We’re All Lucky To Be Alive…

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We’re all lucky to be alive. I mean, all of us, anyone reading this. Humans. But, also, I think about how a particular group of us — a pack of idiots from my late teens and early 20s — are literally lucky to be alive, given the way we ‘operated’ back then.

And I think about this now and then, when I walk past the place where we lived. Though you might not always have been able to call it ‘living’, as such.

It was a weird time, and we each thought anyone else in the flat was the odd one. They all thought I was mad. And maybe I was, but they were the ones that cheated on their girlfriends, took carving knives with them on late night walks (you know, “just in case”). And one of them even tried to kill a mouse by smearing peanut butter on a golf-putting machine, convinced the mouse would roll up to lick it off and “BOOM! Get a good jab in his stupid mouse head”. (Every morning for a few weeks, it was there licked clean, a few pebble-scrapes of mouse shit as evidence of a ‘clean’ getaway).

One of them would finish his tea in the loo, while taking a dump. One of them borrowed my laptop to do his side-hustle gig running the accounts for a guy’s small business. He’d sit watching porno tapes while he worked in the lounge in front of whoever happened to be sitting there, or making the mistake of thinking about passing through.

I kept thinking of that Michael Douglas movie, Falling Down. Specifically that scene near the end when his character says, “I’m the bad guy…how’d that happen?” I felt that line could apply to any one of us at various times.

No one even bothered to carry a key to the place. Well, it was never locked, and, when it was, if it ever was, you could just unlatch the window and step through that. One time someone just threw their drink bottle at it, cleared the remaining glass with their hand and stepped on in.

When it was my night to cook I’d just sign a cheque for the pizza place and disappear, be anywhere else. One time I hadn’t quite cooked the potatoes for long enough, and someone called them apples. So that was me done for the year. I was off out the door with a spring in my step, and often there was a bounce to my cheque.

My room was filled with books and CDs and cigarette smoke, little yellow frames around the frames of any of the pictures on the wall. And I’d bought these old maths excercise books for 10c each. I had about 50 of them ($5, bargain). I wrote all my poems in them. Filled them with my scribbled thoughts. And the other guys in the flat absolutely hated that. They called me a faggot as often as they could, like they were scared of language, scarred by others having feelings.

One time I walked into my room and just found a dude pissing into an electric frying pan that was sitting on my bed. This seemed reasonable, if anything. There was a drinking game going on, and the rules were that you weren’t allowed to go the toilet. While the others sat there with maps of South America down their legs, this guy was technically not breaking the rules. No one had seen him go to the loo, but quite how he disguised the walk down the hall with the frying pan (and why?) would be guesswork for some other time.

So much weirdness. All of the time. We rode a shopping trolley down the stairs and into the wall, missing a huge window that would have launched at least one of us straight into a hospital bed, if not a cemetery plot.

We drank a 5-litre bottle of whiskey in a single night. Shots for all. Someone was dropped on their arse for saying no.

It all floods back whenever I walk by, which seems an appropriate curse of never leaving a tiny-enough town.

For a while there I was collecting my son from school, walking past and seeing my old life hanging there inside an old house. Which just went to prove that worlds had moved, that things had changed. But still this beacon of the former life. Something I’d earned. Something I deserve.

I’m walking along the road — going anywhere else — and I can’t help but look in the driveway at the windows, and see the covers to Tom Waits albums, and Charles Bukowski books, even though they’re not there anymore. And me trying to teach the drums to someone else (when I had barely learned myself) while my flatmate protested the whole thing by sitting in the same room while it was happening, putts of his golf ball across the room with the telly on and his tuts like a muted second hi-hat.

I think of the James K. Baxter and Sam Hunt and Lauris Edmond and Janet Malcolm I read in that room. And the one-night-stand that was referred to as a spear-chucker, because of the colour of her skin. (Someone told me just recently she’d died of cancer — so some of us not so lucky, and what could ever be fair about that).

None of this comes close to the worst of the behaviour back then, because none of us were ever close to our best. I don’t wonder often about where the others ended up. Heard one was a merchant banker, and that totally fits. I feel on some level he was rehearsing that role when he was sleep-walking blind-drunk down the hallway and out the door to shit on the rain-soaked couch that kept so many soggy stories soaked all the way in.

And the other two? I have no idea. They both graduated with commerce degrees. And long before me. One of them was — briefly — a media magnate of sorts. Made the news for shutting down many of the long-running news sites and magazines during the pandemic. But hey, beyond that, I just wouldn’t know.

I just know we are all lucky to be alive. And, beyond that, we’re even luckier to really not know much about one another.

Postscript:

The ideas in this were first written down, in a different way and not as detailed, in the poem The Flat On The Terrace (see below). That poem was also featured, again in a slightly different form, in my first book of poetry, The Death of Music Journalism. I like the fact that I’m ‘cursed’ to walk past this place and see it each week. Or drive past. Pretty much not a week goes by that I don’t see it. And we’re talking 24 and 25 and 26 years since the person that was me then lived in that place. I guess in rewriting this in some way, rephrasing and reformatting it, I’m also updating it slightly. But continuing to live with the curse, and ‘honouring’ it in some way…

Also, R.I.P. Emma. I didn’t know you well, but you were beautiful and kind and I hope you had many good times in a life cut far too short.