End of an era

No, not Dubya and the 'Publicans getting New Broomed into irrelevance by Obama. Nothing as small-scale as that, by criminy. I type at you this afternoon regarding the end of an era much, much more significant in the history of stuff.

Chateau Dodgy Mark One is no more.

It has ceased to be, gone to meet its maker, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. Chateau Dodgy I, not to put too fine a point on it, is an ex-sharehouse. What is is, as of my touring past its former location at 60 Hawken Drive an hour ago, is a construction site. And that's very, very sad. Black armband, flags-at-half-mast sad. Ahh, the memories. If only I still had any. Like the '60s, if you can remember it, you probably weren't there.

Chateau Dodgy I was of a rare breed of St Lucia sharehouses - rare in this decade of slap-dash 2bdr apartments for Africa - in that it was pretty much your archetypal, Felafel-style decrepit Queenslander with all the mod cons expected by anyone who has read Mr Birmingham's 1994 treatise on the subject. Old mango tree shedding its contents over the driveway. Three bedrooms in various states of disrepair. Batshit insano female flatmate incapable of maintaining continuous gainful employment, relationships with men, relationships with humans of any sort, or any fair share of housework, billpaying and/or grocery shopping. Kitchen best characterized as biohazardous. Enormous back deck with a view of the backyard that can only be described as stellar. (Literally. The backyard was largely taken up by a stand-alone flat inhabited by Stella, a statuesque late-twenties/early thirties blonde who drove an old Merc and had a penchant for getting changed with the French doors open.) Old fireplace perfect for winter, and in particular perfect for winter fireside seductions while the other Dodgites were out for the night (and it probably would have been even better had I actually bothered to get some firewood in before the girl in question dropped around.)

It was, in brief, magnificent. And now it's a large hole filled with construction shit. It looks like it's going to be replaced by another house, rather than yet another soulless, identikit block of flats, which I suppose should leave me thankful for small mercies. But I ain't. The new owners - invariably rich twunts - can't begin to appreciate that place like we did. Just the little things, like the fact it was on the bus route to pretty much anywhere, or the front step was the perfect vantage point for watching summer afternoon thunderstorms rolling in over the west, or the bottle shop two hundred yards up the road which almost always had something or other on special (and by on special I mean less than a buck a beer for carton price - this was the year 2000 after all. You can't even get Tasman Bitter for that anymore.) No real surprise then that erstwhile flatmate Craigos put on six kilos in the first month after I moved in. Between the $23-a-carton XXXX Draught and the endless swathes of Pizza Caffe lovin' it's amazing we both didn't end up looking like Mark Viduka on a pies-only diet. Or at least he didn't.

Of course, it wasn't all beer and skittles, or beer and corridor cricket at least. There were thunderclouds of our own on our doorstep... primarily of the batshit insano variety, as previously foreshadowed. The only reason there ended up being a vacancy at Chateau Dodgy I in the first place, at the time I moved up to Brisvegas, was that an old school mate of Craigos' (that's an old mate of his from school, not a mate who was strictly Old School) who'd signed on to live there with Craigos and Batshit Insano Chick managed to last pretty much one month before packing up his van and running for the hills. He was a tradie, had his shit together, dealt with people for a living, had spent time overseas, could pretty much deal with most things thrown his way. He lasted thirty days before deciding he'd rather spend the rest of his life in Woombah than another hour in the company of Batshit Insano Chick. Methinks that should have been the mildest of indicative precursors as to how things were going to turn out.

Then again, while Batshit Insano Chick was pretty much useless when it came to taking the bins out, paying her share of the phone bill or even holding down a rational conversation, she was half-decent at one thing. No, not that, you disgusting reprobates. (I wasn't the one who declared very loudly, very late one night that he wanted to pound her in the... actually let's not get into that. The gentleman in question is a medical professional now and could do without the besmirchment of his reputation.) Batshit Insano Chick was international best-practice at getting monumental volumes of absolute randoms to turn up to our self-evidently epic house parties, being as though she knew a lot of people even more batshit insano than herself (an achievement in itself). Stuff happened at those things. There were firetwirlers in the backyard, spitting sparks into the tinder-dry garden remnants... Super Soaker wars in the front yard... Catholic schoolgirls and reformed Goth chicks... phone books used as projectiles... jello shots used as wallpaper... and one memorable evening, an entire kebab shop set up on our back deck.

Good times.

60 Hawken Drive is now a yuppie project home under construction, but Chateau Dodgy I died long before, of course. It truly died when the place was sold out from underneath us by Doug Dickhead Real Estate, with the assertion that the new owners wouldn't be interested in leasing it to the scummy likes of us. When the new owners' property manager (tellingly, not from Doug Dickhead's lot) got in touch, as Craigos and I were preparing to sign the lease for Chateau Dodgy v2.0, it was belatedly made clear that stable tenants were one of the major attractions. Obviously they hadn't meant our rather unstable other tenant, but the key thing was, they still wanted us. Unfortunately they wanted us at the increased rate of $280 a week; we'd been paying $240. Stupidly, we blew them off. We didn't have a third party to join us at that time, regardless of what windy waftings we were hearing from various mates on the North Coast about finally moving up (we're still waiting, lads) and we thought the increase was nothing less than gouging. Given we ended up paying $230 between two at version 2.0, and that in seeking a replacement third Dodgite, even taking the randomest of randoms, we couldn't have ended up with anyone more random than Batshit Insano Chick... it seems like we might have erred.

So vale, Chateau Dodgy Mark One.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember you.
And at the end of the day, I go to bed.

The Doctor is OUT (to go see if they've run a bulldozer through Hiron St as well.)