"To me, a grudge... uz just a place to pork your core"

Maybe to the un-estimable Tony Greig it might, but to us, the garage was a lot more. The garage at Chateau Dodgy Evolution III, that was, a fugly-but-substantial two storey, three bed, three bath brick joint with polished wood floors, negligible landscaping and improbable river-city views on Hiron St, St Lucia, ten minutes' wander from uni (or twenty minutes' drunken, traffic-sign-laden stagger from the uni bar.)



The primary role of the garage at CD Evo 3 was to house the Brown Hornet and the Future Dr Mrs Dr Yobbo's Subaru. Its real role, though, was as the brewroom for the Old Chateau Dodgy Brewhouse, and the lair for the three seedy individuals who made up the blokey 75% of the leaseholders - Craigos, Yuri and Your Fucken Correspondent.


There was a fuckload of space under there, enough to house the broken old brown couch we'd inherited from our mate Dege, which was held together with gaffa tape, goodwill, an old blackboard and a Sydney bus stop sign I'd nicked from outside college on Anzac Parade and brought with me to Brisvegas. The slum-landlord armchairs were intact, barely, by the grace of Liquid Nails and Craigos' parental-birthday-gift power drill. The house already had a fridge provided with the lease, so the ancient, creaking, monstrous Kelvinator which had served Craigos and I so loyally at Chateaux Dodgy One and Two was hauled into the corner, nominally on semi-retirement but in reality to serve as the beer fridge - considerably larger of course than our actual fridge in the kitchen upstairs, and necessarily so. Likewise an old stereo was rigged up to provide Thinking Music for the brewing of beer and the talking of bollocks. Dodgy FHM calendars were deployed for the establishment of ambience - that's well-endowed JAG hottie Catherine Bell admiring her own splendid arse in the one at top right, we stayed on that month for seemingly half of 2003 - which much to the credit of the FDMDY remained uncomplained about. Likewise the deeply offensive Takischitt Colour Chart poster which for many years had been stuck to the front of the fridge - another souvenir from my time in Sin City. A few sample colours:

though the most memorable ones IMHO were Urinary Tract Infection (a nasty mustard yellow) and Ripped Sphinter (erm, guess.)

We spent A Lot Of Time down there. Many a finely-honed homebrew was mapped out, set up and put down. Quite a few finely-honed homebrews were then thrown out, after figuring out that the reason they were turning manky mid-ferment was because Yuri was filling the brewtank from the garden hose. But mainly it was for the ambience. On hot days it was great, the river breeze wafting in the windows through the gap in the houses afforded by the then-empty block next door, the one that my dodgy top-edged hook shots off Craigos' frontyard-cricket chin music all ended up in (the lofted cow-hits to the pitched-up stuff ended up at deep midwicket in the garden out front of the apartment block over the road where Buddha Handy lived). This was the same vacant block Craigos liked to go and tee off from, Big Bertha in hand, once our prohibitively drunken house parties really started getting silly amidst the witching hours. Not sure if he ever managed to carry the water and land one in the park at the end of Montague Road but he wasn't going to die wondering either way. Even on colder winter evenings it was welcoming, the windows closed against the chill, the bricks radiating the day's solar heat back into the expanse as we warmed ourselves against the fridge and solved the problems of the world over a Tasman Bitter or a homebrew or three, prior to creating more problems for the world ref. random destruction on Goldeneye or Road Rash 64 upstairs, the stereo cranking the likes of The Black Keys' Thickfreakness, Motorhead's Ace of Spades or the Stalkers' awesome Rock 'N' Roll EP. Semi-regular guests AJ, Dawso and the Captain all put significant man-hours into camping on the Dodgy Brown Couch (though we usually let them sleep on the futon upstairs) talking rubbish and helping us knock off the cartons of beer they'd brought along as their rent for the weekend. The Captain's traditional sense of timing saw him turn up a day and a half after his original ETA for getting up to ours prior to Livid, arriving midway through the festival itself, missing two of the bands he'd paid his money to see, and then keeping us up until dawn talking shit in the garage at Dodgy HQ, drinking beers and (in his case) entertaining oneself with Nimbin's finest.

It was a good place to be.

Of course, it wasn't to last. The landlord, a little old lady from Woombie Land, had grandkids coming to uni in 2004, so we were out on our arse. The FDMDY and I moved into a 2br flat in Mitre St, then a year later to New Zealand. The other two made their own arrangements, to varying degrees of success. Craigos is about to get his Piss Head Degree and go off on a series of big shiny fuck-off overseas postdocs with his glamourous blonde Russian PhD-student girlfriend. Yuri... not too sure. He'd always had a tenuous grip on reality, but he'd been happy at Hiron St. Probably the Proton Pills he was on as much as anything, but the companionship did him good too. To my discredit, I've lost touch with him as things go, but mutual mates have reported he's doing OK - not in a great place, physically or spiritually, but OK. Which is all you can wish for somewhat troubled but inherently Good Bastards like the King of Seed.

Seems like a bit of a downer to finish on so we'll throw this in as a distraction: the great Richie Benaud in glorious early-80s Technibeige, immediately after the Underarm Incident. Closed caption translation provided for the hard-of-interpreting.



The Doctor is OUT.