About Everything, & Then Some . . .

I had no idea she was in transit. If I'd have known, I’d have been in transit myself, probably west to the ocean, the one that reaches India and is full of tiger sharks, jelly fish and Indonesian pirates. I got this late night text, it just read: here, pik me up!
Here? Where? I was momentarily baffled, more so when I realised that my own partner had actually returned home after a seventy-two hour party and was unconscious on the bedroom floor. I was in no mood for foolish high jinx or emergency resuscitation crews trampling around my house closely followed by sniffer dogs. Another text came in: well? Was all it said. Well what, I thought? By the time the penny had dropped with a reverberating clang, I thought – what? How? Why me? Of course I could have simply ignored it all, ignored the 23 year old girl ex Sydney waiting at the bus terminal, ignored the fact my current live-in was all but living out. I hadn’t asked the 23 year old to travel, no, I hadn’t even inferred as much in a sexually veiled way. This is what comes of writing a book and having it reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald. Obviously fascinating people are in short supply in Sydney, either that, or . . . or I had asked her – maybe when I was low and pissed and breaking the golden rule of never drinking and texting . . . maybe during that seventy-two hour “break” my soon-to-be ex had taken because she required exorcism – from me.
And now I was in it. I had no choice but to drive to the bus station while intoxicated and collect my human cargo, for better or worse. I’d already telephone betted on the outcome being worse. When my live-in finally regained consciousness, if that was, she ever did, I’d think of some far-fetched overly-embellished mitigation then, after all, I was a writer and as such my mind was a constantly-filling cesspit of shit brown exaggerations. There could be a thousand and one plausible reasons why a 23 year old hippy chick from Sydney was in my house with a mobile pharmacy – the mobile pharmacy I’d also collected when I’d met her and she’d given me a prolonged tongue kiss that had tasted like wet grass. This was all new to me, not 23 year old girls with mouths that tasted of agriculture, but the sudden flush of infamy writing a mediocre book can get someone – well, someone who looks like they would be up for taste-testing the nubile pleasures of a 23 year old girl I guess. I must have looked like that in the photo they’d used, like I was into taste-testing.
Fuck! She said, no sooner was she in my house, your house is so fucking cool and I just knew it would be! Thanks, I told her, still wondering just what the fuck I was going to do with this unexpected appendage that had somehow come into my possession. And then I found out when she said I’m fucked, where are we sleeping? We, I thought to myself, oh yeah, we, like me and her only . . . uh, I began, there’s a problem, of a sort . . . oh please don’t tell me you’ve turned hetero! She cried, very theatrically. Haha, no, but I do have a messy situation here . . .
How messy? She said, unpacking more tablets than a pharmaceutical rep.
Well, messy in the third party way.
We’re going to a party, neat! Should I take ups or downs?
Yourself or to the party?
Both.
Down might be good, considering . . .
Down it is then - should I get changed?
If you can change yourself into a bookcase, sure, go ahead. We’re not going to a party, by third party I meant that there’s someone else here.
You motherfucking liar! You told me I was your girl!
You were, while you were in Sydney.
So there’s some slut here someplace? She demanded, side-stepping neatly around her own fairly obvious sluttish tendencies.
You could say that. I said, pouring myself a red wine and noting that it was already six in the morning and that somehow I had lost a night and was on the very precipice of losing a hell of a lot more than that.
I think it’s pretty rank that you invite me here when the place is already occupied, she said, re-arranging her tablet stash. I didn’t ask you here, if you recall. I countered.
No? You want me to show you the text, the one about you being a train wreck looking for a salvage operator?
Uhm, I mused, as the sounds of vomiting wafted around upstairs.
She’s a class act anyhow by the sounds of it. The 23 year old said, swallowing two blues and a white. Breakfast. She added casually. We both sat there listening to noises like “Dear fucking GOD!” and “Arghhh You Cocksucker!” echo around the porcelain above us, it was already a wretched kind of Sodom and now it was free falling. Kerb crawling is fine - gutter crawling with cyberpunk hippy girls from some far-flung big smoke environ is no one’s idea of a fine and dandy time however. Suddenly I wished I was living in Brideshead revisited, I’d be the youngest daughter; the dotty one who never realised anything, not even that nanny had been dead ten years. When you’re filthy rich the butler just keeps on bringing the tea and cake, even if you’re stone cold putrid. Then my soon-to-be ex stumbled downstairs looking like some bloated whale the Japanese had had a good go at with chopsticks. I could tell by the look on the 23 year old’s face that she wished she had a harpoon instead of a mobile pharmacy . . . jesus h goddamned fucking christ, my nearly ex yelled, who is this slut and why the fuck . . . oh, are those uppers?
And that was the point where I got abducted. Yes, and even though my mind is still a milky nebulous over the exact facts of the incident, I have enough snippets to be able to re-construct the savage madness of it all. I was on my way to the mailbox to see if my Jewish solicitor had finally managed to extricate me from the failing to give way and driving while fucked up on happy drugs charges when I saw the light. Not the same light I’d seen moments after the aforementioned car crash when god had spoken to me and had called me a stupid whore, no, the big red light. The big red light that enveloped me and then returned me to sender faster than priority post could ever hope to emulate. Who needs bright yellow post boxes when you’ve got red light? It was four days later when I arrived back in the street, brainwashed and shoeless, aliens have a thing for Chuck Taylors. The psychiatrist I was forced to see immediately put it down to severe anxiety, subscribed me valium – strong enough to sedate a horse, and adamantly refused to bulk bill. When I finally returned home Woodstock was being re-created in my lounge room. My ex had left and then returned, much like jesus had once done, and now by the looks of the discoloured bottle bongs and discarded capsule sheaths resembling shed snakeskin, she and the 23 year old had been making whoopie, or crack, who knew.
It was unholy, not to mention downright Sadean. The riding crop I could tolerate, two chicks whipping one another for kicks is a wholesome pastime, but when I see my best wine chiller being used as a porta-potty I draw the line. Only, before I could draw it they both said in unison – And where the fuck have you been? Oh, is that a script for valium? They sounded eerily reminiscent of those ass-humping mutant freaks I had just spent ninety plus hours with. I called the locksmith immediately and within moments he was outside yanking off the wrong door and installing some kind of octagonal lock that required retina scans and palm prints to open it. Before I could do anything however the 23 year old had scanned her own bloodshot retina and had then offered the grand key master a bj as final settlement. Which I believe he accepted. And why not, it is not every day one comes across a purebred skank whore from Sydney with lips like two razorbacks fighting on a long line. Then I got the call about the appearance at the writers festival as a late replacement for some b-grade feminist who had been inadvertently detained in Valhalla on child prostitution charges. Are you fucking sure about this? I asked my publisher - who was, as usual, totally smashed and talking in the weird and hybrid gibberspiel easily-amused and over-excitable publishers gabber on in. It sounded foolhardy to me anyhow, replacing a frontline feminist with a drug driving convicted b-grade transsexual author still hauling around a certain appendage – the one those feminists absolutely abhorred until they took it anally as prescribed. Who cares, he told me, they’re all goddamned lesbians anyhow, and besides, it’s good money.
How good? I asked him, as the 23 year old slid one hand into the front of my jeans while simultaneously sliding the valium script out of my back pocket. Good enough, he told me, as I heard a champagne cork pop somewhere. Oh, and wear a hat.
What?
Wear a hat, some straw thingamy bob, it’s all the jah under the tent.
What? What jah? Do I look like P.G. Wodehouse to you?
Just wear the hat, and a frock.
And that was when I hung up.
There were too many things on my mind, things like why my ass was bleeding, why I was the only cocksucker that couldn’t use the supertechno door lock, why neither of these ghoulish girls showed any noticeable sign of preparing to leave and instead spent all day on Myspace making virtually fucked friends with head freaks and idiot savants. Like why I was standing-in at a writers festival for Hairy Mary the feminists poster gal, and why there were strange looking rock ‘n’ roll zombies banging on my door at four in the morning looking for Sally. But, I put all of this turmoil aside to begin a new book, and in-between, or during writing, one or other of my live-in non-lovers would ask me the same goddamned questions.
What are you doing?
Breathing. Try it.
What’s your book about?
Everything.
Drugs?
Yes.
Am I in it?
You’re in it.
Is my mother in it?
She’s got a whole chapter, don’t worry.
Are you in it?
I’m in it too.
Sounds neat.
It is, über neat, the very neatest thing, now fuck off eh?
When I gave my publisher the first 600 pages three weeks later he skimmed forty and then put them down and sighed wearily. I can’t print this shit, he told me, do you seriously think people want to read about a farm boy who lost both feet in a thresher then became a famous tap dancer but lost it all when he was caught fucking a chicken? Get the fuck out of my office and get cleaned up goddamnit - it’s the festival tomorrow!
I still hadn’t bought a straw hat or a frock so instead I went for the Nazi officer cap and fatigues, figuring all those feminists’d get a bang out of a get-up like that. It was hellishly hot the next day and the thought of being under canvas with fifty-odd menopausal women while attired as Rudolph Hess made me feel sick. I took eight valium as a precursor to whatever insanity was bound to unfold. Oh, and before I left I had the locks changed again because my two concubines were out trying to sign-on under assumed names.
I passed out in the cab en route. My publisher took control immediately when some flunky retrieved him from the publishers piss-up tent. They tried vodka first to no avail and then some whackjob suggested a dip in the river followed by Turkish coffee and failing that opium. Publishers have all the goddamned answers and a ready supply of cash if per chance they don’t have a thesaurus or Macquarie style manual on hand. In most cases a good publisher will immediately see where the full stop should actually go. None the less an hour or so later I was barely conscious and semi-coherent enough to replace my festival name card with one of my own which read “The Sodomites Poster Girl”. Funnily enough I appeared to be taking one hell of a lot of audience queries even though there were real writers alongside me frowning deeply and sighing audibly. It was when the 23 year old suddenly burst in shouting about gods, gonads and governments and chucked a handful of blue capsules at me that the shit really hit the literary fan as publishing assistants scrambled around on all-fours looking for the booty like the filthy swine they were. And then there was god, who, in his infantile wisdom, had decided to unleash a 1 in 3000 year heatwave upon us, and as old ladies with hirsute armpits fainted and security pepper sprayed the 23 year old I slid away to the booze tent to converse with some pseudo- intellectual types sipping cough syrup for toddlers.
Sometime later the constabulary turned up on my doorstep. Oh jeez, I thought, better pucker up and take it like a man. They wanted to question me about some recent late night antics where (allegedly) I was out on the street waving an ice pick at the sky and yelling about (they checked their notes) sodomite aliens and some guy called Bukowski. Ha, I told them casually as I buttoned up my fly, I was simply making a martini when I heard the mother of all thunderclaps and had thought god had returned to earth in a Hummer.
They cautioned me then. Asked me about Bukowski and I told them he was dead and that was his good luck because now he didn’t have to live among all these self-righteous hypocrites and jesuits and sodomites. They arrested me then for disturbing the peace. What peace? I asked them, can't you hear all this goddamned noise? I reverse charged my shmuck solicitor in Jerusalem. Later, I was back at liberty to make martinis and text juvenile pussy as was my wont. The jesuits and the hypocrites kept a wary distance from then on, but not the sodomites, no, those fuckers just kept on crawling up my path night after night speaking German and carrying lumbar puncture instrumentation. I decided that self-mutilation held some degree of credibility in repect of literary research and thus began a regime of self-adornment. I never saw the 23 year old or my ex live-in again. The dogs of hell had obviously claimed them as their own. But it made no matter, the lines are always alive with the kind of freaks a person who thrives on excitement and risk craves. The night babies are everywhere; they start off in the constellation and end up deep in your rectum scouting for precious metal resources. A good lock affords some small security - but a fifteen inch blade and an ice pick offers one heck of a lot more.