(ed:thinking back to 1995....)
An early February morning in Perth’s Scottish district. Going crazy spending all day with a beautiful Scottish lass, then going home to her parent’s house and getting a clutch of Mac*s in my face, dad drinking and sputtering at me about music, mother prim checking me out constantly cooking good food and the comedian brother G*, I felt I should be scared of him but he seemed too nice, spent more time just talking to him. 5 G* St. Getting to drive their beaten up old Ford Falcon, a seriously scary car, one night a tyre blew out along the freeway, the mum was dead impressed when I went with the RAWA man (or whatever it is over there) and fixed the tyre and drove the beast home. Days later I was the honorary family driver, picking the dad up from the pub, giving lifts to L’s mum everywhere, driving to Scarborough beach. I coulda been in Scotland, so few Aussies I saw, apart from the continual reminding given by the distinctly Australian weather. Hot hot hot. I was told to look out for the “bizarre” spectacle of the sun setting over the sea, but never having been able to remember where the sun rises and sets, it was wasted on me.
Though I had a few beautiful days at the beach. We were as white as a couple of english tourists,she fresh from a rock n roll ifestyle of nightlife in Melbourne, me from the long-sleeve and pants uniform of my then occupation. We were like two marshmallows plonked on the beach and we fried for the first day or two. A veritable paradise I guess it was. I’d been a week straight and my head was still a spinning top. I’d been trying to get hold of the only boy I knew in that super clean town, David M. I eventually found him at his dad’s, messed up on amphetamines of all things. Silly for a boy his age, but I guess that was all Perth had to offer and beggars can’t ..etc. The day I left he was going into a detox somewhere, confused and tired by months of late nights and expensive (financially and physically) drugs. It was the first town I'd been in where everyone knew the town drug dealer, he could be seen each night driving around town. He survived, it seemed, by a combination of folklore and a few sound beatings, everyone ignored him and supply continued unabated. I guess that with a preponderance of uppers, smack hadn’t managed to get a foothold as it always seems to where kids have naff all else to play with. I scored twice while there, off a local “mafia” agent (probably a spotty boy with Italian ancestry, hence the familial noncelemanture). Utter crap, but it wasn’t so much an effect I was after, more of a binary thing. On off. 0 or 1. Either on or off, and I just wanted to be that other status, one. Never mind if it did jack shit, at least I’d tried, in the words of Eddie Hilary.