These are written in the order I recalled them.
1975
Liz Moore is scary. I can't stop knowing she's there. She's up on the bleachers with Carol O'Hara. Carol isn't as much as Liz but takes some of her shine. There's a cassette player in Liz's port. PE hasn't started yet so we're hanging around the bleachers by the music block, waiting. Liz puts a song on. It has a clunking sound like metal parts, cogs, plates and bolts all moving together in work. And there's a grunting choir of men chanting as they work, hammering and shunting. "What's that?" I ask Liz. She sees me but looks somewhere else and says, "David Bowie." I've heard the name and it scares me. Because it scares me I'll want it and then I'll need it like everything else. A year later it's on Flashez, played as an oldie, Ray Burgess on tv says it's from the vaults. Jean Genie. It's only three years old by then but it looks like it's from the war. But that's the song. The band looks dirty in all sorts of ways. I want to crawl into the tv and walk around with them. I get a copy. I get two. One on Aladdin Sane for Christmas and another on ChangesOneBowie with pocket money but I don't need it on a record. It's a song you can carry in your port or pocket if you want.
1978
I'm sixteen and I started smoking months ago. It's Grade 11 and exams and I can't study. I've got the curtains drawn in my room. They're black. Mum made them for me when I pestered her with the need. I light a Stuyvo and draw long. The fan's on and I still think it kills the smoke smell. I've smoked so long I don't notice it. Don't care. The disc with the orange RCA label is flimsy I always think I'm going to warp it when I take it out but it always plays. I drop the needle and lie back. The swishing noise stutters from one speaker to the other and back and the big plonking piano walks in on stilts one foot on one note and the other on a semitone below. It walks out of the steam on the platform as the rest of the band emerges, screeching and chugging like a train in an old movie. My Stuyvo tastes like a Cuban cigar but it isn't until the Thin White Duke has got on the train and left the station that I really start to float. The Strat quacks out the riff. A tiny gleam from a harmonica. The clicking gives way to drumming and the big cool chorus comes in, part doo wop part Gregorian chant. I remember my modes. They'll come in handy but recognising them here reminds me I'm not studying. The page of The Web of Life I'm supposed to be absorbing is a blur. I'm remembering girls and rum and cigarettes under the press of the big dirty purple clouds of night. For four more minutes I'm floating on luxury. I know I'm going to have to pay for this bliss but I can't shake it. Gooolden years, goooold wuh wuh wuh...
1977
I'm fourteen waiting get picked for a team. It's PE but also grade ten so it's minimum security and the crap they make you do is softer because everybody knows it won't be compulsory next year. We're even getting along with the PE teachers, not just the sucky kids who pretend they're grownups, all of us. The assembly PA is ours at lunch time but someone's put something on now at nine o'clock. A guitar riff, bright and fuzzy, pushes into us. Its sweet but tangy, there's hurt in it, poignant. Wayne recognises it as Bowie but can't name it. "He knows how to do that," he grins. There are words but we can't hear them as the guitar is in the way. Every time I try to catch a line the riff just jumps between us and grins like Wayne just did. We get our teams and head out to the sunlight for whatever drag we're meant to be doing. But that sound is there and it won't go away. Months later I've got friends around to listen to new records. One is Queen's Sheer Heart Attack and the other is ChangesOneBowie. We're sloshing our sars on the rocks and blathering and then there it is, the riff is coming out of the speakers, buzzing, sinuous and tangy, big. I start to say, "shutup!" but I don't need to as everyone else is hearing it, too. By the second chorus everyone's got it: rebel rebel, you've torn your dress......
1979
Her name is Rosanna and she lives by the sea. We have gone out to Pallarenda almost every week of our lives but I have never seen her there. She's in my art and English elective classes and we get on better than anyone. It's hard to tell if there's anything else but fun. It doesn't feel anything like flirting but does that mean it isn't forced and doesn't that mean that it's natural and real? All I know is that by the time school has ended forever we only have a few more opportunities before I lose the thread and all possibility of contact forever. Going out to Pallarenda won't work. A few female mutual friends tell me I should just try it but there's always something that tells me I'd fail and failing like that would be the end. The only thing that stops it being the end is the number of New Year's parties happening. It's the turn of 79 to 80 and no one wants to be left out. I go to school ones and uni ones because I have for the last two years and this makes it easy to get between each one. She's at the second last one. There's a piano down in their rumpus room and I'm still sober enough to play it. I let her find me which she eventually does but that's after a lot of drinks that people keep putting on the piano like a kind of alcohol tip jar. By the time she sits by me and moves in I'm playing Angie. We talk about what the time is going to do when the year and the decade change. The grenade in my throat loses its pin somehow and I mumble that I love her. She blushes and looks away, smiling. Oh, I hasten to add, but I'm not going to do anything about it. She looks worse. Her eyes shift. I say both things again and this time she finishes the last part, the assurance, with me. I don't know if she is relieved or embarrassed. I'm seventeen and it's the first time in my life that I've told anyone that I've loved them. Ever. I can't recall how but I wake at dawn at Pallarenda in a friend's car with the radio blasting a ghastly old crooner singing: "I'll be gooooooone." We drive back and I crawl into bed where hours later, on the first day of the 80s (I know that's officially January 1 1981 but I care not) I rise fat with failure. I'd planned on hearing Bowie's cover of Wild is the Wind. Instead I flip through to the sleeve of The Man Who Sold the World and put After All on. The big delicate dirge plays out through the air with the exact same thickness as the tropical mug. It doesn't make me feel any better; it makes me feel the same. That, at least, will last a while.
1976
Between about five of us we've got all the Bowie albums from Space Oddity to the new one so in a week we've got on cassette what we don't have on LP. For another week all we seem to do is listen and catch up. But that's not hard as it's 1976 and just like with 60s music getting into older 70s stuff feels so much better. 19th Nervous Breakdown is better than The Bump. Ziggy Stardust dacks and decks Boston. We talk about this a lot. And I wonder if it's true of the others that there are some things kept out of the conversation because they are too hard to talk about. I have to look up cygnet in the dictionary but Cygnet Committee doesn't make much sense. The song begins as a softly strummed breakup song but turns into a kind of howling defence against charges of massive crime. The song breaks free of the structure it was so quick to set up and flies wildly into some soaring exhaustion. I can pick out some phrases but nothing helps. I know by now that Bowie flouts convention including sexuality. I'm only thirteen and a half so does that mean I'm going to absorb this and become like him and will that make me some despised freak who gets hit by fists of knuckles and others of breath with the violence that the names they spit. If I like this song, and I think I do, will I even know I've crossed the road for it and will never get back. I've got the flu and it's given me two earaches at once. I'm home from school listening to this and everything about it is making me sicker. I can't hear it just once, either, but again and again. It even plays while I sleep. I drift up, open my eyes and it's still on, playing again. Freak freak freak freak freak freak! Alright! I'm a freak. So what? It gets better. By the time the year's out I'm going to feel even more like a freak but by then I'm going to like it. I like it now. I care who knows but I do like it. So, what are the scary ones for the others? I'll ask. I won't. I'll keep mine and always know it is there.
1980
Apocalypse Now was still in cinemas and some people have trouble getting it but I don't. I'm just back from Brisbane, paying for all that bliss before by supplementing my senior marks and living with the most mentally violent marriage I've seen up close. Then there was Schoolies' on the Coast. Mum picked me up from the airport and drove me back through the decaying vegetation fragrance of Townsville (not joking about that, it's a fragrance not an odour). When she and Dad bickered it was slight, not frequent and about something and so actually quite relieving. They packed off to Brisbane to iron out the bugs in that marriage (for which I wished them luck they wouldn't find) and left me to myself. I got on the phone and drew an edited version of the people I knew at school.
Wayne comes around with Scary Monsters which we blast over iced rum. When I was studying for exams weeks ago I'd ride the dial until I heard Ashes to Ashes again. The album was a harder job but it was good all the same. Alison visits for tea and I put last year's Lodger on. I liked about half of it then but now I leave it on as we talk. So then it's Ray or Alison and Peter or Peter, Alison, Annette and Wayne or Fiona and - . Actually, it isn't Fiona. Her boyfriend was shot in the back pinching someone's dope plants or something (I didn't pry but I didn't want to know: I loved the guy but didn't want to find out he'd been shot for something stupid and small). And others. Every time someone comes around for a few hours on the patio or the pool or the rumpus room I put Lodger on and it starts sinking in. Red sails! Red sail action! That crazy stressed-steel ebow solo that Adrian Belew does after the languid Reeeeeed Sails chorus! All of it works. It works as a whole.
And then there's Rick. Fiona's Rick. It comes into the room as the third thing everybody talks about and won't leave until they do. No one wants to start talking about it but they don't stop once they start. There's this and there's that and there's this other thing "that only I know about because I sat down and worked it out." "This was what happened." I call Fiona a few days into the stay.
When I got home from Schoolies' there was a card from her. It was in a tiny envelope and had a wombat on the front. She began with, "Rick is dead." We'd been writing to each other weekly for the whole time I was in Brisbane that first year. I read about her partying and how lost she felt without him. She tried a few others and they were fun. Knowing her, they'd have to be fun. But Rick meant more and when they broke up they'd always mutually gravitate. Stronger each time, maybe, but I don't know. Could say as much for the power of habits. Oh, that and pregnancy.
She answers the phone and I realise I haven't thought about this conversation at all. She asks how I am and I say fine and regret it straight away. She's fine, too, according to her but we are, of course, both crap. There's this thing but if I bring it up I know I'll want to stop talking about it immediately because I won't have anything to say beyond the bullshit I've been speaking for the past few days with all the others. There is silence after everything we say to each other. She saves it by suggesting we get together which is the best idea. We leave it at a vague plan and I know it's not going to happen. I feel like crap when I hang up and go around the grounds kicking things. Someone calls about a party and I work out how to get to it which takes my mind off.
Wayne won't want to talk about Rick anymore. He gives me a lift. We meet people and drink beer. In a few days everybody is going to be talking about John Lennon. I'll be at a party thrown by my aunt. She'll mention it but it won't register. I'll see it in the next day's paper. It will hit me but I'll keep remembering how embarrassed I was at hearing his new album rather than remember how zapped I was when I first heard I Am the Walrus. His weird murder at the hands of a fan was nightmarish rather than saddening. The whole world was going ragged and grimy. All of the things I liked were being replaced with glistering suicide notes.
The more I hear and notice how good Lodger is as it plays under conversations the more, in quieter moments, I process every second of the opener Fantastic Voyage with its easy swing. It seems to collapse into action. Bowie's voice is a gentle croon until he breaks into one of his grand tenor wails in the chorus. It's a song of crushing resignation. Well, it is 1980 and we are ready for the Cold War to end and it will end in the unquenchable fires of a nuclear holocaust. And we never get old.
I love my friends. Nothing has changed that but now and in the future when I come back to this my birthplace it will be as a visitor. All the little battles I've waged, all the paltry defeats and unaffecting victories have built up. The grimy clean-coated pod world I walked through at Schoolies' has compelled me. Apocalypse Now, a film I will see over twenty more times in the next ten years, has given me the look and feel of the future. Two shootings, both distant in their own ways with nothing but numbing echoes remaining, have cut the ties. The first morning I spent alone in the old house I peered out at the day and saw the back lawn was covered in ibises, long legged birds stepping like dancers over the grass. I had never seen that before. At home I feel like a tourist.
I won't be seeing Fiona then or at any time in the future. That was our last conversation. We won't even write. I enjoy sentimentality and always have but if I can't register anything more than a passing frown at John Lennon's murder and have nothing but mumbles for the murder of someone close then I need work and it isn't going to happen here.
I'm back from the party. We stopped for pizza. It was like hot moulded plastic on hard foam but it went down like dessert. I found a beer in the fridge and went to the rumpus room to listen to Lodger again. It's cooling like the beer. Doomp doomp doompdedoomp. In the event that this fantastic voyage....
What else? It has taken a year of slog but I get into uni: little brother Nick runs through the rain to fetch my acceptance which comes in a thick yellow envelope, as Mum watches grinning. Xmas is big and New Year's is fun. Then it's back south. I take off from Townsville airport and briefly head out over the sea. As we climb we bank and for a moment the window is filled with deep jade rippled ocean. We correct and then it's all clouds until Brisbane.
Doomp doomp doompdedoomp.
In the event that this fantastic voyage should turn to erosion and we never get old.
Remember it's true, dignity is valuable but our lives are valuable too.......
Think of us as fatherless scum. Shoot some of those missiles
It won't be forgotten 'cause we'll never say anything nice again, will we?
