Feel good hit of the summer

Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstacy and alcohol...
- Queens of the Stone Age, 2000

Bollocks to That and Bollocks to This
Released March 2003 (Intercom) as double concept album in two stand-alone installments
Repackaged/rereleased as double CD May 2003 (Intercom), Bollocks To The Lot Of You

Bollocks To That

1. Revenge Of Son Of Brown Mullet
2. Going, Going, Gonorrhoea
3. We Rock
4. If Some Tool This As His Ringtone On His Mobile, You Have Our Permission To Beat Him To Death With It
5. Vomitorium (Welcome Home)
6. Uncle Ted
7. Restraining Order Schmestraining Order
8. At Least We’re Better Than Six ‘N’ Out
9. Bugger All To The Power Of Less
10. Womens’ Magazines Are Full Of Pointless Shite
11. You Philthy Mongrel
12. Throwing A Sausage Down A Hallway
13. Corporate Sucks Rock
14. Disestablishmentarianism (Is A Very Big Word)
15. Ernie Dingo Stole My Baby

Bollocks To This

1. Get A Dog (Up Ya)
2. This Song Is Not Likely To Make It Onto Video Hits
3. Scientology Is Bullshit
4. Innit For The Money
5. The Day Volvo Won Bathurst (End Of Civilization Remix)
6. World Championship Spirograph
7. As Sure As A One Armed Man Swims In Circles
8. Groupie Group Gropie
9. Running In Please Pass
10. Brett Lee Does Seven Cheerleaders For Breakfast (Imagine If He Did Nine)
11. Anyone For Tennis Skirt
12. It’s Only Called XXXX Because Queenslanders Can’t Spell SHIT
13. Inappropriate Uses Of Garden Vegetables
14. Gutted Ewok
15. Weekend At Bernie Fraser’s
    
    

Within two months of our ‘double concept album in two stand-alone installments’ bombing like a fat guy off a diving tower, Intercom hurriedly repackaged them as a ‘double concept album in ONE stand-alone installment’, i.e. as one double CD. But it was more than just the fact that people were more likely to not buy either album than shell out for both, or that the cover art was truly, desperately minging. The great Australian tall poppy syndrome started kicking in right about now, especially with the distinct whiff of sell-out that was beginning to follow us around following our months in the US and our own ‘repackaging’ as a band who literally and unironically sung ‘radio-friendly chick songs’ and were more likely to be seen on The Panel having smug dinner-party conversation with the rest of those fat, faded, self-satisfied clowns and playing cute little acoustic numbers to close the show rather than turning up on Jabba’s anarchic late night show on Channel [V] swearing at Johnny Howard between thunderous garage-punk sonic assaults. And of course, by now every concerned parents' organization knew what sort of foul-mouthed reprobates we actually were (and are), intent on brainwashing their fifteen year-old daughters with filth and depravity. That, and seven new boy bands, four DJs and a fistful of over-processed dance acts have kindly volunteered to take our place in the pop charts in our absence.

And then there were the lawsuits, almost par for the course by this stage. Channel Seven's lawyers were at our throats over the song Ernie Dingo Stole My Baby. The lawsuit fell through because the idea originally came from a Flacco sketch on the Big Gig which Ernie Dingo himself actually appeared in, but we still ended up getting banned for life from the network. Then we had a certain organised religion/cult/tax-dodge set its lawyers on us over a little ditty we wrote entitled Scientology Is Bullshit. Thankfully that case was thrown out of court when they couldn't prove that Scientology wasn't bullshit. But all the negative publicity didn't help, and getting yourself onto Scientology’s infamous black list such that they go out of their way to kill off your career isn’t a great tactical move (not that we couldn’t manage that ourselves). We were further sued by Lucasfilm over the song Gutted Ewok ('inappropriate use of the ewok image' – something about the phrase ‘I was scraping out the gutted ewok when her parents came home’ being considered objectionable - settled out of court), over the closing track Weekend at Bernie Fraser’s (by a certain very-much-not-dead ex-Reserve Bank chairman), and over the track As Sure As A One-Armed Man Swims In Circles (by Jack Newton). We almost got sued over For Christ's Sake, We're Better Than Six 'N' Out, but expert legal advice suggested that Shane and Brett Lee might have a few problems persuading the judge that Six 'N' Out were in fact better than anyone. Then of course there was the legally-actionable ditty It's Called XXXX Because Queenslanders Can't Spell SHIT… and so we waved farewell to the balance of the royalties as they passed into the R&D kitty of Castlemaine-Perkins Brewery Ltd. Although the judge did specify that a considerable sum of the monies paid were to be used in the development of a new XXXX variant that did not taste like shit. We're still waiting, Lion Nathan.

It’s a pity because some of our best stuff is on there - and some of our worst, indicating we really should have thought hard about the double-album idea, then thought again, harder. Easy to say; probably impossible to do, in hindsight. Our writing approach was becoming more fragmented; we weren’t writing things collectively like we used to off the back of rehearsal-space jams, but instead were all coming up with our own material and recording it ourselves without interacting with each other, the ‘silo model’ of songwriting if you like. And then we’d all get into a horse-trading session in order to get all our precious, precious babies into the finished article. No surprise then that it took an unprecedented (for us) eight months from the start of writing in Port Douglas to releasing the double album in March the following year - a double album was just about the only way we could keep everyone happy.

I’m sure everyone else would have agreed there was only one album’s worth of quality material on the two CDs released; I’m equally sure my opinion on what the one album’s worth of decent material was wouldn’t have coincided with that of anyone else. Not even McCarthy, even though we’d always had a lot of common ground - by now he was getting into darker and more obtuse material, whereas I’d heard the Stalkers’ new EP and Hayabusa’s new stuff and was stridently of the opinion that was where we needed to be, smack-bang in garage-punk land, three-chords-and-fuck-off territory. But McCarthy was still producing good material - listening to a lot of early Metallica produced the song Vomitorium (Welcome Home) which was both a tip of the hat and a sly dig at the faded monsters of metal. Our own resident monster Marty had his usual cadre of quality pop as well as a couple of good instrumental compositions, particularly the Air-style ambient electronica he was becoming big on - best of which was the complex and atmospheric If Some Tool Programs This As The Ring Tone For His Mobile, You Have Our Permission To Beat Him To Death With It. Of course, some idiot in California then went and got himself beaten to death with his own mobile phone and suddenly everyone was looking accusingly at us again, but luckily the coroner's findings were that the victim's mobile phone ring was in fact Livin' La Vida Loca – justifiable grounds for fatal assault in anyone's book.

But as it turned out, while that was the best of the stuff Marty was prepared to earmark for Gasket use, he was sitting on a whole stack of even better material which he was polishing up for his solo album, El Martinez, which came out in July of ‘03. And went straight to number one on the album charts for weeks, on the back of a beautiful piece of airplay-heavy melodic pop-rock called Byron Sunrise; this was what happened when you attached poignant, sensitive, heartfelt lyrics to one of Marty’s crowdpleasers, rather than sardonic wit, barbed irony and knob jokes. Our reaction should have been, “Fuck, that’s awesome. Marty’s done really well with this.” To this day, I would like to know why was it more like, “That little bastard’s been holding out on us, and it’s all that fucking bitch’s fault.” It’s not to our collective credit that it was more like that, but it was a direct byproduct of Madonna inviting herself into the band as a surrogate fifth member - no other band-member-partner seemed to think she needed to have input into our direction and our creative process. Admittedly of the band members it was only McCarthy who actually HAD a partner, and probably not for much longer the way he was carrying on. I think it was McCarthy who started referring to her as ‘Lewis the Jewess’, sounding like Eric Cartman – nothing like a bit of casual racism to unify a team - but again, it wasn’t that Madonna was Jewish, it was that she was a manipulative bitch who treated Marty like her puppet; if her hand was any further up his arse she could have adjusted his glasses for him…

“Basically,” Phil admitted to Lena, “we were turning into Spinal Tap.”

And to at least acknowledge the fact, while we were fighting over what the next album was going to sound like, we recorded an EP called This Isn’t Spinal Tap which was a bunch of covers from the movie soundtrack, songs we’d played on and off for years ever since the early days - Tonite I’m Gonna Rock You Tonite, Big Bottom, Sex Farm, Heavy Duty… It never saw the light of day except as a bonus disc packaged with our final album, which nobody bought anyway.

Even our most charitable critics were by now speaking of the Gasket in the same tones as other formerly decent bands who should probably have quietly pulled stumps some time ago to avoid further embarrassment. There were murmurings that the record company were also less than pleased with us… well, by ‘murmurings’ read ‘full-page disclaimers in the industry press along the lines of The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publishers’, but we were assured that was merely a legal requirement of one of our settlements, if not a marketing ploy. Of sorts. Regardless of how pissed off they were with us, given that our deal was for four albums with an option for two more, at our rate of progress we were going to be free of responsibility to them in about three months, even though it was taking longer and longer to actually get stuff down on tape (or digital equivalent) these days. We’d lost the ability to be nimble and agile - with the number of hangers-on we’d managed to add to our entourage, we were a lumbering behemoth of a band, with the turning circle of the QE2. Some of my favourite music of all time was being released at that time - in 2002-03 there were albums from the Casanovas, the Datsuns, the D4, Hayabusa, the Hives, the Donnas, the Black Keys, the White Stripes, even Powderfinger’s Vulture Street that are still some of my all-time favourites - and yet we spent most of our time trying to figure out what we wanted to sound like. A five-minute walk through the New Releases section of Rockinghorse Records should have done the trick.

Hindsight says we should have taken six months off, even a year. But having had a few years to think about it (interspersed with a few years of trying not to), hindsight also says we were subconsciously petrified that if we did, we’d have nothing to come back to - maybe a byproduct of our beginnings, where things happened so quickly and momentum was key, and we felt we could have disappeared back into obscurity in an instant.

“Six months would have made a difference,” I maintained. It was getting dark now out on Phil’s deck, I felt like we’d almost done this to death – then again it was probably the prospect of dealing with our own ‘death’ again that was making me want to wind this up and get back to the farm. “We should have let Marty tour on the back of El Martinez as long as he wanted. Tour until he was sick of the sound of his own voice and the media crawling all over him and the screaming idiot teenie fans and wanted to hide up the back behind us pair of lumbering thugs again as cover. You should have gone off and worked on that solo album that you kept going on about,” to which Phil shrugged reluctant agreement, “and McCarthy and I should have gone for six weeks’ surfing at Margaret River.” Warming to my subject - okay, maybe just to the Uncle Teds that Phil had unearthed from the back of his fridge by this stage - I caught Lena’s eye and corrected myself. “No, fuck that. I should have gone to Margaret River with whoever I was banging at the time, and McCarthy should have taken you off to some island in the tropics so you could have salvaged your shit before it went completely fucking pear shaped.”

My statement hung in the air, refusing to be acknowledged. Yeah, I’d overstepped again; whether the umpire at the bowlers’ end was going to call me on it, I wasn’t sure yet.

“Would it have made any difference?” she replied carefully.

“You kept him in check,” I contended. “He and the plot diverged after you left.”

“So it’s my fault then?”

“I didn’t say that.”

I’d been careful not to say that, just as at the time I'd deliberately taken as active a disinterest in proceedings between the pair of them as a mutual friend could, but it was pretty clear what had gone on; McCarthy had finally given in to all the various forms of temptation which had been waved under his nose ever since he’d entered the industry; he was drinking heavily, had (allegedly) screwed around on her on more than one (alleged) occasion, and was dabbling on the fringes of drugs, which given our shared history with my brother, I thought very fucking poorly of. Granted, I was also drinking heavily and was screwing around almost religiously, but I didn’t have anyone in particular to disappoint, apart from my folks, and my brother, and my sister-in-law. To her credit, Lena didn’t hang around once she had decided enough was enough; she simply walked. One day she was there, the next she was gone. I’d like to say it shattered McCarthy to his very soul and left him a empty husk of a man, but he was by then so caught up with his own importance I’m not sure he noticed for more than a week or so.

So instead of six months off, Marty was given six weeks to get this solo album crap out of his system before reporting back to start work on our sixth album. McCarthy cruised about on the ‘scene’ with his ironically named new girlfriend Chastity, who was a truly nasty piece of work - made Lauren look like Joan of Arc - while Phil and I turned up unannounced on the odd undercard in support of other bands we were mates with, dressed in brown and white striped shirts, jackets and corduroy trousers, me on fuzzy guitar and him on bigged-up drums, playing stripped-back, distorted-power-chord Black Keys/White Stripes style versions of Gasket songs, and calling ourselves the Brown Stripes. Thus putting the ‘arse’ back in ‘genius’, if not the ‘mental’ back in ‘excremental’. To be fair, the idea came to us when I was very drunk and he was very stoned. Which was pretty regularly in the back half of 2003.

Then we had another surprise. This Song Is Not Likely To Make It Onto Video Hits, did. It was just something Marty had flung together in his spare time between solo album recording sessions, TV appearances and shareholder meetings; and Lena had been kind enough to translate McCarthy's lyrics from the original Samagda text before she stormed out, never to return. On the back of that little rise in the dunes we started work on our sixth album, under the ‘working title’ of You Paid Thirty Bucks For This, Dumbarse? and under the understanding that the ‘working title’ would not, at any stage, be allowed to become the ‘actual title’. Nor would the dubious Photoshopped $30 note with Peter Brock on it that was our ‘working cover’ ever be permitted to see the light of day. We’d been sued by everyone and their dog, but getting sued by one of our heroes didn’t bear thinking about. As it was, McCarthy’s lyrical idiosyncracies were more than testing the patience of just the Intercom legal team - they were testing our patience as well by now. Our royalties were being siphoned off into legal settlements. (And into Simon's back pocket as well, but we didn't find that out until later.) McCarthy, of course, replied by saying if it wasn't for his off-colour wordsmanship we'd all still be sitting on our arses in our garage. At which point I wanted to know what the hell was wrong with our garage, if it was good enough five years ago it was good enough today, and that pretending we hadn’t come from there was a total fucking betrayal of everything we’d stood for, etc. And then all the girlfriends conveniently decided they hated each other. And so on and so on, right through the recording of what had become known as Thirty Bucks.

I’m told that tales of the recording of Thirty Bucks are legend around the traps. Screaming matches, drunken brawls, other people's cars being driven off boat ramps, petty arson... as to how much of it is true, I can’t possibly comment. Largely because I was pissed as a fart every day for four months. But it’s interesting how the track order of the final product seems to reflect the mindset of the band as the album was recorded, if not the decline in relations between the band members - largely because the album was pieced together by Intercom’s in-house producers long after the fact from the bits and pieces they found, in order to salvage something marketable from the wreckage. Which explains why the working cover and title did end up being used - and why we ended up getting sued by Brocky. The only change was that our US-owned paymasters decided that we’d misspelt Dumbass, and corrected it for us.

You Paid Thirty Bucks For This, Dumbass
Released June 2004 (Intercom)

1. The CIA Got Rid Of Gough Whitlam
2. Vee Dubya
3. Sackful O’ Kittens
4. Bunch Of Extravagant Solos Loosely Connected By Trite Scatological Lyrics
5. American Beer Is Piss
6. Projectile Gastric
7. I Wanna Beat The Vengaboys About The Head With A Big Fuck-Off Stick
8. Phil’s Total Wank
9. All My Friends Are Drug-Fucked Arseclowns
10. There’s None Dumber… Than The Drummer
11. You’s Fixin’ Fer Ah Ass-Whuppin’
12. Your Mum’s Ugly
13. Marty’s A Complete Pianist
14. Delicate Instumental Arrangement For Virtuoso Keyboard Soloist, Two Ordinary Guitarists And One Incompetent Drummer
15. You Can All Go And Get Fucked Then

There was the politically charged stuff - we’d read Michael Moore’s books, we all knew Dubya was as bent as a dog’s hind leg and dodgier than a two-bob watch, so we told his bent and dodgy story in Vee Dubya. And how the CIA got rid of Gough Whitlam, in the song The CIA Got Rid Of Gough Whitlam. Then there was us desperately trying to rekindle our three-chords-and-offensive-lyrics heyday with songs like Sackful O’ Kittens (first lawsuit of the new album, courtesy the RSPCA), American Beer Is Piss (the first and only single released from the album, which did absolutely nothing for anyone, much like American beer itself) and I Wanna Beat The Vengaboys About The Head With A Big Fuck-Off Stick. Angry, angry young men. And it didn't get much more happy-smiley either: All My Friends Are Drug Fucked Arseclowns; Phil's Total Wank; Marty’s A Complete Pianist; Delicate Little Instumental Arrangement For Virtuoso Keyboard Soloist, Three Ordinary Guitarists And One Incompetent Drummer…

And finally, in somewhat of a summation of the whole recording process and the degradation of the intra-band relations, after everyone else had stormed off home from Firstlight after our daily screaming match, I sat up for most of the night at listening back to the various bits and pieces that everyone had recorded on their own, and demolishing a carton of beer, followed by a thirty-dollar bottle of New Zealand pinot noir. Then I dug out my battered old Yamaha acoustic, the only bit of gear I still had from my now-cancelled contra-deal with them, and wrote a Delta blues song about my experiences in the band and my feelings about everyone in it.

It was simply titled You Can All Go And Get Fucked Then.

I then smashed the guitar to splinters over the recording desk, went out to my car to sleep off the worst of the grog, then drove sedately back to my bed at Jeff and Rebecca’s as the sun rose over the ridge and illuminated the granite peak of Mount Warning. It led me like a beacon away from the studio, along the backroads (not a chance was I going to risk Highway One in my condition) of the North Coast towards Broadwater. Jeff and Rebecca were apoplectic when they saw the condition I was in, and the distance I’d driven. But I managed to placate them with a brief, mumbled sentence, before flaking out on the couch:

“Stick a fork in me, I’m fuckin' done.”

Thus ended my relationship with the band known as Flange Gasket.

And what had Lena said about all of that? Maybe it was because this was an Exocet history of the band, or maybe because it was because it stirred up unpleasant memories, but the Intercom part of the story merited very little by way of detail, as I knew from reading it the day before in the grey desert of the Elantra’s cabin on the way down the day before.

Abscessive Compulsive, the first album for the Gasket’s new American paymasters, saw the seachange in approach that the Gasket’s loyal fanbase had feared. The words ‘sell-out’ were first whispered, then muttered under the breath, then directed pointedly at them. To Flange Gasket, however, ‘sell-out’ just meant that all the seats in the stadium had been sold. Their first single under the new regime, Radio Friendly Chick Song, saw them awarded the status of one-hit-wonders in the US, with screaming pre-pubescent girls trailing their every move. Flange Gasket had become the new Hanson. Facial hair was about the only way the two bands could be distinguished.

The square-up for the sell-out was coming, and when it hit, it was merciless. Their next offering, the preposterous ‘double concept album in two stand alone instalments’ Bollocks to That and/or This, was an unmitigated failure. It was a desperate attempt to return to the band’s traditional values - offending people - but only succeeded in attracted more lawsuits than positive reviews. It has been suggested that in the file-sharing era the only people who actually purchased copies of either were defamation lawyers for major corporations.

The problems were obvious; they were the same that hundreds of bands have had before them, and hundreds more will have after them. Success spoiled them. Andy Young developed a drinking problem. Phil Duff developed a drug problem, or rather further developed the one he’d been working on since uni. Sam McCarthy didn’t discriminate, developing both a drug problem and a drinking problem as well as what one character from the cult shambles Showgirls would have described as ‘a problem with pussy’. Marty di Biagini’s problem was his own success as a solo artist, and the affect it was having on his bandmates’ attitude towards him, following the release of El Martinez in mid-year. Oh, and the minor problem of having a life partner in cosmetics millionaire Madonna Cohen-Lewis who was as conniving as she was manipulative.

I’m presuming this was another part of the draft which was causing legal issues?

The band finally self-destructed in a vast ball of napalm in late 2003, during the abortive recording of their final album, You Paid Thirty Bucks For This, Dumbass. The latter was cribbed together from leftovers by Intercom staff trying to salvage something from the wreckage [hey, I said that first] and may indeed be the worst album ever recorded. Like the end of the band itself, this album is a freeway pileup that only masochists, or those who enjoy dwelling on others’ failure, can possibly enjoy. Unsurprisingly, no tracks from this album have made this collection.

A confident statement, considering that Richie apparently hadn’t even decided on the track listing for the Best Of - but then again, I was pretty confident she was right. Apart from listening back to the tracks the night I put down You Can All Go And Get Fucked Then, I’ve never listened to the album, and haven’t seen let alone own a copy.

“So what you’re trying to say,” I’d inferred, flicking the last page of her draft and turning to her – she was mildly preoccupied driving the car of course, this was the trip down - “is that in signing for Intercom we began an inexorable slide towards becoming sell-out commercial bitches, and that our subsequent failure and ignominious downfall was fair recompense for selling out and deserting our loyal fanbase? ‘For ‘tis the sport to see the engineer foist on his own petard’, that sort of thing?” That was the only bit of Hamlet I could remember, but I liked it and as such tended to bust it out more than strictly necessary.

Lena had considered that for a moment.

“Congratulations,” she’d replied, glancing up from the road. “If you’re capable of that level of cognitive thought, you must be right to drive again.”

What I didn't know of course was what had happened after that, right at the grim death of things after I’d left. Phil’s recollection was hazy (really?) but he came through with the goods. Well, the indifferents anyway. By this stage it was late afternoon at Casa del Duffero, and Phil had knocked off the rest of the ouzo, as well as his available combustibles; the well of Uncle Teds at the back of his fridge was also starting to run dry.

“Mate, if I had it to do again, I'd go out like you did, hey,” he grinned. “Recording that ‘fuck all of you cunts’ blues song, then smashing your guitar up and just fucking off… that was so rock and roll. Pissed everyone off immensely at the time, but a few weeks later I thought… shit, that would have been the way to do it.”

“So what happened after that?” I asked, kinda wanting to move on. By now the conversation was mainly between Phil and I, well-lubricated as it was; Lena was listening intently, as was the recorder, which didn’t help my mood.

“Yeah, so next day the whole band had a screaming match that lasted for hours and would have had Barnesy fearing for his job, trashed the studio in a drunken brawl and were forcibly separated by the constabulary. Who, by some act of God, decided not to search the place for drugs.” He glanced to the ceiling and murmured a ‘Thank you’ to the heavens. “We all stormed off to our various boltholes - by this stage we were booking our entourages into separate accommodation - and waited for the morning, to see which one of us would cave in first and apologise.”

The Duffer paused, reflecting on the retreating sunset and the blatantly obvious symbolism therein (hey, it’s not just our band that can lower its standards to target a stupid American audience.)

“So did anyone cave in?”

Phil shook his head. “Next morning, six am, knock at the door. Has to be someone who knows I'd still be up pulling cones at this time of night, or morning, or whatever. What I'm not expecting is McCarthy. First of all, he doesn't believe in 6am as a concept, and second he's never apologised for anything in his life. But he looked pretty apologetic as he stands in the doorway asking if he can come in. I say yeah, though I’m backed against the wall so if he lunges at me I can defend myself. Anyway he does. Comes in, not lunges at me I mean. He seems very calm, but very distant… I mean he wasn’t really there a lot of the time anyway, not in the end, but he just looked so… remote. Pale. I was expecting some long-winded speech, this being McCarthy, but all he says is, 'Where did all the fun go, Phil? This ain't what I signed on for. Don't think you signed on for it, either.' Then he hands me this small black flake, about the size of a dollar coin. It's his favourite guitar pick - that one which he’d had ground down from a piece of carbon-fibre debris off a Formula One car. He'd picked it up that time we did the Grand Prix in Melbourne, played the afterparty, and used it in every recording session we'd done since. Too scared to use it playing live in case he flicked it into the crowd. He reckoned it was off one of the Ferraris…”

“Always told him it was probably a Minardi or some other shitbox,” I chided. “Could have been anyone after that massive startline crash. Chewed through strings, but he refused to use anything else. His lucky charm, he used to say. That and Lena, but he reckoned it was difficult to crank through a blues chord progression using you.”

“More bleedingly obvious symbolism,” Lena observed.

“Very much so,” the Duffer nodded. “Then he just smiled sadly, turned around, and walked out. Haven't heard of him ever since.”

Lena went quiet as she reflected on this. In the baldest sense, it was nothing to go on, really, in terms of his whereabouts. “What became of the others?” she asked, though it was a pretty vacant sort of question, particularly since the answer was pretty self-evident.

“Well, Marty called a band meeting to announce he was leaving the group in order to pursue a solo career as an avant-garde composer and/or soulful troubadour-slash-balladeer, depending on what paid better and what Maddy told him to. Can't exactly remember how I found out because none of us actually went to the band meeting. Now he gets to release whatever he likes without anyone ever complaining - and it's commercially successful as well. Go figure. The music business makes less sense than Bruce Ruxton after nine cones.”

“His or yours?”

“Not sure, would probably apply either way. As for the other guys, I know from Jeff that you headed back to Queensland to bust out Plan B…”

“There was always a Plan B,” I agreed, “just like there was always going to be a need for a Plan B, someday.”

“So do you mind telling me what you believe Plan B is or was,” Lena said tartly, “since Angus won’t talk to me about it?”

“What I won’t talk about is Bethany, and I think that’s fair enough.”

Phil started subconsciously checking his pockets again for fun organic derivatives. “Plan B was to go back to teaching. As far as I know, that’s what you’re up to.”

“Correct - five points,” I awarded. “As I’ve already told you, I went back to teaching. Updated my ticket and went and got a job. I can give you a list of the schools I taught at, and contact numbers for the principals involved, since you’re so desperate for detail for whatever fucking reason…”

“Forget it,” she said for the second time that day. I didn’t know what the hell she wanted from me. Actually, I did. She didn’t believe I’d given her the full story. Which I hadn't. But the full story wasn’t any more interesting than the brief synopsis, and neither was worthy of publication, so why bother? She did a good impression of being hurt and offended at the inference she wasn’t interested just on personal grounds, that I didn’t seem to think she was interested because she was my friend. My friend who hadn’t seen me in five years, and presumably hadn’t even shed a second thought about me in the interim.

“What about McCarthy?” I queried Phil. “What do you want to say about the last few months with him, considering Lena here had left the scene? Anything you can tell us that might help this one get some closure… I mean, write her story, of course?” I ignored the death-ray stare that was lasering into the side of my head from next to me. Beer was tasty and baiting Lena was fun.

“There was that Chastity chick,” he began carefully. “But I’m not sure she wants to hear about that…”

“She’s a professional journalist,” I replied belligerantly, “and as such, she knows she’s not part of the story.”

“Well… I don’t think he was single for long after… you know. I don’t know if he was seeing Chastity before, but… Anyway.”

“Chastity, huh. Sounds like a porn actress,” Lena remarked kindly, in an attempt to put him at ease.

The Duffer scratched his head. “Don’t think she did hardcore,” he said, “but girl-on-girl, definitely… I mean, I think so, I wouldn’t know for sure.”

Lena turned a whiter shade of pale.

“Chastity was indeed an adult entertainer,” I confirmed. “An exotic dancer and softcore adult film actress from Palo Alto, California. We can probably dig up her real name if it’s needed for your story…”

“She was supposedly from a Mormon family in Utah,” Phil recalled. “At least that’s what her biog details said.” He looked vaguely shifty about knowing this information, which I figured he’d picked up from the very many porn sites he tended to frequent.

“What the fuck was Sam doing with a Mormon porn actress from California?” Lena asked, exasperated.

“What wasn’t he doing with her?” I shouldn’t have been enjoying this, but the Bethany stuff was annoying me, and besides that I was quite pissed. “Apparently she came out for one of those Sexpo conventions, she was the star turn or something. He met her at some industry party which she’d subsequently been invited to. Things happened, sparks were struck. She was a nasty bit of work, granted, but it was the sort of thing he wanted - the polar opposite of his last chick.”

“You’re right, I think we’re safely in the realm of stuff that’s irrelevant to the article,” Lena decided.

“Wouldn’t be so sure,” I shrugged. “It’s kinda the final act in McCarthy going off the rails. You’re gonna have to discuss that if you want the whole story.”

“I have,” she said. “'He had problems with drugs, alcohol and pussy'. That’s all that needs to be said.”

“For the liner notes maybe, but for the longer article…”

“We’ll get to it later,” she said sharply.

“Phil might have some helpful input,” I contended, “particularly on the drug front, like maybe assessing how much he was using and of what…”

“What are you trying to say, I’m some kind of expert?” Phil queried. “Gee thanks for that. I think it was mostly blow - he was getting it from Brady Priddle, I think. They were surprisingly buddy-buddy by the end.” He turned to me. “Do we want to get into that?”

“Not relevant to the article,” I replied grimly.

Phil nodded, with raised eyebrows. “Anyway… I don’t know how much of the stuff was for him and how much was for her, because I think she used quite a lot herself… but as near as I can tell he totally lost the plot, took up narcotics as a lifestyle decision, and I have no idea what became of him after that - for all we know, he could be out on the streets living off dog food. It's tragic, and I'm really fucking sad for him, but those sorts of things happen when you start depending on drugs as some kind of crutch to get through life.”

His frantic self-patdown bringing no joy, he turned to us and asked hopefully, “Got any smoko?”