On the Move – City of Moreland Short Story Entry

‘On the move?! Fat chance!’ snapped James, jabbing at his touch-screen, willing the digital elves, or whoever else they were, to get off their big, fat virtual bums and find him Tram Tracker.

‘Finding apps should be bomb-proof!’

He lifted his gaze to the south. Kebab signs; the Australian Souvenir Shop; one or two vans emblazoned with cedar trees…all good: all 100% dinki-di halal in his eyes but, more pointedly, still no sign of a tram. He shoved the phone into his pants, rueing that moment he’d acceded to his wife’s request to borrow his car.

‘I Zumba at 11:00’, she’d said, ‘…and oh, the shopping. Mine’s past 50,000k’s and needs a full servicing. We wouldn’t want to void our warranty now would we?’  

But what choice did he have? Experience had taught him that a negative response on his part would end in microwave gloop and even further limits to his conjugal rights…and forget a full servicing!

So the tram to work it had to be…bugger.

He remembered the time he got stuck next to a big skinhead; his tattooed legs splayed across a seat in abject contempt of both The Transport Act and any thought of an employable future.

 ‘See this tatt?’ the skinhead had asked, stroking a name crossed out on his inner thigh, ‘It’s the dobber that got me banged up in Barwon jug. Goin’ ta’ visit him… right now’, He then brought his lips up close to James’s ear and whispered, ‘It’s only five stops. Wanna’ join me mate?’

 James answered with a quick exit at the next stop.

Nonetheless, despite this and all the morning’s misery (the quick coffee – the spilt coffee – the coffee-stained shirt), James wasn’t wholly averse to trams, particularly Sydney Road’s Number 19. It never failed to entertain. There were the shop fronts to gawk at and all the Muslim women in their colourful hijabs. And then there were the more ubiquitous tram-y attractions; the toasty smell of brakes on steel; that ding-y little bell, rung by angry drivers at the hoons that hurtled past. Even ticket validating machines had their appeal. James took particular delight in the way they’d regurgitate – over and over and over again – the wrongly inserted Metcards of the exasperated tourists and oldies. And as for Myki – well…

A metallic squeal prised him from his thoughts…the 19. He ascended the steps and wedged himself next to a giggly schoolgirl – the only thing conceivably worse than an ex-con with a bent for violent homo-erotica. He expelled heavily, pulled his phone from his pocket, and proceeded to hunt one last time for Tram Tracker.    

‘Excuse me sir’ asked the girl, ‘What’re you doing?’

‘Can’t find Tram Tracker’ he grunted.

‘Here. Give it to me’ she said, pulling it from his hand.

Her digits danced across the screen.

‘There you go’ she declared, passing it back with an elfin smile.

He found himself smiling back.

 

 

Rick Johnson Reader: ‘Tin Cans, Squeems & Thudpies’

Hold the prunes! Here’s a prosaic purgative to fuel your next bog reading session. ‘Rick Johnson Reader: ‘Tin Cans, Squeems and Thudpies’, cleanses your colon of the ‘smell bag’ residue of the mainstream musical press. As a reviewer for sadly defunct ‘Creem’ magazine, the late ‘Reeek’ (Rick) Johnson dishes up a nutritious blend of ‘deedle-deedle’, ‘aural burp-guns’ and ‘stomach reprisals’  to reduce pop culture down to its most corporally flatulent. Dig this from a rock crit. of Thunderpussy’s, ‘Documents of Captivity’,   

 ‘Illini bands tend to sound like a cow in the last stages of Bang’s Disease squatting on a steel guitar, play ‘bout as fast as a drugged leech on a sticky driveway, and record their albums in green-houses…Then along comes Thunderpussy like a beer fart in Sunday School, really cleaning the air. There’s a lotta’ slice guitar…bat bleep guitaro attacks (lotsa those)…and even a jazzbo or two.’

 April, 1974

 

A Taste of Sweden

Sniping at Swedes is like shooting fish in a barrel, and in Sweden shooting those fish is even easier as they’re already dead,  then left in that barrel to ferment for two months, canned, and then eaten. It’s called ‘Surstromming’ and, like Swedish retail giant IKEA, could best be termed an ‘acquired taste’ (similarly, Nordic Death Metal bands and Swedish tennis players though, if made to choose, I’ll take Opeth’s ‘Bleak’* over Mats Wilander’s ‘den lekfulla lognen’** any day). Yep, when it comes to ripened seafood and  assemble-yourself  furniture, what may smell Swede-y-sweet to one may smell waste-bin whoofy to another. And while, admittedly, I’ve no experience of the olfactory delights or otherwise of Surstromming (I’ll defer to the video on that stuff – make up your own mind***), I can say, with a degree of certitude, that shopping at IKEA Richmond is on the nose.

 

Of Dentistry, Cannibalism and the Congo

Travel spells danger. I’ve seen a turbaned Sikh cracked on the nut by an aircraft baggage compartment, the moorings loosened, no doubt, by a lifetime of dodgy landings and equally dodgy budgeting. I’ve helped a Japanese tourist to retrieve his specs; me and him, on all fours, fumbling myopically across the deck of a lurching ferry off the Thailand coast; a situation made more taxing by the surging bile from a too nauseous – and way too near – German hippy. On one occasion I even spat out the sad amalgam of turbulence, air meal fork, and twelve hundred dollars of bridge-work, twenty thousand metres above the Pacific Ocean (Air travel these days is much safer…fears of fork-effected Fetwahs have largely been assuaged, post 9/11, by plastic cutlery…and it’s easier on dentistry than steel!). Yep, travel has afforded me proof that any abrupt renegotiation of the spatial relationship between body and object can result in suffering – but I’ve yet to experience anything like this;

 

Moving Forward Into History

‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further…And one fine morning – so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ (The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald) 

Hope is timeless; as is futility – a glance back at the bow wave of history says as much…and therein lays the trick.  Do you see it? Twenty odd years ago I didn’t, my gaze more commonly drawn to the stern of a shapely woman rather than to the flow of a fine writer. But I see it now – there – in all its’ carnal beauty – the word, ‘us’. 

 

Vale Lux

 

 I’ve got the cramps. They announced themselves twenty-three years ago and they remain with me to this day; monstering my wife, my neighbours, and my stereo. I recall when they first bonded with my DNA; it was the instant needle kissed vinyl on my copy of The Cramps Gravest Hits EP, all the way back in 1984. That record was warped from the get-go – literally – a dodgy pressing inciting the stylus arm of dad’s ‘3-in-1’ to buck and lurch like some half-cut harlot. Still, no matter (or none, at least, when the old man wasn’t around), that first track, Human Fly, remains, to my mind, proof positive of how compromised surface geometry can, on occasion, serve to accentuate sound etched into vinyl. And, oh, what sound! When I play that song now the fumbling of Poison Ivy’s ‘who-gives-a-pluck’ rhythm guitar, followed by the crunch of the band lurching into life, still sends shudders through my plumbing…all the way down to my pelvic bone.