If someone were to tell me that I have been in Broome for over three months now, I would call them a 'dirty, no good liar'. Then I would have to apologise profusely because apparently it is true. Over a month since my last journal, I find myself at a loss to explain where the time has gone. Being the first time I have found anything in a while, it is not surprising the time has flown by without me noticing it. Turns out I am 34 now as well, a fact that was celebrated with rather subdued civility.
That was pretty much the point where my life got a bit hazy. The day of my birthday was spent running here, there and everywhere moving into a rental property we had just taken possession of. Laura, Carmen and Shane of Bowen fame were moving in, but my English bed bunny and her friend baulked at the distance between the house and their work. They joined in the birthday dinner party, as did my sister and her fiancée as they passed through Broome on their one year around Australia jaunt. Dinner was a vego culinary extravaganza that stuffed everyone too full of nutritious goodness to party on recklessly afterwards.
That was left to two nights later when a random collection of friends from work and our old hostel joined me to see a band perform. And not just any band. If this was still the nineties, and I don't believe it is even though I may act that way, this would be THE band. For me at least. It was more about the man actually as Jeff Martin, the lead singer from The Tea Party, had gone off on his own and formed The Armada.
I had idolised the man for 15 years. An unabashed groupie possessing the wrong bits to be able to get back stage on lewd suggestion alone. The Tea Party had been too popular to get closer to than a solid row of bouncers not known for their beauty, compassion or tolerance. After a long display of Tea Party classics, a meet and greet table was set up for star struck autograph hunters. Everyone seemed mildly interested to meet this fading rock god but I was sufficiently inspired to give the man's leg a thorough dry humping. A tab of acid was blurring the lines between human flesh and table leg so I moderated my desires to just telling him how much of a fan I was.
I'm sure we bonded and would have become best friends for ever and ever if I hadn't of started thinking his face was running like melting wax. Fortunately Jeff seemed like he had downed an admirable amount of post performance drugs and didn't seem to mind that I was more interested in the psychedelic patterns I could create by waving my hands before our eyes. Even more fortunately he didn't seem to mind when a friend and fellow tripper barged through the autograph line and asked him if he could 'spare a durry'. As non-linear as I was feeling myself, I was still conscious enough to be shocked beyond belief. There I was going ga-ga over my own private messiah and old mate comes along and hits him up for a cigarette. I've laughed about it since, and I laughed about a lot of other things that night as the world put on a Vegas style light show for us trippers. I must admit I laughed even more when I found out that Karma had struck a pre-emptive blow to the ciggie scab by inflicting upon him the ignoble distinction of being the last person stung in Broome by an iriganji, the local jelly fish.
Showing up for work the next day after no sleep and still hallucinating made for an interesting shift where I set a world record for the amount of work that I managed to avoid doing. I have no idea what I did for those 8 hours but I am sure it didn't contribute anything to the functioning of Matso's restaurant. Being paid for it all the same made it almost tempting to turn up to every shift like that. Acid is very taxing on the brain though, and the recovery stage gives you a taste of what it is like to be a simpleton for a few days.
Once my brain had gone through a Billy Madison style transition to adult intelligence, I realised Shane and Carmen were moving on. Shane was getting booted out of the country because nobody wants any American here for longer than a year. Except for us, as we had all grown quite fond of having a little G.I. mascot to keep us entertained with his stories and the Forrest Gump accent he told them with. Carmen obviously hated perfect weather and wanted to trade that in for Melbourne's grey skies and freezing cold climate. Pining for an absent lover over rode the differences in temperature and she left to find happiness in his waiting arms. A fond farewell was bidden to them both in a manner that seems to be a nightly affair here. To see how big these nightly affairs can be and what has become of the house, squint your reading pupils in anticipation of the next instalments.
