BEDROOM PUNK: CHAPTER I (PART 1)
March 28th 2007 09:46
The following is the first part of the first draft of the first chapter of a novel I have in the works. Part two will be coming soon. It's a fiction set in Brisbane. I submitted it this week for a subject at uni and my class is critiquing it on Thursday. The formatting is a nightmare but what can ya do?
Any feedback (especially glowing praise or utter dissapproval) would be appreciated.
“I always thought a punk was somebody who took it up the ass.”
William S. Burroughs
In the cool blue water of the toilet bowl, the cockroach circles. It kicks with an uneven number of legs: two on its right; one on its left. As it paddles, hope against hope in that pristine lagoon, my foreskin unfurls, a stream of piss bursting forth, strong and steady.
I’ve been holding this piss in since three.
It is now eight.
The piss rains down on the cockroach, an almost clear liquid where earlier it was burnt orange. My bowel loosens and I let out a short, sharp fart. Brap! A piss without a fart is like an i without a dot. Incomplete.
The turbulence sends the cockroach into a death roll, its scorched almond wings submerging then resurfacing: its three legs kicking air, then water—water and toilet duck and piss.
I wipe off, never having mastered the art of the shake. Any more than two is a wank I’ve been told. I have no time for that now. I let the single square of tissue drop into the bowl, its fragile surface touching the blue water and the moisture spreading into the fine white fibres, weighing them down. Consuming them.
The water now still, the cockroach begins its circling anew. The barbs of its lonely left leg hook into the toilet paper, and having made purchase there, it swings its other two legs around, pulling its body onto the soggy surface.
Land.
The cockroach is light enough that the paper barely notices its presence.
But the blue waters have them now.
The cockroach barely has time to claim this new island in the name of all cockroaches, planting his little cockroach flag, before the tissue is tearing away from under him, his legs pushing through into liquid. It’s hard to define the exact point where the cockroach is no longer landbound and once again in the deep blue. The tissue dissolves in such a way that it is there, and then it is not.
"Why don’t you just give up?" I ask, zipping up and fastening my belt buckle.
The cockroach resumes its futile kicking.
I press the half-flush.
I walk from the toilets into the electric bustle of the Brisbane Powerhouse. I’m here for the Writer’s Festival with some uni friends and Isobel.
Izzy.
I’ve been doing my best to avoid the speeches and seminars and keep my plastic wine glass full. It’s been one of those deeply satisfying days where you measure the hours by the pint—keeping good company with people you know well enough to hold rambling, drunken conversations with, but not well enough to run out of things to talk about. I like hanging out with John, Lisa, and Joseph. We’re studying writing together and the festival seems appropriate. They’re good kids from good homes but we get along okay. Alcohol helps.
John and Lisa are standing in the crowd in the Turbine Room, stroking their chins and listening to some writer talk about his creative process in lilting tones. Joseph is over by the Spark Bar, ordering an overpriced cocktail. Poor kid can’t stomach goon. I let them be, wishing the throng were running around in circles, thrashing about, tearing shit up. Instead they politely squeeze past me, apologising.
Hard to believe that this place was once a derelict building. Home to the homeless. A squat. But not that hard to believe. There are traces of its past now: some original graffiti of a skull and crossbones, exposed crumbling brick. But it’s a façade, a facsimile, a refurbished ruin slutted up for yuppies and hipsters. The glowing white toilets and the sparking blue neon can’t hide what once was and still is. The destitute and dispossessed have been replaced by the sophisticated and upwardly mobile, but the cockroaches are still here. They’ll always be here.
I squirt out of the mass; grab another free wine; duck past the Spark Bar and the comfy couches to the outside balcony. It is here that I will have my first formal introduction with Billy Bangs, lead singer for local punk band the Flu. It is here that I will first realise that Billy is a massive cunt. Cunt’s not a word I would normally use, but Izzy’s use of it has rubbed off on me. It’s a good strong word, stronger than any phallic euphemism I can think of.
Izzy is slouched against the plexi-glass barrier in that way she does, looking at the snaking vein of the river. She is draped in smoke like a vision wearing a too tight Dick Nasty shirt and tartan skirt that shows off her dumpy knees. How I love those knees! Her hair is jetblack tonight, cut short and boyish.
Inside, a hardcore drumbeat: boom-chick, boom-chick.
There are several well-dressed, well-adjusted people on the balcony. Their perpetual burble and murmur mixes in with the sound of the river as they have what I guess are highly elucidating conversations. Names drop like coins: Andrew McGahan, John Birmingham, Veny Armanno. So this is where Brisbane’s cultural elite sip their fruity drinks and convince themselves that Brisbane even has a cultural elite. They cling to events such as this like cockroaches to toilet paper.
I stare at Izzy. She hasn’t noticed me. I look down at the beer belly swelling under my faded Flu t-shirt. I suck it in. My brown nylon pants cling to my crotch, the tattered hem of my left pant leg hanging over my sneaker, the laces a nest of snakes. I bend down to tuck the hem in and think better of it, deciding instead to search my pockets for something to say to Izzy. I finger my Lucky Strikes and under the pretence of having a smoke, walk over to her and asked if she wants one too.
“OK,” she says.
Izzy is the kind of girl who only smokes other people’s cigarettes. I’m glad for this because drunk as I am, I feel my ability for banter draining out of me like so much piss. With the others inside, I seize the opportunity. The cigarette is my in.
“Who are they listening to?” I ask, lighting her smoke and trying not to look into those eyes.
“Fuck knows,” says Izzy.
“Who’re you calling fuck nose?” I reply. Even though this is one of my most hackneyed gags, she laughs huskily.
I laugh too, and my skin tingles. This feels good. Both of us are out of place, but all that seems to wash away with the river and the wine.
I take a sideways glance at Izzy.
She is looking at me.
The cool river air kisses our faces like it had earlier on the prow of the City Cat. We made our way to the Powerhouse from the Plough Inn at Southbank. It is only by chance that Izzy is with us. I’d run into her at Dutton Park Station and she said she was going to visit her mum. I had a hard time believing her. Surely Izzy had beamed down from a far off planet, or bubbled up out of some musty swamp to torment me. Girls like Izzy don’t have mothers.
I told Izzy she should come along to the Brisbane Writers Festival, not so much for the writers but the free alcohol. She said she might, and while I was sitting on the hot metallic chairs outside the Plough—wasting away the afternoon, smoking too much, and speaking shit with John, Lisa, and Joseph—Isobel appeared through the smoke like a fleshy ghost. The fact she was there was just as plausible.
But here she is, realer than anyone I can see in this mass of fauxhawks, tasteful piercings, babydoll dresses. And she’s looking at me. I have no choice now but to look in her eyes. They reflect my own—a mixture of alcohol, sex and fear swirling in those deep brown irises. She knows she wants me like I know I want her.
The burble and murmur recedes.
The world closes in.
The photo moment is crunched up and chucked away by a guy who stumbles up to us with a shit-eating grin cut-and-pasted onto his face. He looks about fifty, and pissed, but with glasses and a tightly-trimmed, grey-flecked goatee that suggests he belongs here.
“Nice shirt, man,” he drools. I look down at the picture of the Flu on my shirt. I nod and turn back to Izzy, but the guy puts a sweaty hand on my shoulder, leaning there heavily. He smells worse than I do.
“You know Billy Bangs is just over there?” The guy points his cigarette like a sixth finger towards the corner by the stairs where the last of the movers and shakers move and shake. The smokers have thinned, venturing back inside to boost their cultural capital. Using my shoulder for leverage, the guy hoists himself up and teeters back to the circle.
“You should talk to him,” offers Izzy from behind me. I am looking at Billy, wondering if that could possibly be black eyeliner.
“I’m sure he doesn’t want a drunken fanboy cramping his style,” I reply.
"What do you think the rest of those people are?” she says. She has a point, which is precisely why I don’t want to talk to Billy.
The frontman for the Flu, the most important thing to happen to Brisbane punk since the Saints, is presiding over a group of the punk in-crowd, laughing and talking and drawing on a cigarette flamboyantly. On my shirt, his heavy eyes leer out from behind his bandmates, all insolent anger and gutter poetry. The Flu have just broken up, but their guitarist Bad Brian is there along with several familiar faces, people I knew only as Anarchy Bill, X-ray Beck, Stegosaurus Man, and Cerebral Paul. I recognise them from what seems like a lifetime lived in dank suburban pubs and now-defunct night clubs.
Members of the circle point in our direction as the drunk guy from before whispers behind a flattened hand. I try to get Anarchy Bill’s giant, black-clad frame between me and Billy’s line of sight. I take a sip of wine and feel my body being pushed, forcing me to walk, putting one foot in front of the other to remain upright. Izzy is small, but when she wants something she knows how to get it.
Here I am in Billy Bangs’s inner circle. And yes, it is eyeliner. Wine slops over the sides of my cup as I try to gain my footing and look casual—or as casual as someone can who’s just been moved around like a mound of dirt or piece of furniture. Hours of drinking gnaw away at my stomach lining. Boom-chick, boom-chick.
“Nice shirt,” Billy says, patting me on the shoulder. If I was a pile of soil or a bookcase, I could have said nothing.
“Thanks,” I reply. I’ve left my sparkling repartee back at the Plough Inn in the bottom of a pint of VB. It has yet to rematerialise in the red goon.
“Looks like you’ve gotta fan,” chortles the messenger. The others stand around and twitter. I am a jester having an audience with the king of Brisbane punk.
“Where’d you get it?” Billy asks accusingly, “it looks pretty old.”
“Gabba Hotel, 2001,” I reply with a little bit of pride.
“I still haven’t seen any money for those. You should give me twenty bucks.”
Billy winks over my shoulder as he says this. I freeze. They all laugh and I laugh too. “You’re alright,” says Billy as he shakes my hand. It’s one of those shakes meant to show you who’s boss, crushing your fingers like twigs.
"I’ve seen you around, man," says Stegosaurus Man, "what’s your name?"
I gulp wine and answer, ‘Nick.’
I’m trying to think of something else to say, reaching for a cigarette when Izzy steps in and asks Billy to autograph her programme. He’s got a pen and everything. He leans in and defaces the front cover.
Where the fuck did she get a programme?
And why is she asking this jumped-up punk to sign it?
And why is he even at the festival?
I say something to Billy Bangs but don’t hear a response, the burble and murmur becoming a crushing wave. Isobel talks to Billy, Bad Brian talks to Stegosaurus Man, and X-ray Beck talks to Cerebral Paul. The messenger sways and grins drunkenly. Lips mouth static hiss. Anarchy Bill turns to me. He is saying something about the fascism of band logos, words half-forming from the crackle as he pokes at the Flu insignia on my shirt. I clutch my stomach. It’s like a circle pit in there. Nice shirt, man, nice shirt. The grain and the grape must be one hell of a social lubricant for the bacteria in my gut. The moshing and slam-dancing turns into a mass orgy. Boom-chick, boom-chick. Bacteria fuck and slosh around in stomach fluid and booze, multiplying and committing exponential acts of sodomy, incest, rape, and murder.
“Who’s on now?” I slur to the night air.
Bloody Nick Earls, it replies. Are you alright, mate?
The circle spins. I taste bitter and grape in the back of my throat. I wonder if bacteria know what love is as I stumble back inside to the Turbine Room. I look for John, Lisa, Joseph, anyone; pushing and thrashing against the circumference of the crowd.
Someone pushes me away. I reel off and vomit red on the polished concrete floor to echoed applause.
***
Read part two here.
Any feedback (especially glowing praise or utter dissapproval) would be appreciated.
BEDROOM PUNK: A D.I.Y. NOVEL
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
“I always thought a punk was somebody who took it up the ass.”
William S. Burroughs
In the cool blue water of the toilet bowl, the cockroach circles. It kicks with an uneven number of legs: two on its right; one on its left. As it paddles, hope against hope in that pristine lagoon, my foreskin unfurls, a stream of piss bursting forth, strong and steady.
I’ve been holding this piss in since three.
It is now eight.
The piss rains down on the cockroach, an almost clear liquid where earlier it was burnt orange. My bowel loosens and I let out a short, sharp fart. Brap! A piss without a fart is like an i without a dot. Incomplete.
The turbulence sends the cockroach into a death roll, its scorched almond wings submerging then resurfacing: its three legs kicking air, then water—water and toilet duck and piss.
I wipe off, never having mastered the art of the shake. Any more than two is a wank I’ve been told. I have no time for that now. I let the single square of tissue drop into the bowl, its fragile surface touching the blue water and the moisture spreading into the fine white fibres, weighing them down. Consuming them.
The water now still, the cockroach begins its circling anew. The barbs of its lonely left leg hook into the toilet paper, and having made purchase there, it swings its other two legs around, pulling its body onto the soggy surface.
Land.
The cockroach is light enough that the paper barely notices its presence.
But the blue waters have them now.
The cockroach barely has time to claim this new island in the name of all cockroaches, planting his little cockroach flag, before the tissue is tearing away from under him, his legs pushing through into liquid. It’s hard to define the exact point where the cockroach is no longer landbound and once again in the deep blue. The tissue dissolves in such a way that it is there, and then it is not.
"Why don’t you just give up?" I ask, zipping up and fastening my belt buckle.
The cockroach resumes its futile kicking.
I press the half-flush.
I walk from the toilets into the electric bustle of the Brisbane Powerhouse. I’m here for the Writer’s Festival with some uni friends and Isobel.
Izzy.
I’ve been doing my best to avoid the speeches and seminars and keep my plastic wine glass full. It’s been one of those deeply satisfying days where you measure the hours by the pint—keeping good company with people you know well enough to hold rambling, drunken conversations with, but not well enough to run out of things to talk about. I like hanging out with John, Lisa, and Joseph. We’re studying writing together and the festival seems appropriate. They’re good kids from good homes but we get along okay. Alcohol helps.
John and Lisa are standing in the crowd in the Turbine Room, stroking their chins and listening to some writer talk about his creative process in lilting tones. Joseph is over by the Spark Bar, ordering an overpriced cocktail. Poor kid can’t stomach goon. I let them be, wishing the throng were running around in circles, thrashing about, tearing shit up. Instead they politely squeeze past me, apologising.
Hard to believe that this place was once a derelict building. Home to the homeless. A squat. But not that hard to believe. There are traces of its past now: some original graffiti of a skull and crossbones, exposed crumbling brick. But it’s a façade, a facsimile, a refurbished ruin slutted up for yuppies and hipsters. The glowing white toilets and the sparking blue neon can’t hide what once was and still is. The destitute and dispossessed have been replaced by the sophisticated and upwardly mobile, but the cockroaches are still here. They’ll always be here.
I squirt out of the mass; grab another free wine; duck past the Spark Bar and the comfy couches to the outside balcony. It is here that I will have my first formal introduction with Billy Bangs, lead singer for local punk band the Flu. It is here that I will first realise that Billy is a massive cunt. Cunt’s not a word I would normally use, but Izzy’s use of it has rubbed off on me. It’s a good strong word, stronger than any phallic euphemism I can think of.
Izzy is slouched against the plexi-glass barrier in that way she does, looking at the snaking vein of the river. She is draped in smoke like a vision wearing a too tight Dick Nasty shirt and tartan skirt that shows off her dumpy knees. How I love those knees! Her hair is jetblack tonight, cut short and boyish.
Inside, a hardcore drumbeat: boom-chick, boom-chick.
There are several well-dressed, well-adjusted people on the balcony. Their perpetual burble and murmur mixes in with the sound of the river as they have what I guess are highly elucidating conversations. Names drop like coins: Andrew McGahan, John Birmingham, Veny Armanno. So this is where Brisbane’s cultural elite sip their fruity drinks and convince themselves that Brisbane even has a cultural elite. They cling to events such as this like cockroaches to toilet paper.
I stare at Izzy. She hasn’t noticed me. I look down at the beer belly swelling under my faded Flu t-shirt. I suck it in. My brown nylon pants cling to my crotch, the tattered hem of my left pant leg hanging over my sneaker, the laces a nest of snakes. I bend down to tuck the hem in and think better of it, deciding instead to search my pockets for something to say to Izzy. I finger my Lucky Strikes and under the pretence of having a smoke, walk over to her and asked if she wants one too.
“OK,” she says.
Izzy is the kind of girl who only smokes other people’s cigarettes. I’m glad for this because drunk as I am, I feel my ability for banter draining out of me like so much piss. With the others inside, I seize the opportunity. The cigarette is my in.
“Who are they listening to?” I ask, lighting her smoke and trying not to look into those eyes.
“Fuck knows,” says Izzy.
“Who’re you calling fuck nose?” I reply. Even though this is one of my most hackneyed gags, she laughs huskily.
I laugh too, and my skin tingles. This feels good. Both of us are out of place, but all that seems to wash away with the river and the wine.
I take a sideways glance at Izzy.
She is looking at me.
The cool river air kisses our faces like it had earlier on the prow of the City Cat. We made our way to the Powerhouse from the Plough Inn at Southbank. It is only by chance that Izzy is with us. I’d run into her at Dutton Park Station and she said she was going to visit her mum. I had a hard time believing her. Surely Izzy had beamed down from a far off planet, or bubbled up out of some musty swamp to torment me. Girls like Izzy don’t have mothers.
I told Izzy she should come along to the Brisbane Writers Festival, not so much for the writers but the free alcohol. She said she might, and while I was sitting on the hot metallic chairs outside the Plough—wasting away the afternoon, smoking too much, and speaking shit with John, Lisa, and Joseph—Isobel appeared through the smoke like a fleshy ghost. The fact she was there was just as plausible.
But here she is, realer than anyone I can see in this mass of fauxhawks, tasteful piercings, babydoll dresses. And she’s looking at me. I have no choice now but to look in her eyes. They reflect my own—a mixture of alcohol, sex and fear swirling in those deep brown irises. She knows she wants me like I know I want her.
The burble and murmur recedes.
The world closes in.
The photo moment is crunched up and chucked away by a guy who stumbles up to us with a shit-eating grin cut-and-pasted onto his face. He looks about fifty, and pissed, but with glasses and a tightly-trimmed, grey-flecked goatee that suggests he belongs here.
“Nice shirt, man,” he drools. I look down at the picture of the Flu on my shirt. I nod and turn back to Izzy, but the guy puts a sweaty hand on my shoulder, leaning there heavily. He smells worse than I do.
“You know Billy Bangs is just over there?” The guy points his cigarette like a sixth finger towards the corner by the stairs where the last of the movers and shakers move and shake. The smokers have thinned, venturing back inside to boost their cultural capital. Using my shoulder for leverage, the guy hoists himself up and teeters back to the circle.
“You should talk to him,” offers Izzy from behind me. I am looking at Billy, wondering if that could possibly be black eyeliner.
“I’m sure he doesn’t want a drunken fanboy cramping his style,” I reply.
"What do you think the rest of those people are?” she says. She has a point, which is precisely why I don’t want to talk to Billy.
The frontman for the Flu, the most important thing to happen to Brisbane punk since the Saints, is presiding over a group of the punk in-crowd, laughing and talking and drawing on a cigarette flamboyantly. On my shirt, his heavy eyes leer out from behind his bandmates, all insolent anger and gutter poetry. The Flu have just broken up, but their guitarist Bad Brian is there along with several familiar faces, people I knew only as Anarchy Bill, X-ray Beck, Stegosaurus Man, and Cerebral Paul. I recognise them from what seems like a lifetime lived in dank suburban pubs and now-defunct night clubs.
Members of the circle point in our direction as the drunk guy from before whispers behind a flattened hand. I try to get Anarchy Bill’s giant, black-clad frame between me and Billy’s line of sight. I take a sip of wine and feel my body being pushed, forcing me to walk, putting one foot in front of the other to remain upright. Izzy is small, but when she wants something she knows how to get it.
Here I am in Billy Bangs’s inner circle. And yes, it is eyeliner. Wine slops over the sides of my cup as I try to gain my footing and look casual—or as casual as someone can who’s just been moved around like a mound of dirt or piece of furniture. Hours of drinking gnaw away at my stomach lining. Boom-chick, boom-chick.
“Nice shirt,” Billy says, patting me on the shoulder. If I was a pile of soil or a bookcase, I could have said nothing.
“Thanks,” I reply. I’ve left my sparkling repartee back at the Plough Inn in the bottom of a pint of VB. It has yet to rematerialise in the red goon.
“Looks like you’ve gotta fan,” chortles the messenger. The others stand around and twitter. I am a jester having an audience with the king of Brisbane punk.
“Where’d you get it?” Billy asks accusingly, “it looks pretty old.”
“Gabba Hotel, 2001,” I reply with a little bit of pride.
“I still haven’t seen any money for those. You should give me twenty bucks.”
Billy winks over my shoulder as he says this. I freeze. They all laugh and I laugh too. “You’re alright,” says Billy as he shakes my hand. It’s one of those shakes meant to show you who’s boss, crushing your fingers like twigs.
"I’ve seen you around, man," says Stegosaurus Man, "what’s your name?"
I gulp wine and answer, ‘Nick.’
I’m trying to think of something else to say, reaching for a cigarette when Izzy steps in and asks Billy to autograph her programme. He’s got a pen and everything. He leans in and defaces the front cover.
Where the fuck did she get a programme?
And why is she asking this jumped-up punk to sign it?
And why is he even at the festival?
I say something to Billy Bangs but don’t hear a response, the burble and murmur becoming a crushing wave. Isobel talks to Billy, Bad Brian talks to Stegosaurus Man, and X-ray Beck talks to Cerebral Paul. The messenger sways and grins drunkenly. Lips mouth static hiss. Anarchy Bill turns to me. He is saying something about the fascism of band logos, words half-forming from the crackle as he pokes at the Flu insignia on my shirt. I clutch my stomach. It’s like a circle pit in there. Nice shirt, man, nice shirt. The grain and the grape must be one hell of a social lubricant for the bacteria in my gut. The moshing and slam-dancing turns into a mass orgy. Boom-chick, boom-chick. Bacteria fuck and slosh around in stomach fluid and booze, multiplying and committing exponential acts of sodomy, incest, rape, and murder.
“Who’s on now?” I slur to the night air.
Bloody Nick Earls, it replies. Are you alright, mate?
The circle spins. I taste bitter and grape in the back of my throat. I wonder if bacteria know what love is as I stumble back inside to the Turbine Room. I look for John, Lisa, Joseph, anyone; pushing and thrashing against the circumference of the crowd.
Someone pushes me away. I reel off and vomit red on the polished concrete floor to echoed applause.
***
Read part two here.
| 31 |
| Vote |
Shared on
Subscribe to this blog
