The Big Whatever by Peter Doyle Read Free Book Online Page A

the pockets of Yankee soldiers on R&R, which it had been ordained, MUST and could only happen to the non-stop accompaniment of funkful soul music, preferably played by one or another band led by your faithful correspondent and teller of truths, Mel ‘Wild Man’ Parker.
    But I digress. Melbourne didn’t do it that way. Down there it was hidden doorways and signs that said “For Madmen Only.” It was a crazy lodge, with secret handshakes and arcane signals. Nothing to see on the outside, but inside – madness and anarchy. Music, drugs and dancing to make Sydney look half-arsed.
    Three days later I’d hooked up with a jazz-fusion group called the Bright Lights. A lucky break. We were playing three, four gigs a week. Wild parties afterwards in ramshackle mansions around East Melbourne, terrace houses in Carlton, mad farmhouses out Eltham way.
    Within a few weeks I was also moonlighting with a rock’n’roll band called the Rods, playing suburban dances for greasy, leather-jacketed bodgies and purple-mohair, beehive-hairdo widgies who didn’t know what year it was.
    Theatre, too. Don’t be surprised, my darlings, Mel Parker is an initiate of the thespian arts. I got a gig playing abstract accompaniment to a nonsensical piece of theatre at the Old Bakery. Never worked out what the hell it was about, but the writer, a young guy known as “Spinner,” told me I wasn’t supposed to, I should just keep doing what I was doing.
    But it is ordained that such times can’t last. One night, as we writers like to say, I was playing with a little pickup jazz group in a St Kilda café. Standing outside, taking a break, a tap on the shoulder. I turned around: Stan.
    â€œHiya, Mel.” He stuck out his hand. “How’s everything?” We shook. For my part, the handshake was not enthusiastic. But Stan’s was. He patted me on the back like we were old, deep friends. “Great to see you, bro.” And fuck me, he sounded sincere.
    Now, let me give you the mail on Stan. Last time he’d not been at his best, having just crawled, climbed and clambered out of Goulburn Jail. I for my part had been suffering a bad case of the Hume Horrors, so all I’d registered was a raggedy-arsed desperate in the back seat.
    He was a different character now. He looked lean andfast. His hair was short on top, longer at the back, in the Melbourne style. His eyes were clear, his gaze direct, ready for anything. He had on Levis, a red and blue striped T-shirt, both clean and new. There was another bloke with him, hawk-nosed, fair-haired, his head down, sucking on a cigarette. The back-up.
    Later on there would be all that talk in the press and on the radio about Stan and me and the others, and the shit we did. Every idiot journalist and politician in the country would come up with some crazy theory or other – international criminal conspiracies, the harmful effects of drugs and music and leftist politics, the rising tide of contempt for law and order – Oh brother, and they said we were out of our trees – and people cast around for a mastermind who was orchestrating it all. Well I’m here to tell you children, it didn’t happen that way. There was no master plan. One thing just led naturally to another. We thought we were paddling our own canoe, but we had no idea where it was heading until we were halfway over the falls.
    But mark my words: none of it would have happened if it hadn’t been for Stan. He had brains and he had guts, and he had something else, a quality I’ve only seen in a few people, something sweet and visionary that swept other people along with him. People wanted Stan around, they wanted to do what he wanted. He wasn’t some kind of Svengali character, though, despite what a certain fuckwit journo later suggested. He was the front man of the operation, but he wasn’t the leader exactly. He had no more of a grand vision of what was