I stand motionless in the shower for the whole song, while hot water splashes off me, immiscible with my pain.
I towel off and get into my shiny black boxer shorts and loose camo-green tank top. There’s no expectation to dress nicely for dinner. Me, Curtis and Rex all slob around the house in boxers or footy shorts. Ahmed is usually the only one in a collared shirt.
Through my door, I hear Curtis get home. Ahmed calls out to him and I hear them kiss and start chatting in low, warm tones. I like to hear that each night. It reassures me true love can exist between two men and not end in tragedy.
As I slide my cheap watch back on my wrist, I glance at my bedroom, full of the bric-a-brac I’ve collected over seven years in the city. The walls are plastered with posters of Aussie bandslike The Living End and The Chats and Amyl and the Sniffers. There’s a blockmount of Rancid’s… And Out Come the Wolvesalbum cover. It’s so iconic, that mohawked punk on concrete steps with his head in his lap. Is he hungover, angry, devastated, asleep, dead? You can’t tell, and that’s why I love it. Maybe he’s all those things at once. You can’t tell if he never lets you look in his eyes.
The Rancid poster always makes me wanna shave my hair into a mohawk, which I’ve never done. I need my scruffy hair to look the part of indie muso in this country. If I went full punk, someone would call me a poser, or I’d be seen as too much. Maybe I could have a mohawk in New York or London, but not in Perth.
I have three guitars propped up against the wall – my wooden acoustic Gibson piece of shit, my black-and-white Les Paul covered in stickers, and a borrowed yellow-and-black-striped EVH – and more guitar picks on my chest of drawers than you can shake a dick at. The top of the drawers is scattered with various shit – a couple of Billy Talent vinyl records, my Beats by Dre headphones in Defiant Red colour, the pack of condoms and Wet Stuff lube from my adventure to Noranda and my black leather studded wristband.
I check my door is locked and remove the vinyl records, revealing what I keep behind them. A stack of CDs of my 2023 song ‘Roof’, which almost nobody wanted, and a larger stack of my 2021 EPCocksucker, which absolutely nobody wanted. A vision board I drew up, the week I moved to Perth, of where I thought I’d be by now, which includes a mansion, a Lamborghini and a seven-figure record label contract. And a little green army man figurine Matt left me, standing guard over an envelope stuffed full of his anguished letters.
I can’t bear to look at those for more than a second.
I stare at my vision board. That first week here, I really thought I was escaping the destiny my hometown had laid outfor me. I had this almost euphoric feeling, that if I could outrun my origins I would also outrun all the pain of my father, and my mother, and school, and my shit bandmates, and Matt, and the humiliation of a whole town hating me for being a homewrecking homo. I thought that Greyhound out of Geraldton was my blaze of glory: I was gonna be a famous rock star and show the world it should never have treated me so shit.
Turns out when you’re a white-trash faggot from Spalding, glory only exists in your imagination. With every passing year, I realise Gero was never the problem. There’s no way out of the shithole life you’re born into. Wherever I go, there is my shithole. I was born poor and I’ll die poor and there’s no making it to the stars, no matter what the world sells us. Life will never get better and I’ll never be rich or famous. And if that’s the case, what am I meant to do with my life?
I am so fucking lost.
3
BIG DOG
HAMMER
Last year’s number-one draft pick is a freckly ranga cunt named Oisin ‘Oshy’ Byrne. He gave me some lip at training yesterday about how I was old news and he was the new gun forward, so me and Tank rubbed Deep Heat on his mouthguard today to get back at him.
I keep trying not to piss meself laughing when we get into the locker room. Tank keeps elbowing me and I whisper to him to shut up or he’ll blow it.
To avoid giving the game away, I shuffle over to the mirror and pretend to be focused on adjusting the wax in my hair, except I actually get distracted by my own reflection. Fuck, I am in peak form at the moment. I look exactly the way I dreamed I’d look when I hit my prime as a footballer in my mid-twenties: I packed on some real mass last summer and I’m the most muscular I’ve ever been; my skin is so bronzed from the sun I look like a pro surfer; and my short blond hair and blue eyes complement the blue-and-gold West Coast Eagles guernsey stretched tight over my pecs, like it was always my destiny to join this footy club.
I flex in the mirror for a minute, showing off the vascularity in my guns and copping a jeer from one of the boys. Just as I try to remember what I came over here for, Tank appears beside me and elbows me again, jerking his head urgently towards the other side of the locker room. Oh, that’s right. Oshy.
And then bam, it happens: Ranga Boy Oshy slides his white mouthguard into his gob. There’s excruciating silence for three seconds, then the most delicious whimper.
‘What the hell?’ Oshy moans, spitting onto the grey carpet. ‘Argh – aaaarrgh!’
One of the assistant coaches jogs after him to the basins as he rinses his mouth out, whining like a little bitch about how much it burns.
Me and Tank are in stitches.
I wait until Oshy walks back into the locker area, head bowed as he realises a lot of the boys are snickering.
‘Jeez, Oshy, you musta mixed up your toothpaste and your Deep Heat? Rookie mistake,champ!’ I say. I pause, cos I want him to understand how hard I’ve champed him, like the studs of a footy boot right in the nads. ‘Guess you’d betterwatch your mouth, huh?’
Oshy stares at me like he’s a TV detective who’s worked out the culprit of a homicide instead of some little prank. ‘What did you just say?’
‘I said you’d betterwash your mouthguard,’ I reply smoothly. ‘Jeez, Oshy, open ya fucken ears.’
Tank loses it, roaring with laughter.
Oshy goes all pale.
‘It was you,’ he mutters, looking devo, like he’s never had anyone knock him down a peg or two. It feels good to see him having a sook, cos it means I’ve put him in his place, little shit. I hate upstarts.
Mosey calls to me in a vaguely warning tone, likeLay off him, Hammer, but honestly who gives a fuck what he thinks.
