The continuing saga of my life as a twenty-something... the first part & the second part
The third person to live with me in Lakemba was Mark, a really great guy. We moved from there to a ‘secure’ apartment building in Burwood, (still in Sydney) with about 12 or 15 floors. The building had a body corporate that was quite strict and we had to sneak my cat in. Every time we had someone come to the door we had to hide her, especially as the ‘secure’ part of the building – having a key to get in to the front door or having to buzz the apartment you wanted – didn’t usually work. All ‘guests’ had to do was wait for a resident to open the door and make an excuse about having forgotten their key and the (usually) older tenants would happily help.
While in Burwood I held my first party; I slaved all day marinating chicken wings and making meatballs and didn’t have anything to eat all day. Needless to say, approaching party time, I downed a few wines and not long into the party found myself in bed, as sick as a dog with all the alcohol having gone straight to my head. Fortunately my mother was a guest and she took over for me. It was a bit embarrassing as my boss was also there, but had a positive consequence, because one of the guys who came as a guest of Marks became a boyfriend for a time. He very attentively looked after me while I was recovering in bed… Nothing too serious though, all the guests were coming in to see me and mum kept coming in to find out what else I wanted done.
This particular boyfriend had a motorbike – I don’t remember what kind anymore, but it was turbo charged (nearly thrown off the back many times) and being very enthusiastic and anal about his bike, he refused to have anything other than the grab bar at the back, which was like having your wrists tied together behind you. You had that or hold onto him. Oh, and if my clothes didn’t go with the colour of his bike, well….
We were at Burwood for about a year during the time of the bicentennial celebrations when we watched the special air force planes fly overhead from our 9th floor balcony.
The next stop was 1 suburb towards Sydney – Croydon and it was here that my accommodation-sharing days really took off. Mark and I moved into a great federation-style 3 bedroom house with a huge enclosed veranda at the back that we used as a 4th bedroom. 2 girls joined Mark and me; Kathy; a Novocastrian with a sometimes boyfriend and Karen; a country girl with a uni-student boyfriend. Kathy was (and hopefully still is) a pretty laid back girl who introduced me to lots music that was just outside the top 20 type of stuff I tended to listen to – REM is one that stands out. Karen, on the other hand was into heavy metal in a very full-on way. She used to listen to it really softly in her bedroom, which still seems to me to be a complete contradiction, while she read romance novels. I saw quite a few metal bands during those years, including Christian thrash (another contradiction), which is what her boyfriend was into.
Going to gigs was the go during the Croydon years – yes, I actually did live in 1 place for more than a year (but I can’t remember how long it actually was). One of our favourites was The Croydon; a local pub within walking distance that used to have Irish bands on Sunday nights. The place would be wall-to-wall footballers and Irish – it was absolutely great – the atmosphere, lots of alcohol, great music and just a walk home.
Used to go out quite often with mates from work, too. A favourite haunt when we went out was the pub across the road from the Balmain tigers footy club (can’t remember the name). We used to see Tommy Emanuel and his brother Phil, the Bondi Cigars and loads of other blues bands. The night was always finished off with a hot dog, the likes of which you don’t see anymore – a roadside vendor with sauerkraut, onions, pickles, cheese and anything else you could want on a hotdog. They were really, really good.
Had a couple of parties here, but the one that remains strongest in my memory was a ‘black party’. The food was typical party fare, but everything else was back; decorations, clothes and we used black ultraviolet light bulbs and black candles. We were cleaning candle wax off the carpet for ages.
One party that Mark and I went to that was the best party I’ve ever been to was a Halloween cocktail party. Everybody was told to bring a specific type of spirit or liqueur. They had a couple of blenders, lots of ice, juice and fruit and cocktail recipes plastered all over the walls. They also had lots of dry ice and stuff that looked very like cobwebs and cool coloured lighting and Halloween-themed decorations. Nobody left sober, that much was certain, but it was a great change from beer and cask wine!
Showing posts with label flatting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flatting. Show all posts
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
Those were the days part 2
The continuing saga of my life as a twenty-something... (the first part)
My third place was in Lakemba. My boyfriend didn’t come with me, but a friend of his did move in – I was still an apprentice, someone had to help pay the rent. This fellow was of a fairly traditional Greek family and my now ex-boyfriend knew his family well. Shame he didn’t tell me what a pig he was! Do the dishes? Sweep the carpet in his room (didn’t have a vacuum in those days)? Do anything else domestic? Forget it – “women’s work”!! Needless to say, this particular flatmate didn’t last real long. Good thing? I got to know that upstairs neighbours when I went to ask if I could borrow their vacuum to clean out the foot of dust and crap that he’d left behind in his room.
My next flatmate was also a friend of my ex-boyfriend’s, although I knew her as well. She was the sister of my exe’s best mate, who I got on really well with. This mate begged me, (and so did his mother) to let this girl stay with me; someone to look after her… I went looking for some knickers in her room one day, mine seemed to have gone missing and I found a desert-sized spoon in one of her drawers. I should add at this point that this girl was a heroin addict and my proviso on her living with me was that she didn’t use in the flat. I confronted her and she broke down, promised to never do it again etc etc. Anyone who knows an addict (I hadn’t before) will know that such a promise is worthless. At one stage she asked me if her boyfriend could move in and took some efforts to persuade me. I didn’t know him and the flat was small, so I kept saying no. Good thing I did… I got a call from the police one night; her boyfriend was actually her pimp and I was advised to stay away from him. How they knew me, or the fact that this girl was living with me and bringing her boyfriend home for visits I still to this day don’t know. But I not long after asked her to move out. I found out several years later that she died, alone, on her 21st birthday in a flat in Kings Cross from; you guessed it, a heroin overdose. Apparently the stuff she had bought was too pure and the overdosed was accidentally.
My third flatmate in Lakemba, where I lived for all of a year, was someone who would move with me for years to come. The atmosphere in Lakemba in those days was pretty tense; I live 4 apartment blocks down from a public school, which was regularly burnt-out. One of the girls living in the apartments across from our driveway was a teacher there and her stories of being sworn at in Lebanese, and the treatment she received from the Lebanese boys she taught were enough to curl your hair. I used to stack shelves in the supermarket as a 2nd job and walk to the station to go to work, so I was in the main street of Lakemba quite a lot. Not a great place to be if you were blond, young slim and pretty (yes, I was once). I used to cop a lot from the men standing in shop doorways. On one occasion while in the flat I was lying in bed, reading, naked, with my cat, when a hand stuck itself through my venetian blinds (no screens but the windows key-locked open about 3 inches wide) and watched me. I couldn’t reach the light to turn it off without revealing myself, so I threw my book at the blind and yelled and screamed. I was living with the Greek guy at the time and when I later confronted him, he said that he thought I was yelling at the cat……….. So much for having a male on hand for safety!
Another eventful occurrence was when I was living alone in the flat (in-between flatmates) and I’d gotten into bed when the phone rang, it was the friends upstairs who said they’d spotted a guy lurking around my ground-floor flat. Don’t panic and keep talking like you’re still on the phone was their advice to me before they hung up and phoned the police. I hung up and called my mother, all the while talking like I knew nothing. By the time the police got there, they’d gone of course; in fact guys trying to get away from someone or something often jumped the fences between the blocks of flats down that stretch of road. I had a cat, given to me by my boyfriend, for company and during the times I was living alone she’d be my ‘guard dog’. My flat was alongside the driveway and on the other side of that was the neighbouring fence and some shrubbery, then next-door flats. She used to raise her hackles and growl, and I knew that there was someone watching me, so I could lock the door out on to the balcony and pull the blinds. I’m sure that she saved me several times during my yearlong stay in that flat.
part 3
My third place was in Lakemba. My boyfriend didn’t come with me, but a friend of his did move in – I was still an apprentice, someone had to help pay the rent. This fellow was of a fairly traditional Greek family and my now ex-boyfriend knew his family well. Shame he didn’t tell me what a pig he was! Do the dishes? Sweep the carpet in his room (didn’t have a vacuum in those days)? Do anything else domestic? Forget it – “women’s work”!! Needless to say, this particular flatmate didn’t last real long. Good thing? I got to know that upstairs neighbours when I went to ask if I could borrow their vacuum to clean out the foot of dust and crap that he’d left behind in his room.
My next flatmate was also a friend of my ex-boyfriend’s, although I knew her as well. She was the sister of my exe’s best mate, who I got on really well with. This mate begged me, (and so did his mother) to let this girl stay with me; someone to look after her… I went looking for some knickers in her room one day, mine seemed to have gone missing and I found a desert-sized spoon in one of her drawers. I should add at this point that this girl was a heroin addict and my proviso on her living with me was that she didn’t use in the flat. I confronted her and she broke down, promised to never do it again etc etc. Anyone who knows an addict (I hadn’t before) will know that such a promise is worthless. At one stage she asked me if her boyfriend could move in and took some efforts to persuade me. I didn’t know him and the flat was small, so I kept saying no. Good thing I did… I got a call from the police one night; her boyfriend was actually her pimp and I was advised to stay away from him. How they knew me, or the fact that this girl was living with me and bringing her boyfriend home for visits I still to this day don’t know. But I not long after asked her to move out. I found out several years later that she died, alone, on her 21st birthday in a flat in Kings Cross from; you guessed it, a heroin overdose. Apparently the stuff she had bought was too pure and the overdosed was accidentally.
My third flatmate in Lakemba, where I lived for all of a year, was someone who would move with me for years to come. The atmosphere in Lakemba in those days was pretty tense; I live 4 apartment blocks down from a public school, which was regularly burnt-out. One of the girls living in the apartments across from our driveway was a teacher there and her stories of being sworn at in Lebanese, and the treatment she received from the Lebanese boys she taught were enough to curl your hair. I used to stack shelves in the supermarket as a 2nd job and walk to the station to go to work, so I was in the main street of Lakemba quite a lot. Not a great place to be if you were blond, young slim and pretty (yes, I was once). I used to cop a lot from the men standing in shop doorways. On one occasion while in the flat I was lying in bed, reading, naked, with my cat, when a hand stuck itself through my venetian blinds (no screens but the windows key-locked open about 3 inches wide) and watched me. I couldn’t reach the light to turn it off without revealing myself, so I threw my book at the blind and yelled and screamed. I was living with the Greek guy at the time and when I later confronted him, he said that he thought I was yelling at the cat……….. So much for having a male on hand for safety!
Another eventful occurrence was when I was living alone in the flat (in-between flatmates) and I’d gotten into bed when the phone rang, it was the friends upstairs who said they’d spotted a guy lurking around my ground-floor flat. Don’t panic and keep talking like you’re still on the phone was their advice to me before they hung up and phoned the police. I hung up and called my mother, all the while talking like I knew nothing. By the time the police got there, they’d gone of course; in fact guys trying to get away from someone or something often jumped the fences between the blocks of flats down that stretch of road. I had a cat, given to me by my boyfriend, for company and during the times I was living alone she’d be my ‘guard dog’. My flat was alongside the driveway and on the other side of that was the neighbouring fence and some shrubbery, then next-door flats. She used to raise her hackles and growl, and I knew that there was someone watching me, so I could lock the door out on to the balcony and pull the blinds. I’m sure that she saved me several times during my yearlong stay in that flat.
part 3
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