Free He Died with a Felafel in His Hand by John Birmingham Page A

eyes must have bugged out of his skull when this fool rushed in waving crumpled banknotes in his face and demanding as much of the expired stock as he could carry. All for nothing now of course. Neal was in the lounge room watching Wheel Of Fortune and I said, ‘Hey Neal. What’s happening?’
    ‘Madness,’ he shrugged.
     
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Launz
Boredom gets to be a really great motivator. Kevin and I were bored and decided to set up an interesting photograph. We got him to sit on the toilet and floated a little boat with some smoke mixture in it. The idea was that we’d shoot a sequence of him being enveloped in smoke and the last frame would be the smoke clearing and this hand coming out of the bowl. We had a mannequin hand. The problem with this smoke mixture is that when you burn it you have to make sure it’s in a long and thin, or thin and flat state. If you have it in a ball, it doesn’t lose heat quickly enough. It moves to this second stage burn which we didn’t know about. So Kev is sitting on the toilet, the smoke is coming then there is this almighty flash and Kev is leaping out of the bathroom clutching his flaming arse. That’s what boredom will do.
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    There were diversions. We saw the house next door get pulled off its stumps and taken away in the middle of the night. Happens all the time in Brisbane. Old Queenslanders get chopped in two, hauled up onto a flat-bed and driven off to some yuppie’s farm. Neal had his own theory about it. The old house graveyard. The movers came around and told us when they’d be doing it so everyone in the neighbourhood prepared meals and stayed up way past their bedtime, picnicking in the front garden or gathering in little knots under the lamp posts. It turned into a street festival. Howie offered to help cut the house up. Neal dragged the moontanning lounge out. Mick got drunk and had a sit-down in the back of a police car. Jabba watched television. The guys taking the house were hopeless. They’d get it half way up the steep front yard and it would slip back down again. Their wheels got bogged in the mud they churned up, windows exploded, chains broke and the outside toilet was accidentally destroyed.
     
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Launz
There was a mouse in Chester Street which lived in the stove. It liked to come out and dance. We were getting real tired of this mouse. One night we were sitting up late, drinking and playing cards. Kevin said, ‘We’ve got to get rid of this mouse.’I said ‘Okay, how?’ Throw things at it. So we propped up in the kitchen and started throwing cutlery. We emptied our kitchen drawers trying to nail the little bastard – knives, forks, egg-beaters and everything. It would go away for three or four minutes then come back. Finally Kev said, ‘I’ve got a plan.’ He wandered over to the stove, put on all the gas taps, wandered back and sat down with a box of matches. I asked what he was doing. He said when the mouse came out he was going to throw a lighted match at it and blow it to pieces. I took them off him and went to the shop for a mouse trap. But all they had was this huge rat trap and rat traps don’t trigger when little field mice gnaw off the bait. So we filed it back to a hair trigger. Re-baited it and set it on the stove. About an hour later we were asleep when this huge snap came from the kitchen. We found the trap had got this poor little mouse but it had hit it so hard that both of its eyeballs had shot out of its head and bounced across the floor.
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    When the house disappeared we discovered the girl in the red panties. Our view had been blocked by the old place, but with the line of sight unobscured it wasn’t long before somebody spotted her dancing in her kitchen between 5.10 and 5.25 pm every day. She was a dancing fool. Never let us down. It was the only schedule the house stuck to, elbowing and shouldering each other out of the way for the best window seat.
    I knew my time at Duke Street had passed when I came home and there