Stuff about me

Not long after moving to Perth my mate and I found an apartment to share and moved in.  We did a couple of brief stints in backpackers hostels, which was fun, but it was time to move on.  The apartment was in Osborne Park, or Ossy Park, about 13km from the CBD.  It was a nice enough apartment that was priced within our unemployment benefits budget.

My mates parents lived in Perth, which was the reason we hitchhiked over from Newcastle (NSW).  Apparently when he was younger he was involved with a drama academy.  Getting up on stage was far from interest to me but I tagged along with him anyway for want of something better to do.  The woman that was teaching at the academy was still there from when my mate previously attended.  We were introduced to everyone.  Attendance at the academy consisted in taking part in lots of acting exercises and rehearsals for several performances per year.

I took part in most of the exercises but, for the most part, couldn’t be convinced to take a part in any of the plays.  I say for the most part because I had a brief walk on role in one play that I thought I sucked in.  I remember my Father telling me stories about him doing some lighting work for a club in Sydney when he was younger.  With this in mind I started doing back stage work and ended up Back Stage Manager.  A title that sounded more impressive then the work I felt I did.

I stayed on partly because I really enjoyed the buzz from the live performances and the social scene.  I’d been raised and thus far lived in a predominately male environment so socialising with females was very appealing.  This was more of a pill stage then a drinking stage.  Sure when we thew unofficial cast/crew parties there was alcohol but my escape of choice at the times was pills.  I was under the belief that I could maintain this without anyone finding out.  To the best of my knowledge I was successful at that endeavor.  The only thing I had to be careful of was not taking too many at once because one of the side effects were hallucinations.  Other than these pills I hadn’t had much experience with hallucinations.  They tended to consist of scary things which experience taught me led to embarrassing situations with me running around pointing out crazy things that only I could see.  Obviously not a situation that was desirable when I was coordinating lights, curtains and set changes during a public performance.

It was at the academy that I met the woman that was to become my first wife and mother to my older two children.  It all started slowly.  Mary had a car and frequently gave my mate and I a lift home after sessions at the academy.  The public transport situation to our place wasn’t great at the time.  I later found out the reason that she was giving us lifts home was because she liked my friend.  This was after Mary’s and my friendship had developed and I was solid enough in the relationship to find that funny.

The relationship started slowly.  We hugged and held each other on several occasions but it was a while before our first kiss.  I don’t recall the time frame but later I told her that I wasn’t certain what love was but that I loved her.  For me that was a huge step.  It would have been the first time in a number of years that I’d said it to anyone.  She told me she loved me too and I was the happiest I’d felt for as long as I could remember.  It didn’t occur to me that perhaps she said it because I said it first.

Things flourished from there.  My mate ended up dating someone that he’d dated in his youth.  He ended up keeping the apartment and I moved into a caravan in the backyard of Mary’s parents place so we could save some money.  We later married in about 1993.  At this point I was more of a social drinker, smoked pot a little and maintained a fairly minimal pill intake.

Not long before we married we found an apartment.  As it turns out it was in a block of apartments across the road from where my mate and I were living.  We lived there for a year or so then bought a house in Balga.  At the time it was a cheap suburb with a lot of Government sponsored housing.  According to a neighbor a lot of the houses in the area, including ours used to belong to air force and were used to house service men.  It wasn’t exactly a pretty house but it was ours, well actually it was mostly the banks.

My pot and pills intake started increasing while we were living there and I ended up spending a lot of time away from the house with friends.  If I was at the house I was often out the back in the shed keeping to myself.  Another form of escapism that took many hours of my time was IRC (Internet Relay Chat, precursor to such things as ICQ, MSN messenger, etc).  I had a group of online friends that I spent a lot of time keeping up with.  Some located around Australia and some in North America.

Mary soon picked up the IRC bug and found her own channel to chat in and made friends of their own.  There was little crossover between her online friends and mine.  My devotion of time to IRC kept us apart for significant periods of time.  Mary’s devotion of time to IRC widened that gap further.

Around this time, June 1994, our first son was born.  To us he was perfect but over time relatives started showing concern for his development.  I know I didn’t put in any effort to researching parenthood and to the best of my knowledge neither did Mary.  Sure we attended some prenatal classes but that was about it.

To this date I don’t really have a name for his condition but I’ve heard Mary mention Selective mutism.  It’s strange to observe, if I try and have a conversation with him it can be a great struggle to get a word or two from him.  Conversely watching from a distance he’s chats happily with some others.  I first noticed him chatting happily a lot later when he, his sister and my eldest from my second marriage were playing together in a room.

Up until fairly recently I’d assumed the reason behind his condition was related to my drug taking and carried a great amount of guilt for a long time.  I was at a point for a number of years that he was ‘just a bit different’ and that there was nothing actually wrong with him, after all not all kids are the same.

Several years later, when I was with the woman that was to become my second wife, we got into quite a heated argument over my son.  She was convinced that there was something wrong with him and specialists should be involved. I maintained that there was nothing wrong.  This was odd for a couple of reasons.  One reason was that we rarely, all throughout our pre, during and post marriage years had an argument that led to me losing my patience like I did that night.  The other thing that I now think is odd is that by this time he would have been about three or four years old and I suspect I was the only one that thought he was OK.

Pre, and during, my marriage to Mary she’d mentioned some of her own personal issues that she had gone through and it hadn’t occurred to me that this may be in any way related to his condition.  More recently, last year, Mary spent some time in hospital for reasons relating to her issue.

Since then I’ve rethought my stance on his condition and while not actually blaming Mary for being responsible it did cause me to rethink the situation.  Perhaps there was more then one reason, or perhaps the reason was completely unrelated to both of us.  To some extent this was a great weight off my mind.  I suspect there is still guilt there in the back of my mind but like a lot of things if I go looking and find something I don’t want to see how will I deal with it?

We also had a daughter in late 1995.  All indications were that she was a perfectly normal child and to this date there has been nothing to contradict that.  Granted her upbringing has been far from perfect, something I can relate to, and there are still things about it I’m learning but I’m sure that will come up in a later entry.

Looking back it may well have been before our daughter was born that the marriage was starting to breakdown, at least in my eyes.  At the time I was happy to put it out of my mind.  Maybe I was too wrapped up in myself.

In the early days of the marriage we kept going to the drama academy but for us that started slowing down as we started breeding.

I think it was around this time I ‘discovered’ my bisexuality.  A later discussion with a gay male suggested that my ‘discovery’ was actually me admitting it to myself.  I guess he’s had more experience in that particular area than I had but I had previously assumed and believed that I was heterosexual.  It was all very new and exciting but I didn’t really act on it in any form or intimate way.

I don’t recall exactly where it fits in the timeframe but there was a brief period where Mary had decided to take a holiday in Melbourne by herself.  This made me a little suspicious and luckily for me my, at the time, in-laws offered to look after the kid/s.  It was shortly after that episode Mary and I had a conversation and I found out that the reason our marriage wasn’t working was due to an issue that could have been avoided prior to the marriage.  I have unequivocally no regrets having both children but it appears now that the marriage was destined to failure from before it began.

It took me a little while to find a new apartment to move into.  I took very little with me and had to buy most essentials again.  I took the car because at the time I was working as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut and naturally needed the car to maintain that.  I took the computer too. To say the least I was pretty bitter about the whole arrangement.  It probably wasn’t the most fiscally wise move to make but I let her have the house.  I think her parents helped her catch up with the payments on the house and she made a small profit on it when she sold it later.

As it turned out it ended up being a good move.  After a period of taking too many drugs and drinking too much I woke up to myself and met the woman that was to become my second wife.  That eventually ended in separation but not before we were both blessed with two great kids.  These leads into a different section of the blog so I’ll leave it there for now.

During 2000 I lived in Newcastle, NSW.  I was staying at a Salvation Army Men’s Hostel.  Full board, bed and some meals, was $155/fn.  I don’t remember how much unemployment benefits were back then but by the time I’d paid my board and bought tobacco for the fortnight there wasn’t much left for entertainment.  I’m not sure how, at least initially, but I still managed to find money to get pissed, stoned and high on pills.

I got along well with the staff at the hostel and in turn was treated to the oaccasional favour.  The hostel had a curfew and if you weren’t inside before then you had to spend the night on the street.  Additionally if you were considered to be intoxicated you had to spend the night in the ‘Tank’.  The Tank was a room with a handfull of beds, all plastic lined in a room separated from the rest of the accommodation.  If you were condemned to the Tank you didn’t eat in the dining room with the rest of the occupants and didn’t get use of the TV room or recreational room (a room that had a pool table).  Many a night I came in either after curfew and/or intoxicated.  The staff knew that I wasn’t a trouble maker and usually told me to go straight to bed.

I stayed there for a while and was offered a position in the kitchen.  There were two roles for occupants in the kitchen.  One was dishbitch, the dishbitches helped with the dishes after each meal and didn’t have to pay for their meals for each day they were on duty.  Before long I was promoted to more of a kitchen hand roll.  There was still an element of dish bitch work but there was also some food preparation for the dinner (and lunch meals on the weekend) and I was reasponsible for preparing breakfasts in the morning.  The extra responsibility meant that I didn’t have to pay any board at all.  It was seven days a week, several split shifts per day but it freed up my unemployment benefits for more ‘entertainment’.

The main accommodation at the hostel was two dormitories that held around 20 beds each.  It felt a little dodgy to the point that you put your smokes and wallett in your pillow case overnight so they wouldn’t get pinched.  There were also a few double rooms that had two single beds in them.  They had much more privacy and as long as you trusted your roommate a lot more security because they were locked.  At around the same time I was promoted to kitchen hand I was also given a bed in one of the double rooms.  At the time it seemed almost like a perfect situation.  Free access, effectively, to the kitchen (and pantry and cold room) and I was no longer in the dorm.

I don’t recall the time period but after a while the staff decided I was ready to move to a half way house.  This was a house shared by a few other of the occupants of the hostel but had added responsibility.  We had to pay more rent for it and were responsible for our own cooking, cleaning, etc.  It was also strictly a dry house, ie, no drinking in the house.

The house was further away from the Newcastle CBD and there wasn’t a great deal to do in the general area.  There was a RSL nearby however.  Cheap drinks and pokies, it was better then nothing.  After staying at the house for a while and observing the ‘dry house’ rule we got a little cocky and started having the occaisional drink at the house.

One day whilst in the back yard I spotted a couple of Pot plants growing in the next door neighbours yard.  We made plans.  They were to be ours.  Plan failed and the neighbour caught me.  Surprisingly he wasn’t pissed at me trying to pinch his plants and the occupants of the half way house the neighbour and I spend several occasions sitting out the front drink and talking bullshit.  He claimed that he was a gay priest that was HIV positive and had been kicked out of the church.  I wasn’t sure that I believed him but went along with it anyway.

One night the rest of the occupants had retired back to the half way house and gay priest guy, don’t remember his name, invited me in for drinks.  I think in the back of my head I thought it was a little suspiscious but if push came to shove I was a larger lad then he was and coudn’t envisage a situation whereby he’d be able to force himself on me; And he didn’t, not physically at least.

We’d been talking about the home made tattoo guns that’s we’d attempted to put together using a toothbrush, guitar string, a small motor and a battery.  They were very crude and only vaguely effective but he was intriged with them.  He asked me into his room so he could show me a drawing of a tattoo that he’d made and asked if I could tattoo it on him.  I was a little suspicious about going into his room but shrugged it off.

I don’t remember exactly what the picture looked like but it was something like the symbol for male combined with the symbol for female and a cruicifix and he said it was some sort of insult to Jesus or question of Jesus’ sexuality or some such thing.  I thought it was amusing, until he mentioned where he wanted it tattooed.  I was envisaging arm or thigh or ankle or something.  He wasn’t. He dropped his pants, lay on the bed and spread his legs.  He wanted the tattoo on his perineum.

He tried and tried to get me to tattoo him but I refused.  I think maybe I was briefly tempted but kept refusing.  He later asked me to take my clothes off so that he could masturbate while looking at me.  I think it was about then I’d decided I’d had enough and decicded to go home.  I was polite about leaving because I thought he was a nice enough guy but I wasn’t into the sort of entertainment for the night he had in mind.

Sometime later a few of us had been drinking in the house and left a cask of wine on the table in the lounge room.  I’d gone out for a while and a friend of mine was still in the house when one of the staff from the Salvos turned up for a snap inspection.  Naturally the cask of wine didn’t go down well.  When I got back my friend was packing his stuff because he’d been kicked out of the half way house for having alcohol there.  The cask was mine and I felt guilty that he took the blame for the cask.  He said that he couldn’t turn around and say it wasn’t his and tell them that the cask was actually mine.  I suspect he’d done some time inside gaol before but that was just a guess.

One of my next memories of that era was me sitting at the pokies drinking beer and feeding the last of my entertainment money into the one armed bandits.  I remember getting to the point that the only money I had left was my rent, nothing left for food for rest of the fortnight.  I justified that I could put myself into the Bridge programme and continue drinking and wasting money on the pokies for now.

Their Bridge programme house was next to the hostel.  I think I stayed there for a little while but don’t recall having to go to AA or any of the other rituals I’d associated with the programme.  Some time after that I was allowed back into the hostel and back into the kitchen.

Around this time my drinking increased along with smoking pot, though not often on the same days.  A few of us would spend time with the local winos who were usually more then happy to share their flagon or cask or whatever they had with us.  Some days we’d pool our funds and get our own flagon of muscat or other crap that only mildly tasted like shit after several mouthfuls.

I don’t recall what led up to it, or how, but one of the staff that used to mostly look after the guys in the tank was drinking with us.   I remember feeling guilty that he’d fallen off the wagon and was drinking with us but not specifically why.  I don’t recall how long he’d been sober but I recall it was an impressive amount of time.  About all I can remember of that event was we bought some vodka from somewhere and I fell down a flight of stairs at his place and that was apparently very funny.

The drinking continued and for a time I was able to fresh mint myself enough that staff in the kitchen didn’t know, or at least didn’t let it be known that they knew, I’d been drinking.  One day I staggered into the kitchen to start work and it was too obvious that I was drunk and I was effectively fired from my volunteer job.  That was briefly crushing, how often does someone get fired from a volunteer job?

Shortly after that another mate I’d made at the hostel said he had family that lived in Perth and that he was going to hitchhike over to see them.  He asked me if I wanted to tag along.  I figured I had nothing else going for me here in Newcastle so I agreed.  We packed our belonginngs and went to the train station to put most of it on a the train so we didn’t have to carry it.  Turned out the cost of doing so was about the equivilant of a person traveling to Perth on the Indian Pacific so we ended up throwing away most of our belongings and started on a new adventure.

I don’t remember where it fits in the above timeline but somewhere there I turned 21.  My family decided to throw a party for me and naturally I had to be there.  I’d been drinking heavily the day/night before and felt like shit.  I took less pills then usual because I was going to be surrounded by family.  I suffered the 90min (I think) train journey from Newcastle to the station nearest the house of the family member that the party was being held at.  The plan was that I was supposed to call someone to pick me up when I arrived at the station but I was still feeling like shit so I decided to walk instead.  My only memories of the journey from the station to the house were as a passenger in a car and I figured it shouldn’t take too long to walk.   Every step pounded my head.  Every step of that 2.5km journey.

I’d arrived early at the party and it was soon noticed I was under the weather.  One of the family members joked about having a big night the night before and I laughed it off.  My brother and cousins were already there playing and wanted me to join in just like old times.  I had no interest at all in doing anything.  I decided to take a walk to the local shops instead and invested in some panadol (or panadiene or something) then went back to the house and lay down on the trampoline for an hour or two.  It wasn’t long before I leapt off the trampoline and raced to the toiliet to throw up.  I felt a lot better after that and started mixing in with the activities.

As I recall it was a good party, there was a pig, or something, on a spit, plenty of beer and a few people turned up that were very unexpected.  One was a mate from school I hadn’t seen in three or four years the other was my Mother who I hadn’t seen in I don’t know how long.  We did the typical family thing and ate and, those drank, drank, and generally had a good time.  As is usual a game of cricket ends up being played out on the road.  The road was a dead end street so traffic was rare.  It was fun having all the family involved.  I went home at the end of the day with fond memories.

Several years later one of my Aunties, married in, pulled me aside and asked me if I was on herion or something.  I was thrown for a number of reasons, firstly she is about as a straight laced person I’d ever met and secondly, herion?  It certainly wasn’t my cup of tea.  She then showed me some home video they took of me early in the day and I agreed with here that very much looked like I was on something like herion but assured her that that wasn’t my thing and that it was simply a case of having a big night the night before.