotel suite hurriedly booked on a credit card stolen from Chris Kurtin. For the record, the nun’s habit wasn’t mine.

Lena looked reassuringly ragged, given how lousy I felt this overly-bright morning, but still with her usual Nigella Lawson glam. A little older, more wistful, more melancholy, but still the Lena I remembered. Maybe her curves were a little more prominent than I’d remembered, but she carried it well. Sure, she was carrying a few more pounds, but weren’t we all - my doctor reckoned I was overweight given my BMI of 29. BMI is bullshit, in my opinion. Supposedly you should be in the 20-25 range to be ‘safe’. If I was in the ‘safe’ range for my height, you could play the xylophone on his ribs. It’s a flawed system that doesn’t account for muscle mass, which I’d like to pretend I still have (though it’d been a while since I’d done any sustained hard work, I had to admit.) Rant concludes.

We were discarded kerbside like bins on collection morning, squinting through sunglasses as dark as modern optical technology would permit, draped over an outside table down at the café on the point. They did quite serviceable breakfasts and sourced their coffee from a roasting house in New Farm which indeed did good in the eyes of the Me. A large flat white was trying in vain to reanimate the heaving lump of humanity that occupied my chair. Lena was mainlining a double-shot long black, looking endearingly crumpled as she reclined opposite.

“Oh yeah, you had a caller this morning,” she recalled hazily. I’d thought I’d heard the phone ring, but given that it’d stopped before I could clear the mulch from my head and stagger after it, I figured it wasn’t that pressing. “Yeah, Gerard or Gerald or something…”

“Faaaarck,” I exhaled, stifling panic. “Can I borrow your phone?”

“Sure,” she said, brow creased quizzically as she fished her miniscule cellphone out of her handbag and slid it across the table to me. I snatched it up, flipped it open, stared at the keypad for thirty seconds, said “Faaaarck,” again, and handed it back to her. She looked at me with raised eyebrows.

“Can’t remember the fucking number,” I finally admitted.

“Your boss?”

“Yeah,” I conceded. “And my future father-in-law.”

“Oh,” Lena said, suppressing a guilty smile. I knew that smile.

“What do you mean, oh?” I growled. “More to the point, what exactly did you tell him?”

“I said you were still in bed, hungover,” she replied, studying her nails. “And that you were bound to need several hours more sleep to recover from the complete sexual exhaustion I’d inflicted on you…”

“Oh Jesus fuckin’ Christ, don’t joke,” I moaned. “The man has no sense of humour whatsoever.”

I tried not to think about what conclusions both Bethany and Gerald Toogood could jump to, as it seemed to result in a stabbing pain in my head that not even swilling the rest of my coffee could quell. I’d call Gerald back as soon as I got home. Straight after I called Bethany, of course.

I was desperate for a mental diversion and found it in the unlikely source of old Wally Jones from around the corner, one of the original Point Lookout locals. In a village full of holiday letting properties it was reassuring to see some people still actually lived here. Wally was on his daily rounds - he always wandered around town stopping off at his old mates’ places of a morning for a cuppa and a yarn - and stopped by our table to say g’day. There was the predictable awkward moment as I tried to explain Lena’s origins and existence in ways that wouldn’t have the local residents’ association (of which Wally was founder and president) abuzz with surrepticious gossip about my ‘bit on the side’. I think I covered it pretty well. Okay, so I lied blatantly and said Lena was my sister-in-law, but it flew. Seemingly Wally was too pissed off to be concerned with how I’d come to be breakfasting (actually by this hour of the morning, brunching was more accurate) with a tall brunette who bore very little ‘sibling’ resemblance to my actual sister-in-law Beck, who I couldn’t remember if he’d ever met.

“Come and have a look at this,” he seethed. He seemed insistent, and neither of us were of sufficient cognitive capacity to reason why or why not, so we followed him across the road and around the bend a little. “See that?”

He was pointing up the ridge to the hideous abomination that was Tuscany on Point, a few months from completion, and likely to be even more hideous by then.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“See those?”

He indicated the majestic stand of Norfolk Island Pines which defended the heath to our left, five massive raised middle digits to Roger Crittenden’s gaudy pink vision. I nodded. He beckoned us in close, to the base of the trunk of the nearest tree.

“Now see those?”

Wally’s gnarled finger, quivering slightly, touched the bark next to a prodigious drill-hole, from which drizzled some nasty-smelling shit, some sort of white crystalline suspension. A scent that any farmer’s son of a given age should be able to recognise.

“2,4-D,” I guessed. Either that or 2,4,5-T. Either way, not very nice for Mr Tree.

“Probably,” Wally concurred. “And look. Same thing with every one of these. What d’ya make of that then?”

“Roger bloody Crittenden,” I observed.

Crittenden had lobbied council, unsuccessfully, to have the huge old trees removed as they were ‘clearly unstable and sick-looking’ and would, without doubt or warning, shortly topple over and kill random tourists. This was the proffered opinion of Crittenden’s tame environmental consultants, the same hacks who’d drawn up the seriously dodgy EIS on the development in the first place. Council had bought the latter, but wasn’t going to come at the former, not with the militant Point Lookout Residents Action Group threatening legal action. They may have been relatively few in number and disparate in age and appearance, but they did have funds at their disposal; you don’t reside or retire here unless you can afford to. Clearly Crittenden had proceeded to Plan B. As a casual member of the PoLoRAG I recognised that this, to our grizzled leader, was tantamount to a declaration of war. For me it was just another massive headache, to go with the massive headache(s) I’d already managed to accrue this morning.

Wally ambled off, having delivered himself of some choice adjectives ref. the integrity of Mr Roger Crittenden and the real estate profession at large, to borrow his mate Artie’s digital camera and capture the incriminating evidence. I leaned against the trunk of the Norfolk Island pine, three times as wide as my shoulders yet marked for death, and watched him go.

“Should I ever hit his age,” I quipped, “if I have half his energy, I’ll be laughing.”

“Doesn’t seem to be one for merriment himself,” she offered.

I shrugged. “Seems to keep him focused, fighting the good fight. So much for positive thinking. Maybe staying pissed off with the injustices of the world is the way to long life and prosperity.”

“Hurrah for that,” she declared. “Can we go and finish breakfast now?”

Over breakfast/brunch/getting-on-for-lunch-actually-by-this-stage Lena asked what I had planned for the weekend. Taken aback by the sudden lunge into small talk, I fumbled about before remembering that Bethany had plans to head over to the ‘mainland’ to the bayside markets on the Saturday, so I was probably going over with her; maybe a bit of gardening on the Sunday, cleaning the salt spray off the outside windows and scrubbing the moss off the paved path around the back of the house which didn’t get a lot of sun. I’d put it off since last weekend. Excitement minus, read Lena’s expression.

“So what did you get up to last weekend?” she asked

“Bathurst,” I said. Meaning TV, couch, chips and beer. Solo.

“What about the weekend before?”

“NRL grand final.” As above. I’d meant to catch the game with Dr Cletus, but it was on a Sunday night and I had to work Monday. Same with Bathurst.

“Jesus, Angus, we gotta get you out more,” she remarked. “When was the last time you actually went out? Headed into the Valley to see a band or something?”

“The Valley?” I laughed. She may as well have asked ‘When was the last time you went on holiday on the Gaza Strip?’ “Fuck that, you can’t be serious… my hearing is fucked enough as it is! Seen enough bands to last me into my dotage. And enough scene kids, hipsters and fuckwits. Leave it to the young and stupid.”

“Angus,” she said gently, “you’re in your mid-thirties.” Early thirties, I would have argued, but being right at the juncture of early and mid thirties I wasn’t in a position to argue much longer. “Spiderbait are in their late thirties, Grinspoon and Powderfinger aren’t far behind, and Tim Rogers is pushing forty if he’s a day…”

“Yeah and AC/DC and the Stones are also still wobbling around, so what? They’re on stage, not thrashing around in the front row. Average audience age is never over 25. Unless of course you’re a dodgy covers band at some rural RSL club, in which case the mean is the same but the standard deviation is monumental - the old farts cancel out the underage kids who got in on bogus ID.” I shook my head, glad we’d been young and stupid ourselves when we’d been that self-same dodgy covers band at some rural RSL club. “Not a fucking chance would I go through that again,” I thought aloud. “You’d have to be an absolute masochist. Or just a total fucking moron.”

Lena just smiled.

“What?”

“How often do you talk with your brother, Angus?”

Lena had once again spared no expense with her search. Google had reliably turned up the name of Jeff Young in a recent article from the Northern Star, a printout of which was slithering across the grey plastic expanse of the Hyundai’s dashboard as we raced to meet the next car ferry to Cleveland. Thing was, as she explained, she hadn’t been searching for The Jeff. She’d actually Googled the name of Philip Duff, former drummer for Flange Gasket, and out had popped Spam Filter.

Spam Filter had been the Duffer’s side project in the last year or so of Flange Gasket, a thrash-metal-funk band with folk and roots leanings, if you could imagine that. The lineup featured the Duffer on skins, keys, vocals and random instrumentation, with an ever-changing rogues’ gallery of stoned session musos filling in on whatever other instruments the Duffer thought were appropriate on the day. They sounded like a high-speed freeway pileup caused by a fleet of ice-cream trucks gate-crashing the Mardi Gras parade, recorded underwater in 7/9ths time, and didn’t last long enough, or couldn’t get their act together sufficiently, to actually release (or indeed record) anything whatsoever. When that went tits-up the Duffer recorded a solo album, which was literally that - an album of solos. Drum solos. Drumphil Comes Alive! managed to achieve cult status (largely among other drummers) despite achieving no commercial status whatsoever. That was about where my interest had historically diverged from the Philip Duff story; Lena sketched in the details of the intervening year or five for me.

“Phil’s still on the North Coast, apparently,” she explained, grimacing against the scrubbing understeer of the Elantra as she pushed on through the short series of bump-riddled twisties that wound through the range between the Amity Point turnoff and Dunwich, and muttering under her breath about the core competencies or lack thereof of the engineers who work for Korean automotive and/or tyre manufacturers. “These days he’s the producer-in-residence, sort of knob-twiddlemaster-general if you like, at Firstlight Studios up in the Byron Hinterland.”

I remembered Firstlight. We’d tried to record our last album there. It was called Firstlight because from the deck out the back you could see straight out to Mount Warning, or where Mount Warning would be if it wasn’t shrouded in cloud. When it isn’t, Mount Warning gets the first sunlight of anywhere on the Australian mainland, hence the name.

“Didn’t he used to own part of that?”

“Used to. Don’t know if he still has an interest. Given that the Duffer also does a bit of drum teaching on the side, according to his website, you’d think he may have had to offload his share to keep himself in clover… or other crop-based materials.”

It seemed Spam Filter, in name at least, had been reborn as that persistent yeast infection of live music, the pub covers band. If the Duffer was having to rely on that as a source of income, he really was in dire financial straits. Servicing the massive mortgage on my place on a casual teacher’s salary didn’t seem quite so uncomfortable a prospect. In hindsight it wasn’t that astounding that the Duffer had seen fit to dust off the sticks and sally forth once more into battle with dickhead punters and dodgy PAs - in our early days on the pub band circuit in the late ‘90s, we’d seen plenty of veteran-class practitioners, and a lot of the same names from those days were still appearing in the local listings. Including that of one Andrea Kerr, nee Barnard, whose byline went on the hundred-word blurb about Spam Filter’s gig this evening:

Only the finest from special Filter
The North Coast’s own supergroup Spam Filter return again this Friday evening to the Byron Bay Services Club…

Return again? Isn’t that a tautology? Standards had certainly slipped at the Star since McCarthy was wielding the Grammatical Sword of Justice on the premises.

…bringing rockin’ good times to the Bay for the second time in their brief career. Not that these are raw rookies, wet behind the ears. No sirree Bob. As Spam Filter ‘frontman’ (leading from the back as ever) ‘DrumPhil’ Duff says, ‘We mightn’t have come down in the last rainstorm, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be thunder and lightning on Friday!’

Cretinous.

DrumPhil, formerly of Oz rock legends Flange Gasket and these days a highly sought-after music producer…

I’d dispute both of the latter, but we’ll move on…

…leads his troops into battle, with trusty axemaster Jeff Young (also ex-Gasket) kicking out the jams…

Um, did I miss a briefing somewhere? How exactly does serving as our guitar tech and regularly scarfing half our drinks rider make one ‘ex-Gasket’?

…and the detached stylings of bass maestro Jack White…

Jesus Christ, Jack White. No, not that Jack White, of sister-marrying White Stripes fame. Jack was our high-school music teacher and had been playing in covers and originals bands for years. He looked like Frank Zappa (if a little greyer, and not as dead) and played bass like John Entwhistle of the Who - I’d pay the ‘detached stylings’ call as valid, even if the rest of the article read like it had been extruded into a bucket. Andrea warbled on for a while about the various bands Jack had been in - if they’d listed them all the hundred words would have been long gone - then proceeded to eulogise ‘the sultry, soulful vocals of exotic songstress Jen Bailey’. I didn’t know Jen, but given Andrea’s monumental hyperbole, I expected her vocals sounded every bit as pleasant and engaging as those of Crazy Frog. The problem was, I should have known her, because apparently, she’d been in Sagittaria. Then again, we’d all been in Sagittaria at some stage (not the way you’re thinking, though - we’d gone on tour with the girls up the Queensland coast years back, and they’d been quite amenable to one of us bogan guitarist thugs guesting for a song or three.) Maybe she was Artemisia’s sister or something.

No, hang on. Artemisia wasn’t Artemisia’s first name, I remembered through the fog of my slowly-retreating hangover. It was her middle name. Her first name was something like Genevieve or Jennifer… something that could definitely be shortened to Jen, should the owner wish to divulge themselves of their previous ‘image’.

Hmmm. This is going to be interesting.

Let’s rewind a decade. It was the mid-year break in season 1998, with barely even time for the oranges let alone the half-time talk. We’d been gigging as Flange Gasket since mid-May, usually doing the Friday night/Saturday night/Sunday afternoon weekend routine, other nights as work and uni commitments allowed (or, since the kickoff of France 98, as our World Cup-watching commitments allowed). We’d been north as far as Tweed Heads (playing at Seagulls for five hours to the back of a row of poker machines - at least the cheque was large and didn’t bounce) and as far south as Coffs Harbour (I believe I’ve already waxed lyrical on the qualities or otherwise of the old Plantation Hotel, yeah?); as far west as Farmadale (where our old high school mates Chops and Harold Bishop, each four-and-a-half years into three-year UNE courses, rallied a huge bunch of drunken lunatics together to mark our performance at the union bistro) and as far east as Byron, because it was as far east as you could go without ending up underwater. And plenty of places in between, of course. Sometimes as in our own right, other times supporting others; some good venues, a lot of dodgy ones. Kretin’s contacts in terms of scoring bookings were on the whole pretty good, even if Kretin himself was erratic, vain, pompous and self-obsessed.

And now, the northern frontier was calling. A couple of Seek’s bands were amassed to head up the North Queensland coast for a mini-tour in the July uni holidays, coinciding with European backpacker season - ourselves, ACME Industries (young Duncan Duff’s punk outfit), Three by Three (aka the Bob Marley Nine) and Sagittaria, Seek’s newest signing. Artemisia Bailey had dropped by one of our gigs in Ballina – at some dodgy and obscure Western-themed place called the Mad Cow Café which isn’t there anymore so don’t bother looking - and had asked our thoughts on signing with Chris Kurtin. Our thoughts were essentially unprintable. However, we slipped her a copy of the ‘good’ contract (as distinct from the ‘evil’ variant which Kretin was continuing to wave in front of potential signees) and she was most impressed with our legal nous. Kretin was less impressed with us, but he agreed to welcome Sagittaria aboard under the same terms and conditions. As such we almost had our own mini-touring festival, with rock, punk, dub-reggae-funk-ska-whatever-the-fuck-Three-By-Three-played, and Sagittaria’s equally classification-resistant folkie mysticism.

We almost had misogynistic death metal as well - Razorslash were originally down to join the circus but Steve Bennett put it to Chris Kurtin that his band would refuse to join the tour if Flange Gasket were on the bill. To which Chris Kurtin put it to Steve Bennett that he could intercourse himself with a pair of Stilsons. We were rather thrilled that Bennett went through with his side of the ultimatum and Razorslash were left behind - partly because it reflected our new-found ascendancy over them, mostly because the ‘Slash were arseholes and we didn’t want to go on tour with them. In the end, money won the argument; we were vaguely marketable, they weren’t.

Also left behind, but for very different reasons, was ACME’s blue-haired frontman/guitarist, known to all (apart from his mother) as Gerbil. Gerbil had made the excellent career move of falling off the top deck of the Lismore Shopping Square carpark while trying to rail-grind the access ramp, breaking his wrist - Christ knows how he didn’t break everything else - precisely one week before his band were due to head up the Queensland coast to play a week’s residence in Port Douglas followed by a couple of nights on the way back at Airlie Beach. Gerbil very shortly thereafter discovered that it is very difficult, in fact nigh impossible, to play guitar with a broken wrist. Once he had finished offering Gerbil a free character assessment (also unprintable), Duff the Younger, now obliged to take over frontperson duties, attempted to remedy their sudden lack of guitar expertise by picking up the phone and dialling his ever-reliable old buddy Jeffrey Michael Young. The Jeff perhaps lacked Gerbil’s incredibly technical playing ability, but also lacked his incredibly stupid hair.

Drunken Duff and The Jeff had met a few years ago playing soccer for the same regional high schools junior rep team, after which they’d signed on to play for the Ballina team’s under-16s side in the local comp. Punk rock was their other major common interest - Green Day and the Offspring had led the ‘new punk’ vanguard, but these two and their mates were into less mainstream bands like NOFX, Millencolin, Pennywise, and Newtown’s own Frenzal Rhomb. (And Blink 182, at least until they went ‘commercial’ in the very late 90s.) In those days Duncan, Jeff and another dodgy mate whose name escapes me had a band called The Toilets who were, fittingly, shithouse. They got together at weekends in the massive shed in the South Ballina industrial estate that housed Phil and Duncan’s old man’s marine engineering business, and played every song they knew - mostly covers by NOFX, Millencolin, Pennywise and Frenzals, with Green Day and the Offspring thrown in just to give the kids in the crowd something they could recognise. They played at friends’ parties, school socials and skate park openings, and managed to get to the point where they weren’t entirely appalling anymore. Of course this was also the point at which they all finished high school and moved in a variety of random directions, most of which were Away, and the band dissolved; so endeth The Toilets’ brave bid for immortality. At least until old mate Gerbil snapped his wrist skateboarding, and Drunken went straight for the Jeffphone. The Jeff was on mid-year break from UQ Gatton, was bored shitless kicking around the farm, and wasn’t going to let a minor thing like not having picked up a guitar in months get between him and a couple of weeks pissing it up furiously in Port Douglas and Airlie Beach.

But it wasn’t a holiday, as Chris repeatedly reminded (lectured) us; it was work. Hard work. Just because we were long way from home, in a world-renown tourist destination teeming with drunken European backpacker chicks, did not mean this was supposed to be a holiday. We tried to take him seriously, but seeing as though he was trying to cram his scuba suit and flippers into the boot of his MX5 while he lectured us, the impact was a little lost on us.

I love road trips. I shouldn’t, I know. Being crammed into a vehicle with a bunch of idiots shouldn’t be regarded as entertaining, particularly after being crammed into as many vehicles with as many idiots as I have throughout my ‘career’ (such as it is, or was). But I love it. I love the countryside flashing past the windows, the tunes cranking on the stereo as the miles fly by in good company and good humour. I love the cabin-fever banter, the onset of road-trip insanity as the piss-taking observations and in-jokes start to layer upon layer on top of each other. It should have been the absolute worst part of being in a touring, gigging rock band, and some days it was. But to be honest, thinking back from the passenger seat of Lena’s rented Hyundai (still too hungover to take my turn at the tiller), I wondered if it was the bit of it all I missed the most, if I missed any of it. If you can even warm to a road trip down a suicidally overcrowded Pacific Highway in a rented Hyundai Elantra which still reeked of the last borrowers’ Maccas, with lunatic Eurotrash as your only companion, then you’re an unreconstructed road-trip tragic.

The trip up the NQ coast in July ’98 was a massive logistical event by our standards; even the convoy itself was impressive enough. Weighing down the postie van were myself, McCarthy and The Famous Jeff, plus musical equipment for the playing thereof. The brothers Duff and the drummer from ACME Industries (the infamous Krusty) joined Marty in the diesel LandCruiser from his parents’ farm, towing an old trailer which was basically the back half of a MkII Ford Escort panelvan - about the only useful purpose to which you could put a MkII Ford Escort panelvan, to be fair - in which the rest of the Gasket and ACME gear was stowed. Sagittaria’s triumvirate of feminine loveliness were packed into cellist Madeleine’s old HJ Premier station wagon, emblazoned with sparkly bumper stickers offering platitudes like ‘Magic Happens’, while Three by Three, long since used to the logistical perils of taking most of a footy team on tour, these days had a Budget Hi-Ace minivan on semi-permanent retainer. And of course there was Kretin in his MX5 dinky toy, though he didn’t really want to associate with us given the alacrity with which he tore away up the Bruce Highway (only Queenslanders could call a highway Bruce - surprised we didn’t come across a bridge called Bazza or a river called Jonno) when the flag dropped on the trip. He wasn't sighted again until we passed him somewhere between Rocky and Gladstone, pulled over by the local cuntstabulary in a shiny new SS Commodore. We didn’t wait up for him.

The trip had everything necessary to make it a classic. Tunes? Check. All aboard the postie van came well-armed in that department; given that the three of us had pretty much grown up together, we had a lot of musical common ground anyway. For his part, our favourite Uncle's speciality was putting together very cool themed compilation CDs. His Short Attention Span series (short, fast, loud) was popular with the punk rock lads, the Non-Aggression Pact albums were great for laid-back cruising - and McCarthy even got to indulge his latent graphic designer tendencies with the cover art. Scenery? Check. The weather was great, the air-con even needed cranking on in places as canefields shone in the winter sun and swayed in the seabreeze. Idiot banter? Check. With we three, there was never any doubt it’d be puerile, juvenile, and fun. The highlights were many. The truck with the bumper sticker ‘If you can’t stop, then at least smile as you go under’, which was immediately adopted as our motto for the rest of the tour. Kretin getting pulled over for speeding, of course. Krusty hanging his arse out of the window of the CannedLoser rolling down the main street of Ayr at three in the afternoon, to the delight of a school bus full of primary kids and the horror of a Corolla full of bowls ladies. Two full days of silly, smutty conversations between the lads in the cabin of the postie van. Camping at the beachside caravan park at Airlie Beach (again, don’t bother to look; it’s now a resort and a stack of arse-ugly condos) as our (roughly) halfway stopover, revelling in paradise, and knowing we’d be back here in a week to play a few nights. Sagittaria’s old Holden breaking down (twice) en route - a highlight because we farmers’ boys were able to show off our roadside-mechanic skills to a trio of gorgeous, slightly heat-affected damsels in distress. After growing up surrounded by six-cylinder Toranas and mates with Kingswood utes, Jeff and I certainly knew one end of a 202 Holden ‘grey motor’ from the other. The old Premier threw a fan belt beneath the concrete bull with the concrete balls (usually missing, presumed stolen) in Rocky - conveniently just down the street from Repco, so we ducked in, grabbed a replacement and strapped it on - and again expired at the first set of lights as we rolled into Townsville. We picked up a replacement alternator from the local wreckers in Townsville and bolted it on in quick time, to the delight and appreciation of the girls, particularly Madeleine who Jeff was spading furiously with intent to cause a disturbance of the peace. Of course we kept it quite that the existing alternator had only lunched itself because we hadn’t tensioned the replacement fan belt properly in Rocky, because that could have significantly endangered The Jeff’s chances of getting any.

The Jeff was quite open about his interest in Madeleine. He could afford to be; he was single. Artemisia (or Anastasia, as he usually called her) was too serious, Imogen (their reclusive third member) was too quiet; he liked funky, outgoing girls, and Madeleine fitted the bill nicely. Which of the three Sagittarians was the most bedworthy (or even trying to establish which of them was the least, given how hot they all were) was a worryingly common topic of conversation aboard the postie van - worrying for those of us who wished to stay on good terms with their girlfriends for the duration of the fortnight: McCarthy and myself were both under strict instructions to return unmolested. McCarthy, for which this long term relationship carry-on was very much a novel experience, dealt with this by going on and on (and on) about Andrea. It was a big deal for them to be apart - they worked together, socialised together, ate and slept together (though not necessarily at the same time), so to be apart for two weeks was a major issue. Should have just been his major issue, of course, but for his insistence on externalising the entire fucking crisis for everyone else's continuing listening enjoyment. Which made it our issue as well. Joy of fuckin' joys. (Which ironically was her middle name. Joy I mean, not Fuckin', though Jeff and myself had been known to refer to her along such lines, generally out of McCarthy's earshot after he'd delivered another long-form Hamlet-esque soliloquy.)

Obviously, I had no such issues m'self. I was the senior consulting specialist when it came to chicks and stuff. I'd been there and done that, I knew what was doing and why it was doing it, I knew the lie of the land, which way the wind was blowing and whether to bat or bowl if I won the toss. I'd been in loads of relationships that had lasted longer than two months. Loads.

Although by loads I meant one. Counting this one.

Still, could be worse. I could be going on holiday for two weeks in two of North Queensland's liveliest tourist towns, oozing with European backpacker-chick temptation. Luckily, I'd have no dramas whatsover. Since this wasn't a holiday and all.