Muff & Donk begin.
1970.
Donk was always a right one.
Full forward for the state rugger team, prodigiously endowed, champion drinker and absolutely peaking in life way too early.
Donk had just scored himself a boiler-maker’s apprenticeship and had, of course, swiftly scored a loan for a second hand ’63 Chrysler Valiant (AP5), manual of course, all gleaming pearlescent cream finish, Aussie-made and manufactured, with wide bench seats for whenever the opportunity to park up at The Lookout presented itself.
Sal had ditched him about a week ago (he couldn’t really recall why), so his sweaty teen fuck obsessed cerebellum calculated those opportunities would soon be on a steep upward climb, pre-season approaching as it was.
Donk was also the drummer in The Groovy Kingsmen, a covers combo specialising in Roy Orbison and Cliff Richard. The Groovies were lead by heavily mutton chopped local music teacher Stavros “Stav” Regonovich, and fleshed out by a group of senior students the ageing lothario had press-ganged into service when the original, all adult lineup quit in disgust over yet another of Stav’s legally and ethically questionable gigging decisions.
Still, drumming down at the Thrumster Ram & Tackle meant Donk had access to a wide array of older women, even, say, married women who were far more likely to take a seventeen year old under their suspect wings and provide some ever-useful tutelage between their crusty floral sheets.
Which was not to say he was much ring-in chop on the skins, just that the other lads from school had given him the late call-up and he’d felt duty-bound to follow through with his solid fisted four-four and some occasional jazz-kit razzle-dazzle if it potentially lead to getting his end away with one of them mythical, chimaera-like (he didn’t actually know that word) over twenty ones who slagged it up on wine-coolers into the early hours of Saturday and Sunday morning.
That hormone-fuelled aspiration would get him through the Meat Night Raffle and the mixer-dance, he reckoned, as he cracked one of his old man’s Toohey’s OIds (nicked).
Donk returned to his kamikaze, garbage bin-lid paradiddles for a bit longer, already daydreaming boobs and… stuff.
It was for sure the time of Donk’s life, that was for bloody certain.
***
Muff had himself a rickety Coles shopping trolley loaded with mum-distilled moonshine, decanted into an assortment of dad-discarded brown beer bottles.
More accurately, his poisonous cargo was just methylated spirits and his school science department’s ethanol stores mixed with about twenty percent water.
That’s the recipe for Rocket Fuel, non-scientists.
Muff’s intention was to present his insanely flammable booty triumphantly at his eighteenth birthday dinner.
‘Dinner’ was probably stretching the point.
BYO at the mysteriously-monickered ‘Pussycat’ on Sancrox Thrumster’s main drag inevitably deteriorated quickly into drunken debauch with most wearing a bib of beef and black bean vomit when proceedings moved on to the strippers’.
Which is not to say Muff’s previous birthdays didn’t have notorious, disaster-oriented precedent.
After all, his seventeenth had ended in an all-in brawl with the Sancrox Thrumster Southies (rugby league, mate). The less said about Cheryl giving a daisy-chain of gobbies to those minor Premier bastards afterwards, by way of dumping him, the better.
Tonight was going to be different, but.
Muff really liked Billy Thorpe.
Muff then intended, optimistically, to get off with a few of the strippers to local Angels shipped in on weekends, for good measure. He’d saved up fifty bucks for it.
Muff had it all worked out, planned to an exacting tee.
Rolling several Panzers into a gunfight, Muff introduced his rowdy dinner guests (most of them members of the North Sancrox Sandgropers) to the evening’s libations.
Jubilant applause and whooping broke out, tables rattled as the horny throng stomped approval.
Muff was well pleased.
***
As he’d fervently yet doubtfully cum nervously fantasised, lo-and-behold, three sheilas Donk vaguely recalled, Year Ten girls when he’d been in Year Seven, which made them fucking ancient now in his wet head, were upon him before the gig-sweat had dried on his brow.
“Give yas a blowie for a lift out to me party?” drawled the one he definitely remembered as “Juicy” Lucy O’Connor, all frizzy blonde perm and heaving bosoms.
How could he not? He’d dedicated more than his fair share of experimental tugs to her in her school sports uniform back in the day, that was for fucken certain.
The Goozza and Rita The Rooter flanked Juicy, hands on barely denim clad hips, spearmint PKs being masticated expectantly. They smelt like bonfire and dampness and confusion.
Donk gulped and broke out in a mean flop sweat, balls retracting northerly. He could hear Stav and the others animatedly pulling the piss over behind him as they packed up- there was no backing out of this one, not with the entire Ram & Tackle observing raptly.
Dread in his guts, Donk lead his three winsome seductresses out to the AP5 for the short, terror-stricken drive out to Juicy’s parents’ house (vacant while the olds were in Bathurst for what none of the kids suspected was actually a Parish key party) on the northern fringes of town, on the lip of the bush.
Donk’s fevered imagination was afire with whatever engorged carnal mysteries might transpire that evening as he pulled the Valiant into the drive, a raging backyard kegger already well and truly in session.
***
Tonight’s waitress quaintly offered her guests wine glasses.
To a man, they’d never clapped eyes on such weird drinking vessels.
Gamely, though, sophisticated young gentlemen of leisure so they were, Muff’s guests charged their glasses to their respective brims and offered up a raucous rendition of their team song by way of an accidental toast.
They’d never really heard of one of those, either.
None of the lads had noticed the fancy geezer guzzling a goblet of cheap red and resplendent in a leather unitard, blonde mane flowing, a complete aberration in small town Australia.
Nonetheless, said stranger sashayed with no little theatre to the head of the lads’ table and offered up, in a mellifluous, alien accent, a rousing “Skol!” and subsequently drained his goblet in a single, messy and prolonged guzzle.
Nonchalantly, he grabbed a flask of Muff’s old lady’s rotgut, took a heartburn-inducing swig and promptly invited himself to the party.
Who the fuck was this guy?
***
Dry patches of the O’Connors’ front lawn smouldered ominously as Donk followed his trio of dodgy sirens through the chaos of the yard.
The yellow grass was an arid inland sea bed festooned with a trove of empties, more than a few pairs of knickers, and, the piece de resistance, some poor smashed fucker was spooning the bird bath with a garden hose up his arse, dozing peacefully.
Bonfires (he had no idea why there were bonfires) spat sparks into the febrile early morning desert heat, fizzing, momentarily catching and finally failing to combust.
For the time being, Donk thought, then forgot immediately as he leered a bit at Juicy’s boobs and let out a an embarrassing, unconscious moan. He gritted his teeth for a shellacking, but none was forthcoming. Golden.
As Rita the Rooter creaked open the wrought iron side gate (replete with YES HE FUCKEN BITES signage, daubed on a buckled sheet of punctured tin and wired at an angle into chicken wire), a few of Donk’s classmates pushed past, baying jubilantly, a blur of muffs and flapping cocks, all tanned bush miscreant and imminent bad decisions larging it carefree and sideways into Sunday morning.
Crudely strung Christmas lights, zig-zagging up the side fence, lead the four of them further along the side of the O’Connors’ slightly clapped out corrugated iron three bedder (in original slate grey with bonus rust colourations). As they advanced, preemptively groping one another a bit in the semi-dark, Donk could feel the shudder of some pretty serious rock and roll shit, reverberating urgently in his nuts and punctuated by what sounded like a baying horde of on-heat cats and some confusingly misplaced splashing.
The side-path dog-legged and they were suddenly in the back yard, a weed festooned red dirt oasis which opened out through a wide back gate into the back of fuck all. Derelict cars, caravans and construction equipment were aligned haphazardly around the fringes of the huge block, revellers drinking and copping off in random back seats and earthmover scoops.
They’d emerged next to the source of that calamitous, barely contained din- a dubious stage had been erected at the top of the yard, restricting entry to the O’Connor manse. The stage was stalked by three low-looking gentlemen, bass-vox/ guitar/ drums, who were concentrated primarily on keeping their stoned gourds on target with some pretty straightforward blues based pub rock.
A dinged up, midnight blue Bedford band was angled, half in, half out of the wide-open back gate, a repurposed cattle number with chicken wire customisation.
Those flickering bonfires were dotted all around the expanse, illuminating an engorged bush bacchanal, all spag-limbed bourbon two-stepping, sloppy pashing and wailing urgent fucking the likes of which Donk’s limited imagination hadn’t even dared to begin sketching.
Best of all, the very centre-piece of the yard was a rain-tank someone had retrofitted with an oxy into a makeshift pool. It squatted on a patch of spinifex. The tank, full of stagnant green murk, contained at least twenty nuded up punters gyrating and revelling like tomorrow was another universe.
Donk was in complete awe.
A tinnie of Tooheys Old was thrust into Donk’s slack mitt. He glanced sideways, agape, to discover The Goozza, Rita the Rooter and Juicy Lucy all in the nick and gesturing towards the “pool”, wicked gleams in respective, heavily mascara’d eyes.
At this stage, you didn’t need to ask Donk twice- he drained that can and grabbed three more from the Esky, fixated on Juicy’s pale derriere disappearing towards the pool, and bit his lip.
Donk got nude, wondered where that bloody dog was, and loped towards that soupy fuck-cauldron.
***
Muff had decided Hani Höden, for that’s who the fuck he was, was one top notch bloke, even though he’d understood roughly a third of what the Swedish rocker was on about, skipping between sonorous English and cryptic mother tongue as he did, no doubt for effect.
Prior to that, however, Hani had laid one fucking righteous birthday bacchanal on. It had, perhaps permanently, erased the trauma of Muff’s seventeenth for all time.
It really was that good.
***
Later, Donk, on Tarzan’s Grip and about seventy beers, was giving a lethargic groaner to The Goozza on the O’Connors’ front fence, when he’d copped a rude tap on the shoulder.
Prematurely ejaculating as he leered around groggily at the wizened, gap-toothed bonce of Edward Von Satan, all of twenty nine fucking years old, Donk dimly wondered what this old cunt wanted.
The Goozza gave him several good slaps and a decent shot to his noodly nethers when Von Satan made his fatal pitch.
The band needed a new drummer. Like, right now.
He wouldn’t go into the gories.
Donk was all ears- there was a fiver a day in this, plus they’d supply the kit and everything.
Member of a touring band, just like that.
He was on board as of yesterday.
***
Muff awoke on the paisley RSL floor in a tangle of stripper-limbs, a feather boa wrapped around his schlong, otherwise clad only in scuffed work boots. He clutched the neck of his SG as if his life depended on it. An amp hummed ominously somewhere nearby.
He was certain he was about to spew, but apparently his limbic system was failing in even that regard for now. Delicately unwinding himself from the ladies, Muff gingerly propped himself up on bruised elbows, squinted, and scanned the wreckage strewn scene of utter debauch radiating out from him.
Shit a brick. He remembered jack and shit post that sixth round of corrosive Pussycat gargle-blasters.
As Muff’s eyes focused, they lingered, now agog, on Hani, who was on his leather-clad knees in front of a stunning blonde splayed atop a bar stool, ravenously performing some well-practiced, next-level Euro-ninja cunnilingus.
The blonde, her name was Narelle, was leant ecstatically back against a one armed bandit, gripping the lever for all it was worth, eyes rolled back in her head and howling some pretty blue stuff.
Hani was the fucking man.
Perhaps sensing a spectator, Hani gazed, fuck-eyed, up from his holy ministrations.
“Vill du gå med ett band?”
Muff had fuck all idea what that meant, but he recognised the word band, and after the night he’d apparently had, he’d follow his depraved Scandinavian sensei to the very ends of the earth.
Like, maybe even Adelaide.
