I'm not sure what this is. A reply? A companion piece? Anyway fair to say it's inspired in one way or another by
Jen's distinctly awesome
'First Kiss' series (though technically a 'series' implies 'more than one', Jen) which has resulted in remembrances of teen angst and other hormonal delusions lingering about the place for some time.
This is another chunk out of the working prototype of dodgy bogan-rock opus
In The Worst Possible Taste - a twatting twatload shorter than the last, I promise - reflecting on Angus and Sam's remarkably shit form with girls growing up in coastal northern NSW. Which of course isn't based on Your Correspondent's adolescence in any way, shape or form. None whatsoever. No sirree Bob.
Ones we prepared earlier:No Bull: waking up on floors with your friend and mine, Andrew 'Angus' Young (a gentle introduction to the premise involved)Tour de Pants: the lads win second prize in a beauty contest and collect a road trip to Port Douglas (warning: fairly lengthy and remarkably shag-heavy)Here we join Angus and childhood mate Samboy (later Uncle Sam, even later fellow-frontman of Strayan garage punk loons Flange Gasket) McCarthy, lost somewhere in the wilds of their final year of high school.
______________
The first time I ever went to a high school social without a supposed Significant Other turned out to be a metric arseload more productive - or at least eventful - than any time before it. At the time, as per the Practice Relationships I usually found myself in - relationships of convenience, usually hers - I’d been loosely linked to a girl named Karen. I don’t know why. I’ve never been big on Karens. I shared a house with a girl called Karen in St Lucia for six months (along with uberlegendary flatmate Dr Cletus) and she was crazy. Not Crazy John’s crazy, not “I’m crazy and therefore I’ll give you large discounts on Telstra-branded mobile communications products” crazy; Karen was more along the lines of 'not paying her share of any bills and never going to lectures and never going to work and dressing up like a Goth and changing her name to Desparia and hanging by her ankles from the ceiling of her room on some sort of goddamn trapeze thing' crazy. In fact, on more than one occasion, our communal Telstra-branded communication product was cut off because she was too skint, disorganised and/or off-planet to pay her share of the fucking phone bill on time. (Random aside: You'd struggle to find a more pointless endeavour than being a Goth in Brisbane. 
Six to eight months a year it’s so stinking hot and debilitatingly humid your deathlike makeup runs and you look most distressed. Anyone who was at the Livid festival in 2000 when the Cure dragged their fat, elderly and sagging arses onto stage will know what I’m talking about. Forty-two degrees in the shade, forty-four thousand punters crammed into the RNA showgrounds, and more runny mascara than taking the Kiss Army through a car wash on a flatbed truck. Funny as fuck. End of random aside.)
Anyway, Karen - not the crazy goth one, the other one - and I were supposedly Going Together. I’m not sure if we’d even so much as shaken hands at this point, let alone gone the time-honoured Snog Option, but we were An Item, or so I was told. It was in New Idea or something. However, a couple of days out from the school social she apparently got a better offer because she stopped hanging around me and instead turned up on the arm of one of the big footy players. My more observant colleague-in-league Sam McCarthy was kind enough to point this out to me, pointing to the vacant space next to me and politely inquiring, “What the fuck?”
“Fuck me,” I remarked, “I’m single.”
For the record, he declined.
Then the big footy player in question was polite enough to drop by that lunchtime and inform me of his catch and that she didn’t want me hanging round her no more, ay, and that he’d go the thump if I did, or or I thought about it, or even if the urge just happened to pass him. My reply must have confused him - I wished him them both the best of luck for a happy future together and then offered to pass on a few tips as to the best way to get her off, given my deep and searching in-depth sexual familiarity with his new girlfriend. I know my reply must have confused him, because he went the thump.
Luckily, my mates were right behind me. A good fifty feet behind me, granted, but at least they were able to alert the authorities, a.k.a. the metalwork teacher, Mr Jeffes, who was trying to dodge playground duty. Of course, Mr Jeffes turned up just in time to witness my first and only fistfight since the early years of primary school end in an unprecedented win for the tenacious, broad-shouldered cane farmer’s son from Broadwater, Andy Young. My glory was fairly shortlived - Jeffes was also the school rugby league coach and I’d somehow managed to give his burly, ball-playing back-rower blurred vision and a busted nose the very afternoon of the seniors' big interschool game against Marist Brothers of Lismore.
At this point I’d like to say that I put my hand up to fill the breach created by my handiwork, pulled on the school jersey and led the boys to a glorious win over the vicious Catholic bastards of Marist. I'd like to say that, but it’d be a complete load of bollocks. Old mate didn’t play because he couldn't figure out which of the three sets of goalposts he was meant to run between in the prematch warmup, collecting all three and compounding his concussion; neither did I because I wasn’t completely fucking stupid; and Marist flogged us by fifty. Then again, they always did - everyone did, our league team was so very, very shit - so noone really seemed to mind.
Except, however, that though a simple act of caveman-level thuggery, somehow I’d appeared on the radar of a lot of People Who Mattered. By this I mean primarily really hot surfie chicks who were impressed by brute force and ignorance, by a guy who was tanned from the surf, chiselled from farm work, rakishly handsome, with a devil-may-care attitude and a willingness to use fists rather than words to settle an argument. Since no-one like that was around, they started to notice me instead. You might call them superficial idiot bimbos, but I would have said that was unfair, harsh, cruel and completely out of line, largely because I wanted to sleep with them.
On the night of the social McCarthy and I showed up late and lively, a couple of illicit beers to the wind, proudly brought to us in association with brother Matt (big ups for the big fella). We did come with misgivings however - the last school social had Sucked The Fuckin' Big One. Last time out, end of last year (call it '92 for arguments sake), one of the Maths staff in charge of chaperoning the show had taken offence to the DJ's cranking of Rage Against The Machine’s seminal chart-topper Killing In The Name, mainly on the strength of its bellow-along coda - not sure how could anyone be offended by a hundred pubescent boys screaming FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME at the top of their pathetically breaking voices, but he clearly was. As such the DJ had been given his marching orders by dint of a size 12 shoeprint on his backside and proceedings had degenerated into what could politely be called a farce, and less politely a total fucking shitfight. From memory one of the year 12 music students ended up running the DJ desk - one with an obvious penchant for the slit-yer-wrist stylings of Morrissey, the Cure and Joy Division, which was all he played for the rest of the evening. A fucking appalling turn of events. As such we bailed forthwith, went back to the farm and 'borrowed' further from Matt's neurotoxic stash of Tooheys Red (itself 'borrowed' from the old man). Teenage self-harm is such a bloody unfortunate thing to be part of.
Tonight was the first social of the new year, which meant a new Year 12 (us), and predictably a new DJ, but yet the same Top 40 chart shite - though I seem to remember it as being better than today’s Top 40 chart shite, somehow. Maybe it’s just the rose-coloured glasses, or the ones with beer in them. For every fully tops track like the Gurus’ The Right Time or Animal by Pearl Jam, there was abject slop and detritus like Gabrielle, or Cut ‘N’ Move, or even Ace of Base. Jesus fucking Christ, Ace of Fucking Base. The bane of my existence for most of 1993 - thanks very much 
Lismore’s own Triple Z FM, you pack of arseclowns. (Our liberation at the hands of Triple J was still two years away from reaching our end of the swamp.) Clearly tonight’s DJ was getting paid on quantity not quality, judging by the absolute crap he was cranking out. As regards Fashions in the Field, McCarthy was resplendent in his favourite Holden Racing Team shirt and stonewash Lee jeans; my own designer ensemble was supplied by Messrs Quiksilver and Co, the quintessence of cool circa the early 1990s. I may have even been wearing a Hypercolor T-shirt. There. Right there. That was why we couldn’t get laid.
Battle was joined. I availed myself of a belt of the strongest hallucinogen in the house (Coca-Cola - don't laugh, they didn't allow us to have it in the school Coke machine, so this was Pretty Big Stuff) and took up a strategic raised position overlooking the dancefloor of the school hall. Settling in to survey the form, I noted McCarthy and some of our other mates in traditional Single Bloke Formation - pressed against the wall, drinks in hand, trying desperately to avoid being sucked into the vortex of the dancefloor, where only self-humiliation could result - as well as my theoretical ex-girlfriend and her new boy, steering each other awkwardly around the dancefloor to the strains of big hair ensemble Extreme’s cheese-laden ballad More Than Words, like a Dalek trying to reverse-park a skid-steer forklift. I’d clearly dodged a bullet there, if not a Wolfenstein-style Gatling spray. Silently thanking the bloodied-but-unbowed Macca for taking one for the team (for the second time in three days), I beat a strategic retreat to recce out the back of the main hall where Too Cool Division, the alpha males and alpha bitches of our year, were likely to be amassed in numbers, surrepticiously getting off-chops on swigs from adulterated soft drink bottles, while slagging off the DJ and the poor fashion nous of every attendee other than themselves. As you do when you're King Of All Shit.
Surprisingly the alpha males and/or bitches weren’t much in evidence in the cool of outside. Maybe big-hair acoustic ballads were their thing. In the darkest part of the shadows I came across one solitary blonde girl, her back against the outside wall of the school hall, sobbing demurely. You may think that it’s not possible to sob demurely, but I knew otherwise. The gorgeous Nerissa Sutton had been in my Year 9 and 10 elective drama classes (I only did it for the chicks, honest) and I knew full well she could sob demurely on cue. This though, as near as I could tell, appeared the real thing. Also worthy of note were the absence of her surfie chick alpha-bitch coterie of friends; my limited intel on the subject had suggested girls usually gather around and commisserate over boys dumping them or being cocks to them or whatever.
(Slightly less random aside. Re intel, my main informant was Sophie from the farm next door, who'd technically been my first kiss - if being taken advantage of by a fellow six-year-old during a furtive game of catch-'n'-kiss at a get-together at her family's place counts as such. Judging by the pitying looks on your faces I'm guessing that's a NO so I'll forge on regardless. Soph went to the Catholic school in Ballina these days and tried to pretend we weren't friends anymore, but that usually lasted until about the second Friday-night drink round the back of ours, then she turned back into 'our' Soph again. As you'd probably expect I semi-secretly fancied her like hell and had done so for about as long as I could remember, but she was good enough not to let that get in the way of our relationship, or lack thereof.)
Nerissa looked up. Catching her eye from distance, I gave a reassuring smile and wave, then turned to retreat and allow her some space.
“Hey, Andy, how’s it going.” Nerissa had a slightly husky voice which would have been an excellent pointer for a career in telemarketing - particularly for services costing around $4.99 plus GST per minute, higher from payphones and mobiles. Tonight, her voice was a little huskier, maybe from emotion, maybe from pulling cones in the back of Dave Murchison’s Valiant wagon.
Whatever, I listened.
“Not too bad,” I conceded evenly, turning back to meet her eyes. “Better than you, apparently… Everything okay?”
She sniffed. “I’m fine,” she gestured, embarrassed. “No biggie. It’s just that… Brendan dumped me.”
And the very Earth beneath me begain to crumble and split. Year 12’s own A-list glamour couple were breaking up??? This was big news, surely enough to punt Tom and Nicole off the cover of Womans Day or No Idea. Brendan Tunks was the school’s glamour-boy football prodigy, halfback and captain of both the senior league and union sides, meaning he was as close to God as anyone aged seventeen and a half years could rightfully be. Despite this he was reasonably easily to get along with, so long as you agreed with him that the sun wasn’t actually hundreds of millions of miles off in space but securely lodged up his arse, from whence all its radiance emerged. Tunks actually went on to leave school midway through our final year, in a flurry of controversy and small-town gossip, to sign for one of the Brisbane league clubs - might have been Wynnum-Manly, though someone told me Redcliffe - and subsequently blew out both his knees in his first and only season in reserve grade. Brendan Tunks now sells used Fords at a dealership on Ipswich Road, on the famed Magic Mile of Moorooka, in Brisbane’s boganlicious south-west. Go talk to him if you’re in the market for a low kays ex-fleet Falcon - just tell him Angus sent you. He’ll no doubt look at you blankly and tell you to bugger off, but at least it’ll be amusing for you and me.
Back in the day, though, old mate Tunksy was undoubtedly king of the kids and could call the tune with The Ladies, even unspeakably hot ones like Nerissa who should have known better (and, to my way of thinking, should have had better, i.e. Me.) So if he’d decided to shop elsewhere, even Nerissa wasn’t in a position to do much more than sulk. Largely because as with most girls in her social circle, despite her good looks and social station, Nerissa had amazingly poor self-esteem, and footy thugs like Tunksy might have been thicker than two short planks but they sure as hell had figured out how to manipulate situations such as these to their advantage.
I could and maybe should have felt some sympathy for her plight, but given that Tunks et al were winning on with babes like her and I wasn’t, my heart didn’t exactly bleed for her. And let's be honest, aside from the obvious physical stuff - I was a teenage male for fuck's sake, and she was thermonuclear) - I did like her, more than most girls of her type, because I reckoned she might have been a bit more than just the one-dimensional footy-player-accessory Barbie doll most of her friends seemed to aspire to. Mostly, though, what I did feel for her was strong, primal, physical, sexual attraction. For which I absolve myself for anything that was to follow, of course.
Outside in the cool seabreeze, Nerissa and I got to talking. I’d admit to laying on the charm, beguiling her with my debonair wit. Okay, so I had to dumb down my lines a bit, but they worked. Nerissa went from tears to giggles in remarkably little time. Tutor-next-door Sophie would have been so proud. Actually she probably would have been repulsed and horrified, but at least her advice was being adopted and adapted.
Rule one: don’t talk about yourself. Unless you’re charming and self-deprecating like Hugh Grant... but not too down on yourself, of course, because you have to exude heaps of confidence... but not so much that you come across as arrogant, of course…
Just as well I’d written all this down. Anyway, we decided to do for a little walk and talk about things, which primarily included Nerissa, why Brendan was a bastard, Nerissa, Brendan, and Nerissa again. I did earn the occasional mention in dispatches.
“You laid out Macca the other day, didn’t you,” she said.
I humbly admitted to taking the bastard apart, downplaying the wild swing and lucky connection which had felled the big unit.
“That was fuckin’ great, he is such a dickhead,” she laughed. “And that mole Karen he’s with, I mean, Oh my Gawwd, what a slag...”
Hmmm, glad my brief tenure with her passed unnoticed then...
So Nerissa and I bailed unobtrusively from the school grounds - an achievement in itself given the Gestapo-like surveillance around the gates - and stole away to her house, nearby. Her mother and stepdad were away in Ballina for the night. Don’t know why; didn’t think to take notes. 
We liberated her stepdad’s Bundy Rum and adulterated Coke with it. Nerissa was the first to show me a neat trick by which you can top up the bottle with cold tea (no milk, obviously) with presumably noone the wiser. Not until they pour themselves a stiff drink, of course, but by then hopefully you will have left home for university.
And, suffice to say, that wasn’t the only neat little trick Nerissa taught me that night…
Um, yeah.
Okay so that last bit’s pretty much back in the realms of the sort of bullshit I would have spun for the benefit of my brothers-in-arms at the time, if anyone would have actually believed my tale after relentlessly crying wolf for so long. The actual order of service - we get a little drunkie, she gets a little emotional, says she needed to be held. I obliged. A gentleman would. Holding becomes touching. Touching becomes feeling, and stroking, and kissing. Kissing - proper kissing, with searching tongue and roaming hands and stuff - hmmm, mental note, strike one off the list of Things To Do For The First Time Ever. And Then Tell Everyone About, And Then Change Your Story ‘Cause You Already Said You Snogged A Whole Bunch Of Chicks Before. (Which wasn't entirely true, nor was it entirely false. Nerissa wasn't my first kiss... maybe call it my first kiss that meant something. Sophie-and-me-aged-seven aside, obvious.)
This... this was nice. Nerissa liked me, liked my hands, liked my lips, liked me, dammit. Her golden ringlets intertwined in my fingers as we kissed on, and on, and owwwwnnn, me hoping to the Jesus Fuggin Christ that my technique was up to scratch, that I hadn’t been suddenly stricken with chronic halitosis, that…
Fuck it. It’s working. Don’t worry. Don’t even think. Just DO.
Nerissa let me slide my hand under her blouse, let me unfasten each button and let it slip off. Black bra, lacy edges. She smoothed her hands along her sides and unbuttoned her fly, then peeled off her jeans. Matching panties, black, silken, lacy. Had she been expecting company tonight? Goddamn.
Don't think, came the reminder. Just DO.
She was kind enough to assist with my shirt, and my jeans, eyebrows raised demurely at the effect she’d had. I’d picked a good night to wear my least scungy boxers, even though I hadn’t been optimistic enough to expect company myself. And then Nerissa, sweet misguided Nerissa, stretched out langruously, reached behind herself and unclipped her bra. The honour of sliding off her panties, however, was generously bestowed upon yours truly.
Nerissa didn't want to think. She just wanted to do.
Yes, Nerissa was very accommodating. Up until the point when it looked like we’d actually have sex. Naughty boy-and-girl-bits-interacting sex, involving concepts like ‘penetration’, and its much less pleasant corollary, ‘contraception’. Long story short, Nerissa said she wasn’t yet ready to go that far, since we didn’t know each other that well, and was so early in our relationship, and stuff… Bless her, though, because she was more than prepared to do just about anything and everything short of the above. It’s amazing what desperation, a crisis of self-confidence and half a bottle of Bundaberg Rum (someone else’s, in each case) can do for one’s evening. Specifics? A lot of other things were ticked off that Things To Do list, let’s just leave it at that.
I certainly left it at that, somehow getting my arse back to the school grounds in time to be collected by the folks (I hadn’t yet inherited Matt’s Torana for myself, so I wasn’t driving) at the agreed time, and returned to my own bed at the farm, buzzing like I’d been transfused with BZP and very much the wiser for my experience.
Oh, and as you’d expect, Nerissa and I lasted just about as long as it took you to read this sentence. She and Tunksy had reunited within 48 hours, if that - the very public alpha couple in love once more, our very own gossip-mag-cover twosome.
As such, I figured what was gonna come next, with the sort of grim inevitability that followed this sort of love (hah!) triangle. I expected Tunksy and several of his biggest mates to drop by anytime soon and discuss my previous involvement in the situation, using similar tactics as Karen’s new partner earlier in the week. Surprisingly, nothing eventuated and my head remained steadfastly un-kicked-in. Tunks and I continued to have the same non-relationship as before, based in contented mutual disinterest in each other’s affairs. Nerissa merely ignored me completely, avoiding communication and eye contact for the remainder of our time together in high school. Which left an equally dismal conclusion - that I had been fuck-all more than a brief distraction who was in the right place at the right time, no more and no less, and that whatever the humiliation and self-torture of Nerissa's tawdry relationship with Tunks, it was far preferable to the shame and social pariahdom of not being on the arm of the school footy hero. And, of course, the fact I still had a full set of teeth was a clear sign she hadn’t told him, or anyone else, about our little ‘relationship’.
Welcome, Angus Young, to being someone else’s dirty, embarrassing little secret. For the first, and sure as dammit, final time.
When I subsequently put the above reading of the facts (you heard me, FACTS) to Nerissa herself, however, she didn’t back away from her position. The opposite. She was defiant. Proud, even.
“Well, what the hell did you expect?” she laughed, squeezing my arm with the hand that wasn’t clutching another glass of the house chardonnay, all ex-model sparkly teeth and Sunshine Coast tan. Or was that the other way around? “I was like everyone else then. Fucking clueless. I thought it was true love with Brendan. I was seventeen. Give me a break, for Christ’s sake.” She jabbed me drunkenly in the chest with an expensively manicured finger, her liquid-amber eyes burning brightly. “And don’t pretend you were some heartbroken little boy who was just used and discarded, Andy. You loved it and you know it, and you'd do the same in five minutes.”
I frowned, contemplating my position (or at least refining my comic timing.)
“Make it ten?”
Nerissa giggled uproariously again. She wasn’t shying away from eye contact now, and she was very much still a serious fucking babe. The years had been kind to her - it almost seemed a pity we were a decade removed from the original events. Pity, for other reasons, that we were at the Evans Head Bowling Club. 
Okay, so they’d renovated the function room. Okay, so the décor was markedly less vomitiferous and the carpet didn’t look like it’d been salvaged from the set of Don’s Party. But it was still the Bowlo, dammit. There were still dead things living in the beer lines and the bistro’s vol-au-vaunts were still made from animal entrails and vulcanized rubber.
As ten year high school reunions went, it had been pretty run-of-the-mill. Of course, having attended none before or since my own, I’m basing my frame of reference solely on the acclaimed Hollywood documentaries Grosse Point Blank and Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, but the fact that McCarthy and I didn’t get to (a) turn up in a thunderous Corvette with Fabulous Hair or (b) blow up a convenience store in a gun battle with a disfigured midget hitman meant that our own reunion was never going to cut it by comparison.
However, we didn’t have to go through the empty charade of having to make up interesting stories about what we’d been up to since Year 12. In fact, by and large, people didn’t even ask; it seemed to be fairly common knowledge, which was mildly gratifying positive reinforcement considering the shitfight that characterised Good Times in the Flange Gasket empire of late. Despite our apparently waning popularity (as our slimy record label A&R dude was disturbingly keen to remind us – as McCarthy pointed out fairly forcefully at the time, how the fuck does that help the fucking creative process, you fucking plastic cunt? – everyone here seemed to know what we’d been occupying our time with.
Actually, now that the hour was becoming late, the natives were becoming restless; the school social déjà vu, like the fake disco smoke from the dry ice machine, was thick, clammy and stank of something dead and worrying. Tonight's house DJ, clearly misjudging his audience, had laid on a veritable smorgasboard of old 80’s cheese, not realising we were children of the (early) 90’s, and despite calls for Pearl Jam, Nirvana and something called ‘Chili Willie’, he kept serving up the likes of Spandau Ballet, Human League and A-Ha, missing his target demographic by at least a decade. A riot and/or old-fashioned lynchin' had narrowly been avoided, but on the insistence of many of the pissed bastards here tonight, I’d had to call for backup.
Brother From The Same Mother, The Jeff, dependable to the last (and most importantly, sober at home with the wife) had answered the call. Before too long he was loping through the doors to the bowling club function room, as casual as you like, or as casual as you can be with the neck of an acoustic guitar in each hand. The Jeff acknowledged the crowd’s applause, nodded at my waved hand, and joined me by the stage.
“Here y’are, fat man,” he greeted me. “The factory Yamaha for yourself and the black Maton for McCarthy, the one he left at ours last weekend. Should be vaguely in tune,” reported Flange Gasket’s long-term (read long-suffering) guitar tech. Vaguely in tune was an improvement from The Jeff's usual standards of service. “Where’s our favourite Uncle?”
“You mean Uncle Ted or Uncle Sam?” I queried. Uncle Ted, known to its manufacturer as Tooheys Extra Dry, was being widely employed as Piss Of Choice among tonight’s attendees, largely as it was free. I’d gone off it a bit since the glory days, I had to admit. “As for McCarthy, he’s probably on the spade, I would predict,” I grinned. “Digging a hole big enough to bury himself in.”
“Reckon it’s about time,” The Jeff figured. “Bit of a shadow of himself at the moment.”
I gave an assenting nod. A nice way of putting that he was carrying on like a complete fucking cock. “Stay for one?” I semaphored with the end of my empty Uncle Ted.
“Best not,” The Jeff replied with a knowing smile. “Keep me powder dry. So yeah,” he continued, “Beck wants to know if you boys will need beds made up for you tonight.” The knowing smile was quickly turning into a smug grin, the little bastard.
“Can’t speak for McCarthy,” I replied, taking the moral high road, “but I’ll be sleeping in my own bed tonight, I reckon.”
The Jeff’s eyebrows narrowed. You’d pay big bucks for that on Extreme Makeover, I thought. In his typical call-a-spade-a-spade way (particularly when referring to spadework), he decided to ask, “Weren't you gonna try and fuck that Nerissa Sutton?”
He must have noticed my Adam’s apple rise and fall like a guillotine.
“She’s right behind me, isn’t she,” The Jeff added calmly.
I nodded conversationally.
He turned, nodded politely to Nerissa, and exited stage left as fast as his hairy little legs would carry him. Nerissa, returning from the bar with another Tedski for me and house chardy for herself, handed me my beer.
“Well, aren’t you?” she ventured, not even skipping a beat.
I was about to give a carefully-considered response but was collared by McCarthy, who led the way onto the stage. Given that the last performer had been chased off with coarse language and upturned bar stools, we weren’t overly confident. Actually we weren't overly confident full stop. Flange Gasket were currently taking a break from playing live - at the time we were struggling through the recording of our next, and as it turned out, final album - and we were rusty as fuck. We were obviously short of our backline, Marty and Phil - though the meteoric sales of Marty's solo album meant he'd be playing in the backs for no bastard, least of all the likes of us, pretty soon. Neither had we played to any of these people before - unless you believed the independent assertions of pretty much all present that they’d been to our early gigs around the North Coast. If everyone who claimed they’d seen us play had actually done so, we could have packed out Wembley on our third-ever gig instead of playing to two men and a dog at the Gollan Hotel. (Though to be fair, the dog seemed to really get into it.)
“Well,” I began, “you asked for it.”
Appalling PA, scratchy mikes, no foldback, lots of feedback - our front-of-house was rarely this good at our full band gigs. In any case we made the SHED (that’s Shit-Hot Executive Decision) to go unplugged. Hey, it'd been trendy back in 1993 too. Sticking with the theme of the night, we played a bunch of other people’s songs of the era - Crank-era Gurus, Pearl Jam, U2, Stone Temple Pilots, 
half the tracklist from ‘93’s Triple J Hottest 100 Volume 1 - not that our region actually got Triple J coverage until 1995 - and even cranked out our favourite completely obscure song from that era, Scatterbrain’s epic and transcendental three-minute rock opera Don’t Call Me Dude.
Under immense, asphxyiating pressure, we relented near the end, and played one song of our own, one of our earliest and most obscure recordings. The heartfelt lyrics, McCarthy’s, spoke of the superficiality and contempt which he endured from some quarters during his early years of uni in our largest and most pretentious capital. The riff, mine, was big and ugly, as you’d expect, shot through with Sex Pistols hooks - we’d been listening to Never Mind The Bollocks a lot the week we wrote it. I think McCarthy had it on high rotation on the living room stereo, in the house we’d been sharing with a few others on the Goonellabah hillside.
Paul McCartney once said the Sex Pistols were just another band playing Chuck Berry.
At the time I thought “You boring old wanker” - but now I think it’s downright scary.
(TISM, 1995)
The point is, though, Paul was right. You listen back to Never Mind The Bollocks Etc and all you can hear - well, all I can hear, once you set aside Lydon’s primally gutteral delivery - is Steve Jones’ thermonuclear Chuck Berry chops. Particularly on stuff like Pretty Vacant, God Save The Queen and the opening track which I can’t remember the name of. Old-school rock-and-roll riffs, played gloriously raw, heavily distorted and far too loud. Not so simple to do on a Yamaha acoustic designed for classical use, but that was why they were paying me and the lads the big bucks on the live circuit these days, or at least half price drinks and cab fare home. “Mr Angus,” declared my suitably half-cut colleague-in-league in his swaggering stage voice. “Would you do the honours and crank this motherfucker up.”
The motherfucker in question was called Our Year 12 Formal Was At The Evans Head Bowlo, written by Young and McCarthy, copyright Gasket Goo Publishing Emporium And Recycling Depot, 1998 AD.
Moved to Sydney, met some people, pampered kids of well-off folk
Private school at vast expenses, rural schoolin's just a joke
Private schoolgirls say we’re yee-haas, we ain’t got that North Shore style
Play the banjo with our toenails all the fuckin’ day long while.
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Can’t get no cred
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Been living in Sin City for four long years
Without so much as head.
Not saying I regret it, beachside childhood was our gain
Brought up by surf and sunshine, stolen six-packs in the cane
That world’s a world away from mobile phones and Daddy’s car
PLC girls just don’t buy it - never let me get that far…
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Don’t seem to impress
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Can’t get laid in this city
Unless you’re some prick from GPS.
[INSERT SOLO HERE]
City girls want a prefect with a Beemer and a suit…
I can drive a tractor, but does that get me a root?
Had their formal at the Hilton, or the QVB, or worse
Up on Sydney fuckin’ Tower - it seems somewhat perverse
Miss the girls from my old school days, didn’t care from where you came
Long as you brought the Passion Pop, and vaguely knew their name…
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
It’s not fuckin’ right
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
It’s superficial shite
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Decision time, alright
Our Year 12 Formal was at the Evans Head Bowlo
Need to find a girl from a country town
Or it’s Oxford Street tonight.
We hadn’t played Evans Head Bowlo (the song or the venue) for a lot of years. Helped that it was a pretty big, dumb, memorable riff (forward planning from yours truly there). Also helped that McCarthy, for his more recent failings, was a god when it came to remembering lyrics (particularly his own) or at least could ad-lib close enough to seem like they were the right ones. So what, you’re saying, he should be able to remember them. But we’d written the song several years earlier and had written a metric fuckload of others since, it’d been fairly obscure filler in the tracklisting of our first album, and I don’t think we’d ever played it live more than a dozen times. Which kinda excused Nerissa, when we came off stage, gushing about “how awesome it was that we wrote that song right there onstage, just like theatresports or something!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was actually off our self-titled debut album (cunningly named Self-Titled Debut Album). Nor had I the heart to subsequently inform my fellow certified (read increasingly certifiable) rock god that according to our audience we sounded like we’d never played the song before in our lives. “You know what, I’ve realised what seems different tonight,” Nerissa said. We’d earlier agreed the most noticeable thing about tonight was that nothing had changed, everyone was effectively the same as they’d been ten years before, despite the success or failure of their subsequent lives. “Give me the boy to the age of seven and I will give you the man,” I’d quoted at the time, which seemed to impress her. At least she didn’t call me a kiddy-fiddler. My point being, lives may progress beyond high school achievements, but childhood personalities don’t. The jocks are still the jocks, the cocks are still the cocks, QED, in excelsius deo, pass the chips.
“What’s that?”
“Everyone here is just the same… except you guys. It’s just you two. You can’t help it. All the attention, all the confidence. Look at you, you’re strutting around like you own the place,” she said, “basically because you do.”
I shrugged noncommittally, not sure I agreed. Didn’t reflect that well on me. Noone wants to be king of the kids.
“Particularly him,” she indicated over her shoulder to where McCarthy was in animated conversation with a particularly striking former classmate of ours, one an old version of him had carried a torch for over many years. “He’s turned into an arrogant little bastard, hasn’t he?”
“I couldn’t possibly comment,” I grinned, which seemed to close that line of questioning.
Things were wrapping up quickly. We’d had to finish up as the bowling club was closing. Any moment now I expected the ‘ugly lights’ to come on (as per 3.30am at the infamous Powerhouse Niteclub [sic] in Lismore, where we inevitably ended up most Saturday nights of ’98, our first year in Lismore after Sam and I bailed post-uni on life in the major capitals) to scare everyone out of the building, in the company of whoever they’d managed to hook up with. The analogy did occur to me at the time, as we wandered out of the front doors of the club, Nerissa under one arm, two guitars under the other. A brief chat with McCarthy had indicated (a) he wasn’t going to need that bed made up for him and (b) he wasn’t likely to be in a position to return his guitar tonight, so I’d collected it for him to take back. In fact he’d just set the thing down on a sideboard and flicked me a signal to grab it, barely interrupting his silken spadework to do so. It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered whether perhaps Nerissa had a point.
Outside, it was a cool, humid evening, the seabreeze salting the night air. Déjà vu all over again.
“You’re heading home?” Nerissa asked.
“Back to the farm,” I replied. “Jeff’s coming back to pick me up.”
She absorbed this information. It seemed to take a little longer to sink in amongst all the alcohol. Then she grabbed me and kissed me breathlessly on the steps of the club, her chardonnay-flavoured tongue flickering defiantly in my mouth. She could have been more discreet, but didn’t seem that interested in discretion.
“I’m staying at my parents’ place tonight,” she began, her incandescent eyes signalling barely-concealed intent, “and I’m free all weekend.” She scrawled a number down on a piece of paper. “So, if you feel inclined to, shall we say, finish what we started ten years ago…” She pressed the paper into my hand. “You know what to do. Pretty sure you did then…”
And I would have. Trust me, I really would have. But for one thing, which I later explained to a frankly incredulous Jeff on the way back to the farm. Only a small thing, but it’d got my attention.
It was the photo of her husband and kids from her purse, which she’d proudly shown me not an hour before. She’d left them back at home in Noosa for the weekend - she’d told me all about how she and Marcus ran a trendy ‘modern Australian’ café-bar on Hastings St, quite the success to date. The kids, a boy and a girl, were starting school next year. The husband was a grown man and presumably able to fend for himself - if she strayed, I reckoned that was at least partly down to him for not meeting the requirements of the position (I'd admit to having used similar self-justification in the past, and I'd probably do again.) The children, though, were another thing altogether. They had no choice. I wasn’t going to be any part of contributing to any potential screwing-up of their lives, even if their mother was.
Jeff considered this opinion and proposed an alternate theory.
“So it’s not just that you’re just too pissed to get it up?
“Ah, go and get fucked.”
Jeff laughed, and gave me a brotherly punch in the arm. “You serious? Fuck, man, that’s cool. That’s one of the the single most decent things I can ever remember you doing. There’s hope for you yet.”
“Now you’re just patronising me,” I remarked wryly. “Go. And. Get. Fucked.”
And, to no particular surprise, I received the same alternately derogatory/patronising rubbish from my dear sister-in-law Rebecca, once we got back to the farm and debriefed over a few more drinks - totally unnecessary in my case, judging by the massiveness of my hangover next morning. Thanks Jeff Beck, I love you guys.
________________
The Doctor is OUT.
For the record, here's my shortlist. If 48 songs is a shortlist. It was interesting to see what stuff made the Jays' pre-culling regime (i.e. the songs available for voting upon) and what didn't. There were a bunch of songs - the Gurus' The Right Time, the Monarchs' 2001, the Hives' Main Offender - that I'd have voted for, or at least shortlisted, had they been there.
