Free The Big Whatever by Peter Doyle

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    TAKE ME TO THE BRIDGE!
    Winter was becoming spring, and I was the speed Santa of the Melbourne discotheque scene. People had finally started picking up on the new powder thing. Parties would start after midnight and go through the next day and night. Catswere grinding teeth, bobbing their heads, dancing like dervishes, drinking without let or hindrance. Musos were jamming high craziness for hours, even days on end. The whole damn town was raving .
    I’d been making free with the shit, and was digging the heady round of boogaloo parties as much as anyone. Each day I’d resolve to give not one grain away, then that night I’d be chopping up lines for all and sundry. I was the Wizard of Whizz, the Guru of Go-Fast, the Master of the Good Ship Giddy-Up. Dig this, children: if you’re going to play Captain Trips, then be free and open-handed about it. You’ll fill your pockets just the same. But it never hurts to put a little something in the poor box, so to speak.
    Anyway, that groovy Melbourne spring – music, parties, speed. Beautiful ladies with long straight hair and willowy figures, cool, amused and reckless. Tech college and art school students, earnest university girls. Chicks who worked in clothes shops, ran market stalls, or sold matchbox-fulls of smoking dope. Young lads who were playing at being musicians, painters, poets or freelance philosophers. Ne’er-do-wells and no-hopers, most of them, trust-fund playboys and Toorak tramps, still too young for their character flaws to show. Funsters, though. There were a few Maoists, forever gobbing off about the violence that liberates and the violence that oppresses, property being theft, and so on and so forth, while horning up the free drugs on the side. Would-be Neal Cassadys, soldiers of fortune, itinerants, vagabonds, mad scientists, fugitives, bikey types and crazy visionaries. Queers and lesbians flitting in and out. Petty criminals and hard men from Stan and Jimmy’s crowd, mellow and sweet on dope and music.
    Gradually a core group formed. There was Bobby Boyd, the bandleader and singer. Bobby was King of the Heads. The President. He sang in a big-voiced soul-blues style. Bobby was a solid cat, then and always.
    There was Denise, photographer, arts student, freelancejournalist, and aspiring novelist. Younger, a big girl, just the right side of plump. Thick blond hair parted in the middle in kind of a supercharged Bardot style. Wore R.M. Williams with Cuban heels, straight-leg Lee jeans, bulky knitted jumpers – Afghan or some shit – carried a big shoulder bag, flicked her long straight hair around. Private school, equestrian, confident. She first turned up at the Barrel saying she was writing an article about Bobby for a student paper. We talked, we took drugs, we made love, we moved on.
    There was a bloke named Clive, another journo. A fop. Wore a linen suit. Trying to look like Tom Wolfe, was my guess. He had plenty to say, pontificated about the “Carlton Underground” and such things. Took lots of drugs but was never seen to pay for any, or bring along any of his own. Wrote music reviews for a Sunday paper.
    Another character who was usually still there when the rest had finally gone home was this heavy-drinking toff, a large, fruity bloke, always calling people “dear boy” and so on. Said to be ex-military, but he had a taste for the newfangled drugs. I’d never seen anyone put away as much. With a certain roguish charm, even old seen-it-all Mel had to admit. They called him ‘the Captain.’
    Stan stuck pretty close, too. His crowd of old-school crooks and roughnecks mostly thought drugs were a longhaired degenerate poofter thing, but Stan was getting good mileage hanging around the Barrel and other discotheques, tagging along to the inevitable all-nighter at my flat or someone else’s. Usually with Jimmy the Thug in tow. No one, but no one , in the scene knew the speed was coming from