Gruntings. Last year I decided to have a crack at NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The rules don't actually specify which Nation it's meant to be the National Novel Writing Month of, but they do set out that you need to write a 50K-word novel in a month, and it must BE novel - i.e. not a rehash or a rewrite of anything previously written before. Which is a bugger for me as pretty much everything I write is a rehash or rewrite of something I've written before. Anyhoo. As I was recovering from surgery and chemo at the time I had fuck all else to do other than lie on the couch watching Monday Night NFL on Tuesday afternoons so I figured I'd have a dig. This is the result, an Australian roadtrip story called The Highway North, which I'll proceed to serialise In The Worst Possible Taste style over the next couple of weeks (probably in about five installments, so about twenty times shorter than ITWPT which will make a lot of people happy). Though inspired by real events this is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or drunk is (a) on purpose or (b) me being lazy with characterization. It is dedicated to the people in it. You know who you are. Or can probably guess.
Dr Yobbo's World Of Bollocks hereby presents The Highway North, pt I.
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Monday. Newtown.
OK, let’s get this out of the way straight off. Hi, my name’s Ben North, and I write captions for Grunt Weekly. Apparently, some fucker has to do it, and apparently, it’s me. I used to have a proper gig, writing for something that looked more like a proper grown-up publication and less like the wank-stained oinkings of a bunch of semi-literate first year mech-eng fucktards, but yeah, not so much. Tits, cars, beer, more tits, footy, explosions, casual misogyny, bogan rock, and just to be sure, more tits. Possibly sprayed with beer. Basically, being staff writer/subbie/all-purpose grunt-level hack for a bogan lads’ mag like Grunt involves operating at the intellectual level of a Lynx commercial: women are hot, stupid, and will bang you if you smell nice. It’s not such a bad gig… if you’re a drunken misogynist redneck homophobic bogan cunt. Which, these days, I wasn’t that far from being. Whether this was cause or effect, depended on who you were talking to. Like my ex Caroline, for instance.
Yeah, an angry start. Sorry about that. It was late and I’d been drinking. Another exciting Monday night at Casa del Spurioso. A six of Boags, a pack of biersticks and Monday Night NRL. Still, it could be worse. I could have been listening to JC.
My flatmate forever and a day, JC and I grew up together in the same hick town in northern NSW, sharehoused when we came down to Sin City for uni, and now like some fucked-up sitcom pitch were both the wrong side of 30 and still sharing a dodgy flat - admittedly it’s a bit shinier than the shabby student digs we’d inhabited over the years around the inner west, south and east of Sydney - but whether it was much of a statement about our personal development depended who you were talking to. Like my ex Caroline, for instance.
Anyway JC wanted to go for a beer. I had beer, as I pointed out. He wasn’t convinced. I figured he really just wanted me off Foxtel for the night so he could DVR Glee or Desperate Skankwives or some bucket of arse he’d probably already ripped off the net anyway. But our JC is a persistent bugger. Literally.
“Will we just end up at the fucking Impy?” I asked.
“Noooo….” JC said. Meaning “Almost definitely.”
I hate the Impy. Not because I’m a drunken misogynist redneck homophobic bogan cunt, either. Because it’s a windowless fucking box with a dodgy pool table, a jukebox that only plays utter shite and beer pipes that need a fucking good cleanout. And because the only people there who want to sleep with me are other blokes, which I can’t say I’m into.
Alright, a bit of context. The Imperial’s in Erskineville, just down the road from the main drag of Newtown. JC and I drink in Newtown a fair bit - it’s close, it’s handy, most of the pubs have history for us, and the wanker quotient’s still surprisingly low after all these years. The Bank’s our regular, even post-gentrification - one of the few gentrification jobs that haven’t utterly fucked the place over. Back in the day it had a dodgy oval-shaped front bar with a sticky floor that was best avoided, but an awesome oasis-in-the-city style beer garden terrace out the back with just about the best Thai in Sydney - which is a hell of a claim I realise. A couple years back they’d tsuzjed the fuck out of it with sandstone walls and frosted glass and shiny things to distract fuckwits with, as a hundred thousand pubs had been fucked over by over the past decade. But somehow they’d managed to hang onto the character of the place - probably as much through the same clientele rolling through the doors, Newtown’s usual eclectic shambles - so it was still our go-to option for what JC liked to call pulling a Code 6 (i.e. emergency after-work beers, the restoration of sanity therefore). He’d picked up the term from a couple of construction guys who’d been working on an office reno in his department. Much as he’d tried, that’s all he’d picked up in that exchange, despite angling for some rough trade from the rough trade.
Yeah, off topic as usual. The Bank = good. The Impy = not so much. And not cos it was a gay bar - though the crapness of the music and the unlikeliness of me finding a life partner or short-term stand-in therefor we’ve discussed. It was just that, no matter what JC said, every night we went out seemed to involve ending up at the Impy, or at least JC making a valiant effort to make that into endgame. And if this was my life after 30 - turning into some sort of dilapidated fag hag who followed JC around on his exciting adventures in drinking, party drugs and picking up visiting sailors - then bollocks to this with extreme prejudice.
JC, realising he wasn’t onto a winner with his Monday Night Code 6, sank into the couch and nicked one of my beers out the fridge. Actually, who knew whether they were mine or his, we stopped counting for-and-against about fifteen years ago.
“Who’s playing?” he asked breezily, pretending to give a shit about the league.
“Raiders and Saints,” I mumble.
“Ah yes, of course. The dog-rooters.”
“The Raiders?”
“Them too…”
He left that hanging, with a sly grin. He was trying to cheer me up. He was failing. The Raiders’ reputation preceded them, courtesy a truly disgusting Mad Monday photo which had been circulated on Twitter a while back. The Saints… that was a more personal thing. I had nothing against St George (sorry, St George Illawarra), was happy to see them win the comp last year after 153 years of trying. Boded well for my busted-arse South Sydney Rabbitohs to finally win something other than the fucking mid-week Tooheys Cup in 1994. The problem I had was with specifics. Specific players, in fact.
No way to sugar coat this. Caroline - my ex - was from Shellharbour. That, technically, wasn’t the problem. We’d been dating a year or so. Met through work. I thought things were going alright, but apparently not. Apparently I used to talk over her at parties. Belittle her for her lack of intelligence. Make little jokes about her appearance. And apparently the equivalent response to this is to get fucking smashed at your ten year Shellharbour High reunion and fuck the former high school footy captain in the back seat of his HSV Clubsport. Apparently equivalent, according to all her mates and most of the girls in the office we worked in, which made work all kinds of awkward until we got merged with another magazine in the stable and they found an excuse to punt me. When I say ‘they’, I mean Caroline. She was my boss. Yeah, I know, never dip your pen in the company ink, unless the signature’s meant to be permanent. Thought it had been, of course. Thought this one was endgame. Certainly the longest relationship I’d been in - not that I’d been in a hell of a lot that went long-term, I wasn’t scaring the clubhouse leaders on that front - and my mindset had been towards the sort of stuff you’re meant to be doing as a 30 year old. House, car, ring, wedding, accrue stuff, breed, take up golf.
Not sitting on the couch with your gay flatmate getting drunk(er) and sledging the fuck out of Monday Night NRL.
Caroline’s high school sweetheart - she’d actually tried to justify it, straight-faced, on the basis that your first love is your strongest love, they always have a hold over you, even started paraphrasing fucking Wuthering Heights at me - was these days playing first-grade for Saints. So yeah, I was death-riding them pretty hard these days. Raiders v Saints: the battle of the dog-rooters. Yeah, not nice I know. Drunken misogynist redneck homophobic bogan cunt, that’s me. What else do you expect from the guy who writes the captions for Grunt Weekly? Didn’t excuse JC, of course. He was a social justice advocate, an equality campaigner, an all-round superhero who defended the rights of disadvantaged and vulnerable youth, not just at-risk LGBT kids (though that was the focus of most of the advocacy work the NGO he worked for carried out). He didn’t have a misogynist or bigoted bone in his body. He’d just always hated the bitch. Thought she was a manipulative, shallow, vacuous intellectual midget with massively inflated views of her own importance, intelligence and significance. That’s pretty much what he said to her when she came over to collect the last of her stuff from our place, six months ago. Should have trusted his radar back at the start - didn’t help now I was mired in some sort of alternative universe Two-And-A-Half-Men netherworld. The world was a fucking joke. There was no karma in this world. There was no justice. Some cockhead had banged my girlfriend and I’d lost my job as a result of it. My career, if you wanted to be grand about it. It hadn’t been much, but it’d been more than writing the fucking captions for Grunt Fucking Weekly.
“Ohhhh,” JC groaned. Not about whatever he was furtively exchanging texts on his iPhone with Persons Unknown (probably one of his friends-with-benefits he’d been planning to hook up with at the Impy or related establishments later in the night) - nope, he’d looked up and seen what I’d seen. The gruesome impact of bodies, the Saints player being bent back on himself like a Gumby figurine, the slow-mo of his face contorting hideously as his knee did likewise…
“That’s nasty,” I remarked. “Knee. Not meant to go that way. Cruciate ligament, or something…”
“Fucking ouchies,” JC nodded. He knew. He’d blown out a knee pulling an over-ambitious move on the dancefloor at the old UNSW unibar. It was an old injury from years of high school basketball, dance eisteddfod work and the like. Fucking ouchies, all right. For us as well, because we’d had to carry the big unit home from the unibar like a fucking Crimea War casualty. With him wailing ‘Leave me, save yourselves’ in the sort of histronic fashion that only a bucket of $2.50 vodka-and-limes can produce.
JC by now had detected my sympathies weren’t really with the injured Dragon. A Shellharbour Marlins junior, if my recollection was correct...
“That’s not…”
“Yup,” I nod, with a sardonic grin. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.”
Instant karma’s gonna get you. Well, when I say ‘instant’, anywhere in the following six months was OK by me.
“Well your work here is done,” pronounced JC. “Shall we head to the pub then?
I rolled my eyes. “Got beer. No pub required.”
“This is the last of the Boags,” JC pointed out.
“Oh you fucker,” I replied. “This is a conspiracy.”
“Totes,” he said, “planned it all along for you to drink five of my beers and only leave me one.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Can I go in this?”
I was wearing old three-stripe Adidas trackpants and a grotty promo T-shirt from a bourbon company, the sort of crap you get inundated with at a publication such as mine. You takes the perks of work where you got them.
“Sure, if you want to stroll into the Impy with a shirt that says ‘CRACK A WOODY’…”
“No Impy,” I maintained. “Windowless fucking box.”
“More that it leaves you windowless in terms of finding box…”
“That’s champagne fucken comedy.”
“Yeah, it was. What do you expect, I’ve only had one beer. Not up to my usual standards of sass and sparkle.”
“The Bank. The Erko. Fuckin’ Zanzibar for all I care. Just no Impy.”
“OK, OK.” He readdressed his iPhone, prepping a text. “I’ll just have to tell Belle we’ll not be going there…”
Bastard. When you’ve known someone most of your adult life, you tend to know their weak points. Their little embarrassing secrets. So yeah, we had a friend called Belinda. Belle, to us. Nice girl, rich parents, pretty and feisty and fun. She’d been in JC’s first year drama course (and a first-year drama she was, too) back in the day, we’d all been mates since. I’d always had a bit of a thing for her. Disguised it as well as you could through the flawed platform of outwardly-platonic male-female friendship, and I’d pretty much made my peace with the fact it was never going to happen (after ten-plus years you’d want to have figured that out), but if the option had been there… so would have I, with Belles on. You know it. And JC knew it. Hell, Belle probably knew it too, but was nice enough to pretend I wasn’t sending off any sort of creepy vibe. Thing was, JC wasn’t in any way averse to pulling stunts, pressing buttons and playing cards to get what he wanted - like dangling the prospect of a few beers with the still-lovely Belle in front of me in order to get my arse out of the house and help validate his drinking on a school night.
Not that he needed my validation, of course. JC was an avowed hedonist. He threw himself at life like a Japanese Zero on final approach to the USS Nimitz. Everything about JC was larger than life. (Well, as much about him as I ever wanted to investigate, anyway.) He was six-four, six-five with his current fauxhawk; he’d always been a bit of a unit as a lad, which had resulted in a large part of his hatred of football (aside from the obvious reason of being picked on by jocks most of his adolescence) via being pestered and bullied by coaches and teachers into playing for the school footy side. Instead he played basketball, danced like a maniac, and blew his knees out. These days a careful regimen of diet, gym membership and the scientific application of party drugs had him lighter on his feet and in better shape than he’d been for years as he entered his thirties. He was in better nick than me, anyway. These days I was carrying about 10 kegs more than I should, made a stubborn habit of dressing only in old jeans and T-shirts I’d been given for free, and basically looked like the ‘before’ photo for a Men’s Health exercise article. Which was ironic as all fuck, given that’d been one of the mags I’d written for before Caroline and her long-lost Heathcliff (who to me looked suspiciously like yet another bovine, peroxided, box-headed, bull-necked footy-playing fuckwit, rather than a dark, mysterious romantic hero with a penchant for repressed passion on t’moors) had intervened.
Men’s Health, though. Fuck me. WTF was I doing writing for them in the first place. If you're interested in reading about how to make yourself even more of a metrosexual softcock who loves his own reflection almost as much as he loves drinking wheatgrass juice rather than beer, eating tofu rather than red meat, and having intercourse with himself rather than pretty ladies, Men's Health is probably the magazine of choice for you. Even JC thought it was gayer than Christmas at Liberace’s. Obviously, I hadn’t gotten into writing because I wanted to write for Men’s Health, any more than I wanted to end up writing undergraduate knob and tit jokes for Grunt Weekly picture captions. I’d gotten into writing for the same reasons most baby writers did - because it was all I was good at, and because I wanted to emulate my heroes. Which weren’t maybe the ones most journalism students - particularly the pushy, punishing first-years trying to impress their lecturers - would reference. As a kid, I got inspired by people like Nick Carroll’s surf journalism, like Michael Stahl, Bill Tuckey and Jeff Cockburn in Wheels and Modern Motor, like the bewildering Milligan-esque brilliance of Mr Smith from Two Wheels. Guys who wrote about stuff I loved - cars and bikes and sport and whatever - in a way that absolutely engaged you. That was why I wanted to be a writer, back in the day. Now, of course, I’d long since had the youthful enthusiasm drubbed out of me - now I knew how the industry worked, now that I’d been passed over for jobs, and now that my card had been marked pretty much permanently at one of the major magazine publishing houses for as long as my ex was embodying the Peter Principle at work in their editorial middle management. Years ago I’d have looked at stuff like ad copywriting or scribing advertorial guff for airline mags as below me. These days, I’d have sold out in an instant, if only someone was buying.
Someone was, tonight anyway. JC knew I was short until payday tomorrow, so he was buying the beers. Which meant, of course, that he picked the venue - sure, we started at the Bank, but even surer, we ended up at the Impy, me in my superbly ironic ‘CRACK A WOODY’ shirt. And no, Belle didn’t show. Course she didn’t. What kind of responsible 30-something went out drinking on a Monday night anyway?
Tuesday. Still Newtown.
We made an odd couple, JC and I. We’d been living together long enough to almost be an old married couple. To the point where his crap taste in music (currently Lady Gaga and God-awful pop mashups) and my inability to deal with mornings without air-guitaring to Motorhead at call-noise-control volume didn’t really faze either of us any more. We might have shared nothing in terms of our preferences for music, hobbies or bedpartners, but diversity is to be celebrated. Besides, we did have one very important thing in common. The belief that no day is worth facing without as strong a coffee as the battered old stovetop espresso maker could be coaxed to produce. It was technically only a two-cup unit (two Italian cups, meaning about one decent mug’s worth), but we’d figured out that if you absolutely packed the hell out of it full of coffee, and topped it right up with water, you could make a superconcentrated ristretto sort of thing which you could dilute a bit with extra water or milk, or take it as a short black like JC sometimes did (insert joke about ‘I like my coffee like I like my men’ etc). Or just mainline it into your veins if you were really desperate.
I’d surfaced marginally earlier than JC so I was on coffee duty. His Spidey senses must have detected the evocative bubbling and hissing of the stovetop rocket because just as I was dispensing the black gold into suitable vessels - his ‘Thirty And Still Dirty’ mug and a ‘The Stig’ Top Gear one that came with the Easter Egg Caroline had got me last year - the door to the man-cave creaked open and out staggered JC, scratching his unmentionables. He was wearing his summer coat of sparse ginger fur and alluringly stained boxers. For the record, it was mid-July. I’d taken to not eating breakfast as a weight-control gambit (contrary to just about every bit of advice the magazine I used to write for would have given), and getting a visual of JC straight out of bed of a morning was as good an encouragement as any to avoid food until the sun was approaching the yardarm.
Still, like I said, you know someone for a lot of years, you know their weaknesses, you see them at their roughest points. JC had seen me go through some ugly breakups and had prescribed the correct medicinal dosages of alcohol and ranting. And I’d seen him through some black periods. I used to joke that I’d known JC before he was gay - the joke (as such) being of course that there was never a time when he wasn’t, he’d just refused to acknowledge it to anyone, least of all himself. I’d probably been just about the first person he’d told about it, after his family. The fact that he told me while he was lying in a hospital bed heavily sedated having his kidneys flushed out after trying to consume the contents of the medicine cabinet at our uni sharehouse at 2am probably illustrates (a) the context under which that confession came about and (b) what his fuckwit redneck fundamentalist Christian family thought of his announcement. My response, of course, was more reassuring. I think it was something along the lines of ‘Well DUHHHH, you big fucken poof.’
So, yeah. We gave each other a lot of stick, but he was as close to a brother as I had. Apart from my actual brother, of course.
“Excellent work as ever, domestic bitch,” he declared.
“Fuck you, you syphilitic ponce.”
He beamed. “Touche, boudreaux.” A throwback to when we’d sharehoused with a couple of marine science students from Louisiana for a year or so, and had picked up a bunch of obscure Southern/Cajun slang, most of which we’d managed to get out of our system. “When’s the little fellah getting here?”
The little fellah was JC’s favourite term for our old mate Dr Chris Bellamy. It wasn’t that Chris was short - he was five-eleven, only an inch or so less than me - but he was the shortest out of our old school posse (old school!) Actually most of JC’s gay friends were tall too, they were like the world’s sparkliest basketball team. You know that saying ‘he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed?” Chris was the sharpest tool in the shed. In our year, anyway. He’d aced his HSC (heavy on maths and physics), had come down to Sydney with us for first year, never quite clicked with the place, chucked in his actuarial course (annoying his old man who was an accountant and who would have given his very love spuds to have been an actuary) and fucked off to UQ to do science instead. Followed by a PhD, an overseas postdoc in Dusseldorf or somewhere, and now 2IC of a big research group at ANU. They did 3D protein structure prediction or something for drug design, I’d spent many years trying to figure out what the fuck it was they did and it was still black-box bollocks to me. Lots of computers and stuff. Fearsomely dull. But that was Chris. Not fearsomely dull I mean, just very… detail-focused. He was a scientist, yeah, but genetically he was really an accountant. You could see him doing the sums in his head whether it was over splitting the bill at a restaurant, predicting the odds of Australia making a comeback from a hundred plus down on the first innings in a test match, or weighing up his chances with that cute girl from the lab down the hall. The last one, the sums had never seemed to come out right on. I’d always reckoned he could do with binning the calculator and just having a crack, but I wasn’t much of an advertisement for a fulfilling and rewarding love life.
Not only was Chris a genius, but he was a morning person. More reason to hate him, perhaps, but it meant he and his meticulously-maintained metallic-beige ’96 Mitsubishi Magna were up the Hume and outside our slightly ramshackle terrace by half-nine on Tuesday morning. He could probably afford something newer - or for God’s sake, something cooler - than an old Magna, but Chris didn’t like to spend money on cars, not when the one he had worked fine. Same went for clothes, too. He was still wearing the same Lowes-spec collared golf shirt and plaid walk shorts as ever I remembered him in. Somehow, that was kind of reassuring.
“Jesus, you made good time.” That was the sort of compliment Chris appreciated; he grinned. “Coffee mate?”
“Aww, yeah?” he replied thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t say no. We’ve got time.”
“When’s the Pommy Bastard get in?” I queried.
“No idea,” JC grimaced, squinting against the morning light. Anyone looking back at him would have been grimacing too. Put a shirt on, for Christ’s sake. He looked like somebody had put Bundy Bear in the same washing machine as Warwick Capper’s playing shorts.
“Nine-fifty,” Chris reported. He probably could have quoted the flight number, original scheduled departure time and model of aircraft, if asked. “But I’d give him 45-50 minutes to get through customs and everything, it’s a bit of a zoo with the new regulations.” Chris knew, he’d flown internationally ex-Sydney fairly recently. Like, last week.
“Where was your conference again?”
“Bangkok,” he reminded me. “Asia Pacific Society For…”
“Low budget sex change operations,” I finished.
“Computational Protein Structure And Function,” he corrected me.
“And ladyboys.”
“Norco... you’ve been working at that dodgy stroke mag too long,” he said.
You could count the people who call me ‘Norco’ on the fingers of one hand. The fingers of one hand of a particularly clumsy printing-press operator. I’ve had Northy, Benny, Benno, Richie (as in Benaud) and pretty much every permutation possible, but it’s only my old mates from up the coast who still call me Norco. That was the dairy cooperative from our local region, the Northern Rivers of NSW - reputedly, it’s how the term ‘norks’ came about in Australian slang, from the cows’ udders on the logo on old packs of Norco butter a couple of generations ago. There’s your random pub trivia factoid for the day.
Chris was right, though. I had been working at Grunt too long. I thought in smart-arsed rejoinders and sly non-PC one-liners these days, because I got paid to. A drunken misogynist redneck homophobic bogan cunt, by profession. I used to be nice. Truly. Girls had broken up with me because I was too nice. Well, because I was too dull and focused and wrapped up with my work, but if I’d been more of a bastard I’m sure it would have made a difference. In strike rate if nothing else. Chris was nice too, but his nice actually worked. Eventually. It’d worked on his girl, an English postdoc who he’d met on his overseas travels and who was desperately trying to wrap up a year’s project in six months so she could migrate down here by Christmas. Lisa, her name was. I liked her. Never met her, but I liked her. Unlike seemingly every other girl who’d ever crossed paths with Chris, she hadn’t seen him as a renovators delight in need of fixer-upper attention re wardrobe, haircut and music tastes (which were resolutely anchored in ‘80s poodle metal). She seemed to love him, if not for his Lowes polo shirts and cardigan-wearer wheels, then certainly not in spite of them. Dunno how she went with his golf thing though. He was pretty hardcore with the sticks. We’d see when she got down here. I was amazed he’d left the sticks behind, actually, but presumably jettisoning the extra weight improved his fuel economy figures and lowered his average speed.
What were we doing here? Glad you asked. I am, you mightn’t be. JC and I lived here, so that was fair enough. Chris had come up from Canberra so we could go to Sydney Airport in order to drive to Brisbane over the course of the following week. With another old mate, Jules, who was flying in from Tokyo. Why were we doing this? Because we were mentalists. Because JC, Chris, Jules and myself hadn’t been in the one place at the one time for a thousand years and someone thought a roadtrip up the coast would be a concept made entirely of awesome. That someone was me, as you’ve probably guessed. My idea had been met with large rounds of indifference. JC’s prediction was we’d make it to about Gosford before multiple-homiciding each other over car stereo rights. Chris was even more dubious in his own quiet way, probably because his car had been volunteered for the trip - my old grey-import Skyline had reluctantly been sold earlier in the year after losing my job and smacking into my own micro-scale GFC, while JC’s wheels were a ludicrously unsuitable little Holden Barina shopping trolley that looked like a sparkly clown car when stuffed full of JC and his equally lanky buddies. While happy enough to go along with it, given that aeroplanes were available which could fly us hither and yon for a moderate fee, he didn’t really see the point. But the point was pretty clear, as far as I was concerned. I’d enshrined it as the official motto of the entire mission: What Would Munter Do?
For Munter was the reason for the season. Munter - Mark Munton to his mother and the Australian Taxation Office, both of whom he ignored the advice of - was our man. Our brother in arms. I’d known Munter since preschool, when he’d identified himself as a man to watch by hurtling off the climbing tower, Birdman Rally style, and cracking his head open. No lasting damage. Munter was rough. He liked a beer (but loved another eight or nine), swore like a Derek and Clive LP, was so laid back he was near horizontal, and had a history of doing inadvisable and stupid things with motor vehicles, like trying to jump trailbikes over parked cars, or Scandie-flick his parents’ mustard-yellow Bluebird wagon through the intersection into the main gate at school (at the exact moment the Principal was trying to head home in his shiny new Camry). However, Munter was also sharp as a tack behind his laconic rural reprobate exterior, and despite the advice of pretty much every teacher who’d ever had him, had pushed on to do earth science at uni and was now head geologist for a string of mines in central-western NSW. And on Sunday afternoon, in Brisbane - in the grounds of the super-exclusive Indooroopilly Golf Club, in fact - our Munter was getting married. This fact was as astonishing as the fact that we’d all been invited, given the low opinion which his betrothed and her family (who were funding the thing) appeared to have for us. And vice versa. I’d never actually met her, but from what I’d heard, and what I’d inferred, I was seeing more red flags than a PRC Communist Party parade, and really wasn’t feeling too flash about their prospects for ever and ever amen.
Which was a bit of a bugger, since I was down on the programme as best man.
Anyway, I kept those sentiments to myself, since this was all for the Munter. And if he was involved in any way with organising things - which by the terse Bridezilla-does-Brisvegas theme of Munter’s sparse emails from Gunnedah over the past few months, it didn’t sound like - it’d be a fucking awesome party. Because Munter had always done fucking awesome parties. His folks had lived out the back of town amongst the lifestyle blocks and the tree-changer city escapees, in the rolling hills of the North Coast hinterland, and the parties he used to throw in the last year or so of high school were epic in the extreme. Having an understanding old man and a mother who was away for work a lot probably had something to do with it. There was an old farmshed up the back from before the old farm had been subdivided into lifestyle blocks - many years before the Muntons lived there - and it had power and running water, so it was a natural to drag the big old ‘70s stereo out there once it’d been retired from the Muntons’ loungeroom, and the dodgy old half-size pool table with the bizarrest ‘roll’ in all of Newtonian physics, and the prehistoric ‘beer fridge’ (actually the old familial unit from the kitchen) that was the size of a shipping container and roared like a 747 on takeoff. Yeah, we had awesome parties there. Sometimes, girls even came along to them. Sometimes, even, they came back again a second time.
It probably won’t surprise you to know we were crap with girls. Chris was too quiet, Munter was too rough, and JC was too gay. Of course that meant he had more female attention than he could usefully deal with, which didn’t do his state of mind a lot of good as a conflicted teen. Me… dunno what my problem was. Can’t really account for my thinking process as a teenager. (Who the fuck can?) I was focused on these long-term, low-level psy-ops campaigns trying to weasel my way into the affections of superhot alpha-females who were echelons out of my league. Surfie chicks and the like. The sorts of girls who date the school footy hero. *cough* And yet I actually had a reasonable headcount of what you’d have to call female friends - mainly through JC, who seemed to collect them in number - but being shallow, hormonal and focused entirely on looks (i.e. tits) over personality, I did absolutely nothing and got absolutely nowhere with them. Although being shallow, hormonal and focused entirely on looks (i.e. tits) over personality was a hell of an asset in my current gig, where women were either wanking fodder or worthless annoyances, or both. Basically I was channelling my 15 year old self for professional gain. If I’d actually liked my 15 year old self, rather than feeling sorry for and embarrassed by him in equal measures, it’d probably be a fun gig.
Anyway, what this was, was a Happening for Munter. And if Munter was synonymous with anything - other than drunken stupidity - it was roadtrips. He’d been the first to have a car - well one we could all actually fit in, my first car being my grandparents’ poxy 1976 Toyota Corolla, baby-poo-brown with a vinyl roof, metal sunshade and plastic wind-deflectors, pimped out and rollin’ on 13s. Yeah nah. Whereas Munter’s (folks) old Nissan Bluebird wagon, while possessing all the credibility and respectability of a Fox News anchor, at least fitted us and all our shite into it for camping missions down the coast, trips up to the Goldie for Schoolies, or just piling into the bastard, cranking AC/DC on the tape deck and cruising into Lismore of a Friday night to see a band or something. Later, when JC, Chris and I moved down to Sydney, uni holidays meant a mission up the Pacific Highway in my VL Commodore - often with a detour via Armidale to catch Munter for a beer at the UNE bistro - to get back home for a week or two. That tradition kinda died after first year when Chris fucked off to Brisbane - and when JC’s family decided to be absolute cunts about who he was as a person, so he wasn’t really that keen to go home any more.
Although ironically JC and I did roadtrip it up the coast at the end of last year, in one of the last missions in my old two-door R33 Skyline GT. I went to have Christmas with the fam, he went to have New Years at Tropical Fruits, Lismore’s big queer festival. By which I mean a festival that is both large and gay/lesbian-focused, not so much a festival for big queers, though as mentioned previously, JC and most of his lanky like-minded mates could qualify as such. The two that came along with us, Adrian and Simon, had to be folded into the back of the Skyline like deckchairs, and banged their heads on the back window every time we hit a bump. I drove, which as per the laws of international roadtrips, meant I got to inflict my music on them the whole way… it was awesome. Until JC nicked the keys off me at Kempsey Maccas and it was Wild FM compilations, pop mashup MP3s and Simon’s bony knees in the back of my passenger seat all the way to the Byron Shire boundary. JC and I declared a truce on the way home - we returned to our normally scheduled programming, i.e. we just cranked Triple J. Over the years the frequencies of the various JJJ stations en route had been pretty much laser-etched into our conscious. Adrian and Simon, suitably traumatised, decided to fly home from Ballina.
So that was our last roadtrip. Not as much fun as usual, with the knees in the back and the non-optimal tunes and the constant difficulties of finding freetrade coffee and organic vegan lunch options in rural and regional NSW. Constant in that they were constantly voiced from the cheap seats. I think JC’s pithy response summed it up best, delivered through a dripping, greasy mouthful of roadside-servo burger-with-the-lot: ‘Harden the fuck up princess, you’re not in Surry Hills now.’ JC’s Chopper Read impression was world’s best practice - he’d even kept the mo for Trop Fruits, a full month after the end of Movember - and in general needed very little encouragement to get his Chopper out. Actually, in hindsight I’m not sure what Adrian and Simon found more traumatizing - my music, or JC’s Chopper.
Munter tended to live on the road, too. He lived in Gunnedah where his company offices were, his future missus was a rural vet based just out of Tamworth, so that was a 150 kay round trip just for conjugal visits (though they’d allegedly become fewer and further between as the wedding had approached, born-again-virgin style.) His company had mines dotted all over central-western NSW, and he was in charge of research drilling on all their prospecting sites, so his work ute got a lot of miles under its heavily-worn 4x4 tyres. But aside from all that, Munter just liked driving. Case in point, he’d turned up on our doorstep one Wednesday afternoon a few months ago, large as life and random as fuck - dusty jeans, work polo and Blunnies (so dressed up for the city, yeah), grin on his face, carton of Old under his arm. Substitute the work outfit for Stubbies, bare feet and a tatty old mid ’90s Gold Coast Seagulls league jersey (he’d always had a thing for backing the Gold Coast side - ‘Orm backin the locals there Norco’) and it could have been Munter from any time in the past dozen years or more. He was in the area, he said, so figured he’d drop by for a beer. In the area… he’d been at a conference at the NSW Department of Mineral Resources head offices. They’d knocked off early, so he figured he was in the area, he’d drop by. Their head offices are in Maitland. Our front door, says Google Maps, is 167 kays away. Anyway, he stayed for some beers and a feed, which he put on expenses (or ‘I’ll just farken book it up on me tab’ as he traditionally put it), we hit the pubs - avoiding the more lurid ones, out of respect for Munter and his more rural sensitivities - he rolled his swag out on the floor for the night, headed off before first light and was back at the office in Gunnedah in time for morning smoko. Meanwhile I called in sick with a hangover that would have killed a brown dog. JC, for his sins, had kicked on solo to the Midnight Shift, ‘trawling for schlong’ as Munter delicately put it, and wouldn’t surface until mid-afternoon, looking like an extra from a zombie flick. He had an RDO up his sleeve though. Bastard.
Which brings us back to the question - What Would Munter Do? If Munter was going to Munter’s wedding, a thousand kays up the road, would he pack onto a Deathstar flight like a gormless sheep and jet it up there? Hell no. He’d give the occasion the respect it deserved. He’d fuckin’ roadtrip it up the highway. He’d take a couple days at it, too. Get some beers in with the lads. See the sights en route that he always has to blast past at 110km/h on his way to somewhere else. (Well, actually he probably wouldn’t bother, but work with me here.) It’d be an experience. It’d be made of awesome. It’d be emotional. And if nothing else, it’d make a hell of a story.
Not that I’d actually told the boys I was planning on writing it up as one, of course.
The one who’d really bought into the ‘What Would Munter Do?’ line of logic, surprisingly enough, was our overseas contingent, Jules. Surprisingly because Jules and Munter had never struck me as particularly close, back at school. Jules always thought Munter was a bit of a standing joke, and Munter thought Jules was a bit of a wanker. His folks had made a packet on real estate - his old man ran the local LJ Hooker franchise - and he was never short of a buck growing up. He used to do unfathomable things like actually spending money on his hairdo, his clothes and his shoes. His family had a flash multi-storey house overlooking the river with a pool and a tennis court (OK, a table tennis court); he had a PC, an Amiga AND a Sega Master System. He even had his own TV and VCR in his bedroom, the bourgeois bastard. After school, we hadn’t seen as much of Jules, apart from uni holidays - he’d headed up to UQ to do commerce and economics and financial market shite. Chris had share-housed with him for a couple of years after he moved up there, though the reports coming back from him at the time were that Jules was turning into even more of a market-obsessed choad warrior the more he immersed himself into the finance world, hanging out at trendy bars in the city with shiny ex-private-school wankers rather than smashing jugs at the RE like a proper uni student.
After that bit of trouble in paradise - which, if you dug deep enough, probably went back to long-buried residual history between the lads, someone snogging someone else’s not-entirely-reliable sort-of-girlfriend at a fairly messy party at Munter’s - they went their separate ways, Jules recruited straight out of uni to a analyst gig at KPMG, Chris plugging into a PhD in the Centre for Drug Design and Development (or the ‘3D Centre’ as they called it) at UQ. For the last couple of years Jules had been working in London’s financial district with the rest of the City Boys - where I figured he’d have fitted in pretty well, his apprenticeship as a professional wanker having been very successful by all reports - so to hear he was coming back for Munter’s wedding was a surprise. To hear he wanted to be a part of the ‘What Would Munter Do’ Roadtrip as well… that just seemed… odd. Maybe he’d changed. Or maybe he’d just been misinformed.
They way we were going, he’d be sitting on his arse in Arrivals getting progressively grumpier, which while amusing wasn’t particularly useful to us, so we threw our bags in the boot of Chris’s Magna, locked up and hit the road. Since about the only thing Chris hated more than driving in Sydney was being told how to drive in Sydney by people who reckoned they knew every demon shortcut, back street and rat-run between here and the airport, JC and I shut up about directions and let him and his GPS (voiced by Kryten from Red Dwarf, of course) get mired in a fugly mid-morning traffic snarl on their own merits.
“Bourke Road would have been quicker,” I muttered. Fuck it. Force of habit.
“Stow it,” Chris grimaced, as we crawled down a gridlocked Princes Highway.
“I’d have taken Canal [Road],” JC offered.
“I bet you fuckin’ would,” I said.
“You know, with sparkling wit like that, you should get a job writing the captions for one of those bogan lads’ magazines. Cos they’re reeeally funny. ”
Kryten wanted us to turn left at the next intersection. I wanted to punch Kryten in his stupid plastic face. He was giving me the irrits. I suspect my rancid hangover wasn’t helping the situation.
“Never really saw the point of novelty GPS voices, have to say,” I declared. “What’s wrong with the traditional bossy stuck-up bitch telling you where to go and what to do?
“You tell us,” JC piped up slyly.
Ouch. “Walked into that one, didn’t I.”
“Faceplanted into it,” JC chortled. “Epic fail.”
Chris’s mood wasn’t much improved by discovering there was no way to avoid having to park at the airport. He wanted to do an old-school dive-bombing mission - like he used to be able to pull at Brisbane Airport, hanging out at the Kingsford-Smith memorial waiting for a text from the arriving personage. While that would have worked back in the day at Brisbane, such as when he was collecting JC and I the year we went up for Livid (the year the Cure played and all of Brisbane’s Goths came out to melt in the 38 degree sun), it wasn’t going to work for Jules. Involved too much organisation on his part. So there he emerged, into the 1980s regional shopping centre splendour of the International Arrivals terminal, behind Raybans, under hair that cost more than my shoes (though admittedly so did half the drinks on the menu at the airside bar), with an air of superiority and detachment from his surroundings. Either that or he was still half-cut and shattered from the flight from Japan. Or Japan itself - he’d had a couple of days stopover there catching up with ex-pat mates and had clearly been hitting the Asahi and the Suntory pretty enthusiastically judging by the footage on Arsebook.
“Hey,” he nodded. Jules didn’t do hugs, or enthusiastic greetings. Even after a year or two on the other side of the globe. I stuck out a hand and he thrust a bottle of duty-free scotch into it, still with the protective foam webbing and the ‘2 for $60’ tag around it. Presumably the second of the pair was Model’s Own.
“Cheers,” I said, “Don’t drink spirits though.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry, forgot.” He took the bottle off me and handed it to JC instead. “How’ve we been, lads?”
“What the fuck is that accent?”
“What accent?” Which sounded more like ‘Wot aksent?’ Probably needed a ‘Geezer’ or an ‘innit’ on the end. Luvly jubly, right royal barrel of monkeys this was.
“Erm, the one which sounds like you’ve come straight from casting on a fuckin’ Guy Ritchie gangster film?”
“You can talk. What’s that inflection you’ve got at the minute? You sound like a la-di-dah poofter.”
“He is,” Chris pointed out.
“Exactly,” JC said. “And besides, what infections I have are my concern.”
“And that of half of Darlinghurst…”
“Hey, fuck you, Hemingway, whose side are you on?”
“Mine,” I pointed out with a grin. “It’s lovely to see you again Julian, you bring out the best in us.”
“Yeah I’ve gathered that,” he smirked. “Can we fuck off and get drunk now?”
“What time is it in your head?” I asked him. Which produced a range of suggestions. Few of which were useful.
“Judging by the sunglasses,” JC estimated, “1987...”
But Chris had already done the maths. “Japan’s only an hour behind.”
Jules frowned. “Never really changed over from GMT while I was there, to be fair. Out all night, kipping all day…”
“Doing what all day?” chirped JC.
“Kippering,” I explained. “It’s some sort of fish… arranging… thing they do there. Like sashimi.”
“I thought Kippa-Ring was north of Brisbane…” That was a Chris joke. Geographic comedy was one of his strong suits.
“You lot going to give me grief all fuckin’ week over this, or what?”
“Yeah we are, guvnor. Innit.”
“Should have expected as much. C’mon, let’s get the fuck outta here.”
“Jesus suffering fuck, how many bags do you need, Imelda?” I marvelled.
“This many. You going to look admiring at them all morning? Cos I can take a photo and put them on Facebook for you to make smart arsed comments there, probably save us time in the long run.”
I didn’t do much on Facebook. Not on my own wall, anyway. Mostly used it to make smart-arsed comments on other peoples’ walls. Made up for the times I couldn’t be there in person to make smart-arsed comments in person. Since the invention of Arsebook someone clever had invented Twitter, which was the perfect forum for smart-arses to smart-arse off to their heart’s content. I’d actually been doing the Official Twuntering for Grunt, plugging new issues, website articles and promos… until they took exception to the content of various flamewars I’d had with feminist activists (they started it, naturally) and gave the gig to some other junior shitkicker who’d stick to the script - pimp the articles and ignore the baiting, sledging and slandering. Like most of the media industry, I was also on there as myself - username @norcogoodness, which made sense to about half a dozen people in the entire world - and like most of the media industry I was using it to pimp my writing, my blog (where all the freelance writing I did which nobody wanted to publish went to die, along with my sweary Roy-and-HG-style rants about sport and music) and my incredibly witty insights on the world which occasionally got RT’d (re-tweeted) by bigger new-media fish like John Birmingham or Wil Anderson. (It was Wil Anderson’s fault I’d seen that Joel Monaghan dog-act photo late last year, for the record.) A hundred thousand other writers, comedians and screaming egomaniacs were doing exactly the same as me, so actually getting heard was bloody hard and getting harder.
Long story short, if you want a friend on Arsebook who isn’t going to bag you out in front of your supercool London hipster mates and/or subtly question your sexuality every time you post a status liking some obscure Euro DJ or techno-house-trance-dance outfit, I ain’t it. The good thing was, it clearly wasn’t anything he was bitter about.
“Where’ve you parked the motor, guvnor?” By this stage Jules was taking the piss. I think. He had to be, surely.
“Well we wouldn’t have had to if you’d just flicked me a text,” Chris pointed out. “Did you get my email?”
“Yeah, yeah. Last night. Big list of instructions. Big bottle of sake. Guess which won. Anyway, what’s parking here, five bucks?”
“Seven,” Chris corrected, “since we’ve had to fart-arse around here for twenty minutes.”
“Pffft, that’s what now, a pound? 50p?” Jules laughed. “Do us a favour. I earn in pounds, mate.”
“Yup,” I nodded. “Certainly got more of them now then last I saw you.”
The reality was, we were all carrying a few pounds more than we used to, now we were all the wrong side of thirty. Even Chris, who’d always been thin and wiry, and JC, who sweated out his excesses at the gym (and other places of course) were at least a couple of kegs over their fighting weight. Was that just yet another indication of how our best years, like our best shape, were long behind us in our early 20s? Was this insane road-trip idea just a desperate attempt to regain the good times of nearly ten years ago? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Is Kyle Sandilands a cunt? Look, at least we weren’t in denial about it. Well, apart from Jules, who dressed like a Gen Z hipster and had the newest and shiniest smartphone of any of us. Which needed half an hour’s further arguing at the Vodafone counter to actually work with full functionality in this part of the world.
“Android, eh?” I remarked.
“Don’t you start,” Jules muttered, as he changed some of the hard-earned pounds in his wallet (as distinct from those around his waist) to red Australian lobsters in order to pay Chris’s burgeoning parking bill. “Not another fucking Apple fanboi…”
I wasn’t, actually. I used Apple stuff - an old MacBook Pro for writing, an original-gen iPhone for comms - not because I lurrved it and everything Jobs did, said or stood for with blind fanboi passion, but because PCs were desperate, grievous crap and every office I’d ever worked in which had them had been crippled by their thundering glitch-ridden hopelessness and held to ransom by the infantile whims of their despotic IT managers. But if it was free, I’d use it. Basically, I just liked winding up both sides of the argument. The other side of said argument was provided by JC, who would have spent his rent on a shiny dogturd if it came in a polished fake-brushed-aluminum case with a backlit Apple logo. And apps, of course. Lots of apps. The pooper-scooper app would be a good one, I’d suggest. Chris had an old-ish iPhone like me, which he used to check cricket scores, not update his Facebook, and that’s about it.
“Shit just works,” JC chimed in. Couldn’t help himself.
And they were off. So ensued an absolutely fascinating back-and-forth about the merits of each platform, their developers, their users, the intellectual tenor and sexual hygiene thereof, etcetera. Yeah, glad I kicked that off. Shall we just pause for editing and move on? Let’s.
Alright, so half an hour later, and we’re on the road, finally. Except the road we’re on is the road outside my house. Because JC is (a) the world’s most inept and forgetful packer - phone charger and deoderant left behind, just for starters - and (b) gives every impression of being clinically incontinent. You seriously couldn’t travel more than 30-45 minutes with him without him voicing a need to go wees. Draw your own conclusions about the condition of his prostrate and how it got to be as such. Now Jules wanted lunch. And Chris wanted to Facetime Lisa back in Cambridge before she went beddy-byes. Me, I just wanted to gouge my face off with a can opener. Herding fucking cats, this lot were like.
More to the point, it’s finally dawned on Jules what he’s agreed to.
“Why are we taking a week to get from here to Brisbane? It’s what, a day’s drive?”
“Yeah, if we drive like total fucking arseholes.”
“You know any other way to drive?” Jules smirked.
“You know how to drive at all?” I replied mildly.
“I know how to drive,” Jules insisted. “Just haven’t wasted my time on the bureaucratic bullshit involved in…”
“Convincing mum and dad to teach you how on the Volvo?” I reminded him. Like he needed to be reminded that he’d never got his licence. Never been arsed. Never needed one, probably, because there were always other people who had cars and could be convinced to drive him around the place - parents, friends, flatmates, taxi operators - and for the last couple of years he’d been in London where a car is more useless and futile than Marcus North’s test career. “It’s about the journey mate, not the destination.”
“How very Zen of you.” Neither Jules nor I had any idea whether it was or wasn’t very Zen, because we knew bugger-all about Zen, or about motorcycle maintenance. Which was why my old XR250 had seized years ago and was still in the back of the shed at home, last I looked.
“Did you seriously not realise…”
An ironic laugh. “Nah,” he said. “I thought we’d be in Brisbane tomorrow. Made plans to see people. That’s those plans fucked then.”
“Doesn’t sound like the end of the world to me. People will still be here next week. Not as though you’re only here till Sunday night.” Thinking: he’s about to tell me he’s flying back Sunday night.
Jules frowned. “I just can’t see the point of taking…”
“Well mate, you can opt out if you want. No gun to your head.”
Every captain knows you’ve got to kill insurrections early, before they get a chance to spread. You also get to see whether the rest of your crew fall in behind. JC was nodding sardonically. Chris was paying no attention to any of us, as he was making googy-eyes at his iPhone. Call it one in support and one abstaining.
I got the backdown I was after. Jules shrugged. “Hell, if it means that much to you. Not like I’ve got that much else to do in this fucking country till I go home.”
“That’s the spirit. What would Munter do?”
“Probably get pissed,” Jules said. “And run around with his arse hanging out, with Eagle Rock playing.”
That was about as much of a ringing endorsement for my Master Plan as I was likely to get out of him, so we hit out for the highway north.
Continued in Part II
