A week before Christmas, on the 18th December, I had my 21st birthday.
I had business cards printed with a bunch of cut-ups from a dictionary, inviting anyone who found a card to come to what I called a “passage party”. I distributed the cards by leaving them in shops, in pubs, on window ledges, on tram seats, by dropping handfuls in the street, by throwing fistfuls out of a moving car.
I invited Liza the veterinary nurse, and she invited Shark.
On the night of my birthday party, Tim helped me rig the whole flat at 764 with red spotlights. I’d hired a PA system for the music, there were free drinks in the bath tub and some drugs of different descriptions stashed out on the roof. The crowd started to arrive, including the cast and crew who worked on “Meanwhile Elsewhere” and a large proportion of the bar and nightclub scene of Melbourne.
Things took an odd turn that evening, with the arrival of the entire Coffin Cheaters membership. Shark’s mates arrived in station wagons (never a good sign).
In no time at all they invaded the kitchen, the hallway and the lounge room and the bedrooms. They seemed to fill every space, stacked in tiers on the lounge room couch, blocking the bay windows, watching Vanessa and a gang of punks, including Tim and Chris Waters, all dancing their brains out to Graham Parker.
The place was crowded with bikers. They bailed up guests like beautiful Troy Davies, wearing a leotard and his B52 bombshell hairdo, torturing him in the corner of my bedroom. They stripped Nique Needles of his leather jacket and forced him to scoff a jar of marmalade to get it back. He did it, so they told him to scull a bottle of soy sauce too, so he did and then they gave him his jacket.
The bikers pissed in saucepans and tipped it out from the second floor onto the heads of escaping guests. A few people called the police, and I was told the cops drove by a few times, but it didn’t help. The party was completely out of control, and at some point I hid in the bushes that I’d raided for a set, and I watched as more and more people filed into the flat, the queue reaching into the street.
I remember my born-again Christian friend Colin getting me into his panel van with a few other people, and we talked about what was happening and what we should do. It was mayhem inside the flat, but guests kept going in as others were being forced out. I got out of the van and stood in the telephone booth opposite the flat, from where Nessa used to call taxis to go home to her Mum. I snorted a line of speed.
As night turned to morning, I watched people leaving, some looking back inside, waiting to see if their friends would come out. I wanted to run and hide, but eventually I went back inside.
The place was a complete disaster and there were about five bikers left, standing in doorways and waiting down the hall, giving me the evil eye, but I was beyond caring or feeling anything at all. They’d destroyed the balustrade on the spiral staircase. They’d commandeered the place completely and there was nobody left except a few people I didn’t know hanging out in the kitchen with Liza.
Then at dawn, they came back for me and Colin, and we tried to bribe them with the drugs that we said we had stashed out on the roof.
There were no drugs left, but that’s what they wanted. Colin and I ran, escaping through the now-empty lounge room, where I realized one of the PA stacks had disappeared. They’d squeezed it out the front bay window and dropped it into the street, where it was loaded into a station wagon, already long gone.
Colin and I jumped out the front window and reached the end of the awning, maybe fifteen feet off the ground. Colin jumped and landed as I looked up Jackson Street into the rising sun, only to see the last of the Coffin Cheaters carrying my refrigerator, my record player and an eski full of warm beer to the last station wagon.
They drove off into the sunlight and I wished I had a camera.
I went back inside the flat, and as I checked the place out it became apparent the bikers had stolen everything they could pocket; my grandfather’s smoking pipe, my wristwatch, my Pentax camera.
There was basically nothing left except the couch. I was too shocked and exhausted to weep, and I think Colin preyed or rolled a joint.
After 9am, a detective from Hawthorn police station appeared in a raincoat. He said, “So, you had a party last night.” It wasn’t a question.
“It was his birthday”, said Colin.
“Really,” said the detective, “…Well, happy birthday mate.”
It was like being given a gift I didn’t expect to survive.
My parents came over and some of my friends came back, and they helped my Mum clean up the mess, and my Dad rebuilt the entire staircase and balustrade single-handed. Colin drove me out to Warrandyte, and we found Liza pleading innocent, but Shark and his mates were all gone. Who knows where?
Thankfully nobody was seriously hurt. We were all art school punks and they were real Coffin Cheaters, so I guess I was lucky.
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