Part 3: I moved to Parnell with the Crusties (Crass punks! Fellow travellers on the road to peace and tofu…)
My flatmates were good people (for nightclubbers…hehehe) but they never paid the rent. I had scored a job out in Ellerslie because the Dole Office wouldn’t sign me up: “You won’t get a job with a haircut like that!” were their exact words (burned into my mind’s eye for eternity…).
Between nightshift at the factory, fueled by packets of No-Doze and hanging out with the Metro punks, it wasn’t too bad, though I often failed to go to work cos I’d be on the piss. I was also hanging out with the Venue crew a bit and collecting records. My favourite record shop was down on Fort street and was owned by a guy called Kerry, whom I was told, used to be in a punk band circa 77. So I held him in awe. He had the shit in his store!
My Metro mates were not, however, great fans of Crass label bands. ‘Fuck Crass, Special Duties rules..etc etc….I had bumped into another Metro punk called Kurtis (he’d hit me up for some cash one day to buy some cough syrup…). The landlord at Grange road had had enough so booted us out. I ran into Kurtis one night after a few beers at the Windsor Castle with my pommie mates GF (she was a nurse and everyone who met her lusted after her…) and we’d been dragged up to this seedy house for a smoke by some guy who wanted to hit on the aforementioned Nurse. I had tagged along to make sure he didn’t try anything on and it turned out to be this huge, rundown mansion on St.Georges Bay Rd. Kurtis was there and offered to repay the money he had borrowed. I said “Nah, Cool as man”.
Kurtis had the hugest Crass label collection I’ve ever seen…He had everything! Even down to the 7″ floppy Crass had released in some Romance magazine under an assumed name! We became mates and when we got the boot from Grange rd. he said I could crash at his place. He also corresponded with Steve Ignorant! The Big House (as it was called) is right next door to the Rehab place and was inhabited by a motley collection of Punks, nine to fivers, sex workers and druggies. It was wicked! 20 something rooms, a huge lounge and a filthy kitchen. I had lost my job but was able to sign up on the dole now. The other punks were all cruisy as and there were even a few older punks there who were transitioning into hippies (LOL). Kurtis showed me how to screenprint patches and we set up business making patches, screenprinted bags etc. Our housemates would get pissed cos we’d steal their white sheets off the clothes line for material (never mind the shady stains…print over them).
Kurtis had the weirdest pick-up line I’ve ever heard before. He’d go up to a girl and say “Hey, do you wanna fuck?!” The first time he said it I nearly choked on my beer. He assured me that it worked, “Even if I have to ask a hundred girls at least one of them will say yes…”. And it did. For a scrawny, smelly, Crasspunk he’d hook up with some total babes. I was always too shy to try it.
It was about this time that I ran into an ugly side of the punk scene. We were at a Mainstreet gig one night and some skins showed up. They beat up a couple of my metro mates, for as far as I could tell, simply because they could…I had always wondered about the strange look Keegan had given me one day when we had been setting up a night at the pub. I had asked him if any skins would show up to get on the piss with us and he had said “I fuckin hope not!”. Being into Oi! I couldn’t understand the division between punks and skins then (I do now, mostly it’s caused by our own miscomprehension of each other, but a lot of it is that some skins are dicks…LOL…but assholes come in all colours and genres).
I was shocked. A skin I knew told me to “do nothing or I’d be next”. So we ended up bailing. Being a peace punk, I found it hard to accept why anyone would beat up someone for having a good time (I was pretty naive back then…). Even tho I had terrorised our kid gang enemies when I was little there was always a respect thing. We’d beat them up, they’d try beat us up or we’d have massive dirt-fights…hehehehehee… but this was pre-meditated. From what I later learned, most punks were open to attacks from skins, boot boys etc…As if it wasn’t bad enough with the cops, gangs in AK we had to contend with people who listened to the same shit as us out on the streets. Oh well….
Hanging out with Kurtis opened up a new world of Crass label bands. Poison Girls, Rudimentary Peni, The Mob were my faves as well as the SUBHUMANS! My clothing slowly changed from Oi! to (alright…I’ll use the word…) crust. Studded denim jacket, leopard skin covered german commando boots (with speed lacing!), bum flap and front flap (adorned with our own patches), scum-covered black Crass t-shirt (scored in WHK!) and hordes of badges, Discharge (FUCK YEAH!), Crass (of course), The Samples, Infa-Riot, Sham 69, Cockney Rejects, Cock Sparrer (alright ya can’t take the Oi! out of the boy…), Poison Girls, The Mob, Subhumans. But on the back of my jacket I had painted ‘FLESH D-VICE’ as well as “ATTACK”…
We never had enough to eat and always seemed to be scrabbling in gutters for ciggie butts. Truly, we were crustie…we lived on soup mix and rice or chips. Drank homebrew and smoked the odd joint or two with the older hippie/punks. I look back on that time now as one of the best in my life….Ahhhhh….little did I know something even stranger and terrifying was on the horizon…