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Siaoubo (A Normal Date)
Area: LTUAE Date: 02 Nov 93 16:35:59 From: nikolai kingsley (3:632/103.666) To: Bill Leckey Subj: A slice of life It's like this. The concert is due to start at eleven, but the main feature (Einstuerzende Neubauten) aren't due to come on until some time after midnight. I want to see what kind of goons would front for EN, so I get to her place at quarter to ten. She's only just woken up, is still drunk, so I help her get dressed and drag her out to the car. She realises she's left her bag inside, rushed back to get it and emerges with one of those hessian bags, you know the ones, about the same size as a large TV screen. As we drive to the Old Greek Theatre, she's going through the bag, doing an inventory. By the time we get to the main road, I feel like grabbing the bag and throwing it as far as I can - there are enough illicit pharmaceuticals in there to put us both away for several life-times. She keeps sampling them. I feel like Oscar Acosta, trying to keep up with Hunter S Thompson. I think at least one of us should be straight, so I settle on munching on some chewy, earthy-tasting brown stuff while she eats several varieties of capsules and tablets, washing them down with bourbon (yuck!). "Are you trying to kill yourself with all that stuff?" "All what stuff? All this? This is nothing, my love." "Oy vey." She keeps asking me to pull over, 'cause its hard to inject speed when i'm bumping over the tram-tracks in Bridge Road. I find a parking-spot around the back of that hospital just down the road from the venue, and she crouches on the back seat with a spoon and a cigarette lighter and a length of shoe-lace, trying to co-ordinate her actions. I have half a coke-bottle full of water under my seat (left over from when I drove a car with a radiator) and so to avoid the distressing sight of my lady friend boiling up speed with bourbon, I offer it to her. I even hold the spoon for her. "You should try this stuff, it's great." "uh-huh." "No, really, you can shoot it into the veins along the side of your dick." "Yeah, right! Did you read about that guy in the states who did that with cocaine? He developed blood clots in his legs and had to have them amputated, along with his balls, his dick and most of his fingers." "Well, that's cocaine, isn't it? That stuff's mostly baby powder anyway. This is pure, Gowron [real name changed to protect the guilty - ed] makes it himself." "And what does he cut it with?" She snarls at me. "He wouldn't dare." We walk down Bridge Road to the Old Greek Theatre. There's a huge queue full of goths (up 'til now, I didn't know Melbourne had this many goths) and we're right at the end of it. She's twitching like someone's jammed a power cable up her ass and they're turning it on and off in time to music only she can hear. Despite the large number of alternative type people in the queue, people are still nervous when they see her. I just hope she doesn't start noticing that they're noticing her... We get inside, with approximately half of the audience still behind us, which means we get fairly good seats. I chose seats up in the balcony in the hope that she wouldn't try to get up on stage and participate (as she had done in the past), but it occurs to me now that she might try some impromptu flying lessons. It seems she can't go more than sixty seconds without glaring at someone and asking them "What the FUCK are you staring at, asshole?" I hang back and signal over her shoulder to whoever she addresses that she's off her face and should be ignored. I dread to think what she'd do if she turned around and caught me making that twirling-the-finger-next-to- the-head gesture. I don't think she brought that gun with her. I hope she didn't. There's some guy playing a variety of native Australian instruments. He has a huge dirty grey beard and looks a lot like a wandering street person. His music isn't amplified and before she can focus her irritation on him, I try to engage her in a conversation about a story I'm writing, during the course of which I discover that she did bring the gun but didn't bring any bullets. What seems like years later, the street person has vanished and the stage crew are setting up EN's stuff. Desperate to sidetrack her from noticing her boredom -because she is most dangerous when bored - I ask her if she has anything `interesting' in her bag. A sly look crosses her lovely Asiatic features and she produces something like a ping-pong ball made of crumpled dark-brown paper. It smells like compressed dust-bunnies. She's looking at me like go on, I dare you!... I draw the moment out as long as I can, slowly take it from her, sniff it cautiously and then swallow it whole, hoping that it isn't fatally poisonous and that I can drive while under the influence of whatever it is. At that point, the band starts, Blixa Bargeld doing the speech which is the introduction to the song Prolog, from Haus Der Luege:
Meint ihr nicht: I'm relieved that she waits until they start singing Feurio! before joining in. It's almost near the end of the show before she starts coughing badly. I drag her outside where she starts vomiting, really projectile, like a fire-hose. Where is all this spew coming from? She's throwing up into the gutter and we're slowly moving up the street, and there's a police car on the other side of the road, and they're watching us... oh god. She finally runs out of chunks and faints, so I grab her in an awkward fireman's carry and stumble back to the car. Just another fun night out. I'm driving her home when I realise the buzzing in my head, which I thought was from the loud music, hasn't gone away, and I remember the brown- paper ping-pong ball. Uh oh. |
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