I awoke at 8 and was edgy, but then
she seduced me (not that I put up a fight) and I fell back to sleep like the
cliché I am, then it was 11am, I’d been snoring apparently, so I jumped out of bed, put on my clothes from the night before,
cut a slice of hard cheese on the counter, then put a pear in my pocket, and
bid farewell, and I was off, into a storm-cloudy King St on a Saturday, where
the streets were full of suburbanites on holiday, mixing with inner western
freaks, and yuppie bankers who had bought in, and a women said she didn’t know
the way, but if they were in Paddington she would (though I don’t know where
they were going) and then I caught the bus outside the gay chemist by the
Martin Luther King mural and at the next stop, bus packed for a Saturday, a
local bag lady got on, and I was glad, because it felt like old Newtown, she
had a dirty ocelot-print blanket around her and hair like a share house bathmat
and she smelt like a week on the street and it was a gorgeous aroma within it’s
context and she asked the driver pleasantly for a ticket to Broadway, and
handed over $10 and because it was the weekend he didn’t tell her she needed a
prepaid Oyster or Metro-Ten or some other inconvenient crap designed to make
public transport less attractive and out of the reach of the poor, but I’ll get
off my soapbox, because behind her, in delicate juxtaposition, was a family of
three, and the father asked awkwardly if the bus went into the city, and he
said, Yes, and they were a little freaked-out having stood behind ocelot print
lady, but they got on, again with cash, and danced past her, she was sitting
behind me, I could tell, and then I got off at the pool and did a quick 25 min
swim, to sweat out the vino and relax the muscles for drum practice at home
that arvo, and cool the nerves so as to freak-out just ever-so-slightly less
about ‘that’ play, and about the conditions of my casual day gigs (one of
whichs [is that a word?] conditions had candidly soured that week, boohoo,
yeah) and it was the worst time to be at the pool because one side was taken up
by seniors aquaerobics, and another by kiddie swim lessons, and ran into a
friend, Glen, and other breeders whose morning (well, it was midday now) was
ruined by sitting next to a pool watching their sprogs paddle, but there were
three lanes in the middle, and I got in one, and as I swam I thought about how
juicy that pear was that I had eaten from my pocket on the way, and would it be
late enough to jump straight to lunch, bypassing breakfast - a nice, hot curry
perhaps - and I was halfway through my 25 min swim and then before I knew I was
under the shower and then the change rooms where nobody looks at one another,
awkwardly (this seems an awkward planet for many people) and back out under the
darkening sky on the bridge towards Abercrombie Street it was starting to rain,
and I ran into old compoetriate, Tug, and my godson, Rock, and they were
retreating from tennis against a wall, what I would have called two-touch as a
kid, but done with a soccer ball, and they seemed not to know what I was
talking about, but they offered a cup of tea as they climbed towards their
garage door but I was in a rush to get home, for lunch/breakfast, and
coffee/tea (as I’d not had that yet either/either) so I strolled through
Redfern, which was looking more and more like Newtown every day, but that’s OK
(as long as my rent stays stable) and noticed that the Newtown Vodafone shop
had moved there, and seeing as my phone had been playing up and I was out of
contract, I dropped in, but there was no shop assistant, and I waited another
five minutes, spending the time trying to tell the difference between the
seemingly identical phones (in fact they all looked the same as mine, which was
shit, so why would these be any different?) and after briefly considering ripping
off all the display phones (although they were probably just shells, and empty)
I left, and things where uneventful (even more so) until I was walking through Australian
Technology Park (what a ridiculous name for an old train works) and there was
an enormously portly (OK, fat) man waddling towards me and I said, Hello, as we
passed (rather uncharacteristically, perhaps I was still drunk? unlikely
considering the swim, but I digress...)
and the portly man nodded and said, much to my surprise, Are you going
to look at knives? And I stopped, and said, Excuse me? He said, Are you going
to look at knives? I said, No I live around here, I’m going home, Oh, he said,
OK, because if you were I was going to offer you my ticket, and I realised
there must be a knife show in the old carriage sheds, a trade show sort of
thing, but for knife makers (knifesmiths?) so I smiled and said, That sounds
kind of odd out of context, and he just looked at me awry (though not
awkwardly) and turned and waddled off towards Redfern Station, and that’s when
I saw the sign alerting me that that there was indeed a knife show and I
thought, why not, so I went into the old metal-works bit at the beginning of
the Eveleigh-side of the old train carriage works (where my grandfather on the
Irish side had once worked, and which I live next to) and I watched a
blue-overalled blacksmith (knifesmith?) lady stick a metal pole into a
gas-fired furnace and then pull it out and bang it down with some kind of foot
pedalled industrial hammer straight out of a 1950s Warner Bros cartoon where
the anthropomorphised hero or heroine would be getting crushed, and then
another dude, older, perhaps her dad (because we like to think of quaint
trades-people as family, and ignore the horrible TAFE course they probably met
at) and he was banging some metal bit into a fire-place poker type thing and I
thought, Oh, that’s how they make knives and shit. Makes sense.
PS: it appears I left my swimmers
at the pool...
PPS: next day, picked up swimmers
from Sydney Uni pool where they'd been put in a box in the basement with a tag that
said, "Vinito - will pick up Sunday"
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