One Way or Another Read Free

him from a distance. Huddles of schoolgirls cried with melodramatic anguish. Suddenly he had been everyone’s best friend. The bell tolled for us all.
    Teachers avoided any discussion of the subject, fearing a rash of copycat behaviour. Chris had been an exemplary student – gifted at music, academics and acting. Talk was that he had had his heart set on being a Shakespearean actor and was gutted when a teacher told him to forget the dream. Chris was of Chinese heritage and it was pointed out to him that there were no Chinese characters in Shakespeare’s plays. It might work in the school theatre, he’d been counselled, but not on the world stage. If this was his dramatic answer to such narrow-mindedness, I thought, there was something poetic and noble about the act. I made Chris my patron saint of schoolboys for a while.
    My tight-knit group of girlfriends from my Catholic college, Star of the Sea, had little time for the lads from our brother school, Aquinas. We preferred a better cut of meat: the boys from The Southport School. There were four girls and four boys in our little tribe and over the course of year eleven we paired off with each other in turn. I held hands with Alan, went boating with Richard and then doe-see-doed into Sean’s arms in time for his school formal. We never really dated in the traditional sense. No moonlit dinners or romantic strolls on the beach. Instead we groped and fondled with naïve and apprehensive hands in borrowed bedrooms and the back seats of cars. Despite my interest, I never managed to get past about second base.
    By the end of year eleven my final marks were dismal and the principal, Sister Annette, dropped a bombshell: I lacked the ‘emotional maturity’ to move into year twelve and would have to repeat. Horrified, my parents decided I should transfer to the rough-as-guts public school where my father taught. It was pointless to argue: the gavel had struck the bench and my sentence was not open to appeal. Besides, I had bigger issues on my mind. As I contemplated the long summer holidays and swapped torrid fantasies with the Vultures, my lust throbbed along like a thumping bass section. It was time to turn my rock and roll daydreams into reality.

3.
    In early January of 1982, with stars in my eyes and butterflies in my knickers, I attended my very first rock gig. Australian Crawl performed at Bombay Rock, a gritty nightclub on the darker edge of Surfers, down the river end of Cavill Avenue. Posters of touring bands plastered the concrete walls and a narrow ramp lead to the front entrance. When a big name came to town, the queue of punters could wind all the way up to the Pacific Highway, inching its way towards the bouncers on the door.
    Inside, the smell of beer and sweat was stale but sweet. Lights beckoned from the two bars, one upstairs, one down, glasses and bottles glistening behind the busy staff. Up against the stage, the dance pit was thick with tanned young people stomping and pogo-dancing to the tracks spilling from the DJ deck. Strategically placed fake pot-plants provided receptacles for their cigarette butts and vomit. The whole place reeked of a summer hangover, the stench of sea-salt and coconut oil spilling from day into night. Paradise by strobe light.
    We had chosen a busy night, hot and humid with the smell of a storm in the air. The young surf-rockers from Mornington Peninsula belted out unintelligible lyrics to a hypnotic beat while I pressed against the stage, a tidal wave of kids pushed up behind me. The band gyrated and sweated and the sound possessed my body, writhing through my veins like an erotic python.
    After worshipping my idols from the floor I abandoned my friends with tunnel-visioned determination. I would take my virginity backstage and thrust it at whichever musician wanted it. They had played me into a frenzy and I figured one of them could damn well put that fire out.
    I wore a tight pair of stonewashed jeans and a