Don't call me dude

Well today I leave the psycho ward
My sentence did conclude
I killed a man with my bare hands
Because he called me dude...
- Scatterbrain, 1990

I would have loved to spend longer in the South Island, particularly around Otago. I’d forgotten how much I rated that part of the world, and the people in it, and who knew when I’d have enough disposable time or income to fly over again. But super-organised Aroha had already booked me onto the Tuesday flight back to Brisbane, presuming I had Important Things To Do, wrongly, and that the earliest available direct flight after the weekend would be most useful. So I said my farewells – some potentially more permanent than others – and boarded the Airbus for the ride home.

But strange happenings were afoot, and probably ahand as well, and not just the very strange happening that my ute was still in the carpark with my guitar case under the tonneau – the strings wouldn’t have thanked me for leaving them tensioned up in a massive hot-box for four days, but all was still present and accounted for. Which was good, as this was still listed on eBay – though now as a auction for Tractor’s cancer charity – and I hadn’t had a chance to see whether the auction (any of them in fact) had met reserve yet.

No, the strangeness was in the looks I was getting. Furtive glances from people on the plane. Slightly awkward expressions from airport staff. Mutterings behind hands. I wondered if I’d mixed up my face and arse when getting ready that morning – or whether this was just the rekindling of my minor celebrity status from the band days, and I’d become oversensitive and forgotten how to deal with it. By the time I’d reached Cleveland I’d decided it was the latter, and I’d ignore it unless people were rude enough to make a big deal of it. The girl at the ticket office for the barge at Cleveland executed a classic double-take, but she wasn't the first for the day, abd by now it was water off a drunk's back.

I made it home around eight – the trip from the airport to home took almost as long as the flight itself, but it’d given me plenty of opportunity to refine my battle plans for dealing with insolvency, unemployment and official investigations. One: sell everything, as much of the house contents as possible, so that when you sell the house it’s less stuff to have to move. Two: stop whinging about your dignity and start looking for work. Three: (and this was a bit cunning) find out somehow whether Annalise was still enrolled as a student at SCC on the night of the Schoolies gig. If not, she wasn’t your student, making sleeping with her quite unethical, possibly immoral, but definitely not illegal. Angus wins on a technicality, cos he’s a cunt. The End.

I unscrewed the downstairs bathroom window with the cordless drill (what do you mean, that’s a strange way to secure the premises?) and crawled inside. The house was as I’d left it, unlike certain previous weekends away. I unlocked the door and brought my bags and guitar case inside, grabbing the phone to check my messages while I did so. I punched in the quick-dial for voicemail, switched the phone to speaker, and waited for it to go through its little introductory spiel while I fired up the internerd to check on my emails, and of course my auctions.

You have twenty-three new messages, said the nice lady inside the voicemail machine.

You fucking what?

First new message. Message received on Saturday. December. Six. Ten-fifty three am. [Beep]

‘Hey dickhead, it’s Jeff. Um, I know you’re in NZ, but I figured you might be picking up your messages…’

Email: Twenty-seven new messages. No, seriously, you fucking what?

‘…anyway you’re very fucking unpopular down here. I think you know why. It’s in the Weekend Australian if you don’t. Give Mum a call, she’s beside herself. That’s all. Hope Tractor is going all right.’

No goodbye. He sounded ticked. No idea why, but I wasn’t looking forward to finding out.

Second new message. Message received on: Saturday. December. Six. Eleven-oh-two am. [Beep]

‘Hey, Angus, this is Anna... Hey look, just wanted to see if you were doing all right, sounds like some heavy shit you’ve been through... Hey, still in Faaaarrrmerdale, haven’t been game to go outside the school grounds yet. You were wrong, by the way. It’s a fucking shithole. Later dude.’

Oh good, because I wasn’t in enough trouble already without anyone finding out I’d been in contact with my alleged ‘victim’, or vice versa. Who was either an innocent pawn, or was astonishingly good at playing games. Even money odds for either, I figured. And more to the point, didn’t she know I’d killed a man with my bare hands because he called me dude?

And some other stuff he did, I guess.

Third new message. Message received on: Saturday. December. Six. Eleven-ten am. [Beep]

‘Hey Andrew, this is Mike Cross from the Age, look…’ Grumpy sigh. ‘I just want to check some of the stuff that Tweedledum and Tweedlefuckingdumber have you saying here, because frankly I don’t believe a fucking word and some of those allegations are mind-blowing, and mind-blowingly libellious at that…’

Hey, if you were anything of a music journo, you’d have realised I was off being a goddamn rock star that weekend. But I’d joined a few dots already, enough to know that what I wanted to do was not to go through every one of these fifty fucking phone messages and emails, but for someone to explain to me exactly what the fuck was going on. That someone, I decided, was going to be Australia’s Leading Music Journalist™, because if any bastard would have done his research, it’d be he. I replayed the end of his message, scrawled down the mobile number he quoted, and punched it into my phone.

Things sounded lively wherever Mike X was. Either at a gig, or perhaps the Fairfax office went a little mental around deadline time on a Tuesday evening. He found somewhere quieter to be, anyway, and suggested he call me back on a landline so it wasn’t my call cost. I wondered how he knew I was so skint. Maybe he was used to dealing with musos after so many years in the biz. Anyway, he called back and I asked, as rationally as I thought I could, I’ve been over in New Zealand for four days and the universe has apparently exploded, what the fuck was going on?

So he told me. And once he’d finished, I put down the phone and went to go find something to kick. Hard.

The three burials of Angus Young

Former Flange Gasket rocker Andrew Young bears a lot of crosses.

By Megan Lane with Kas Casoli

Which made no sense in itself – that was an unholy alliance that defied belief – but we’ll move on.

“Let’s face it,” Andrew Young begins, his sunny permagrin fading, “I’m not the best of omens. I seem to bring death. What was it Lemmy from Motorhead said? If I moved next door your lawn would die.”

Black humour isn’t lost on the singer-guitarist from disbanded, dissolute alterna-rockers Flange Gasket. After all, their first student radio hit was titled Learn To Swim With Harold Holt. But navel-gazing on one’s own mortality was never the Andrew Young (Angus to his friends) way. The mortality of others, though… that just keeps getting in the way.

“Thirty two years, two best mates, two worst enemies,” he relates. “Then again two of those were the same person, which serves me right for hanging around with f---ing mentalists like McCarthy.”

Any conversation with Young means the topic of McCarthy is never far away. Even more than five years after their last words to each other – which Young maintains are deeply unprintable – it’s still obvious Young is missing his right hand. Like Dean Martin without Jerry Lewis, or Roy without HG. Decide for yourself which was which. Young and McCarthy grew up on the NSW North Coast, Young on a cane farm, McCarthy on his family’s native plant nursery near Evans Head. Rumours that Young buddied up with McCarthy in kindergarten solely to complete his Hot Wheels collection remain contentious. Another figure looms large over their shared childhood – that of Young’s brother, Matt.

“He was our hero,” Young pronounces, “simple as that. I can draw a line through all the things which matter to me today, and that line runs straight to Matt. If it wasn’t for him…” He shrugs, seemingly content to leave the question as rhetorical. For a bit. “We wouldn’t be having this conversation, anyway.”

I wasn’t sure we ever had, actually, but we’ll move on. For the moment.

Matt taught the boys to surf, to play the guitar and to ride motorbikes. His real talent, though, was filmmaking. He was in his first year studying film at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney when he was killed in a car accident near Hornsby in late 1993. Andrew Young was studying for his HSC at the time.

“He was a good lad,” Young says wistfully. “Maybe a little too… I don’t know… susceptible, I guess. Susceptible to what other people thought and said, and susceptible to his own demons. That sensitive, creative eye which made him so good at his chosen art form, made him very vulnerable outside of that. Of course, we never thought that of him growing up, to us he was just brother Matt, superstar, guitar hero, moviemaker extraordinaire and scorer of wild intense arty chicks. We had no idea he was hurting as much as he was. Until he went and smashed himself into a tree on the old Pacific Highway. There was a girl, who was f---ed up, and there were drugs, which were f---ing the pair of them up, and that was that. I mean, we should have seen the signs. He was dressing like a complete twat, talking utter bollocks, all pretention and artifice. And he’d gotten rid of his Torana to buy an old Saab. If there ever was a desperate attempt to try to be interesting, that was it. Saab drivers - it’s the same f---ing demographic who used to buy Citroens back in the day because they were ‘quirky’. Dull, punishing, self-involved marketing department f---wits trying to look like they’re f---ing arty trend-setters...”

If it sounds like Young is yet to completely forgive his brother for killing himself – as Young is quite certain the ‘accident’ amounted to – it’s because it is. “The guy Matt turned into, I f---ing hate,” he confesses. “Mainly because Matt hated him too. I read his diary afterwards, I knew what he was thinking, how depressed he was, how much he hated what he’d become. My brother was a good lad, a kind and decent lad. He was my man. And he thought the guy he turned into was a f---ing c--t. If he thought that, it’s good enough for me to think the same.”

So here, I realised as my stomach churned, we have the reason I might be having Christmas alone this year. While that was my reading of the facts, and while it pretty much matched that of Jeff and the old man – perhaps not couched in the same vigorous language – my mother never had, and never would, accept that her eldest son, her baby boy, would have killed himself. I didn’t agree with that, but I accepted it, and it had become an understanding in the family; the officially accepted story was the one which had been reported at the time, demise by accident. Belligerantly declaring otherwise in a national weekend newspaper was not the most sensitive of things to do. Not that I’d known I was actually DOING it of course.

Young picked up the pieces at the University of Queensland where he spent four years drinking, chasing women and occasionally turning up to science lectures. “In hindsight, you could just say it was research for Gasket songwriting material,” he offers. It still meant re-training as a teacher at Southern Cross University in Lismore in order to make himself in some way employable. And in what punishing, self-involved marketing department f---wits might call ‘convergence’, Sam McCarthy too had headed home after four years in Sydney doing a BA in communication, to work for the local paper and help Young out in dealing with the chronic local oversupply of cheap beer and cheaper women. Their flatmates were a floppy-haired drumming stoner called Phil Duff and a painfully shy, prodigiously talented music student called Martin di Biagini. The rest is history. Or, as Young puts it shamelessly, “the rest is The Least Worst Of Flange Gasket, out soon on Exocet Records. Available on CD, DVD and iTunes just in time for Christmas. Buy it for someone you want to get jack of.”

Flange Gasket’s calling card was an utter refusal to take themselves seriously – any band who releases albums titled More Arse Than Class or Abscessive Compulsive can hardly claim to be aping Radiohead. The calling card of their Exocet labelmates, Melbourne post-modern futurists (or was that post-future modernists?) deusexmachina, was an utter refusal not to. It was never likely to work out, despite the best United Nations peacekeeping efforts of Exocet founding father Greg Richardson. “We toured a few times with them, particularly in the early days when we were all lean and hungry and trying to establish ourselves. We spent most of the time being thoroughly obnoxious to each other. We hated their f---ing music, their f---ing fans, their f---ing $200 hairdos and their smug f---ing selves, and they pretty much felt the same way about us. At least we had something in common. Richie [Richardson] never really figured out how to deal with the aggro. By the time he had half a clue, we’d both f---ed off elsewhere.”

Massive though both the dollars and the potential were of Flange Gasket’s subsequent 2001 deal with US label Intercom (now absorbed into the Sony-BMG empire), it was the beginning of the end for the Gasket, as Young reluctantly agrees. “Seeds were sown. We had too much of everything. Too much cash, too much attention, too much in the way of toys, and of hangers-on telling us we were shit-hot, when in reality we occasionally needed to be told we were shit. Find me a band who haven’t been f---ed by their own success and you’ll have a band who never f---ing had any. End of discussion.” Or is it? Young isn’t finished with his rant, which is becoming notably affected by the second bottle of cab merlot we’re sharing. “The Beatles. Oasis. Rage. Chilis, they’ve been rubbish ever since they got off the smack. And shitloads of other local acts – Jet, Wolfmother, You Am I, The Vines, even though they couldn’t play live for a half-chewed cheeseburger from Maccas Westfield Miranda, or wherever the f--- they met up.”

For the band that met up as flatmates at Chateau Dodgy, a rambling two-storey temple to the glories of 1970s décor, and played their first gig (recorded live to tape for an audio engineering assignment) in its garage, Intercom’s cash and creative lack-of-control resulted in more bad behaviour, a lot of headlines, and the occasional bloated, confused recording. Worse yet, Flange Gasket had birthed an artist who was very rapidly about to dwarf it in popularity; Marty di Biagini’s smash debut album El Martinez sold more copies than Flange Gasket’s last three Intercom albums combined. Under the uncompromising management of new beau, cosmetics millionairess Madonna Cohen-Lewis, di Biagini’s career soared ‘like a f---ing melody from one of his identikit B105 [Brisbane pop radio station] ballads’, as Young pithily describes it. Questionable dalliances in side-project electronica and ‘serious’ avant-garde compositions aside, di Biagini never looked back once he was free of the band, or had ‘jettisoned the ballast’ – Young, self-deprecating again – and indeed was directly encouraged not to look back by his management.

“Maddy continually fed him this drivel about how we were holding him back, how we were deliberately keeping him in the background, how Sam and me were conspiring against him. It was bollocks, absolutely, but it was motivational. It worked. While we fought amongst ourselves, he took off like a nuclear missile.” He pauses to refill his glass. “I think she actually still believes that we really were out to get him, which is f---ing not right. Who the f--- was it that got him to come out of his bedroom and actually play his f---ing incredible songs in public? Certainly wasn’t the Lipstick Princess. She was fairly busy going through high school at the time.”

While Marty was moving onwards and upwards, the rest were descending into the gutter. Young was drinking like an ‘80s cricketer on a flight to Heathrow. Phil Duff was more absent than Lord Lucan. McCarthy dumped his long-term partner and replaced her with a porn actress called Chastity, celebrating the union by developing a drug problem. He was aided to this end by his new-found BFF, deusexmachina frontman Brady Priddle.

Please tell me this isn’t going where I think it’s going, Lena.

“Priddle was scum,” Young says, almost conversationally, as though the point was so obvious it barely merited words. “Irredeemable f---ing scum. What McCarthy saw in the guy I’ll never know.”

Please tell me this isn’t going where I was personally assured it was never going to go, i.e. into print.

But it was hardly Young’s problem; as his band disintegrated, his personal life was suddenly on the up-and-up. He’d met a girl. Sure, he met lots of girls, it went with the whole singer-in-a-band thing, but this one was different. This one was worth keeping. She was smart, funny, and seemed to like him, a lot. Sure, she was a bit odd. Most people would have just called it ‘being Canadian’...

But of course I already knew where it was going to go, because Mike Cross had told me. Hence my compulsion towards kicking eight shades of Christ out of inanimate objects, and the reason I had a sore foot now.

You know this part anyway, so I’ll skip over it. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boy and girl drugged by massive cunt, who gets into girl’s pants. Boy wakes up with a bad case of the psychotics, sees his lady being fooled with, by another man. She was down and he was up, had a bat in his hand. Willow started flying everywhere, people start to scream. Big man lyin’ on the ground with a hole in his head where his face had been. But it was all in the name of dignity…

As I read, and slowly fumed, I wondered what this was revenge for. Was it revenge for bailing on her on her sister’s wedding night? Or for not telling her the real story back when it’d actually happened? Or for what, then? Because this – all my deepest, darkest secrets splayed horrifically across the pages of the nation’s press – looked like a karmic get-square I hadn’t actually earned. Whatever I’d done, surely I hadn’t earned being shat upon from this sort of height.

If not for the gun, I ask carefully, McCarthy would have been next, yes?

Young nods. “To me, he was an accomplice. F---, to me everyone was an accomplice. It’s what happens when you’re f---ed up on that shit. I do not recommend it as a weekend’s entertainment. No, he was going down, he was going on the pile with Priddle. End of.” He pauses. “Actually, it wasn’t the gun which stopped me, or McCarthy. It was Rachel. She found me beating Christ out of this bloodied mess at the bottom of the stairs. Given she remembered that, and not whatever Priddle had done to her, I think it might have affected her opinion of me, to be honest…”

The local press wrote the incident up as a home invasion, in which the surviving Priddle was painted as a hero, on the basis of absolutely no actual evidence whatsoever. “Made me violently f---ing ill, of course, but we were in a bit of a deadlock. He would have known there was no way he’d be able to get me into the picture for the assault without the whole f----ing story being told, and he had more to lose. I wanted to kick the whole house of cards over so he got f---ed over for what he did to Rachel, even if I got the book thrown at me, but she didn’t want to know about it. Or me, for that matter. She went back to Canada and deleted me from her life. I bought a bike and a swag and f---ed off up the coast of Queensland.”

And someone dobbed Priddle into the drug squad.

Young shakes his head angrily at the inference. “F--- off. I had no f---ing idea. I thought he was full of shit. Well, he was, but I was convinced the whole ‘I’m the lynchpin of a massive North Coast drug f---ing distribution network and the pigs don’t have a f---ing clue’ carry-on was just bollocks. He was constantly talking bollocks. He once claimed he was going to build a working, functional light sabre in his garage. And he believed it! He was a bullshit artist beyond comparison, to the point he actually believed his own bullshit. Why the fuck would anyone take him seriously about the drugs stuff? I mean, yeah, he seemed to have a lot of access to gear – the reason Chastity and McCarthy actually put up with his shit – but claiming he was the local kingpin? I mean, for f---’s sake, it’s not James f---ing Bond territory this. You don’t waltz into the cop shop like it’s the evil genius’ HQ giving it ‘Ah, Chief Constable. Welcome to Amsterdam. I’m Brady Priddle and I sell drugs. Would you like some, pleeceman? Or would you prefer me to shove it up your arse?’ Hey, I may be no expert, but here’s a f---king tip off the top. I’d say if you’re selling drugs, and you already have enough customers, shut the f--- up about it.”

Brady Priddle, having the discretion of a gossip columnist and the ego of a cocaine-fuelled rock frontman, declined to shut the f--- up about it. And he told someone – if not everyone – including someone who wasn’t Andrew Young. And this someone, who wasn’t Andrew Young, told the police. Who turned up to his palatial Byron Bay mansion with a very large digger while he was still hobbling about, swathed in bandages, sweeping up broken bits of household chattels from his recent ‘home invasion’, and proceeded to make an even bigger mess in his driveway. They unearthed an underground cellar, accessed from a trapdoor beneath his heavily secured garage, packed with ‘commercial samples’, weapons, cash, and records of names and addresses of contacts in his supply chain. All of a sudden, the local press coverage was several degrees of separation from ‘Brady Priddle, home-invasion hero’; closer, in point of fact, to ‘Brady Priddle, scumbag rock star selling drugs to your children’ and edging speculatively towards ‘Brady Priddle, potential supergrass’.

“Given he was utterly, utterly f---ed, it wasn’t surprising he decided to turn,” surmises Young. “Not surprising his handlers weren’t keen to let him, either.”

Brady Theodore John Priddle was on a routine transfer under armed guard from the Lismore courthouse to his cell when he disappeared. Or, more accurately, the police vehicle he was travelling in failed to arrive at its destination. The vehicle was eventually found some weeks later, abandoned in a remote creekbed near Tabulam, deep in the dense hinterland between Casino and Tenterfield. Locked in the back was Priddle, or what remained of him after his captors had dragged him out, staked him to the riverbank. Forensic examination indicated Priddle had been shot repeatedly at short range with a sawn-off shotgun, first in each of his limbs in turn, then finally his lower abdomen and his genitals, before being locked in the dumped paddy wagon and left to bleed to death. He eventually died, police forensics experts inferred, an excruciating 48 to 72 hours later, most likely from a combination of loss of blood, shock and sepsis.

“I’m guessing it was intended as a deterrent,” Young notes blackly. “Worked alright, he didn’t end up testifying.”

At the time, Young was in Port Douglas (and has the photo album and Visa receipts to prove it, he points out), coming to the end of his short-lived wanderlust. “Ran out of money,” he admits, “so I got a real job.” The only job he was qualified for, of course. He’s been teaching ever since. “It’s a job,” he says. “The bureaucracy is ridiculous, some of the parents are painful, but the hours and the holidays are decent.”

One is left to wonder, are the parents ‘painful’ – particularly those of year twelve girls – because of Young’s reputation in a previous life? “I doubt anyone remembers,” he replies, after briefly considering getting offended, then deciding not to bother. “Most of the kids were primary school age or younger when we were going around. Besides,” he adds thinly, “I’m engaged to be married.”

Which is technically correct as his fiancee, who broke up with him six weeks ago, hasn’t actually given him the ring back yet.

There’s a point. If Bethany has any sort of moral integrity, I might be able to eBay the rock as well…

Ha. I crack me up sometimes.

“It’s a job,” he reiterates, almost apologetically. “It’s a life. At least I have one. Your man McCarthy’s short of one.”

While Priddle’s gangland-style execution made front-page news, Sam McCarthy’s anonymous demise on a lonely NZ South Island road barely even made the ‘Regional Briefs’ column of the local Otago paper alongside the stock prices, let alone being reported widely on either side of the Tasman. McCarthy’s Ducati motorcycle left the road on a bend on the Queenstown-Glenorchy Road late on the night of April 8, 2004, impacting with the crash barrier at speed and throwing McCarthy over the rail, onto the rocks, and into oblivion.

I presumed the ‘Ducati’ bit was a guess, based on his history. There was nothing much recognisable of it judging by the photo in the Queenstown free paper.

“He asked me, once, near the end, whether I thought he’d end up like Matt. Whether it concerned me. I’d have said it should have concerned him more than me. The parallels are there, draw them all you like. Single-vehicle crash, deserted road, guy with no real control of his life, who probably wanted out. I did tell him he’d f---ing kill himself on one of those things one day…”

And, in the next breath, reconsiders his position: “I don’t think he killed himself. I think he just f---ed up, personally. The lad binned more motorcycles than Barry Sheene over the years. Running out of talent was a regular occurrence for him. Except for once he ran out of luck at the same time.”

On November 22, after five years of radio silence, the remaining members of Flange Gasket, along with long-term ‘Fifth Gasket’ and youngest Young brother Jeff, reformed for a reunion-cum-farewell show in Young’s adopted home of Point Lookout on North Stradbroke Island. Despite short notice, few rehearsals and a largely bewildered-looking Schoolies Week crowd (supplemented with bargeloads of more mature punters in ‘Respect Da Flange’ and ‘Hey Hey We’re The Drunkees’ T-shirts), the Gasket showed they were still owner-operators of one of the most thunderous rock ‘n’ roll assaults in Australasia, as well as being more fun than a bouncy castle full of cheerleaders. (Young’s simile, not mine.)

Great, I’m out to bang cheerleaders, that’ll read real well when I’m up before the beak. Yet more evidence for the prosecution, along with all the beating-dude-within-inches-of-death revelations. Thanks. For. That.

And that for all the industry talk of him being a decent, loyal 2IC rather than a born leader, Young can lead a band as well as any. Yet Young dampens any prospect of more Gasketeering in the future. “Getting this together was a mission enough, thanks all the same. Everyone has their own deal. Jeff has a farm to run, Phil has his studio, and I really don’t think Maddy would be too keen on us eating further into Marty’s billable hours.”

Despite that, Young maintains all is well now between them, and the rapport between he and di Biagini at Point Lookout suggests nothing less. “We’re good. As much as we’ve ever been. Look, surprising as it probably seems, I don’t resent Maddy for anything she’s done for Marty, even where I’ve been on the receiving end, because it comes entirely from love and from an absolute belief in him and his ability, and I can respect that, totally. She’d knock down anything that stood in his way, and that included us. So no more Gasket. But Marty and I might work together on stuff, we’ll see. He might decide what he really needs in his repertoire is a bunch of big, stupid rock songs with big, lumpy riffs you can stir with a crowbar.”

He pauses a moment, more for comic timing than anything. The laugh lines around the eyes are more prominent these days, but the sparkle in them hasn’t faded entirely.

“Not so much, you think?”

Postscript: At time of press, Andrew Young was in New Zealand to participate in the inaugural Tractorfest rock festival in Dunedin, held in honour of his close friend Dan ‘Tractor’ Maxwell of Kiwi band Hayabusa, who has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Proceeds from Tractorfest will go to cancer research. Donations can be made to…

What was that in aid of? Pointing out another poor bastard who I’d nearly succeeded in killing off?

After I’d finished kicking things, I put my foot in a bucket of ice and reflected on the weird, sick, vaguely terrifying feeling you get when you realise all your darkest secrets are now utterly in the public domain, having been published in a national newspaper, and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it, other than wait for the shit to start raining down on you. From everyone from the tabloid press, to the rozzers, to irate members of your family, to irate former contacts of Priddle looking to tie up some loose ends...

If you’ve not had this happen to you, I thoroughly recommend it. And by ‘it’ I mean ‘not having ‘it’ happen to you at all because it’s fucking horrible.’