The Unexpected Salami Read online

  Rachel liked Phillip well enough even if she didn’t like his words. No skin off her back if she lived with a handsome bad lyricist. After a year, enough time with Phillip to pale anyone’s view of him, Rachel had a repertoire of hilarious comments about his sickly sweet breath, the jar of peanut butter in the medicine cabinet which, he said, let him get a closer shave, and the overpowering patchouli he dabbed on instead of cologne—he’d bought ten vials at an Indian spice shop. But she never went for blood. Phillip amused Rachel. He was a cartoon character for her. He was a hack, but he wasn’t lazy. Phillip was our Captain Kirk, a kind idiot we could make fun of, who kept life easy for us by making the decisions, such as which day we had to write out the rent checks. By then, Rachel’s venom was reserved for Stuart.

  “Why can’t we kick Stuart out?” Rachel was forever whining.

  Rachel could laugh Phillip Harvey off. But as band members you’re married to each other. I could hardly justify to myself why I joined, let alone stayed, in this bubble-gum band in the first place. My taste runs a little harder, pop with a sprinkle of dissonance.

  A customer had needed a gig poster printed. I filled out his order form. Phillip Harvey. Robe Street, St. Kilda. Phillip had flat ears you couldn’t see when he stood directly in front of you. His body was disproportionate—his legs, muscular like a huge frog’s legs, were too big for his frame. But girls never saw that. Girls liked his red lips and violet eyes and big shiny smile. He smiled with confidence, a good-looking man.

  “I’m a muso, too,” I’d said, casually. “You know anyone who needs a guitarist?”

  “No, but hey, you know anyone good on bass? My bass player and keyboardist are moving to Sydney next month.”

  “I play bass, too,” I said a bit grudgingly. Playing bass or drums is the only way to join an established band. Everyone wants to be up front with the guitar or singing.

  “Yeah? Bass? Where have you gigged?”

  “I was in Ursa Major, towards the end of the band.” (A bit of a stretch. I played with them for one week before they broke up, for one show, two years after they had their number one Australian hit.)

  “Yeah? I’ll try you out. I got a new drummer three weeks ago. Stuart. He’s an insane drummer—learned everything in a day. I’m thinking of reforming the Poppies as a three piece.”

  “Worked for the Police.”

  “You want to jam?” Phillip asked.

  “Better than playing in my bedroom with the door locked.”

  A whole swag of friends was over at his house. It was Bourke Street in his living room. He’d even converted the garage into a soundproofed rehearsal studio. Phillip’s offer was a tidy little package: a whole new house and social set if I joined his band. And I needed to break from my houseshare; my flatmates at that time hadn’t spoken to each other in a month, ever since Nigel had a threesome with Helen and Justine. Justine had gone down on Helen, not part of their arrangement. I’d heard Helen screaming at Justine about her indiscretion, and Nigel had happily clued me in on his sexual adventures at the pub. The household tension back at Imperial Avenue was hard to stomach, plus how come I wasn’t invited?

  This mysterious singer Phillip could make his mob laugh. He had stacks of old Warner Brothers cartoons on tape. He did spot-on impressions of Foghorn Leghorn and Daffy Duck.

  That very first day I came around his house to jam, Phillip left the room for a minute to get some firewood from out back. I asked his new drummer, Stuart, who seemed like a quiet, watchful type like me, what he did. Phillip had said that Stuart had moved into the Robe Street house two weeks earlier.

  “Me?” Stuart looked startled that I’d asked him. “I do construction out by Preston.”

  “You go up on scaffolding?” I said. “I’m afraid of heights.”

  “It’s nothing once you puke the first time,” Stuart said, almost red. He seemed like an okay bloke.

  “You pay the rent yet, Stuart?” Phillip said, resting down an armful of logs.

  “I’m getting my check tomorrow,” Stuart said defensively, unsure why he was the sudden center of attention.

  “Thath no exthcuth. I’m thick—I’m thick and tired of your exthcuthes.”

  Stuart laughed. He didn’t have money trouble then. He saw now that Phillip was only going for the Daffy joke. Everyone was having such a good time. I moved in.

  Four years later I’m on stage with Phillip Harvey, options severely limited, and I’m still his flatmate. What the hell else was I going to do? In Melbourne, the chance of landing a major label deal is slim unless one of your band members is a uni student. Crowd is everything to the A&R reps, not to mention the club owners. If you’re older, you’re not about to pull in twenty-four beer-guzzling classmates with girlfriends to an unheated Richmond pub in the middle of the winter. Two good things I’ll say about Phillip. He had enough people coming to our gigs. There were always heaps of nurses from the ambulance corps; he was like Hawkeye with the nurses, which never sat well with Kerri.

  And Phillip did get us a record contract, although with Shock, not Mushroom or EMI. In Australia, though, you don’t get jackshit for mid-size representation. Crowd-pulling was too depressing for me. I left the people stuff to him. I felt like the Poppies’ gun-for-hire, sleeping in the house, showing up for rehearsal twice a week with the bloody bass.

  Then came that summer day, the day after New Year’s 1992, when managing the print shop and strumming four strings for the dedicated local crowd didn’t do it for me anymore.

  Rachel had her shift at the Dog’s Bar, and Phillip had his ambulance video job. I’d added days to my New Year’s holiday because it was use-it-or-lose-it time. I heard noise in Stuart’s room. I figured either he was rooting some bush pig, his horrible term for his pick-ups from the pub, or outside his window there was a possum in the tree warming up for a full-blown screech.

  His door was near the kitchen, and on the way back from fixing bread and jam, curiosity got the best of me. I opened the door, and Stuart let out a yelp.

  “Don’t kill me! I’m going to pay you back!”

  I got raspberry jam on the sleeve of the Money Talks, Bullshit Walks T-shirt I’d somewhat adopted from Rachel; her brother had sent it over from the States wrapped around a gift salami.

  “Mate—what the hell is going on?” Recently, Stuart had been acting weird, the few times he bothered to come home. Phillip was even thinking of giving in to Rachel and kicking him out. He thought Stuart’s habit was getting too deep to turn the other cheek anymore.

  “You scared the shit out of me, Colin,” Stuart whimpered from atop his homemade loft. I could see his stringy brown hair sticking out from his sheet. He had a cricket bat in his hands. The room stank of cigarettes. Our big fat cat, Hector (Phillip’s really, but Hector loved Stuart), was in his usual state, curled up under the loft on a dirty old jumper. One of Stuart’s skinny legs hung over his loft’s edge, vibrating in fear.

  “Stuart, what’s happening? Calm down and tell me.” I was always the one Stuart trusted—lovely honor that was. Turns out he thought I was sent to kill him. Jesus. Said he owed money to “people.” I kept trying to assure him it wasn’t that bad. But he was strung out. I tried calming him down, but he kept saying it was the end, that if he had a way of getting away he would. It saddened me; he was never the most articulate guy in the world, but he was, as Phillip had promised, a terrific drummer. In all honesty, he was a better musician than Phillip and me combined. Stuart was part of a group, not trying to steal the show with ridiculous overplaying, the way his replacement, Mick-O, did sometimes. He understood that rhythm should be seamless, like a Möbius strip.

  But Stuart wanted to hang out with Melissa, sniff or shoot whatever she had, forget rehearsals. We decided to boot him out of the band. He was a low-key guy, but even so, particularly passive about his dismissal from the Poppies. Was it his cry for help? It was so strange that I told Phillip that we should let him live with us as long as he kicked in for the rent. Why kick him whe
n he was already down? He had it hard enough as it was; he was from a common-as-dirt housing estate out near Airport West. And Rachel told me Stuart had bragged that his father was killed in Vietnam, picking up a baby stuffed with a grenade. We both felt sorry for him, that he was reduced to a lie like that.

  “You can just tell he’s trying to compensate for his lower-class childhood,” Rachel had said, doing a lax job attacking the mildew in between the shower tiles.

  “His father’s probably a boozer on the dole,” I’d said, taking over the brush and showing her how to really scrub.

  Those last few months it had surprised me that Stuart always made his rent. He’d been fired from his construction job for not showing up. I didn’t dare ask how he got the money, though my mate Gary (who was a cabbie that year) swore he’d spotted him hanging around Fitzroy Gardens hustling swishy old men. I didn’t want to hear it.

  “Get some sleep, Stuart. You’ll feel better. I’ll give you some Panadeine.” I gave him four tablets. Panadeine is Panadol with added codeine—I get shocking migraines. (Rachel always bummed two Panadeine off me for her period cramps. She couldn’t believe the stuff was over-the-counter.) Four’s enough to knock you out for hours.

  Since Rachel and Phillip were at work and Stuart was zonked out in misery in his room, I retrieved my locked metal box from my closet. That’s where I kept the tapes that I was too embarrassed to play when anyone else was around. I also stashed important papers in it: my birth certificate, my Swinburne diploma, and the Cadbury wrapper collection Cormac Kennedy had given me the month before he died. Cormac had been ridiculous about keeping those wrappers; they attracted bugs for the first few months I’d had them. But they meant so much to him that I never threw them away. He said that he had twelve of the twenty-two different kinds. Caramello, Energy, Cadbury Dark. There was a little painting of the inside of each wrapper on the front so Cormac could see beforehand if he would get a cherry filling or an almond one. I was about thirteen when he died. It was pouring, and the spouting was full of gum leaves. My father, wearing a purple Speedo and a shower cap, had climbed the roof to dislodge the mess. My parents were laughing at Dad’s absurd outfit, and I was angry because, well, he looked ridiculous, and the way your dad looks matters when you’re thirteen. Anyone could have seen him half naked up there. And then we heard a wail, and Dad climbed off the roof to see what had happened. But we knew. Cormac Kennedy had died. And my mother rang the ambulance as Cormac’s father sobbed in my Speedo-clad father’s arms. Fuck. He was around eight. I’d promised to finish off the collection for him, but I only got around to adding a Fruit and Nut wrapper a few years later.

  There were no more noises from Stuart’s room. From the locked box, I took out my Peggy Lee tape that I’d almost worn out. I put on a bit of Peg. My life was at a standstill. I was blue as I’d ever been. I recently found out that Peggy Lee is still alive, in a wheelchair. But I used to tell Mum back in Form Two—around the time Cormac died—that if I was on the scene, Peg would never have committed suicide. Listening to her every word, I was sure that she’d offed herself. And I knew that I could have loved Peg right. I had Peg’s life figured out. She’d needed someone to indulge her, to make her laugh at her self-obsession. The day is long, I’d have told her, but you’ve got such a voice. “Let go, Peg,” I would mouth as I came into my hand.

  We were going to shoot Gnome in three weeks. I knew that Phillip would take charge. He even had his mate Doug Lang doing camera work. A Phillip number, like the time he’d offered to videotape Mick-O’s British grandfather at the old man’s nursing home talking about the World War, and spent fifty minutes confusing the ninety-one-year-old bastard with questions about the wrong war.

  The gnome outfit Phillip wanted to hire for the film clip worried me. Another doubtful decision. And where was that going to get us? I put on my headphones so I wouldn’t wake Stuart.

  “Is that all there is to a fire?” Peggy sang.

  3

  Rachel: THE UNEXPECTED SALAMI

  I was back in New York just over two months. I’d convinced myself that the shooting was behind me: a fantastic memory, like having been elected student union president in a far away time. Temping at a fire extinguisher company, I was miserable, and no one, not even Frieda or Janet, was helping. “Welcome back to the vortex of depression,” Janet would say, ad nauseam. Frieda had a slight variation: “The nineties are a collective nervous breakdown.”

  The living room was a constant mess of newspapers and photo albums I never returned to their shelves. More than a few nights, I fell asleep on the couch in my clothes, once even breaking one of Mom’s good European water goblets. My reaction? Hmm, I’ll get to it later. Later, like everything else: morals, goals, and a haircut.

  I felt I should be in better touch with Colin. I made a list on the back of my overdue telephone bill of why I liked him better than Will. For one, Colin was less concerned with what the cultured world thought. He openly despised chamber music, my secret bane. (Will also adored Light Opera and once ruined my imminent orgasm by crying out “I am the Captain of the Pinafore!”) I underlined that Colin’s eyes were powdery blue and kind, the eyes of a good listener, while Will’s were a grave and steady blue, a genetic gift from some colonial silversmith forefather.

  I’d sent Colin an any-more-drama-going-down note early on. I wrote him another postcard.

  Dear Colin,

  Yesterday I heard on the local news that the latest craze Down Under is walking on fire coals.(?) And they’re descended from convicts, the other anchor said. Please safeguard your feet. (I’m lonely.) Scratch Hector behind the ears, he must miss Stuart. Do you? Love, Rachel

  My apathy was in full force. I never did mail that one.

  I started to hang out solo in coffee shops; particularly one near my apartment called, oh so post-modernly, Coffee Bar. I didn’t want to alienate anyone with my funk. Could I honestly not care that Stuart was dead? At the time I thought so; he had been a consistent heel for most of the time that I’d known him. I only felt sorry for his family, although Colin had written that no one had come forward as kin since I left.

  I lacked a belief system. Hebrew School Saturdays and Catechism Sundays had long ago canceled each other out. Everything else seemed forced. Atheism, or whatever this was, was damn depressing.

  Finally home after an endless Friday at FireQuenchers sorting through invoices and typing white labels for Penderflex tabs, I threw my scattered clothes into my parents’ washer. The machine sputtered after the first cycle, and, cursing, I fished out the culprit: a hanger cleverly concealed by a towel. Stashed under the kitchen sink (with my father’s nuclear-holocaust supply of extra toilet paper) was a stack of plastic shopping bags. I loaded up two, one from the MoMA giftshop and one from Bernie’s House of Prime Beef, and schlepped them to the laundromat a few blocks away. I packed in my soused clothes tighter than the posted rules allowed.

  I opened a thick letter from Colin, chock full of the latest “good news” from the murder fallout; the Poppies had been offered a global contract with EMI Records. When I looked up at the folding table, a seventy-ish man seemingly afflicted with Parkinson’s was having enormous difficulty gathering and creasing the legs of his plaid pants. Will, had I still been with him, would have said that the old guy should be lauded for self-sufficiency, not pitied. But the loneliness I sensed in this shaking man put me over the edge. I watched from my sixties-era, pastel-yellow plastic seat, digging into my 501s for a few more quarters for a diet root beer from the soda machine. I imagined that the folding-man’s wife had died and he couldn’t afford a nurse; that he was once as cool as Dean Martin; that he would fight back tears if his dead spouse could see him now in a grungy Village laundromat, taking ten minutes to fold a pair of pants, surrounded by a half dozen arty types in cookie-cutter black, the two by the bulletin board no doubt on a particularly high dosage of unlawful substances. Pulling out my load, I realized the spin cycle of the Maytag was no match for my over-wet be
longings. Over the sink, I got the dry heaves.

  The next morning, I emptied an instant oatmeal packet into a bowl of hot water. It was a crisp weekend day. I grabbed a jacket and walked downtown toward Battery Park, waving sadly as the Circle Line passed by. Once, that was enough to keep me happy for a whole day. A half dozen people waved to me from the boat; Wyoming and London mothers perhaps, telling their daughters to wave, too. See, honey, New Yorkers are friendly. My own mother had taught me to wave to the ships passing through New York Harbor. “It is your duty as an ambassador of the city to do so,” she would say with a straight face. I would wave, proud as a new private breaking in a uniform. She’d nudge Frank, who’d roll his eyes, but ultimately move his arm up and down. He couldn’t help a small grin when the far-away tourists responded.

  I’m twenty-seven, I thought, which suddenly seemed not so far from fifty. The water under the docks shimmered in a way that made me feel biblical. I walked back to the Village via Broadway. I drew a hot bath, which I eagerly awaited. In the house in St. Kilda, the hot water always ran out. I eased in, onto the red antislip rubber mat with suckers on the bottom. I let my decayed rubber duck float past my belly. My dad had bought it for me when I was five. He enjoyed having it on the edge of the tub, a rare display of sentimentality. Dad is all for the new. “Science is the new religion,” he likes to say. I lowered my neck down the white enamel, letting water clog my ears.

  That night I must have been gnawing at my hair again; when I went to pee at around eight in the morning, I felt a wet and frayed clump against my cheek. My mother called.

  “How are you?”

  “Okay.” I opened the fridge, removing Kraft American slices and milk.