Love and Other U-Turns Read online

  ‘Jim …’ I gulp, looking up at his face, every line and freckle imprinted on my memory. ‘What’s your surname?’

  By sunset, we are in Macksville, a coastal country town about a hundred kilometres south of Coffs Harbour, where he has a gig in a couple of hours. After setting up his speakers and saying hello to the publican, a beer-bellied fellow with cheeks in a permanent state of rosacea, Jim jingles the keys to our bedroom for the night, upstairs. It couldn’t be more romantic. The ancient bed sinks almost to the floor and a stray dog howls outside the window. The window, covered by a grey, dusty curtain, looks out to the back verandah.

  Sometimes when he does a gig they give him dinner on the house, as well as a room. Here, we get both. When the waitress comes out to the verandah overlooking the river to take our order, we both order the calamari and a glass of white wine.

  ‘Jinx.’

  I’ve often wondered how I would have felt about Jim had his rough comedy been the first thing I saw. If I still would have driven nine hundred kilometres to kiss him had I witnessed his game of ‘Perfect Snatch’ before speaking to him. I’ll never know.

  He slips me his mum’s phone number in case I have a ‘change of heart’ when I hear him perform, and says, with gravity: ‘Lou, whatever you decide, tonight, I’ve really enjoyed this crazy love adventure.’

  Then he runs downstairs to start the show.

  I lie alone in room number 12 at the Macksville pub, until I can hear enough voices down below that I think I can slip in to the main bar without him noticing me. Up on a makeshift stage in the front bar of the hotel, the tinkle of pokies plays in the background while he yells to a crowd of strangers with a different, commanding voice to the one I’ve been listening to in the car.

  ‘How are you cunts going? Had a few bongs have you?’

  They laugh. He’s one of us. Just as rough … unafraid of a few boundaries being crossed. He’s making it clear he’s not some city tourist. He holds up one of his t-shirts and the small crowd laughs, but I’m sensing some weird energy nearby, and do my best not to look around and make eye contact with anyone except the bartender.

  You’re never anonymous for long in a country pub, and after ingesting Dutch courage by way of about ten bourbons, three girls appear in front of me, demanding to know who I’m ‘with’. I point to Jim, at that point encouraging people to join in his Talent Quest, with two girls kissing on stage to the shouts of the rest of the pub, the sure winners, unless the guy who claims he can play the guitar with his toes tries to beat them.

  The girls next to me look slightly confused.

  ‘Lucky – or we’d have to fight ya.’

  Suddenly one smiles, offers me a sip of her bourbon because I don’t have a drink, asks me where I’m from, inviting me ‘and the funny fella’ to a party at ‘Mick’s place’ after the gig. I decline the offer of bourbon, but am careful to look neutral. No judgements. No preconceptions.

  I smile and look around, rest my eyes on Jim as refuge, hoping he hasn’t noticed that I’m there yet. He tells me, later, how he saw everything that happened when I walked in to the room, and I realise the detailed concentration he must have, to keep on top of the crowd, leading them instead of being led by them, commanding attention, staying in control.

  The girls are now talking about which pubs have more ‘Abos’, and I automatically fade out at the word which rattles me, coming back into focus while one of them is talking about ‘a fight at the other pub which was cool’.

  ‘How come?’ I ask, curious.

  ‘It’s a bit of something different, you know?’

  When she says this it dawns on me how much comedy is needed in these places, how the means – crassness, crudeness and swearing – justify the ends. Jim’s language is so coarse I cringe, but at the same time I can’t help but marvel at the miracle of creating laughter in places where fights are the only way to get rid of the frustration of living. I love that flicker of realisation when they do laugh, like they’ve seen themselves for the first time, and how special they feel when he calls them up on stage to vie to win one of his t-shirts.

  Laughter is as base a human need as food, sex, crying, sleep. And it has a unifying power like nothing else on this earth. Although getting two girls on stage to kiss for the purpose of winning an ‘I Fucked a Goat’ t-shirt – whether it’s consensual or not – goes against my principles of what ‘should’ be funny, I can see that in places like this, it’s the only thing that will work.

  This is the antithesis of everything I consider pretty, intelligent or beautiful. But Jim’s not degrading anyone, he’s sending up society, at the same time he brings them together by freeing them from the constraints of all the things they can’t say unless they’re drunk or deranged. Perhaps he’s deranged himself? Who knows.

  But I do know that smug, city-slick humour just isn’t going to cut the mustard in a town which still uses the word ‘Abo’.

  The room is on a high, in a unified frenzy of laughter and cheer, as Jim crowns the winner of the contest. A man in shorts and thongs with a dripping plastic bag ambles in, takes a seat with a beer, and Jim asks if he’s just got back from a fishing trip. Immediately he’s smiling at being ‘included’ in this odd but happy show.

  In ancient times the court jester was often brought in to make people laugh before they prayed, because it was thought to open them to broader ways of thinking, to open them up to new spiritual possibilities. Like the proverbial court jester brought in to free the town from its preconceptions, Jim’s blown in like a mystery and will blow out, just as fast. And all the town will remember is that for this night, they felt better.

  ‘I only swear in drinking environments,’ he’d told me in the car on the way. ‘If there’s no alcohol, I don’t need to swear. It’s uptight enough for me to say something gentle and they laugh. But I need to use my full arsenal in these places, because the ante is upped for loosening their boundaries.’

  Is it my imagination or are they standing taller? He continues into the night, sticking to the common thread of sex, drugs and alcohol. These people want a commercial break from worrying about the state of their world, the state of themselves. Like the orders for more drinks, which keep coming, they are seeking relief.

  When he finishes, he meets me upstairs, jolting the room with the fiery energy of someone who’s been on stage for two hours. His mannerisms are overlapping, and it takes him a while to lose the extreme stage persona, debriefing after the gig and asking anxiously if I still want to continue ‘on tour’ with him.

  ‘Of course!’ I say, pulling him into the bed to let him know I’m still desperately in love with him.

  How weird can it get? A couple of boundaries and perceptions made their way out of my head and got swept up in the ash of the night’s antics downstairs. I’m curious to know just what I’ll lose next.

  ‘You can always go back, you know, Lou,’ he says, drawing me closer.

  I fall asleep dreaming of all the strange roads we’ve just travelled, are travelling, will travel.

  In the morning when I wake there’s dust on my tongue and the memory of words in a dream:

  No. Going. Back.

  6

  Road - tested

  ‘I don’t see much difference between that alcoholic behind the bar and a glossy pub in Sydney. It’s just addictions – in different clothes.’

  BREAKFAST IS EGGS ON TOAST at the Macksville café, messy fried piles of slush served on white toast while the plastic door covering flaps and whips in the wind. My fine-dining taste buds have officially left the building. Gulping back a faint flicker of guilt at not being at home in rainy Melbourne on my computer, I relish my meal in the lighter, warmer landscape. Jim is reading our horoscope out loud from the local paper when a woman comes in with her daughter and orders an ice-cream. The girl tiptoes over to Jim and stares, waiting.

  ‘Hello,’ she says expectantly, looking up at him.

  ‘Aww, g’day,’ he nods and smiles respectfully, l
ike he knows this little thing. Almost absentmindedly, he starts blowing up balloons he just happens to carry in his back pocket, making her a pink poodle after asking her how old she’s going to be when she’s seven. With a storybook little-girl grin, she pads proudly back to her mother, to show her what the clown just made.

  Jim tucks back into his eggs, now onto the sports section. The mother does a quick to and fro from the girl to the only other people in the café – us – holding her daughter’s hand and looking at the pink poodle with early morning confusion.

  As I settle back into the passenger seat of what seems like an alien-ship which is transporting me to other dimensions, the landscape gets more and more unfamiliar as we wind further and further away from Melbourne, mirroring my internal shifts.

  The valium-like heat of the Australian sky makes me sleepy, and Jim folds his tennis towel on the console, patting it for me to lay down my head. He drives on, and I fall asleep thinking of pink poodles and a river I’d never seen before today.

  I wake to find we are in Grafton, a town that feels like it was once grand, but is now an empty shell of its former self. Jim takes me on a small tour, too late for his usual trip to the golf club for a run. The sun has almost set, and he has a gig due to start in less than an hour. We drive up a street that seems to die a little more the further we go, until finally, we are at a dark and crusty-looking pub at the end of a dead-end road that is overgrown with weeds. Hotel Creepsville.

  I see his poster flapping in the window, feeling my heart sink. Yes, these are our digs for the night.

  The place smells of old dreams and sadness long since drowned in ghosts of alcohol. The air is hostile, thick. It’s hard to even walk forward, like my body can tell I’m not wanted in there.

  A cork hits me on the face, and the stooping, frail-looking crone who threw it glares at me from behind the bar and starts muttering swear words.

  ‘She’s only joking Lou, she’s just upset that I have a girlfriend,’ Jim says, of the woman nearing eighty and drunk, who has immediately forgotten what she just did, goldfish style.

  ‘Glassofplonk?’ she slurs, proffering me a trickle of cask red coated in a thick layer of dust, which has risen from the bottom of the glass. After a few minutes she forgets who I am and asks, again, where I’ve come from, why I’m here.

  Jim has keys to the room, so we slip away, saying goodbye, and the moment is gone from her brain, I’m sure. We learn later that she’s usually in bed by now – 6 pm.

  Someone once told me living alone makes you more sensitive to other people’s energy, but I think even the least intuitive would feel the ghosts in this place. The energy of the spirits is so tangible, it’s as if I can hear the howls of their pain and suffering. The air in this place – empty as it is – feels so busy.

  We walk up a dark hallway, where the light bulbs are all blown. I hold Jim’s hand tighter. An old sink lies on the floor, and we step over a trail of other unclaimed, abandoned objects: a workman’s singlet, a hairbrush, a broken comb. The smell is of stale cigarettes, dust, sadness and rising damp. I need to go to the toilet, and Jim escorts me to the murder-scene bathroom. Is that a bloodstain below a coating of dust on the sink?

  ‘I don’t think I’ll have a shower here,’ I announce. I’m too scared to even close the cubicle door. Jim respectfully looks at the floor while I go.

  Opening the door to our room, I’m relieved to see a clean, freshly made bed. Oddly, the bin is still full of rubbish: dirty tissues, crunched up empty Jack Daniels cans and cigarette butts. A door leads outside onto the top balcony, which is jammed with old couches, cobwebs and abandoned wardrobes.

  ‘This is like the Hotel California,’ I say to Jim. But he’s gone into his pre-gig oblivion. As I’ve started to notice, he gets into a certain ‘zone’ before he does a gig where it’s very hard to penetrate his head with anything vaguely right brain, such as conversation. He becomes erratic, silly, as if his creative alter ego makes him blind to the here and now. I tell him I’m scared three times until he finally snaps out of his fog and hears me.

  ‘Oh no! Babe!’ He does a playful blessing of the room, chatting to the old men whose ghosts we feel are still lurking, asking them to ‘be nice to Lou’.

  His gig starts in twenty minutes, so I follow him downstairs to the bar. There’s no way I’m staying in the room on my own.

  Later, I ask Jim how he does this, night after night. Sleeping in different towns, rooms full of cigarette butts and ghosts of hobos, alcoholic publicans and never knowing what will happen next.

  ‘I don’t see much difference between that alcoholic behind the bar and the guy drinking ten beers at a pub in Sydney. It’s just addictions – in different clothes.’ He’s right. Addictions flow everywhere – country or city.

  ‘Besides, there’s something which makes you feel really alive, not knowing where you’ll be next!’ I know what he means. I feel like I’ve been woken from living on auto-pilot, and I’ve only been on the road for a couple of days.

  Downstairs, the hotel bar is filling slowly with younger people than I would have expected. Unlike the slightly aggressive vibe at Macksville, Grafton is more relaxed. Jim starts early, chatting with everyone at the bar, coming into his own like a preacher holding fort.

  He’s not a big guy, but when he puts on his stage persona, he pulls people’s attention. It’s fascinating to watch someone so quiet and philosophical transform into this rowdy, quick-lipped being in a crowd beset by hecklers. And confirms for me, yet again, that appearances are more than deceiving. Feeling is the truth.

  The room is filling with more Anglo-Saxon-looking white Australians, a mullet here and an oversprayed ponytail there, nervously ordering drinks and remaining quiet, until they’ve downed at least three apiece.

  Jim’s friend Roger, from the tennis match in Coffs Harbour, has driven up to catch the gig. He arrives late, sits beside me and asks me a few questions about how I met Jim and where I live in Melbourne. He seems anxious that I might change my mind about Jim. Just as Jim pulls out a particularly raw punchline involving the ‘c’ word, Roger leans in towards me and says, earnestly, ‘You know he went to university, don’t you?’

  Although he’s only thirty-six, Jim already has over a decade of experience in the comedy industry in Australia, which is probably why performing to drunks isn’t so scary. ‘Doing thousands of kids’ parties was good preparation,’ he said in yet another of our marathon getting-to-know-you conversations. ‘Sugar and alcohol have the same effect!’

  We talk about this conundrum, of playing to drunks when he’s not really a drinker, of playing the rude ocker guy when he’s conscientious to a fault. When we’d eaten oysters at Circular Quay just a few days before, he’d stopped me from throwing one of the shells over the harbour into the water.

  I always liked the way they sounded, clacking against things. His face had grown anxious.

  ‘Oh Lou, let’s just leave them on the plate. The waitress might get upset …’

  So what’s with all the filthy humour, and throwing the ‘c’ word around like it’s going out of style?

  ‘I wanted the belly laughs. Not the chuckles,’ he explains. ‘To get them, though, you’ve got to go in hard, and shock people a bit. I love it when people laugh before they’ve had a chance to think about what they’re laughing at.’

  Before the Sydney Comedy Store became one of many venues that banned him, he was pulled aside and told by its manager, ‘The people who are laughing at you are so loud they’re drowning out the people who aren’t laughing.’

  ‘That’s when things got weird,’ he says later, as we lie in the creepy room at the Grafton hotel. ‘I thought: if I tone it down any more I’d rather go work in a bank. The whole thing is you’re up there working for that belly laugh, that scorcher, if I can’t go in for that I might as well not do it!’

  ‘I never imagined comedy would have this censorship,’ he says now, four years after he gave away his belongings and started touring
out of his beat-up Mazda. ‘The whole point of a comedian in society is to make fun of the rules, to say the things no-one’s allowed to say. And people laugh at the same things city or country – we eat, we root, we work. But the city has been hijacked by this corporate market where it’s like the humour has to be aspirational, little funny titbits about what you’ve done with so-and-so and who you’re going there with. And it’s not the punters that want that, because I’ve seen them breaking their necks laughing at the other stuff. So, in essence, the art of comedy suffers.’

  He keeps talking, like a hosepipe has been let loose on his passionate rant. I’m just so happy to be with someone who loves what they do.

  ‘Comedians say they either “kill” or “die” on stage, Lou. But if someone tells me before I go on up there what to say or to tone it down, I feel like they’ve taken my arsenal away. It’s like sending someone into battle but not letting them take their full kit of weapons. In the outback, the publicans never do this to me. They let me swear, do my Talent Quest, make balloon animals, whatever. As long as the punters are laughing and they don’t have any fights, they’re happy.’

  For someone like me, who doesn’t like swearing, the purity of the feeling in the room outweighs the means by which he’s getting there. It feels strange not to be scared to be surrounded by forty-odd people yelling about sex, but they are ridiculously happy, relaxed, and laughing at themselves in a way which leaves me in no doubt that they have moved to a point beyond their daily troubles. And isn’t this the purpose of art, in all its forms – to elevate us beyond the mundane?

  ‘The problem is, there’s this perception that rude means not intelligent,’ says Jim, later on, in our creepy room, as we debrief over the night.

  Whether or not I think rude humour is unintelligent, if it makes people laugh, in a way I see it as akin to a national service. What else has the ability to simultaneously relieve pain, make us forget all the troubles of the day, and lighten the atmosphere? And for some of those people in the room, who have been through things in this life I can barely fathom, what healthier way is there to forget about it all than to laugh?