My life in tights

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MEN IN TIGHTS

I knew that eventually I'd have to go shopping for a pair of proper ballet tights. What I hadn't figured on was the attractive assistant at the dancewear store twirling an elaborate jockstrap around in front of a bunch of suburban ballet mums and their daughters, bellowing: 'You'll be needing one of these. What size are you? Medium … or small?'.

'These' were supports, elastic contraptions devised to hoist the family jewels out of harm's way as the male dancer plies, jettes, pirouettes and attempts other potentially nut-cracking manoeuvres. The support accounts for the lumpy bulge you will no doubt have noticed about the nether regions of male dancers. You may also have noticed that some boys are bigger than others … although it was not unknown for cheats to resort to stuffing their support with a sock or two. Such were the initiation rites awaiting a boy bitten by the ballet bug in the back of beyond.

I grew up in Townsville, North Queensland, by all accounts a very pleasant seaside burg these days. Back then it seemed like a bit of a shithole. I'd gotten into ballet on a lark, and as an arcane way to impress a girl. Donald, a school mate of mine, was keen on one particularly tasty Grade 10 girl. I fancied another.

And as sophisticated men of Grade 11, we figured a surefire way into their leotards was to impress them with our graceful terpsichorean prowess. Unfortunately we couldn't just talk the talk; we had to dance the dance. And so we signed up as extras for Cinderella, the annual gala performance by the North Queensland Ballet, now bolstered by a couple of ungainly galahs. 

SILLY, BILLY 

Even as extras, we had to take classes at the leading regional ballet school so we wouldn't flap about like total spastics. The first few times we wore shorts. We began to learn the basics, how a ballet class unfolded. You began at the barre, and progressed through a sequence of bends, twists, glides and stretches. Then you moved to the centre, and the tough stuff began.

Naturally, we were terrible. We fudged and fumbled, groped and giggled, gawky, uncoordinated fools that we were. But from those first faltering steps, I also felt the stirrings of something I couldn't quite put my finger on, that quivering, queasy tingling that marks the start of an infatuation. After a couple of classes, it was whispered in our ear that proper male dancers - or danseurs if you wish to get technical - wore tights.

Pulling on your first pair of tights is a weird moment in the life of a relatively normal suburban small town Australian boy. It felt dangerous. Subversive. And likely to earn me some painful schoolyard taunting, if not a beating. At my high school, the real men played rugby, and possibly a spot of cricket. Also-rans like me opted for soccer (and boy, did I suck). The nerds and geeks fiddled about with Vic 20 and Commodore 64 computers or joined the chess club. Ballet was so far removed from anyone's imagination that it had no real place on the totem pole, but doubtless it was so far beyond the pale as to be underground. Basically, I was Billy Elliot.

Dancers wear tights to highlight the unadorned beauty of the human body and the purity of line ballet requires. The sheer clinging nylon prevents attempts to hide faulty technique from the hawklike gaze of the ballet master or mistress. I pulled on my first pair in the studio's little-used male changing room with trembling and trepidation.

But like some lithe Narcissus gazing into his pond, I slowly raised my eyes to the full length mirror and noticed that my legs looked rather fetching clad in navy cotton lycra. It turned out that I'd been blessed with the right kind of body for ballet: flexible hips, long legs, tapered torso. I had flat feet, but exceptionally loose ankles (which would cause me no end of heartache later but made my toes look freakishly pointed, another highly prized asset by ballet's strange standards).

But this was Australia's far north, you understand, the antipodean answer to America's deep south, where men were men, cows were cautious and sheep were scared. Townsville in those days was a hard army town with a thriving yobbo culture and an undercurrent of violence simmering beneath the surface. A town where the local weekly free-sheet once splashed with the headline: 'Poofs in the Park'. Just re-reading this paragraph makes me cringe and whisks me back to a heady, hormonal and very confusing chapter in my life. 

RUDOLF, I SAID,
POSE VAIN DEAR

Over the next few years, I would watch my father struggle with alcoholism, locking myself in my room to study so I wouldn't have to witness my parents' marriage teetering on the brink. I'd see my dad resurrect himself from the edge of suicide with born-again Christianity and I'd give it a whirl myself, joining the happy-clapping hordes who flocked each Sunday to church. And I'd take to ballet like a swan to water. I became obsessed. I pored over ballet books, watched countless films of the Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet and other legendary companies, and attended class compulsively. Our neighbours must have thought I was nuts as they watched through slats in the fence as I practiced my leaps in the backyard.

My twin heroes were Rudolph Nureyev, a coruscating genius with a magnetic stage presence who would meet a tragic end with AIDS, and Mikhael Baryshnikov, the other Russian defector, technically Nureyev's superior and captured at the height of his powers in The Turning Point, a movie I watched and watched until the videotape wore out. Much to my parents' displeasure, I would also turn down the chance to study law at the University of Queensland to take up instead one of the dozen or so spots handed out to boys each year at the Australian Ballet School. 

MIRIN BRAH? OOPS,
WRONG STORY

Donald and I didn't win rave reviews for our clumsy waltzing and precarious presages in Cinderella. But we did get to enjoy a bit of rough and fumble - or 'full crumpet' as it somehow became known - with our shapely ballerina crushes in the back of the bus as the show went on the road weekends to a succession of country towns. I was also offered a year's paid traineeship with the North Queensland Ballet (which was in the throes of becoming a proper professional outfit as Dance North. These days, it sports the trendier moniker dancenorth and enjoys a reputation as one of Australia's most innovative contemporary dance troupes).

Part of the funding came from the Queensland Arts Council, which meant we had to embark on a succession of school tours to some of the most remote outback towns and rugged mining outposts imaginable. I was teamed up with Trevor, fresh from a stint with Sydney Dance Company, short, floppy-fringed, acid-tongued and enormously doe-eyed, possibly the campest thing ever to flounce out of Oxford Street, and Susie, a small but perfectly formed ballerina who was sex on well-defined legs.

There were bigger performances with the full company but the arts council odysseys account for my most vivid memories. We would roll into town, locate the school, set up the stage and get our costumes ready. Then we'd slap on some pancake and ham it up in front of the bemused and wide-eyed students, and repeat the whole process one or two more times before calling it quits for the day. 

GAGZILLA, QUEEN OF THE
DESSERT CART

Now in towns like Mt Isa, Richmond, Hughenden, Cloncurry, Longreach, Winton, Blackall, Barcaldine, Charters Towers and Ravenswood, and many others besides, there wasn't a great deal to do at night. You drank, or you slept. So we would find ourselves in some local pub or other, where the locals congregated in sweaty wifebeaters, Stubbies shorts and thongs (the kind you wear on your feet, not the kind Trevor sported beneath his flamboyantly multicoloured overalls).

The men didn't dress up either. They would ogle Susie over their pots of XXXX beer, and she took a twisted delight in twisting her pretzel limbs into impossible shapes just to watch them pant. But they would also shoot dirty looks at Trevor and I, arty outsiders and no doubt poofs, and therefore to be reviled if not bashed.

Unfortunately, the filthier the looks became, the more outrageously Trevor would camp it up. You could see it in their eyes; torn between paroxysms of lust over Susie and the urge to beat down on Trevor and I. On more than one occasion we had to hightail it out of town at peril of grievous bodily harm, sprinting for our battered van as the lynch mob formed. This was pre-Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but the shoe certainly fit.

The Australian Ballet School was another adventure, not necessarily from the Boys' Own oeuvre. In my day, it hadn't yet taken up residence beside the Yarra River in the posh Performing Arts Centre; rather, it was accommodated in a converted tyre factory on Melbourne's Mount Alexander Road. I was lodged in a mouldy ground floor flat in North Melbourne, near the Queen Victoria Markets and amidst a burgeoning Vietnamese community. My flatmates were Brett, a second year student beset by worries about his acne, thunder thighs and child-bearing hips (his descriptions), and Bruce, a talented fellow first year, and a lovely bloke from the outskirts of Adelaide.

I MEAN TO HAVE YOU
EVEN IF IT MUST BE BURGLARY

The School, as we called it, attracted a certain species of ageing queen which couldn't resist the bulging legion of young men in tights. I suppose they fancied themselves as patrons of the arts, but patrons of the arse would be closer to the truth. They would offer meals and lodgings to young fellows who were down on their luck, with an unspoken agreement requiring payment in kind.

My circumstances were fairly exigent in those days but I eschewed the importuning of these 'Uncle Monty' types and managed to make ends meet working in a succession of Melbourne's grand old hotels at night, prowling the corridors doing turn-downs, pilfering wine, cheese, chocolate and the odd bathrobe, and almost nightly managing to barge in on people mid-bonk. As I was still a virgin at the ripe old age of 17, this turned out to be a handy crash course in sex education.

One of the most active patrons was a gravel-voiced old luvvie named Maximilian, Max for short, maximally interested in the contents of one's boxer shorts. Maxmoid, we called him, if we called him at all. Why, I have no idea.

In his wisdom, he sometimes saw fit to donate his swanky South Yarra pied-à-terre to the school's students for parties. I remember my first. A callow lad straight off the bus from Townsville (literally - a hellish three day trip that nearly ended my budding ballet career before it had begun), still settling into the big city, I overindulged in spirits and became tired and emotional.

In those days I was a pretty young thing, and in between fending off the unsolicited ministrations of Max, managed to capture the attention of a third year man-eater with the unlikely name of Cherie Dick, a willowy sexpot with big breasts and a creamy olive complexion. It was a nailed-on dead-set cert, and my best opportunity yet to rid myself of my virginity. Instead I burst into tears and demanded to be taken home. Brett was only too happy to oblige and tucked me into bed, listening to my sobbing litany of suburban dislocation and teenage angst. Our briefly flowering friendship was to end when some hours later, I thickly awoke to find him trying to wrestle my trousers down.

DON'T YOU STEP ON MY
RED POINTE SHOES

It wasn't to be my last brush with Brett. He became obsessed with me, and I took to spending as little time in the flat as possible. I'd loiter after class, practicing my spins and leaps. I'd dawdle at the hotel, drawing out my shifts as long as possible. Things finally came to a head about eight months into term, when Bruce and I heard a faint rustling in our cupboard. Smelling a rat, I put a finger to my lips and crept out of bed. I put my ear against the door and discerned a muffled groaning. I grabbed Bruce's cricket bat and flung the door back. There, with his hand down his pajama pants and a stricken rictus on his face, crouched Brett. I screamed. He curled up into a catatonic ball, star of his own fetal attraction. A week later, Bruce and I moved out.

I shacked up with Joanne, a lissom, Barbie doll blonde who would later become my wife. I'd study diligently and make good progress but somehow my infatuation was running out of steam. I'd have the opportunity to see the stars of the Australian Ballet up close and personal, extra-ing in performances of Swan Lake, Giselle and Don Quixote. I'd meet a doddering Sir Robert Helpmann, impossibly frail and literally on his last legs. I'd witness my favourite teacher and one of the best danseurs of his day, Kelvin Coe, wither away from AIDS. And I'd win the favour of Maina Gielgud - 'Mainly Feelgood' as we called her - the company's artistic director and niece of uber-thesp Sir John. After I announced my intention to hang up my tights, passion spent and beset by niggling injuries, she'd pen me a lovely letter, urging me to reconsider.

MAINLY FEELGOOD

Some time in second year, I would finally lose my virginity, fumbling beneath a fluffy doona to the crooned strains of Julio Iglesias (Joanne's choice, not mine). I'd also have one more run in with Max, in the toilets of an inner city shopping mall. Pants around my ankles, going about my business, I suddenly felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise and was seized by the conviction that I wasn't alone. I raised my eyes and leering over the cubicle wall were the beady blue eyes and Father Christmas eyebrows of Max. A grimace of recognition swept over his features and, no doubt, my own. I leaped from my porcelain perch, arse unwiped, and burst from the stall like a racehorse erupting from the Melbourne Cup gates. As I threw open the bathroom door, grabbing at my pants, the last thing I heard was a stupendous crash and an anguished moan from Max.

Two months later, I found myself in Brisbane, ballet bug cured, pondering just what the hell I would now do with my life.

And now for something completely different ...

http://soundcloud.com/djlovehandles/nolovehandlestoo
It's my blog and I'll mix if I want to. First return to the decks (well, laptop these days) for DJ Love Handles, aka Jason G, in a while. Enjoy, download, whatever. Thanks to DJ David Lam for some stonking new tunes ...

Pumping idiocy ... the short life and strange death of Zyzz

YOU MIRIN BRAH?

It might just have been one of the most beautiful bodies ever laid out on a Bangkok mortuary slab. At least on the surface. Underneath the perma-tanned skin, stretched taut over bulging muscles, was a 22-year-old heart that exploded, or simply gave out, and a system most likely ravaged by a toxic cocktail of steroids, testosterone and growth hormones.

'Bodybuilder found dead in Bangkok sauna' blared the headlines. The bodybuilder was Aziz 'Zyzz' Sergeyevich Shavershian, an exotic looking fellow of Armenian, Kurdish and Persian heritage, born in Moscow, resident of Sydney's suburb of Eastwood and bronzed habitue of Bondi beach. He was in Thailand for a month-long holiday, where he had planned to spend his time getting shredded in the gym, strutting shirtless in the streets and getting off his nut in techno clubs where he could go hog wild with his bizarre fist-pumping, grind-and-bump dance moves. He expired last Friday evening, slumped in an as-yet-unnamed sauna. Dead on arrival at Camillian Hospital in the beating heart of trendy Soi Thong Lor.

Zyzz was the typical skinny wimp of a thousand Charles Atlas ads, who, tired of getting sand kicked in his face, decided to get big. Notes Zyzz: 'Throughout high school, I was ridiculously thin, I'm talking the skinniest guy in my grade in school; people always commented on how skinny I was and I hated it. I remember feeling like a little bitch when I was out with girls, walking next to them and feeling the same size as them.'

CHESTBRAH PUMPS
 'BLUE STEEL'

The death of Zyzz has left his brother and fellow bodybuilder, Said Shavershian, bereft. 'I miss you sooo much my baby brother. I can't live without you comeback please. Don't do this to me,' said sad Said. Said, better known as - and I'm not making this up - Chestbrah, was another pumped up Adonis. The pair, and their coterie of acolytes and imitators, were a new breed of bodybuilder who eschewed competition to pursue pure admiration via social media (Zyzz's Facebook page has 72,314 likes), viral videos and sheer persistent ubiquity at beaches, rave parties and anywhere else that offered an excuse to go shirtless. 'Aesthetics', they dubbed it. It was all about getting shredded. Ripped. And to inspire 'jelly' (jealous) followers into frothing bouts of 'mirin' (admiring). It wasn't about getting roid monster huge. At least, not at first.



But the last Facebook posts of Zyzz and the recent arrest of Chestbrah for steroid possession tell another story. Chestbrah was fined A$4,000 in Parramatta Local Court for possession of anabolic steroids, along with three members of a biker gang, and looks set to lose his job as a personal trainer at Fitness First. Zyzz, meantime, was on a mission. His last Facebook posts chart his looming demise. In between links to trance and techno tracks introduced with his trademark 'fuaaaaaark', he writes on July 13: 'Off to Thailand for a month this weekend, any traveller tips so I don't get raped by ladyboys are appreciated.' ('No homo' was another of their war cries, despite their high camp, oiled-up pouting and posturing).

CHESTBRAH: NO HOMO

On July 17: 'Walked around Bangkok all day with no shirt and muay thai shirts (sic) = thai girls mirin brah. BRB massage.' On July 31, after being sent a link to a story about him in a Sydney newspaper, which details his brother's drug bust and suggests Zyzz is also into steroids, he notes: 'Second page of australias biggest newspaper. hahahaha. mainstream zyzz is mainstream. They clearly mirin.' A post on August 2 hints at a darker path: 'one year ago, and 10kgs lighter. 100kg now (90kg here) this size is the sweet spot for girls but fuck that, arnold status here I come.' Arnold Schwarzenegger was his all time hero. There is pathos and a hint of obituary in his final post on August 4, where in a shill for his own brand of protein shake, Protein of the Gods, he notes: 'Tasted like the heavens fuaaaaaaaark.'

ZYZZ & NARCISSUS:
NO HOMO TOO

The other chief activity in the lives of Zyzz, Chestbrah and fellow aesthete Narcissus was 'trolling', similar to the annoying internet pursuit but apparently carried over into real life. Check out their puerile, self-obsessed exploits here (Zyzz): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YsGJz3j4os here (Chestbrah): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74C-Vb4WLrU and here (Narcissus): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px3CnxxGDJ8&feature=related Indeed, amongst the 'mirers' of Zyzz, his death is still suspected of being the ultimate troll. The Bangkok Medical Examiner thought otherwise, confirming a massive heart attack, although thus far no autopsy report has been released to reveal what might have been circulating through Zyzz's stretched network of veins.

SHREDDED BRAH

His parents believe a recently revealed 'congenital heart condition' was to blame. A close friend thought otherwise. New Zealand mate Tim Sharky said he had urged Zyzz to slow down. 'This is a warning for any of you boys coming to Thailand. Thailand is a country with it all … girls, steroids, growth hormone, it's all here and it's cheap. I spoke to him the other day and he looked like a kid in a candy shop.'

With their peacock preening and strutting and flexing and pumping, Zyzz, Chestbrah and Narcissus represent an Australia I scarcely recognize. Their bizarre lexicon and idiot savant social media savvy is as fascinating as it is repulsive. But their admiration of mythology and ancient gods should have warned them of the perils of hubris. Mirin? No, just sucked into the mire.

Primal screaming and a stoned rose … Fuji, Mani and Me

Just what is it that you want to do?
We wanna be free.
We wanna be free to do what we wanna do.
And we wanna get loaded.
Primal Scream, Loaded

THE FOO FIGHTERS ARRIVE AT FUJI
IN THEIR STRETCH UFO

Japan's Fuji Rock festival is something of a misnomer. It's been a long time since anyone rock and rolled upon the hallowed slopes of Fuji-san. The festival is now held every August at
Naeba ski resort in Niigata Prefecture; a brisk shot on the bullet train out of Tokyo. But you can see why the name stuck. Better to identify your festival with a world famous icon that is firmly wedged in the id and an integral part of the Japanese psyche, even if it means telling a geographical porkie pie. After all, it's the place that launched a thousand guidebooks.

Fame is funny like that. The trend justifies the means. Fame can cause dislocation, alienation, loneliness - and many have sought to fill those hollow places with chemicals of every description.  Fame can also make you act like a complete asshole. Lady Gaga made one of the few sensible comments of her short public life when she dubbed this effect: 'The Fame Monster'.

BACTERIAL CELLS DIVIDE
IN THE TOXIC GLASTO OOZE

Fuji Rock is mostly good, clean fun, with the merest smattering of mud; a kind of Glastonbury-lite, featuring three days of world class acts, tens of thousands of people braving the inevitable rain to have the time of their lives, lashings of fast food and cheap beer, all set against Japan's unfailing politeness and unquestioned weirdness. For evidence of the former, I cite the calm and orderly queues to use the relatively spotless port-a-loos - not, I suggest, an experience familiar to those who go to rock festivals in America or Europe. Even the Fuji mud seems more civilized somehow, compared to the seething bacterial ooze that poops the Glasto party.


So I'm slogging through a better class of bog as misty drizzle descends on this humid August night, at my first ever Fuji, on the way to the White Stage to watch the incredible double-header of Coldplay and Foo Fighters. Chris Martin is in rare form as he romps through the band's impressive oeuvre of Everyman anthems, stopping between songs to throw in the first bit from Best of You, the Foo's huge new hit at the time. 'I've got another confession …' Martin growls, Grohl-like.

ARTIST'S IMPRESSION 

Grohl-like. If it was a Facebook button, we'd click it. We all would. Everyone loves Dave Grohl, the easy going and uber-talented former Nirvana drummer who by now had cast off Kurt Cobain's long shadow and become a rock colossus in his own right; a goofy, goateed yet mesmeric figure with an uncanny ear for a power chord and a pithy lyric. Grohl refuses to wear his angst on his sleeve, and looks like he can't quite believe his luck. He is approaching the height of his powers, and on this night we all know we've seen a special show. As the last hands-in-the-air anthem fades, a surging human tide sweeps us towards the exit. The faint remaining traces

KISS ME, I'M FAMOUS.
ER, HOLD THE TONGUE.

of riffs rumble like distant thunder in the hills. The mist suffuses everything with an otherworldly glow. It's an awesome moment, floating along on air, far above the mud, high on the fine rare rush the best live music elicits; that adrenalized endorphin alchemy that sadly is all too fleeting. Later, there may be other chemicals in the mix. A big Hong Kong contingent has come over to let its hair down, and it is strongly rumored that among their number are lovable rogues and purveyors of proscribed substances. Some of our posse elect to rough it, erecting tents amongst the bedraggled muddy multitudes squatting on steep wet hillsides. I manage to bag a futon at a friend's place in town (though sharing a basement shoebox and its unventilated toilet with three big ugly blokes subsisting for days on a diet of beer and kebabs is rough enough stuff).

WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS A MANI ...
GILLESPIE FATHER, FOR I HAVE SINNED

While the next three days will get decidedly messier in many silly ways, at this point there is nothing stronger than a couple of Kirin beers under my belt as we wander into the Palace of Wonder - a bohemian collection of tented bars, carnival barkers and burlesque reviews set amongst giant apocalyptic sculptures welded by real gypsies from car parts. This has become our rallying point, watering hole, and a suitably surreal setting for what happens next. For no sooner have I secured a seat and procured a drink than I become aware of a loud voice behind me, making derogatory if not defamatory comments about some poor fellow in a flat and whiny Mancunian accent.

ANT MUSIC MADE A COMEBACK
IN THE PALACE OF WONDER

I wonder if the cast of Corrie is in town for a jolly. But even the most shocking dialogue on Coronation Street would pale before this stream-of-stupidness ranting. I turn around to see who is making all the noise and I am gobsmacked to realise that it is being directed at me. I do a double-take, befuddled by this utterly unprovoked attack. My friends have not yet joined me. Is it, to paraphrase Dave Grohl, because I'm alone and an easy target?

To this day, I don't know what set Mani off on his mother of all rants. Had I pushed in front of him to buy a drink? Stepped on his toe?  Perhaps the melted years of gargantuan drug guzzling had finally come home to roost and his brain had broken. The only other possibility is that he took exception to my very lairy shirt; a horrid floral thing I picked up in Phuket, emblazoned with outsized orange hibiscus: 100% Mambo meets Magnum PI.

MANI HAPPY RETURNS 

I size up my tormentor, who is now giving me a very slow motion, exaggerated version of what English and Australian readers will know as 'the forks'. It's basically flipping the bird times two and it doesn't carry a pleasant connotation. He then launches into a groin-grabbing, pelvic thrusting routine, executed with such glowering malice that my sphincter gives a twitch and I feel Michael Jackson turn in his grave.

Mani is not a huge chap. He doesn't look terribly fit either. But what he lacks in size he makes up for with an aura of demented bravado and a scary saturnine stare. This is the face of Caligula, of a man who has journeyed to the outer limits of debauchery and returned, damaged yet hardened to the point of being indestructible. He's wiry and almost certainly wired on something. His shapeshifter face is the hue of a ripe tomato, his hair the matted, sweaty remnants of something Moddish. Call it the lunatic fringe.  Most unsettling of all are his truly, madly, deeply-disturbed eyes. They are cartoon crazy eyes set in diseased dark circles that could have been inked in by Dante. He continues to carry on, shouting and gesturing, and none of it strikes me as the product of a sane or rational mind. Nearby, a band launches into its set and a wall of harsh chords advances. I'm stuck between rock and a nutcase.

I HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT

I turn back to my drink, hoping he will go away if I ignore him. But the gobby fucker just won't stop and finally I snap. I'm against violence as a general principle, but I also support the maxim that if push comes to shove, it's advisable to hit first and hit hard. Which isn't to suggest I am some sort of hard man - however I did spend some time at the boxing gym as a younger man, in between ballet lessons. But the red mist is most definitely descending. I ask him what his problem is, but he continues to mug and gurn and gesture. I can't fathom it. Is he trying to provoke me into punching him? I summon all my powers of rapier repartee, and snap: 'Why don't you just piss off.' Adrenaline surges, but not the nice kind. I clench my fists and scan his face, both for targets and for some sign that this has all been a silly misunderstanding or a prank. Is someone getting the best of you? Not tonight. Especially not this rude punk runt, who has now officially asked for it with a gilt-edged, handwritten invitation. Call me the Fool Fighter. Let's get it on.

But my sucker punch is still born, as not for the first time during these mad three days at Fuji, the weirdness deepens. A gaggle of Jap girls into synthesizers interrupts this shrieking of nothing. They are dressed in their Madchester Hacienda best, acid house smiley face t-shirts nd leggings, football casual shellsuits. One girl even totes some glow sticks. And they are all screaming something at the rude runt. I can't quite make it out. It sounds like 'Manny' or 'Mini' or 'Money'. 'Stoneru Roses,' one nods approvingly, waving an original sleeve of the Stone Roses' self-titled first album. 'Foors Glod,' asserts another. 'I am the Lesserection.'

I HAVE OF LATE, WHEREFORE 
I KNOW NOT, LOST ALL MY MIRTH. 
MAYBE IT'S IN THIS BOX.

I'm starting to get a bad feeling about all of this, cogs slowly clicking into place in my head, when one of my best mates leans over and whispers, 'That's Mani! From Primal Scream? They're playing tomorrow night. Shit, man, what are you trying to do, beat up their bass player?' I need a quick reality check. Am I really in some far flung Japanese valley, surrounded by retro ravers, getting ready to take a swing at genuine rock royalty?

I mean, Mani, man! Of course I'd heard of Mani. Gary 'Mani' Mounfield, party animal non pareil and partner in crime of ex-Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher. Mani the member of Freebass, a supergroup also featuring New Order's Peter Hook. Mani of the hammered cameo in 24 Hour Party People, the Madchester movie. Mani whose driving, funk-laced bass grooves set the mood for two of modern music's most important bands.

SCREAMADELICA

But I'm confused. How can a major dude like Mani behave like such a low-rent thug? Surely even by the television-defenestrating standards of rock star bad behavior, there can be scant kudos for wandering a rock festival alone, looking for random strangers to humiliate. Primal Scream. Now I remembered; they were last minute additions to the bill after some other band dropped out. I look over at Mani, mobbed by fans, happy as, well, Mani. He still looks wrecked, but now he's purring like a pussycat, getting his ego tickled. A loopy, shit-eating grin plastered across his ravaged dial. I consider saying something to him, but the moment has passed, and he probably wouldn't even remember. What if I had hauled off and thumped him? Would a posse of bodyguards have materialized; beefy genies summoned to rip me limb from limb? Would a punch have been pointless in any case? In his righteously twisted state, normal rules of pain likely don't apply.

Primal Scream played the next night, and they sucked. Maybe Mani was still mid-bender, or in the grip of some crushing comedown. Perhaps their last-minute inclusion found them under-rehearsed and ill-prepared. It was a disjointed, shapeless and largely groove-free performance. Even their rabid Japanese fans were bewildered. They would play at Fuji Rock again, a few years later. They would redeem themselves with a mental, epic set that would blow the roof off.

Hard to fathom, but I guess the rock gods don't always let the sun shine upon their chosen few. And Mani? I didn't see him again, apart from onstage. I have read a couple of dozen interviews with him since, and he does a fine line in gnostic gibberish and musical babble, but I'm no closer to knowing what makes him tick. I never did find out what I had done to earn his ire, or if I had done anything at all.

I suspect, like so many fame monsters who thrive on attention, who outside the limelight are ciphers, Mani feels a bit empty. Maybe what it all boils down to is this: he wants to be adored.

I DON'T WANT TO LOSE YOUR LOVE

Macau's 'Whore Wars' and other juicy morsels

I have yet to set foot in Macau since it became Las Vegas-by-the-sea-on-steroids, with its Wynns and losers, its shimmering Mirages and shifting Sands, its addled Adelson monuments to dubious taste and its massive, mounting stacks of cash. I prefer to recall the sleepy Portuguese enclave of yesteryear, a place of cheap wine and lunches that lingered, of pousadas and cobbles and decaying colonial charm, siestas, fiestas and gigantic garlic prawns.

LEAL SENADO SQUARE: MODELLED
AFTER JIANG ZEMIN'S COMBOVER

So many memories: jumping on the jetfoil at 3am on a whim after a long night in Wanchai, lazy feasts at Fernando's, DJ-ing in front of a crowd of almost 2,000 people at a crazed rave party and being given a hand-painted t-shirt by my one and only groupie (short, bad teeth and unfortunately male). I look back less fondly on a night spent in the emergency ward after some local lothario decided to assuage his jealous rage by smashing a heineken bottle over the head of one of my best friends.


My last trip to Macau was just before China gave the nod to get kitsch quick. Back when Stanley Ho was the only game in town, the Hotel Lisboa the ugliest edifice for miles, and instead of Cirque de Soleil there was just the circus of the Leal Senado, with its princelings and potentates and their port-soaked posturings. It was to the Lisboa that I was drawn for a story which originally appeared in Australian Playboy and the SCMP's Postmagazine, and which involved an altogether different species of 'ho'.

GET KITSCH QUICK

Pitched battles were erupting almost nightly between mainland Chinese prostitutes and their Eastern European rivals and between the gangs that ran them. At stake was the coveted hunting ground of the Lisboa. I spent several days skulking in shadows and doing my best impersonation of a John, fascinated by the ups and downs of the world's oldest profession, risking the wrath of gimlet-eyed pimps.


I still treasure the expense form I submitted upon completing the story … a pithy document requesting reimbursement for some thousands of Hong Kong dollars, painstakingly itemized, with each ledger entry simply stating 'prostitute'. Here is the story:


THEY venture out at dusk in packs, jackets flapping like bat wings as an icy wind roars out of the north. They swoop and chirp and chatter, sending out sonar pings as they swap notes on last night's pickings. And as blackness swallows the sleepy Portuguese enclave that recently became part of China, they are drawn to the nectar of the improbable rococo confection that is the Hotel Lisboa; a beacon of bad taste that eclipses the rest of Macau's dizzy neon free-for-all.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT WARNED THEM
NOT TO TAKE THE ORANGE SUNSHINE

The Lisboa resembles a wedding cake mated with the mother ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You wonder what fevered acid flashback inspired its architect. You almost expect doe-eyed aliens to glide silently from its belly. Instead, I find sloe-eyed Vera and Katerina loitering near the side entrance, sporting scowls that might clot their mascara.

It's unseasonably cold for a spring evening. They'd like nothing better than to step inside, where it's warm and awash with cashed-up chumps. But they can't. Vera and Katerina come from Minsk, and have become unwitting combatants in Macau's 'Whore Wars'. It boils down to a triad turf skirmish. One faction of the powerful 14K gang controls the mainland Chinese prostitutes who flock down from the border and get the run of the fertile corridors inside the hotel and casino. Another gang has dibs on the lucrative trade in exotic ex-Soviets - many of whom, with their blonde manes, endless legs and strange accents are as alien to the locals as anything from Steven Spielberg's oeuvre. The Russians are permitted to trawl the dark lanes outside the Lisboa but must not dare cross its portal.

HOW MUCH FOR THE
PORTUGUESE BREAKFAST?

The result is a demilitarized zone of sorts, policed by pimps in cheap suits and huge tattoos. Sighs one veteran hotelier: 'Every so often you get some new girls who don't know the rules. They go inside the hotel and the shit really hits the fan. Cat fights. Scratches. Girls clobbering each other with mobile phones. Every so often there's a token crackdown and they round them all up, but it's always back to business as usual within a day or two.' Indeed, the world's oldest profession seems one of the few industries immune to the changes sweeping post-handover Macau. The tide of thugs kneecapping and shotgunning each other over casino rake-offs has been stemmed. The lugubrious Portuguese civil servants nodding off into plates of chorizo after three hour lunches have been replaced by local toadies. Even the gambling monopoly of Dr Stanley Ho, which long seemed carved in stone, is being dismantled. But prostitution thrives.

BIG PIMPIN': THE WORLD'S
TALLEST JOHN

One local journalist explains: 'In Macau, only pimping is illegal. So you find that hookers are extremely aggressive because they don't fear being caught. They will even wait outside the lifts in the Lisboa and when a man enters, they jump in with him.' Vera, 23, and Katerina, 25, don't seem that desperate tonight. They register at least four distinct expressions in the seconds after I approach them: Smiles. Calculation. Confusion. Hostility. When I explain my purpose is other than sexual, the shutters slam down. They might be young, but they are hard. After we settle upon suitable remuneration, they agree to answer some questions.

How long have they been in Macau? 'Three weeks'. How's tricks? 'Business is good'. What about the Chinese competition? 'Fucking bitches,' snarls Vera. 'They are not as beautiful as us,' sniffs Katerina, who has sky-blue eyes and golden hair swept up into an elaborate coiffure. 'Chinese men go crazy for us,' she adds, looking down at the fishnets criss-crossing her long slim legs. Groups of women, always in twos and threes, mostly blonde, drift past, hips swaying. 'It's safer in groups,' Katerina adds.

I SEE YOU BABY 

Same place, another night. I'm talking to Nadezhda. Tall, blonde (but with black roots), a former chemistry student from Vladivostok. She becomes more communicative after I fish a crisp HK$500 note from my wallet. I wonder if it's the most money she's ever made standing up. 'Come. It's safer to talk over here,' she says, leading me into the dank shadows beneath a flyover. The stale urine stink adds an acrid edge to the conversation. I ask her about the demilitarized zone and the mainlanders. 'Yes, it's true. They hate us and we hate them. That's just the way it is. They get the best places to work, but we are more beautiful than them.' Is it dangerous? She smiles. 'Are you joking? After Vladivostok, this is like heaven.' Nadezhda charges HK$1,000 to $3,000 a trick, depending on the customer and how many other girls are vying for attention. When her visa expires in a week, she plans to go and work in Bangkok and Japan, and then perhaps another crack at Macau.

NEIGH HO, NEIGH HO
IT'S OFF TO WORK WE GO

Inside the Lisboa after midnight, the dark heart of Dr Ho's empire is beating furiously. His monopoly on gambling in Macau stretches back decades and the oft-married Septuagenarian's vaguely spectral presence reaches into all corners of life here. The decor is equal parts ostentation and desperation; scuffed marble, dusty chandeliers and toilets where the paper is dispensed one sheet at a time. Bellhops in red lederhosen hover by the doors in search of tips, amid a swirling miasma of sweat, lust, fear and greed. The floor plan is circular - a fleshly carousel of feminine wiles. Round and round they go, trolling for tricks. I start to feel dizzy, the clickety-clack of high heels becoming hypnotic. Successful girls usher inebriated men into lifts. The rest set out on another lap. I can't manage to get a single one to speak to me.

DOES MY BUM LOOK
HORRORSHOW IN THIS?

Helen Kwok, the hotel's marketing manager, says she worries about the flagrant importuning of punters but 'there's not much we can do'. Local laws are toothless and there's too much money sloshing back into the economy for anyone to lose any sleep. One senior hotelier says Russian gangsters followed their countrywomen to the enclave, leading to dramatic and bloody shootouts between these interlopers and the local triads.

Feeling dirty and fed up with the whole scene, I retreat to my hotel's bar. All around are clusters of Slavic looking women, with heavy make-up and cheekbones that could slice you open. The Canadian band, straight-faced, strikes up Boney M's Rah Rah Rasputin. It's hard to tell if it's a rebuke or a salute.

An idiot's guide to building a house in Thailand

IN THE NEXT WAR ON DRUGS, DEALERS
WERE IMPALED ON THEIR OWN KALAE 

When the men on their motorbikes finally came, black balaclavas pulled down over granite faces, guns tucked under sweaters, no one in the village was really surprised. Not even Cousin Daeng and Cousin Bum, who were laughing and tossing back lao khao, rice whisky, as the bullets scythed them down. Not even my wife's brother, Pi Met, who reportedly was next on the list.

Ah yes. The list. The list of 'drug dealers' proclaimed as holy writ by the Dear Leader, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. A list every bit as sinister and risible as anything dredged from the dark reaches of Kafka's fevered imagination.

As a matter of fact, Cousin Daeng and Cousin Bum were drug dealers. Sure, they sold a bit of weed to tourists looking for a toke or two. They sold the odd yaba pill too when the occasion presented itself, no doubt. But they were strictly small time. And they were also farmers, and home owners, and husbands, and fathers.

It was a still and sticky morning, barely past breakfast. Flies buzzed around the pooling blood as the makeshift ambulance collected the bodies. The local police didn't want to know. 'Take them to the temple,' they said. Cousin Bum's wife sobbed, crumpled and confused. Cousin Daeng's wife was away working in Bangkok to help pay for their daughter's school fees. Bum's kids ran in circles, wide-eyed, unsure if this was all a game.

M&Ms ... METH AND MADNESS

And by now my wife was frantic. 'Honey, we have to pull down the house'. 'Pull down the house? What are you talking about? We haven't even finished building the house. And my parents are supposed to be coming to stay soon. Remember, those nice people who gave us the money to build it in the first place?'
'Yes, but you don't understand. They are going to kill my brother.'
'What? That's ridiculous. Your brother hasn't done anything wrong.'
'It doesn't matter. We've got to pull down the house, and he's got to go away for a while.'

My lips twitched with a thousand reasons why none of this could be real. But something in my wife's tone gave me pause. 'This isn't the time to argue. You listen to me. This is the time to shut up.'

How had this quiet village in the gently rolling foothills of Chiang Rai, with its shimmering rice fields and somnolent ways, become the scene of a reign of terror? There had to be some mistake. But there wasn't. This was the war on drugs. This was as real as it gets. And it was getting far too close to home.

I felt like someone was waging a war on my sanity, on two fronts. Even as our dream of home ownership in Bangkok was going to hell in a sticky rice basket thanks to a vicious ex-military conman who saw the stupid farang coming from a mile away, so our dream home in Chiang Rai, a painstaking teakwood recreation of the classic Lanna home my wife's grandparents had inhabited, was crumbling before our eyes.

A couple of months earlier, Thaksin had declared his fatwa on drug dealers. It hadn't seemed much more than a headline back then. Like some comic caped avenger, the Prime Minister boasted of how he could leap intractable social problems with a single bound.

Pi Met wasn't a drug dealer. He was the salt of the earth. In the five years I'd known him, the worst I'd ever seen him do was sell the odd illegal lottery ticket to supplement his meagre military pension. He was an ex-soldier, border patrol. He'd given the best years of his life for his country, and his left leg above the knee besides. On a dawn patrol one hot jungle morning on the Cambodian border, he had heard the terrible telltale click as he stepped on a land mine. He had waved his men away before taking the brunt of the blast. Now he hobbled about on a cheap fake leg that chafed at his bandaged stump. But he never complained. Just got a faraway look in his eyes sometimes.

He'd given the best years of his life for his country. And now that country wanted him dead. Because he was on the list. That fucking list.  What a joke.

Pi Met owned about 10 rai of prime rice land, roughly half way between Chiang Rai town and the Burmese border. He sold half a rai to my wife and I, at less than market value, so we could build our home. Some years earlier, he had sold another small parcel to a neighbour, who decided to renege on the deal. Money was owed. Face was lost. Words had been exchanged. Bad blood persisted, along with a state of cold war.

SMART ALEC CAPTION UNNECESSARY

We will never know for sure. But it seems likely that this neighbour, jealous of the big teak house being erected on Pi Met's land, or simply suffused with spite, or perhaps both, had had a quiet word to the local constabulary. And now Pi Met was on the list. So he had to go away. And our house, our unfinished house, with its gleaming teak floors and rough-hewn teak clapboard walls and bueng wow
(kite-shaped) roof tiles and classic kalae, had to come down.

OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR 

Friends and family pitched in. Each board wrenched from its frame twisted the knife a little harder in my heart. But each nail prised loose was likely one less in Pi Met's coffin. Within a couple of days, nothing but concrete poles and joists remained. The roof tiles were stacked in a friend's backyard shed. The timber divided up and stashed under canvas in the dark recesses beneath several nearby homes.

By the time the war on drugs ended, more than 2,000 'dealers' would have been summarily executed without trial, as many again arrested and jailed. Over 300,000 addicts would surrender and enter treatment programs.

The scourge of methamphetamine abuse is just as real and perhaps even more widespread today. Our Lanna house remains scattered over a smattering of backyards. Our Lanna dream lies in tatters.

The stag night, the greedy pig and the stripper's hammy

HANDS IN THE AIR AND
SPREAD 'EM

There comes a time in many a young man's life when he decides to settle down, tie the knot and put his footloose and fancy free days behind him. But before arriving at the altar and proceeding on towards the dubious attractions of matrimony, there is that tortuous ordeal to navigate popularly known as the stag night, or if you prefer, the buck's night or bachelor party.

For reasons now lost in the mists of time, no stag night is regarded as complete unless the services of a stripper or two have been engaged, preferably those armed with a fearsome array of unfeasibly large marital aids and sporting assorted exotic costumery. Unseemly consumption of alcohol is de rigueur, and apparently it behooves one's (soon to be former) friends to conceive an array of puerile pranks with points awarded for cruelty, imagination and potential to ruin the wedding photos.

Now in these days of legalised brothels and above-board sleaze, when every other corner seems to boast some cheekily named sex shop or naughty knickers emporium, engaging the services of said strippers is no doubt as simple as letting your fingers do the walking. But back in my day, which is to say the late 80s, one had to be somewhat more circumspect, not least since the Fitzgerald Inquiry into Police Corruption was drawing to its scandalous tall-poppy-lopping close.

A more apt name for this painful ritual would be the lamb's night, for the hapless groom is led like a yearling to the slaughter, not knowing precisely what cruel fate lies in store but instinctively fearing the worst. And so it was that a passel of rowdy journo mates and assorted other friends and family members rounded me up after work late one afternoon and whisked me off to some watering hole in the hilly Brisbane district of Paddington to spend a couple of hours forcing toxic cocktails down my throat while working themselves up into a frothing frenzy.

Once suitably lubricated, we adjourned to a nearby house - whose, in truth, I have forgotten - and amid much smirking, nudging of elbows and digging of ribs, settled down to wait for the main attraction. We didn't have to wait long. The suburban evening's slumber was rent by the banshee shriek of a police siren at full volume, as up into the driveway, Starsky and Hutch style, an unmarked police 'Q' car screeched. There was a shockingly loud rap on the door, and it opened to reveal a more than passably attractive if not particularly convincing Queensland police constable in full dress uniform, hat jauntily cocked and fearsome truncheon raised.

HOW TO INSPECT A
TORN HAMMY

Obviously tipped off by some shameless snitch, PC Prod made a beeline for me, jabbing me back towards the sofa with each exaggerated thrust of her truncheon. 'You are under arrest,' she barked, 'for being a very, very bad boy'. She then launched into a routine which could charitably be described as erotic. In my addled state, somewhere between anaesthetised and traumatised, I seem to remember truncheons boldly going where no truncheons had gone before, amid persistent attempts to separate me from my trousers. Her come-hither stride was only broken when a particularly high kick ended with a painful cry and her collapse to the floor. Alas, the star turn had pulled a hamstring. Gathering the shed remnants of her uniform, her truncheon, handcuffs and whatever was left of her dignity, she hobbled off stage left, into the arms of the unamused, burly boyfriend who had suddenly appeared on the scene. Through my haze, I noted fistfuls of dollars being forked over and the irate bodyguard assuaged with generous tributes of booze.

Of course that little setback didn't mark the end of the proceedings. Oh no. There were more pubs to be crawled before the grand finale, which involved me being blindfolded and shoved off the edge of Mt Coot-tha then being being stripped and tied to a tree in the middle of Toowong Cemetery - a popular spot at the time with satanists bent on practicing their dark arts. My 'mates' then abandoned me for what felt like hours. And though I didn't end up a human sacrifice, I can report that some sick bastard pissed all over my legs.

THE PHANTOM LEG-PISSER
OF THE CEMETERY?

End of story? Not quite. One blabbermouth recounted the injured stripper saga to the newspaper's gossip columnist, who obliged with a lewd snippet the following day. Next thing we knew, the newsroom was crawling with anti-corruption officials determined to get to the bottom (and presumably other parts) of the matter. For it transpired that while PC Prod may have been ersatz, her boyfriend and minder was anything but. In fact, he was an on-duty detective, using his police vehicle not to pursue criminals but to ferry his nubile young charge to stripping gigs all over our fair city.

We held our tongues. The cop lost his job. And presumably the stripper's hammy eventually healed.