15--1 mindless love

Existentialism sounded an exotic concept but if you live as if it's your last day you may get in a lot of s**t.

CHP 15 "Mindless Love"

In the '50s people looked and acted inhibited. Some tried to be different and were called beatniks or non-conformists. It was such a groovy lifestyle that by the 60s people began to conform to non-conforming.

But I was determined to be King of the non-conformers. I didn't collect Zappa albums like other freaks. In a conscious effort to be "hip and weird" I began recording albums of dog barks cut with sound effects from public dunnies. Now that public toilets are rare, my Toilet Tape is worth a fortune (if anyone's got a copy-- I only made one)

 

My ideal woman was painfully thin with long straight black hair, small breasts, wore tights and turtle neck jumpers, no shoes and said,

"Don’t bug me man" a lot.

To earn the respect of beatnik chicks you had to prove you were interested only in their mind and didn't care if you made love or not. If you could convince a beatnik you weren't after her body then you had a chance of getting onto a mattress with it.

 

Existentialism sounded an exotic concept. In the cavernous darkness of jazz cellar and coffee shop I’d mumble the doctrine.

"Live for the moment! Live life to the full!"

Trouble is if you live as if it's your last day you get in a lot of s**t. For example: on your last day you could kick the hell out of a right wing politician, rob a Corporate office, give the money to African Relief, tell the truth to the boss at work that you've embezzled for the last ten years, then go home and go to sleep having lived a full and exciting day.

Then you wake up next morning, find it wasn't your last day after all and you've got a hell of a lot of problems.

 

Lesley was a student at the University of Sydney but I had no other information. No 'phone number, address, nothing. I actually prayed I'd run into her once more so I could slap my brand on her before someone else did.

She was so noticeably more intelligent than most of our group that someone invented the nickname "Mindless" for her. She appreciated the irony and gladly encouraged us to call her so. After all: wasn’t the concept of "no-mind" at the centre of Zen Buddhist enlightenment?

She’d been one of the first Australians to be given experimental LSD in tests that she later found were run by the yank CIA. It was legal in those days. At the time she thought it was part of a clinical trial by the Psychology Department of Sydney University. The acid opened up her Doors of Perception and from then on she (like Timothy Leary in the USA) had a yen to intently experiment with the substance.

 

Ear-ring Paul (he and Pirate Ted were the only two guys who wore one in ‘65) told me that Lesley occasionally frequented two wine bars near Taylor Square, "Whitty's" and "Martins". They were (slightly) up-market "push" watering holes and you (sometimes) needed money to hang around in them, so I waited on the bus stop bench across the road. Whenever I saw someone I knew go in the bars (they were 80 meters apart) I'd engage them in conversation, try to bum a drink and keep a watch out for her.

One evening, from my bus seat vantage point, I saw her alight from a taxi, accompanied by a tall nasty piece of work called Chris Heald. Lesley ( as usual) was laughing and Chris (as usual)was smirking. I crossed Oxford Street to Whitty’s and got ready to say hello, although her being with Chris was unnerving.

 

I'd met Marcia and Lady Sky at Cheverell’s hotel last summer. Sky had told American Jack a bit of trivia about Chris (as they bubble-puffed a hookah pipe). Jack said,

"Lady Sky hitched from Melbourne with Chris one time and she said he's a real prick. One night he almost raped her but a car came along just in time and gave them a lift all the way to Sydney. When the car let them out, Sky ran like hell.

Whenever they see each other these days they don’t speak."

Marcia said,

"Yeah: and Heald told me that 2 years ago he killed a girl in New Zealand: well "murdered" was the word he used. He said he overdosed her with Spanish fly and that the NZ cops are still looking for him and if I ever told anyone I'd be the next one killed, so I never said this OK?. "

American Jack's eyes widened.

"S**t! That b*****d has slept on my floor plenty of times. He never will again." He went on.

''He told me he'd been in the Foreign Legion. I never believed him but I bet he did kill someone."

Back at Whitty’s bar I pushed through the swinging doors. John the Punter handed me a spare Methedrine tablet and I swallowed it to give me extra confidence.. If Les was involved with Heald I didn't want them to know I was there so I watched their body language from across the room. They were never more than 16 inches apart and it spoilt my high.

 

I thought I’d trudge miserably back to my pad but as I was leaving Les saw me and said hello. A few seconds later she turned away and made a joke to someone but all I picked up was "he’s a cretin."

That one little speed tablet had caused me to become super self conscious and I (of course) thought she’d said "cretin" in reference to me.

My soul was crushed. I walked around Centennial Park for the rest of the night insanely paranoid that all my so-called friends thought me a cretin. I also imagined that psychic cops were following me and trying to read my mind to find out who else I knew who used Meth .I quickly had to invent all manner of mind blocking techniques to fool any lurking telepathic cops. It was a hard day’s night. By next afternoon the tab had worn off and I returned to my Paddington lounge chair and slept. When I awoke the cop paranoia and the "cretin" fear had worn off.

 

That girl was really under my skin and I wasn't going to let that tall streak of murderous misery get his stinger any deeper into her honey. But how the hell do I get him away from her? I figured if I could get Lesley alone again, I had a chance of winning her heart.

My favourite book of Zen wisdom told me to find a subject close to my heart then study until I had mastered it. This was the path to enlightenment. I decided my chosen subject would be "the loving of women". I would devote myself to becoming a master of the art.

98 Hargraves St was the first LSD experimentation house where people interested in the "new" concept of mind expansion gathered to live communally. Whenever I walked through the (always open) front door the sounds of Bob Dylan, Hendrix, The Beatles, 'Stones or Buffy St. Marie could be heard on the lounge room record player.

The house had a very old landlord who had no idea there were 20 people sleeping in his 3 bedroom house. We hardly ever saw him or his wife. They lived on the 2nd (top) floor and had an old fox terrier dog called Boxer. In return for cheaper rent it was our job to walk, house and feed Boxer.

We had use of 5 rooms, each containing a mattress, the most important furnishing in the house. The people who slept on mattresses were ones who put in a share of the rent. Anyone who could not pay (but were nice enough to be invited) could sleep on one of four big lounge chairs or on the floor. At any time there could be from as little as 8 or as many as 20, soulful occupants. The days I was falling for Lesley, I was sleeping on one of the lounges.

 

 

Two days after I'd seen Les out with Heald, I was walking home from the 'George (via the Piccolo Bar) when I saw Graham Holt coming out of the Folk Cellar. Graham looked like Jesus was supposed to have looked and was the best 12-string banjo player in the country. He’d been raised in the remote hillbilly mountains of Victoria. An expert polisher of Australian opals, he made great jewellery that he sold at the first hippie gear shop in Australia, "Frank’s Café".

 

During Bob Dylan’s first Australian tour Holt snuck into Bob’s party (with a classy model he later married and Adrian Rawlins the poet) and stole a pair of Bob’s psychedelic trousers. Later I stole them from Graham and wore them for 40 years. In 2004 they fell apart with age.

Holt had a knack of finding far out objects in the street. A month before he'd found a dead shark near Rose Bay wharf. It was four foot long and smelt OK so we carried it home balanced on our old bicycle with no tires, stuffed it in the 'fridge (with great difficulty) and lived on it (fried, boiled, roasted and grilled) for 2 weeks.

Graham seemed excited. He explained,

"Down near The Scottish Hospital I saw a marvelous thing. We gotta get it now. It’ll be gone tomorrow. Come and help me get it home. It'll take two of us to carry it."

Still at the stage I said "yes" to everything, I followed him through the hospital and down a dark alley. Proudly he pointed,

"There it is Cass, isn't it cool?" I peered into the gloom but could not quite see how cool it was.

Graham lit a few matches and I saw what it was. We staggered back to the pad with it, resting every 100 metres.

The lounge room was full of cool cats deeply conversing. A Buffy St.Marie folksong on the record player had just finished as we groaned in with our Art Piece. The room went silent.

"Wow!"

"Far Out!"

"What the f**k?" were comments I recall. Graham and I posed beside our find as a statuesque blonde model (Victoria Reardon) ran to get her camera. She asked

"What is it?"

Proudly I answered,

"An authentic genuine 5 foot by 5 foot wide actual original wooden cricket scoreboard from Trumper Park sports field. It's covered with arcane symbols of the white-flannelled mad dogs of Englishmen who ventured out into the midday sun?"

It had the symbols WKTS, RUNS, OVRS printed on it.

Unfortunately, the actual set of numbers had been taken before we found it.

"Now we’ll always know the score!" Graham mused.

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