© Tug Dumbly July 2010
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“Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space.”
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- Hamlet
Bardflys was spinning like a drunken compass to its irregular cast of metho actors, geek loners, cool Christians, geriatric whackjobs and bitter divorcees. And that was just the front row.
On any given Tuesday, seeded further back in the darkened booths getting pepped and prepped, as Johnny Maddox and Peppermint Tea warmed the house with some Django Reinhardt, might lurk Goths and earnest uni students, broken Rockers and sweet old ladies with dirty tongues; salacious dykes preparing to whet appetites with digestively graphic sex poems; spiky ratbags with axes ground down to the handle; sleaze artists, with their one sensitive poem that they’d use to try and bait some mousy office-girl into the sack; mousy office-girls working up the champagne-nerve to revenge themselves upon said sleaze artists from stage, armed only with a shaky voice and shakier bit of paper.
Sure, we’d jag the odd sensible mortgaged couple, just there to watch the freaks and soak up the co-mingled essences of Marxism’s corpse, punk’s armpit, and hippiedom’s patchoulied groin. But they were outnumbered by the Bardflys faithful, gearing up to take in the show and maybe have a three minute spray from the stage in the Slam! This was a truly egalitarian gig, a broader and more colourful church than your average AA meeting (often with the same vice): actors, council workers, matrons and minxes, purveyors of poetry, prose and rant, there to poleaxe demons and staple hearts to sleeves, to weep, to woo, to crush the System and the Man with the power of the Word! Everyone slotted in: the impeded and impaired, the medicated and maladjusted, the socially untenable, deeply awful and, yes, occasionally, Fucking Pindrop Brilliant! In short, your typical poetry crowd - people unfit for any other scene.
Every week for seven years we’d throw out the net and never know what we’d haul in, but there rarely failed to be a doubloon or two glinting in the catch - a whiskey priest, a retired submariner, an old Spanish whore - a colourful cast of characters richer and stranger than any sitcom could ever hope to devise. Any or all of them might breach the stairs to the Friend in Hand’s upper galley, like the setup to a thousand-punchline joke, to set sail on the good ship Bardflys in the name of camaraderie, art and hard liquor. Who knows, maybe tonight we’d be graced with Crazy Pete - a dandy bum savant, dressed dapper in cravat and socks with thongs, spitting flecks of red wine from a ruined mouth as he cackles maniacally, one hand foppishly to waist, like the bastard spawn of Oscar Wilde and Henry Lawson. Pete used to bring me gifts, like plastic bags full of Thai restaurant menus. He was an astrologer of note who pinned me for a Gemini Snake, and his internal dialogues would occasionally erupt into random, free-associating interjections from the audience. Not really heckles, but cut-and-paste collages of esoteric facts that mixed together anything from a history of the Whitlam years to “Sir” Paul McCartney’s birthday. We’d sometimes invite Pete to take the stage, which was entertaining but fraught with danger. Once up, he was impossible to get off, and would strike at you like a cobra if you tried to take the mic.
Who else?: Dark Mikel, a panto villain to boo and hiss as he plied his line in Gothic misogyny; Jimmy Street, the greatest rockstar that never was; Pterodactyl Man, the world’s only haiku spouting dinosaur; Captain Dave, an English ex-submariner besotted by Wordsworth, whose poetic style he imitated at length. Dressed in seacap and puffy pirate shirt, the Captain would sit stately at his customary back table, sagely dispensing advice to young poets as he rolled joints. There was the legendary Phil Frea, equal parts Tom Waites, Rolf Harris and Krammer. Just add everything. Phil was my poetic mentor, the man who inspired me into this game in the first place, and who taught me everything I ever forgot. And who could forget my faithless sidekick and co-host Benito Di Fonzo? Di Fonzo still does the finest line in Snide I’ve ever seen. He delighted in ribbing from stage, like a schoolboy, over my stature or slurred state. It was puerile, but the trouble is the bastard always wrung a laugh. We were great duo, like Deano and Jerry, only without the elegance, wit, money and fame. Benito would also supply the ‘special prize’ for the Slam! Tonight’s trophy might be a box set of some American televangelist’s sermons on cassette tape that he’d trawled from a gutter in Marrickville.
Then there was me. Bardflys was my baby, and I loved it. It got me pickled, paid and, yes, even laid. It gave me a reason to write, and public platform from which to perform. Despite the gig’s loose, at times chaotic, nature, it was a little weekly beacon of stability in my otherwise shambolic life. I’d corralled and wrangled gigs in inner-city pubs for years, starting with the Hopetoun in Surry Hills and then the Sando in Newtown. Performance poetry was a small scene, but a scene none the less. I wasn’t famous in any conventional sense – i.e. critical or public acclaim, achievement, influence, sex, drugs, money, err, fame … But I was known by a certain number of people in small pockets of my suburb as someone who did stuff on stages in inner-city pubs, as well as a weekly spot on National radio, and I guess I liked that.
So let’s end with me, back at Bardflys, in the upper room at the Friend in Hand. I’ve just come off stage to some toasty applause and had the little inkwell of my ego refilled. I’ve sparked a fag and fallen into the arms of the last beer on my six drink ryder. I’ll be dipping into the profits for a JD soon, maybe a slammer or two. That’s okay, we’ve got about 80 heads tonight. The door take on top of the stipend the pub pays us will be okay. Then it’ll be out the door and up City Road to the Town Hall Hotel in Newtown, to celebrate another successful night’s poetry by drinking our dough dry, loading the jukebox, playing impossibly brilliant pool, inventing pyrotechnically deadly new cocktails, generally shooting the shit and laughing in libated camaraderie till we’re hosed out the door at dawn. I don’t think current office health and safety regulations would recommend it, but jeeze it was fun at the time.