by Nicole Skeltys

The Bliss Button

A friend of mine who worked in the drug addiction field told me ages ago about a very simple series of medical research experiments where rats (rattus norvegicus strain) were given two buttons to push with two distinct outcomes: one button gave them food, the other gave them doses of cocaine. If the survival instinct is as hard-wired as popular versions of Darwinism would have us all believe, then you’d think that the rats, way back in the traffic jam on the evolutionary turnpike, would prefer to chow down on some rodent nutrients. This would enable them to bulk up and continue to cane it past other muroids, and even eventually give the bird to homo sapiens, against which they apparently currently hold the number two spot in the ‘most successful mammal’ race.

But no. Faced with a choice between life and bliss, the rodents chose bliss. Over and over again, they jabbed their snouts against the cocaine button and forgot all about dinner. And breakfast. And lunch. Eventually, they moved on to that rat disco in the sky.

I related strongly to those lab rats when I was wheeled back into my hospital room after the uterine fibroid embolisation operation. This is whats called a ‘day procedure’ which starts with a 90 minute suite of pelvic pokings and manoeveurs under local anaesthetic, and ends with wobbling patients trying to follow the ‘exit’ signs, 24 hours later.

Wheeled into my hospital room after the procedure, I was shown a device which looked a bit like a TV remote only it was hooked up to a drip. I was told that if I hit the green button, I would be given doses of morphine. But not to worry, they were controlled transmissions so I couldn’t overdose, no matter how many times I hit ‘play’. The local anaesthetic was wearing off fast. Even before the nurse had left the room, I started to jab at the ‘morphine play’ button.

For the rest of the afternoon and all that night, I lay semi-conscious with no more mobility or motivation than a potato. My only foray out of my heavily doped reverie was courtesy of the pre-programmed blood pressure machine, which mechanically tightened its velcro grip on my arm and squeezed me out into some kind of hospital gown awareness at hourly intervals. I had (perhaps recklessly) agreed to be part of a pain control research project, so when my eyes slit open as my upper arm lost feeling, I would then behold a lady research assistant with a quiet lisp leaning over, handing me a pen and asking me gently to rate my pain on a graph. I remember looking very hard at the paper, trying to understand what was going on, then looking pathetically at the assistant as her hand hovered anxiously over the long black line. “There’” I said, gesturing as much with my snout as my hand. She reached over and obligingly did a smart cross right about where ‘eight’ was in relation to ‘ten’.

I kept snouting to ‘eight’ for what seemed like a long time. I hit ‘play’ for hours with total abandon. I got as high as a kite. At one point, I remember my surgeon and his team swimming into my field of vision, asking me questions, and I more or less just grinned. When the pain eventually started to lessen after several hours, I pointed to the camera next to my bed and asked one of the nurses to take a photo of me toasting the bliss button with my medicine cup. When she looked startled, I explained “I’m supposed to be on holidays, so I better take some happy snaps of my adventures.”

By the time I was due for discharge from The Alfred the next day, I had not eaten for 48 hours and I had successfully self-medicated myself into a glowing, spongy blob. But I realised then no matter how high I got, the tracks of the operation still throbbed away with varying intensity. The morphine certainly dulled the pain, but only up to a point; after that, all it did was separate the thinking and the feeling parts of me. As Kerry came, gripped my arm, guided me towards the elevators, then down to her utility truck in the carpark, I said “This is what its like to be a junkie!”. She laughed, but I was serious. As we slowly nosed through Punt Rd traffic on our way to my favorite Vietnamese eaterie in Richmond, I looked up at the pale blue Melbourne sky and thought this is how the world can be so beautiful and serene in its touch, while in the distance you can always feel the wounds.

Emergency roadside assistance

My GP prescribed some opiate based painkillers to help me through the next few days, a brand I remembered fondly from the last time I was recovering from an operation to remove an alien growth – my breast cancer tumor of 2 years ago. The tablets gave an optimistic shine to everything, so much so that in a couple of days, I felt well enough to contact Graeme and Eugenie – who have acted towards me over the years with the support and kindness of adopted parents – and said I was finally going to make it up to Canberra to see them. As luck would have it (or synchronicity again), their son Alex was in Melbourne and was driving up that Tuesday, a week after my operation, and I could get a lift with him.

As we pulled up outside Graeme and Eugenie’s two storey townhouse that night, I felt a knot of apprehension form in my stomache. I knew that Graeme was still very disabled from his massive stroke five months ago, was confined to a wheelchair and needed 24 hour assistance with all personal care and living tasks, which was provided largely by Eugenie – who was now as much a nurse as a wife. When Alex and I bustled into the loungeroom with our baggage and Thai take-away, I saw a figure with thinning grey hair stooped over in a wheelchair and my heart missed a beat. I bent down and gave him a hug and kiss. To my relief, Graeme looked pretty much the way he had always looked, a man with a sturdy frame and kindly, intelligent eyes. The big difference was, though, his arm hung lifeless in a sling, and when he saw me, he didn’t smile.

Later, Eugenie explained that one of the many side-effects of a right brain stroke was that you lost the ability to register facial expressions, and your ability to express your own emotions with facial movement and rising and falling vocal inflections was also lost. This was one of the many things that Graeme was having to learn all over again. Over the next few days, I also realised that my old dear friend could indeed return to his former animated and witty self, but that these periods were often cut short by the chronic fatigue that accompanied the stroke. Graeme would suddenly become very quiet and then start to nod off in his chair, or sometimes he’d gently ask Eugenie to help him back into bed.

After a few days of hanging out in the loungeroom, broken only by trips to physiotherapy and medical appointments, I think all of us felt a heaviness building in the air. At one point Graeme looked at me over the dining room table and said in a voice that carried the shadows of many nights waking up and lying still for hours “If I thought I was never going to improve beyond how I am now, I’d rather die.”

I just nodded and glanced over at Eugenie. We understood. Graeme may be on powerful anti-depressants, but the prospect of a life where you can’t even get yourself out of bed in the morning, where even the most basic of independent living tasks was beyond you, a life of infant-like dependency on another human being – who wouldn’t feel betrayed by their mortal coil, who wouldn’t want to shake it off? I understood, but my heart grew so very heavy with that understanding.

We decided to break the routine by making a trip to Mt Darragh, a beautiful part of the Snowy Mountains range where Graeme and Eugenie had bought a plot of land several years ago. They had almost finished building their dream home there, what was to be their retirement house, when Graeme suddenly collapsed to the floor one night in early October and for the next five months, the center of their lives was dramatically relocated to the wards and rehabilitation units of Canberra hospital. Somehow, through all of this, Eugenie had had the presence of mind and fortitude to take over the remote supervision of the final stages of building, and the house had finally been completed. Graeme had been there once since his release from hospital, and they both found the beauty and deep quiet of the land spiritually healing. It was a two and a half hour drive to the property, but we were all keen to go.

The trip down was uneventful, and Graeme chatted amiably all the way down, his spirits already lifted at the prospect of seeing their gorgeous patch of nature again. However, when we finally got there and helped Graeme into the bare loungeroom to look at the view, he quickly grew quiet – even more quiet than usual. After a while he said weakly “I don’t feel well. I need to lie down.” Both Eugenie and I felt alarm – there was no furniture in the house, nowhere to lie down except in the car. We took Graeme back out to the Subaru, Eugenie all the time probing for symptoms, asking Graeme if we should take him to the local hospital about 20k away. He just kept repeating that he wanted to lie down, and after Eugenie had placed him back in the front seat and tilted it back, Graeme quickly fell asleep. We wandered slowly back to the house.

Eugenie and I ate our sandwiches on the front patio and stared out over the silent eucalyptus covered ranges, undulating from deep green to misty blue in the distance. As we talked, we were both acutely aware that Graeme was missing out on the very healing wilderness experience he craved. The situation felt hopeless. I felt a sense of crisis in the air.

Suddenly a sound came from the car. It was the mobile phone, which Eugenie had left in the car – we were both startled as reception was so patchy out here. Eugenie ran over to the car and reached inside to grab the phone. As she walked back to the house, I could hear her puzzled conversation: “Roadside emergency assistance?? No, I didn’t place a call for help- who is this? RACQ? I’m sorry, but you have the wrong number, I’m not even in Queensland, this is a Victorian number!” She hung up and looked up at me with surprise – “That is so odd – why would the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland think I called for help? And I can see by the missed calls that they’ve tried at least 3 times to reach me!”

At that moment, I got goosebumps and chills down my spine. On the drive down, I had thought about my deceased parents, as I often did. How I had always felt that they had something to do with Graeme and Eugenie reaching out to me like I was family, given they were no longer around on earth to provide that kind of protection anymore themselves; and I wondered vaguely what they would think now, when my adopted family was struggling to keep going. Mum and Dad had lived in Queensland, I grew up there. The fact that the bizarre offer of emergency roadside assistance came from Queensland, when Graeme was so unwell in our car, struck me like a call from heaven. No doubt I was still under the sway of the synchronicity book I had recently finished reading, and all the other coincidences I had been experiencing over the last 3 weeks, and no doubt I very much wanted to believe in guidance from the beyond, but the call filled me with a strong sense that help was on its way.

When Graeme woke up, he felt much better, and even started to apologise for “mucking up the afternoon”. We shushed him, enormously relieved that he was ok. and bundled the wheelchair and commode back into the car. The drive back to Canberra into the fading light of the afternoon was spectacular – the sunsets in the high country of Australia are amazing, a fresco of saturated gold, pink and purple clouds swirling across ultramarine – the acid trip skies make up for the parched monochrome of the scrub and pastures that crawl underneath them. Graeme and Eugenie chatted all the way home, and I realised with another small chill, that I had dreamt this scene earlier, I had seen this sunset in a vivid dream a week ago.

The journey to Mt Darragh felt like a turning point. For the remainder of my trip, Graeme’s mood seemed, on the whole, to have improved. On the last day before I had to leave, Graeme and I spent the afternoon absorbed in doing Tarot spreads, a passion we both shared. That evening over dinner, I asked Eugenie if she’d like her cards read but she said no, she only liked to consult the cards “When I am feeling optimistic. I’m afraid I am not feeling so optimistic right now.” Graeme turned to her then and urged: “Now love. We have to push on. Make the best of the situation. Onwards and upwards, right?”

Wisdom McNuggets

A couple of days after the fibroid operation, I had decided that I was going to be alright. MOFO would surely shrink and stop frigging around with my innards. Surely I could go back to the States and not worry about needing any further medical attention. I hopped onto the internet, found an amazingly cheap flight to LAX on 15 April, booked it; booked another getting me to Pittsburgh, arriving early hours 16th. There. Done. No going back now. I eagerly emailed Tanya with the news. T wrote back excitedly, enormously relieved to hear I was indeed coming back and that I felt confident I would be fighting fit again soon.

How could I not go back, when I knew there were so many good people egging me on? Scott told me that he and T had done a little candlelight ritual and prayer the night before the operation. I was extremely touched. His parents and Granny, devout Christians who lived in Butler, just north of Pittsburgh, were also praying for me. Our 45th St neighbors, Tim and Jim, sent healing energy my way (Tim is a reiki practitioner). Americans I don’t know sent kind responses to the last blog post. Charlie called on the morning of the procedure to wish me well. While I will miss my friends in Australia terribly, the tug to go back to the US, to Pittsburgh in particular is still strong. Made so much stronger by the empathy and support of Tanya, who has kept the faith that “opportunities will present themselves, we’ll be ok!” – and our small, but growing, circle of warm-hearted American buddies.

A couple of days ago, my faith that MOFO would eventually cease to engage in lower abdominal delinquency got its first boost. The MRI showed the fibroid – creepily, by far the biggest object in my lower body – completely sapped of blood, upon which it had been feeding and growing, vampire like, for goodness knows how long. My handsomely bearded interventional radiologist looked up from the lurid 3D image on his MacBook that we had both been craning over, and announced that the operation had been “perfect”. He leaned back in his office chair and explained that I could expect to get symptom relief from organ pressures in about 4 weeks, and after that there was every likelihood that MOFO would continue to slowly wither for up to a year. He stood up, and we shook hands: “Good luck in Pittsburgh” he smiled, and then added in an accent more suggestive of a bloke from the bush than a well-heeled 4th Avenue specialist “Cheerio then!”

That night I started cleaning up my backyard studio, getting ready to vacate again, this time for good. I peeled off all the wall posters, most of them advertising events I had played at, or CDs I had released over the years. I stared at my old analogue synthesisers, all stacked up in a pile now, getting ready for their transfer to live with their uncle Byron, a super-nice guy with whom I had written TV and other scores over the years. Byron would give them the love and attention they deserved. Still, I felt a wave of sadness and nostalgia. All the intense times we had shared, how closely their circuit boards had listened to my yearnings and channeled them mysteriously into unique sounds. And this room had borne witness to the hatching of so many creative projects over the last seven years, the last, and perhaps the craziest, The Jilted Brides album and subsequent adventures.

On one part of the wall near my workstation, I had pinned up various motivational images and texts, something I had done shortly after I had received my cancer diagnosis two years earlier. One of those was a photocopy of the summary pages from “The Secret”, a ‘positive thinking’ book that was then just starting to explode in popularity around the world, and which several friends had urged me to read. As I peeled off the pages, I now cringed at some of the New Age exhortations – reduced to statements so simple and often so fantastical that they were very hard to take seriously “You attract what you think about.” “See the good things in people and you will get more of them.” “The mind can heal the body”. But at the time, I didn’t want philosophical treatises or a full, balanced meal of cognitive therapy mixed with oncology research statistics. I wanted wisdom McNuggets, easily digested globs of hope, deep fried in magic. Something that would convince my brain that everything was going to be ok as quickly as non-complex carbohydrates would convert into a sugar rush.

Back at Mt Darragh, I had shared a wisdom McNugget with Graeme. He grew more and more quiet as we stared out at the property he could see but was currently unable to walk around. I instinctively kissed him on the head and grabbed his hand. “Everything is going to be ok” I had said, with some force. “Things unfold at their own pace, often not at the pace we would like, but at the right pace. I know it will take a long time, but you will pull through this.” Graeme squeezed my hand. “I know” he said, but with an expression I found hard to read. “I know everything will be ok”.

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by Nicole Skeltys

Twists of fate

Tanya and I have been back in Australia for just over a week now. And in that short space of time, I have got some news which made me realize that my life over the last 2 years has actually turned into a series of novelistic cliff-hangers. My return to Pittsburgh – which was initially planned to be in 4-5 weeks time – is now uncertain.

Two days before we left for Australia, The Jilted Brides had our debut Pittsburgh gig and CD launch at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It was a splendid night. Richard Parsakian dressed the band out of his stylish retro clothes collection and we could have been on Top of the Pops in 1969. There was a good crowd, and the band played extremely well. After the show, there was much positive feedback, people bought CDs and even asked us to autograph them. T, Scott and I came back to our Lawrenceville boudoir late that night on a high, cracked champagne and had a mini-party in Tanya’s attic bedroom long into the night.

The first twist of fate happened the day after the gig. When I popped the question to our brilliant new backing band ie are we now all ready to move on to even bigger and better gigs? the answer was well, actually, no. Our drummer, guitarist and bassist all emailed me one by one saying they have other creative and professional priorities. That was it – one great performance that will never be repeated! Its always hard keeping a band together, harder than most ‘blended families’ I imagine…

On Sunday 16 we boarded the first of five flights that would, two days later, deposit us in Melbourne. From Pittsburgh to Denver, Denver to Vancouver, Vancouver to Taipei, Taipei to Sydney, Sydney to Melbourne, my mind circled two preoccupations like a demented vulture – how to make money from music in Pittsburgh, what was the ‘Big Idea’ that would keep The Jilted Brides going and help us prosper? And, more disturbingly, what was going on with my health – I had been in more or less constant pain for three weeks, there was something wrong with my stomache and it felt suspiciously like there was a growth. At the back of my mind I knew the first two years after a breast cancer diagnosis are the highest risk for metastases (tumors) to appear anywhere in the body.

At Taipei airport, T and I tossed around many business ideas – some whacky, some not so whacky. Suddenly, just as the boarding call came for our flight to Sydney, we hit upon it – we actually hit upon The Idea. The more we talked about it, the more excited we got, we thought ‘yes! this might just work, this could combine a lot of objectives, spiritual and material!’. More of the ‘Big Idea’ in a later post, but it felt good to walk out of the departure lounge onto the China Airlines plane with a vision to pursue, a creative way to perhaps make a living when we got back to the USA.

If I got back.

Make-up sex and Brunswick revisited

As the Qantas plane dropped below the cloudline and began its descent into Melbourne, you could see the thick pall of smoke haze that hung over the city and the surrounding north-east countryside. Less than two weeks earlier, super-hot temperatures (47 degrees celsius/ 116 degrees fahrenheit) had combined with chronic drought conditions (or more precisely, global warming conditions) and galeforce windspeeds (up to 125km an hour) to create a firey holocaust – massive tracts of bush, and entire towns were incinerated within hours. And most horrificly, at least 209 people died, many as they tried to escape in their cars but were engulfed by the racing flames.

Despite this sombre context, we were nevertheless joyful to return. My dear old friend Aaron picked us up from the airport and took us back to our old house in East Brunswick, where he treated us to beer, wine and Indian take-away as we collapsed into the beaten up old sofa onto the front porch. My old flatties Roland and Hiroko welcomed us home, and I met the new couple that had just moved into my old bedroom. I noted with great pride that the little backyard vegie patch I had started all those years ago had, under the loving attentions of Roland and Hiroko, doubled in size over the last 9 months, and even the front yard now had been replaced by a permaculture garden. Pipes from the roof had been extended to the ground to ensure the (increasingly scarce) rainwater reached the plants and trees. Australians are famous for being obsessed with their backyards, and I realized how much I missed that connection to earth, the appreciation of fresh food pulled from your own garden.

Tanya moved back into my former backyard bungalow studio where we had spent the previous summer sweating, swelling and panting in the heat, recording our debut CD ‘Larceny of Love’ which is what we had launched at the Andy Warhol museum just before we left. I bunked down with one of my dearest, oldest friends Kerry, and her park ranger husband Chris, at their flat not far away in West Brunswick. The plan was for Tanya to spend a week sorting through and getting rid of the rest of her possessions (either selling them, shipping them up to her mother’s house in Terrigal – just north of Sydney – or simply giving them away), then she was to head up to see her mum and visit her old pals in Sydney before flying back to Pittsburgh a couple of weeks later. Upon her departure from Melbourne, I was to move back into the studio to work out what to do with my remaining stuff, which mostly consisted of my beloved old synthesizers and recording equipment.

While T complained about the heat, which she was really feeling after chilly Pittsburgh, I found myself falling in love with Melbourne again in exactly the same way that you see the very best in your former lovers shortly after you’ve broken up with them. It was like make-up sex, only with a metropolis. I wandered down Sydney Rd, Brunswick and marveled once again at the abundance of fresh, delicious, cheap cuisine of so many ethnicities. Melbourne is one of the gourmet capitals of the world, if not the global food capital. Its actually hard to get a bad meal in inner Melbourne: even the local pubs have menu items like ‘pan-fried zucchini flowers’ or ‘duck wontons with harissa and wild rice’. Before I had left, I had felt the cloudless blue skies and searing heat sapping my energy in the same way they were sucking out any moisture from our scraggy, rock hard lawn. Now I beamed up at the sun (rarely seen during the Pittsburgh winter) and relished the thought of getting a tan. I could even walk into a bar – any old bar – and order a single glass of champagne, my drink of choice, something I had not been able to do at any bar T and I had patronized during our trip through the USA (you could sometimes order a bottle, but that was beyond my capacity, notwithstanding Australians’ notorious reputation for alcohol guzzling.)

But most of all, my spirits lifted because I was back with my network of buddies again. As both T and I had never married, nor bred, all our emotional investment over the years had gone into creating ersatz families from our friends. While most of T’s friends were in Sydney, mine were in Melbourne. As I started the process of catching up with everyone, I started to feel stronger, more myself again. I found myself sitting on the toilet and staring at Hiroko’s motivational notes: “Do not always push the moment away! Do not always push love away!” as well as the household injunctions to be eco-conscious and save precious water: “If its yellow, let it mellow; if its brown, flush it down!” and I wondered, with a pang, if I could find like-minded souls like this in Pittsburgh. Idealists with a sense of humor, eco-activitists who loved to have fun, down to earth visionaries, spiritual trippers with big hearts.

Giant fibroids and rare, analogue synthesizers

As T frantically raced against time sorting through all her remaining possessions, I embarked on a week of nail-biting medical tests. I was prodded and poked up both ends (gastroscopy, colonoscopy), had my boobs squeezed flat (mammogram) and had my uterus zapped by an ultrasound. To my enormous relief, by the time last Friday came around, I had been given the all-clear from cancer again – reprieved again from any threat of imminent demise. But the news was not all good.

I sat opposite my doctor Jeff, a handsome, ridiculously healthy looking man my age, who was progressive by any medical standards (he was also a naturopath) and political standards (I found out during the last Federal election campaign that he was also a member of The Greens and from then on we spent half our consultations discussing my health and the other half whining about ALP and Coalition policy failures). Jeff looked up from the ultrasound report and announced that I had “a giant fibroid”. In fact, it was “the biggest fibroid I have ever seen. It takes up your entire uterus”.

I stared at him. “What does that mean?” I asked, now suddenly a little short of breath. “I mean, how do I get rid of it?” It was a relief to know that the painful growth I was feeling was benign; but I now felt like Ripley in Alien – there was an intruder in my womb! Jeff shrugged “Well, sometimes hysterectomy.”

“HYSTERECTOMY!???” I just about shrieked. There was no way I was having a hysterectomy. “OK, OK!” Jeff leant over to his computer and started typing out a referral to a gynecologist. “Well, we won’t send you to any of the old male gynos then. The old guys like doing hysterectomies you know. When did you say you have to return to the States?” When I explained that I needed to be back in Pittsburgh in 5 weeks time, to finish off a film project we had started, Jeff looked grim. “You’d be lucky to see a gynecologist in less than 4 weeks. And as for surgery, well forget about the public hospital system, you’d be waiting for months.” But the angels had not entirely scampered off – after several phone calls, we found – incredibly – a female gyno who could see me within a few days.

That afternoon, I wandered back to Clarence St and sat in the lounge room slumped in front of my computer trying to do some paperwork, but full of foreboding. If I had to have urgent elective surgery at a private hospital, that could cost thousands. Kerry and Chris had very kindly sold my car for me a few weeks earlier; so I now had only one possession of any serious value left, and that was a rare, analogue synthesizer from the late ’70s – the Roland System 700, which was my pride and joy. I googled it and sure enough, it was worth a pretty penny.

Tanya came in from the studio, leaned against the kitchen counter and tried to cheer me up. I said, putting on a brave face: “You know, if I have to I can always sell my System 700, it would fetch a few grand.” Tanya looked at me with surprise and compassion; I suspect she heard the catch in my voice. When I had looked up the machine on the web earlier that afternoon, one entry had really stuck in my mind. A vintage synth site had described the System 700 thus: “This extremely rare machine is quite possibly the best synthesizer ever built.” And I knew then I couldn’t do it. I felt as loyal to that bunch of modules, circuits and wires as if the System 700 (or Seth as I called him) was my own flesh and blood. Giant fibroid or no giant fibroid, Seth was staying with me.

This afternoon I headed off with Natasha, Robert and his son James to check out the Sydney Road street party and Brunswick Music Festival. Melbournians are addicted to festivals, there is one happening somewhere just about every weekend. This was the big one for Brunswick. We pushed past the dreadlocked men, the veiled women, the overexcited kids, terrible middle-aged punk bands and multi-ethinic world music ensembles. We gnawed on satay and drank middle eastern soup. Tash and I finally ended up at my local pub, The Lomond, nodding and giggling to a ukulele blues band. I’m hitting the sack now, back in my Clarence St studio which Tanya vacated a couple of nights ago, surrounded by piles of boxes, cables and gizmos. And tomorrow I see the ‘gyno’, after which I guess a new chapter awaits.

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by Nicole Skeltys

There is a Zen saying: “Leap and the net will appear”.

That was the spiritual justification T and I used to sell most of our worldly possessions in early 2008 and take off to the US with a tiny budget, almost no US contacts and (in my case) uncertain health. The hope and expectation that if we just followed our instincts and put our faith in strangers in a strange land, our lives – which had reached personal and artistic deadends in Australia – would turn around. Now, 10 months after touching down in Vancouver and embarking on our North American adventures, there is no doubt that is exactly what has happened. And the spate of good fortune (or spiritual cuddles, depending on your point of view) that followed us on the road has, since we reached Pittsburgh in October last year, developed into the kind of spectacularly lucky streak that would get you thrown out of a casino in Vegas.

As I write this, The Jilted Brides are preparing for our debut Pittsburgh gig and CD launch on 13 February (Valentine’s Day weekend). Thanks to the generosity and flamboyant vision of Richard Parsakian – one of Pittsburgh’s arts community movers and shakers – our launch is taking place at The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the most spectacular venues in town, as part of an AIDS Task Force benefit. And thanks to the generosity and enthusiasm of Charlie Humphrey, another formidable force in the Pittsburgh arts scene, we actually have a CD to launch – courtesy of his little label, Uh Oh Music. Our new band – Al Vish (drums), David Wallace (guitar), Ryan McMasters (bass) – are extraordinarily talented musicians and lovely people to boot. We rehearse in Al’s studio which just happens to be down the road from where Tanya and I live in Lawrenceville. As we step up rehearsals and media promotion in the lead up to the gig, I reflect upon where I was 12 months ago and I have to say, things are looking up.

Our first (and only) gig in Australia was in April 2008 at Melbourne’s Glitch club and cinema, only a couple of weeks before we took off to play at one of Canada’s biggest festivals in Vancouver. On the whole, I think its fair to say, the gig “went bung” (an endearing Australian expression meaning something screwed up). The mix wasn’t great and our nerves mercilessly attacked our vocal chords in a quivering battle that lasted all night. Nevertheless, one audience member enthused later that Tanya reminded her of Janis Joplin, and someone else pointed at my keyboard and said Pink Floyd. At each subsequent performance in the States our sound has improved and our new band now has such a powerful psychedelic sound, we are expecting our Pittsburgh debut will be our best gig yet.

At the end of the Melbourne gig, we played one of the hymns from ‘Larceny of Love’ called Darkness/Light, while Tanya’s tripped out montage of space flight and planet footage filled the screen behind us. I wrote an incantation which we read over the deep electronic drones and angelic voices of the track. I reproduce it here, as it reveals the state of mind I was in just before I left Australia.

Incantation to Darkness/Light

If I do not make it to the other side of today
I was glad to meet you anyway
Though I was more alone when we parted ways
I was glad to meet you anyway
I don’t know my future, I just know I cannot stay
This is a prayer for the highway

I am telling you this because
I am the Broadcast
I hear the voices singing across time
Even those voices that rang in ancient times
I can still hear them
Listen to me because I am stronger than what you see around you
It is because each night I wander back
Marvel without end at how I can be

I tell you turn your mind to wonder
Be a stranger to Existence
And you will see what I see
I tell you every thought and action creates every hour
And every heart opened is a question answered

My feelings, you see
They are like the finest lace ever woven
And my mind, you see
Is the finest hourglass ever fashioned
Truly, you can see the whole of history gleaming there
If you lean close enough

I can pull away from this flypaper without any effort
I fly up and float around and around the room
Elated with release
Peacefully spiralling upwards and upwards
I fly straight to the window and crawl all around it
Trying to sense the opening, the crack
Because You are outside
And I can feel Your breeze

A great murmuring filled our ears
Of wind in meadows and ocean breeze
The purring sands
And the fire on leaves
And we ask forgiveness from all we see
And the rivers and mountains and sea
Thank us endlessly

So we bless and thank you for this:
That you’ve shared with us a night of bliss
We bless each marriage of Darkness and Light
And God speed every Jilted Bride.

I like to think these two jilted brides have been sped along the highway by ‘The Great Whatever’ and much of the net is starting to become visible. T is now teaching in the film faculty at Point Park University, developing video projections for Squonk Opera (an innovative multimedia troupe based in Pittsburgh) and together we are working on a series of promotional films for one of Pittsburgh’s great regional parks – The Grandview Scenic Byway Park on Mt Washington – which is enormous fun. I was recently granted a 3 year artist’s working visa – not easy to get, but I was apparently able to convince US immigration I was an “extraordinary alien” despite having no experience with inserting anal probes into earthlings or creating crop circles using lasers from spaceships hovering several miles in the air.

But still, I feel the whistling of air around my ears, I am still in a kind of freefall. There is currently not enough income coming in to survive and just as much uncertainty as ever as to how that situation can be turned around. Starting again in a new town – even one as absurdly friendly, supportive and beautiful as Pittsburgh – is tough, with no friends to call up, hang out with. Faith, optimism and the benevolence of the Great Whatever will continue to be required to pull through the next few months.

Forty eight hours after our Warhol performance, T and I board the plane back to Australia for a few weeks to wind up our affairs and get our various bodily parts medically examined courtesy of our excellent universal healthcare system – I am in particular overdue for an oncology check-up and mammogram. And I am also most anxious to spend time with my dear friends and adopted parents Graeme and Eugenie – Graeme’s condition after his massive stroke has hardly improved. It will certainly be a moving experience to go back home after so much as happened, and then to say good-bye again.

But between now and then there is much to do – costumes to select from Richard’s Eon shop in Shadyside, hair-dos and false eyelashes to discuss with our make-up artist, more invitations to send out, and many more hours rehearsing under the fairylights and ’60s swirly wall carpets of Al’s studio. We are certainly anxious to sound and look as good as we possibly can, make a good impression in our adopted home. Hopefully the audience will be in a particularly good mood thanks to the Steeler’s superbowl win on Sunday (you could have been forgiven for thinking world war two had just ended, such was the hysterical jubilation in the streets all night!). And of course, we will be playing on Valentines day weekend – our heart-ache ballads will make happy lovers relieved that all those woes are now behind them (at least for the time being) and for the single and lonely there is always the hope, of course, that a jilted bride or groom might catch their eye and the greatest safety net of all – the net of love – might magically appear by the end of the night.

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by Nicole Skeltys

Truck and cow songs

Here are some songs heard on local Montana radio, when T and I were staying at the Montana Artists Refuge in Basin in June last year:

“America Moves By Truck” – (sung with semi-religious enthusiasm over an anthemic driving country rock arrangement):

(chorus)

“America moves by truck
America moves by truck
America moves
BY TRUCK!!!”

That one from Gearjammin’ Gold, an internet radio station from Great Falls in the north of the State.

Heres another great lyric line:

“There ain’t a cow in Texas if I don’t love you”

This latter gem from the only local ‘terrestrial’ radio station that Basin picks up – the “low power emergency” station broadcasting from Boulder, 9 miles away. It played continuous old style country music and syrupy 60s and ’70s ‘easy listening’ ballads.

T and I listened to the emergency station whenever we were in the kitchen, which was often.

Late every morning, we would find ourselves staring into the fridge deciding what to do about lunch and dinner. Given the nearest grocery store was over 20 miles away, and we had no car, we approached this daily ritual of meal planning with the seriousness of survivalists. Other times I’d come and stand by the window sill, T would look up from her editing work and we’d talk about ideas. Given the kitchen was also where we washed our clothes by hand in the sink, that was another reason for me to be there rather than working in my studio. But one of the most frequent reasons for my restless journeys from the studio to the kitchen to was to reach into the fridge and fetch myself another Moose Drool, Missoula’s finest brew – to aid the creative process, or block out sucking life uncertainty, or both. All the while, semi-forgotten country hits streamed out of the very old, grease streaked boombox which sat on the counter by the sink.

Emergency country radio

The music on the emergency station was also continuous, pre-recorded, only interrupted every hour to inform listeners in a slow drawl that this is the FM frequency to tune to when you are in Jefferson County for advice on what to do in case of “an emergency”.

Every now and then I found myself wondering about what kind of emergency would they have out here – has there ever been one around these parts? There are no nuclear power stations in Montana, so presumably no need to issue evacuation procedures in case of local nuclear melt-down.

So, I could only think of a national disaster, something so big it would shut down the TV stations, and maybe cut off the phone lines, and, lord forbid, even the internet. This little station then would be people’s only access to the outside world. I imagined frightened families huddling round the crackling kitchen boombox, waiting to hear the fate of the nation while ancient country classics clocked one into the other, filling the room with swaying sounds of faded loves, chaffing small town morals and heartache.

I was introduced to some great music thanks to Jefferson County emergency radio. Traditional country music speaks about some of the deepest hurts you can get dealt in life, but with a kind of sincerity and unselfconscious humor that seems largely absent from the cool, modern ‘alt’ stuff.

Dark country lyrics

For example, emergency radio introduced me to Bobby Dare. Bobby Dares 1969 hit “Margies at the Lincoln Park Inn” was one of the tracks on rotation, worming into my ears at least once a day. Lincoln Park Inn has an instantly appealing and familiar melody, like your Mom might have hummed it around the house when you were a kid. But the image of desire trapped by conformity and conscience packs a wallop because it is so simply told:

“My name’s in the paper where I took the boy scouts to hike
My hands’re all dirty from working on my little boy’s bike
The preacher came by and I talked for a minute with him
My wife’s in the kitchen and Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn
And I know why she’s there I’ve been there before
But I made her a promise that I wouldn’t cheat anymore
I tried to ignore it but I know she’s in there my friend
My mind’s on a number and Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn
Next Sunday it’s my turn to speak to the young people’s class
They expect answers to all of the questions they ask
What would they say if I spoke of the modern day sins
And all of the Margies at all of the Lincoln Park Inns
The bike is all fixed and my little boy’s in bed asleep
His little old puppy is curled in a ball at my feet
My wife’s baking cookies to feed to the Bridge Club again
I’m almost out of cigarettes and Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn
And I know why she’s there”

Well how you can best that, lyric-wise? You just can’t. But real country music could get a hell of a lot darker – Porter Wagoner’s monologues, for example, included men going mad inside “rubber rooms’ and little boys being burnt to death at home while their parents whooped it up at the local dance.

Late one night as I lay on my tough little futon mattress on the wooden floor in the corner of our shared room, my consciousness changed down gears into sleep. It was passing trucking songs, dark Porter Wagoner ballads, the physical discomfort I felt from my recent ailments and emotional losses. Suddenly a deliciously provocative title for a country/gospel/trucking song popped like a jack in the box into my desultory mood. I chuckled out loud – it was a wink from the Lord I knew, daring me to record this track one day if ever got to Nashville. Here it is:

“God Kills Someone Everyday”

‘I’ve got a hole in my gut, a scar on my breast,
A rip in my heart, a flat in my tire
Lord, what did I do to disrespect you?
Make you so mad, bring down your ire?

Well my friends they all say
You got it good, you got it good
So what if you hurt?
So you should, oh so you should
Ain’t nothing so perfect, it can’t be swept away
Don’t you know God kills someone everyday?

Well he put us down, and he helps us walk
Puts food in our mouths and hears how we talk
All the praising and pleading, hears the screeching u-turns
The kicking at bottles that roll down the curb
The cussing and bleeding and drunk before noon
Hey, no-one can say our times come too soon

Then I felt His hand come down on my shoulder
I knew, yes I knew I was old and getting older
Theres creatures to whom I must give way
Pull over, take the exit off the cosmic highway
I still take it personal, though I hear the angels say
Don’t you know God kills someone everyday?’

I can only hope I live long enough to hear that tune one day rise out of threadbare AM frequencies, float along on rusty pedal steel twangs, fill the air of a lonely Montana saloon like smoke out of a Winchester and make a trucker tap their toes:-)

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by Nicole Skeltys

On Friday night, Tanya was bouncing around in front of the bathroom mirror in her new slinky black stovepipes, rock and roll stud belt, black skivvy and red neckerchief. She was getting ready to go out and see a concert with Scott and was sparkling with happiness. As she tossed her dazzling blonde mane over to one side and blasted it with the hairdryer she yelled “Hey, I feel like a teenager again!” After she snapped it off, she bounced out into the loungeroom looking for her handbag, then chuckled gleefully with a wink: “A baad teenager!”

Tanyas remark about feeling like a teenager again reminded me of Montana, where we both started to have “teenager revisited” experiences. Given I started this blog in New York in September, which was almost at the end of our epic road trip that began in May, perhaps now is a good time to get some ‘back story’ in and recount some of our neo-juvenile adventures in Montana in June.

Escape from paradise

Life in an artists refuge shows just how contrary human desire is.

Tanya and I had finally arrived at an idyllic retreat. The Montana Artists Refuge was a cluster of historic Wild West buildings in a tiny former gold rush town called Basin (pop. 250). Basin was nestled in a tiny high plains valley framed by soaring mountains and forests, many miles away from anywhere that could be called a serious town. The Refuge was run by a bunch of women artists who had discovered Basin in the ’70s and settled there. They were pioneering women of enormous courage and hardiness, who had the vision and conviction to pool what little money they eventually saved to buy some of the tiny town’s historic buildings and turn it over to the use of other artists. They joked with us that in the early days of ’70s counter-culture lifestyle experiments, bemused locals would muse that “there will surely be a war between the hippy bikers and the arty lesbians”. But in fact, everyone got on just fine, and the women run artists’ refuge was now just as much a part of the region’s proud history as the disused gold mines and the cowboys.

Our residence was the top floor of a former 19th century bank, all old exposed beams, high ceilings and buttery mountain light through enormous windows. The faded wooden floors creaked like a ship at sea every time I walked from the kitchen through the bedroom/ living area to the large open studio where I had set up my work station. I tapped away at my computer each day in front of a panoramic view of Basin’s main street (where a 3 legged dog limping down the middle of the road was the most exciting thing that ever happened) and I could gaze for hours at the nearby mountains which were still snow capped in early June. Tanya set up her laptop in the kitchen, where she could look down on the backyard and domiciles of our fellow artist residents, one of whom was a handsome young poet from Pittsburgh called Scott.

Here we were finally getting longed for rest at last – after all the weeks of stress getting ready to leave Australia for an extended period of time – possibly for good. Then the nerve wracking build up to our second only ever gig at Vancouver’s biggest New Music festival. Followed by our back-breaking stint as volunteer organic farm workers on Galiano Island, one of Canada’s Gulf Islands, off the coast of Vancouver. Then the long, intense cross-examination by US customs officers as we tried to cross the Canada/US border in an overstuffed SUV with a Taiwanese driver, courtesy of a rideshare lift we’d found on Craigslist. But finally we had made it. Here we were in the promised land – America! And nowhere looked more like God’s own country than western Montana; the drive from Seattle to Basin had been the most spectacular of my life – verdant mountains, serene valleys, glassy green rivers gushing everywhere, diamond clear lakes, and the famous Big Sky – the eggshell blue of the earth’s outer atmosphere was so close here, you could see the curve stretching forever.

But after two weeks of splendid isolation in this astonishing environment, we got bored.

When Saturday morning rolled around again, the sun dazzling in through all the windows, I sat down at my computer to work, but then I immediately got up and creaked all the way down from my studio to the kitchen. T was fixing some kind of breakfast, a “cowboy meal” as we called them, because so much of our diet for the last 2 weeks had been based on beans and leftovers as there was nowhere to buy fresh food in Basin. I said “I can’t stand it anymore, I feel like I’m trapped in a nunnery, I have to get out of here”. T agreed. She was going stir crazy too. She was easily persuaded that we had to check out Butte – a town about 20 miles away that apparently had great bars and was full of slightly unhinged but friendly people.

A couple of hours later, we were scrambling over some barbed wire fencing on the outskirts of Basin, making our way to a verge on Interstate 15. We held up a hand scrawled sign saying ‘Butte’. And we waited.

We took turns holding up the sign and tried out our friendliest Australian smiles. Neither of us had hitch-hiked since we were teenagers, and we were a tad nervous. Cars whizzed past, many of them not even bothering to glance at us. There were frequent pauses in traffic: it was not a busy interstate, and besides, it was not a busy State – there were less than 1 million people in the whole of Montana. Half an hour passed. Then finally a red 4WD screeched to a halt up ahead of us, and with a mixture of relief and trepidation we ran up – quickly glanced at the guy – he looked small and non-threatening – and jumped in.

A few minutes down the road, the scenery went from serene to sublime. Out in front of us in the distance, a ring of gigantic snow capped mountains suddenly jumped out from a curve in the highway against the intense blue sky. I gasped out loud. Our small, bearded, driver, who wore paint stained overalls and gripped the steering wheel intently with his calloused, grease stained hands, had said almost nothing since we hopped in the car. But finally he volunteered: “Thats the Rockies. Don’t know their names. Just the Rockies”.

As we got to the outskirts of Butte, our driver opened up a bit more. He launched into a favorite topic of conversation by Montanans, and that was how Californians – who could no longer afford to live in their own over-hyped, over-priced State – were migrating in droves to Montana, putting condos on perfectly good grazing land, driving up property prices, and generally screwing up everything with their yoga studios and their organic decaffeinated coffee houses. Our driver explained – “You know what they call Missoula? Miss-angeles. And Bozeman? Boze-wood. But those Californians haven’t got to Butte yet – its still our town and we hope it stays that way.”

As we drove into Butte, the gigantic open faced copper mine that our driver informed us had been the town’s source of boom and bust throughout its history spread for miles around like an artificial canyon. Old drilling towers came into view down long empty streets, their black frames silhouetted high like skeletons against the sun. As we headed downtown, some of the town’s most important bars were pointed out to us. There were a lot of biker bars. Butte was Evel Knievel’s birthplace, and every year the risk-obsessed showman’s birthday attracted about 30,000 bikers who paraded down the mainstreet non-stop for over an hour and probably made enough money for the biker bars to keep going for another year. A former train station was now a watering hole; that former crumbling brick drygoods warehouse is now a snug bar. We asked about the Silver Dollar which we had been told was the most hopping bar in town – there it was, still with its ’50s/’60s neon saloon sign, right next to the original Chop Suey restaurant with its blinking sign from the same era.

The further we drove downtown, the more excited we got. Abandoned buildings, warehouses, shops everywhere, most with their original faded advertising painted on their sides, promoting long gone products and services. Glorious heyday architecture starting from late 19th century right through to 30s, 40s, 50s, now razed across with broken windows, crumbling eaves, boarded up wooden doors, paint peeling in the breeze. The town looked like it had lost its wealth suddenly and pretty completely decades ago, leaving the town in a time capsule. I was reminded of pictures I had seen of Cuba, where the US embargo kept people poor and living in an immaculate simulacra of the ’50s. But we could see that the locals were starting to reclaim some of these spaces, and transform them into bars, eateries, quirky shops, art spaces – so there must be money coming back in again, the town was starting to slowly be reborn.

The Cohen brothers and deja vu

We were let out uptown Butte, the oldest part of town high up on some hills, outside the Capri, a rundown ’60s style motel, which our driver informed us would give us a room for $35 a night. That was our kind of budget. We stood on the pavement and looked around; the streets were silent except for the soft breeze, some kind of clinking tin sound in the distance (the drilling towers?) and the occasional dusty car cruising slowly past. We could see for hundreds of miles across the town, across the surrounding plain, our vision halted only by the cresting grey and white waves that were the Rockies in the distance. I felt the thrill of discovery and the eagerness of a child to run up and down the steep streets looking at everything, gulping in the atmosphere, which seemed full of secret messages about times past. For some reason, this was the kind of town I was hungry for.

First things first – we walked into the Capri’s peeling foyer and were shortly greeted by a skeletal elderly woman, in carefully coiffed hair and an ironed-thin pastel outfit from the ’70s. She looked genuinely startled to see us. She shook (not from shock but from Parkinsons). The thought flashed into my head “This is just like a scene from a Cohen brothers’ movie – maybe some of their stock characters are real after all”. She told us with a wary look that rooms were $55 a night; disappointed, we thanked her and left. T said outside: “She put the price up just for us”. Later that night, one of the bartenders told us that was right – rooms were usually only $35 – but that was because the hotel was a hangout for crackheads!

T took off up the hill with her long Swiss legs shouting “I’m in photography heaven!”. I wandered around with the video cam. Can a town have too many sagging gabled rooves, colorfully painted Victorian turrets, overgrown lilac bushes, porches lined with old bowling pins and other found kitsch, nooked and crannied laneways, rusting gold-tipped ’50s Pontiacs, rainbow peace signs and mountain views from every corner? No, it cannot. Many porches were hung with wind chimes so that gentle tinkles wafted everywhere through the lazy Saturday afternoon sunlight. And most houses, no matter what their state of repair, sported ‘Welcome!’ signs on their front doors. People smiled greetings passing us on the street, or from heads lifted up from gardening. Despite the obvious hard times that had hit and stayed, it was clear that people were happy here.

T said: “The hills, the architecture, the feeling here reminds me so much of San Francisco in the early days, when it was still vibrant and still affordable to live there.” T had spent the best times of her life, the times when she had felt “the most alive and most free” in San Fran in the early to mid ’90s.

Our impressions of a largely happy, friendly town (except, presumably, for the biker meth and crack addicts) were confirmed when we came across an old bar high up on a hill called The Goodwill. I needed a wee badly. T peered in through the window to make sure it was ok to come in – it could well have been another biker bar. She saw all the locals in the little bar staring back at her, gesturing eagerly for her to come in.

When we walked in, people called us over to the bar and started talking to us immediately. After our first beer, a middle aged man and his son-in-law bought us a second round. The bar owner Annie (in her 70s at least, custodian of The Goodwill for 30 years) gave us a packet of chips and refused to take payment. After a while, one of the three older women sitting next to me – the one who smelt delightfully of old hairspray – offered to drive us up to another bar further up the hill where “there is a poker game going on this afternoon, its going to be really hopping, honey”. We declined the kind offer, as we had our heart set on seeing some live music at the Silver Dollar – and we wanted to meet some younger people. I handed around one of our few copies of our album ‘Larceny of Love’ for the regulars to look at – and was gratified to see how they were genuinely impressed – by the look of it anyway. And once again we were congratulated heartily on choosing a great name. We’ve hit upon something for sure, I thought, something that resonates, but it did intrigue me: why do people like the concept of jilted brides so much?

After a couple of hours, we reluctantly left our new friends to continue on with our wandering and photography. As we started off down the hill, the father in law ran out and asked if he could buy one of our CDs. We had to explain that we sadly didn’t have a pressing yet, but we gave him our MySpace site so he could hear some tunes. He hoped we would come back soon and play at the Silver Dollar; we really hoped we could too.

As we made our way down the hilly streets to look for food and more bars, T said: “I have never been made so welcome by strangers in a bar before – never”. I couldn’t recall a similar experience either. I looked around the town as the sun started to decline and another strong wave of nostalgia hit me. “Does all this seem very familiar to you?” I asked. “I mean very familiar”? “Yes!” she said. “It sure does”.

Teenagers revisited

A couple of hours later, we were cruising downtown, sitting in the back of a Chevvy driven by a curly haired teenage girl called Sarah and her buddy Megan. They had spotted us walking down the street after we had had our cheap dinner at the Sports Bar. Once again I did not get through my alleged American meal -most of the ‘pork chop sandwich’, Butte’s specialty dish – a squashed and deep fried bit of meat product in an aerated bun – sat in a styrofoam container in my backpack, infusing it with crumbed meat smell; I didn’t leave my meal behind this time as I calculated that this combination of fat and protein would be precisely what I needed later to soak up a night of bar hopping.

Megan and Sarah were driving us to the local bottle shop so we could buy them a 24 pack of Pabst and a pint of Nikolai vodka. When they saw us on the street they said “You looked like teenagers” who might be able to buy them some booze, so they stopped and offered us a lift. Although we turned out not to be teenagers, we were still most happy to oblige. In the bottle shop, we were astonished that the pint of vodka they asked us to buy only cost $4. So we bought one for ourselves too.

Back in the car, the girls were full of gratitude. They had everything they needed now for an evening “with some boys”. “Lucky you” I remarked. They laughed and dissed Butte: boring as hell, and most of the boys “are backward and goofy looking”. I felt transported back in time: I remembered being a teenage schoolie so well, the emotions fresh like they were lived yesterday – the sexual drive straining against parental restraint, the hunger for excitement, the frustration of growing up in a dull town, slim pickings when it came to boys (actually, this is starting to sound like my recent life in Melbourne). Megan asked if we were married. “Do we look married?” I asked. They laughed again and said “No way. You sexy ladies look like you’ve just stepped out of Sex in the City”. Thats great, I thought! My confidence was boosted, ably assisted by the Moose Drools we’d downed at the Sports Bar. I was looking forward to a good night out. Maybe even a wild one.

They dropped us off at the former railway station, The Depot Bar as it had now been reincarnated. But there was a wedding reception there (irony not lost on us), so we wandered back up the hill to find another bar. We found the warehouse bar that our driver had pointed out. Inside was indeed cosy, all exposed beams and golden pine chairs and tables. But it was full of mums and dads treating themselves to a Saturday night meal. It was dull. We downed our dangerously large and cheap bourbons quite quickly, and waited to be given the bill. We weren’t. We started to make our way to the cash register, when I suddenly turned to Tanya and said. “Lets pull a runner”. T said: “Thats exactly what I was thinking”.

So we just kept walking, out the door. Once on the pavement, we picked up our pace and giggled hysterically as we ran towards Main St where the Silver Dollar awaited. Neither of us had pulled a runner for a very long time – probably not since we were teenagers.

The Silver Dollar reeked with old saloon atmosphere – long polished wood bar, blinking red Bud lights, old photos and assorted band paraphanelia – the kind of place I would live at if it was my local. But it was empty -at the bar, there was a plump, heavily made-up barely 21 year old girl, and further down, a geeky looking guy (who turned out to be a petroleum engineer). And that was it. The house band turned out to be a mediocre white blues band. Mediocre country is ok with me, but blues played by white guys- and ok, reggae too – white blues and reggae are genres I have always failed to ‘get’, striking me as genres that are presumably a lot of fun to play, particularly if you are stoned, but monotonous beyond belief to listen to. We hung around, downing more bourbon, but no more people showed. Our hopes for finding some friendly Buttites to party long into the night with faded.

The Silver Dollar bargirl was helpful, and recommended we go to the old Finlan Hotel for the night, and gave us directions to the historic hotel, and also to a good diner for breakfast the next day. At the end of the night, we staggered up the road, found the Finlan and pushed open the heavy glass doors into the foyer.

The Hotel Finlan foyer looked exactly as it must have in the ’30s when it was the hotel of choice for rich and famous visitors who, according to the faded black and white photos on the walls, had, for some inexplicable reason, frequently found themselves in Butte. We slowly wobbled through an imposing row of gold and pale green gilt columns illuminated by art deco chandeliers throbbing out pale yellow light from high up in the ceiling. We eventually found ourselves at the front desk. The night porter guy, who was of around the same vintage as the columns, slowly looked up from his book and stared uninterestedly at us.

Sixty-six dollars for a room, he told us blankly, with a take it or (hopefully, for customers like us) leave it attitude. He elaborated: “Thats a good price. A third less than the flats. You’ve come down from the flats haven’t you? Everyone is pleased when they find out the Finlan is a third less than the flats”. It was 1.30 in the morning, we were sozzled, and could not figure out what he was talking about. Once again, I felt I’d stepped into a Cohen brothers film – not ‘No Country for Old Men’ as up at the Capri, but ‘Barton Fink’.

We had no choice so we accepted, and grabbed the keys from his reluctant hands. To my disappointment, the actual accommodation was not an atmospheric piece of Americana, but a room in a standard low budget motel which had been annexed to the grand old original building; the old Finlan infrastructure had apparently been turned into apartments. But I didn’t care too much. After we got into our room, I made myself eat my pork chop sandwich remains (which then tasted ok) while T excitedly got a much needed TV fix, surfing through late night movie channels. I must have then passed out for maybe 3 hours; only to be awoken by doors slamming and T swearing. In the room next to ours, there were teenagers – going back and forth to the balcony, drinking, smoking, laughing and talking loudly. T rang the front desk to complain- she hadn’t been able to sleep at all. But the old Cohen Brothers porter didn’t seem to intimidate the kids, so the noise continued. Finally, after T made a second call, the door slamming and loud talking stopped. Good, I thought, glancing at the clock and registering 5.00am, we can get some sleep at last.

Then the unmistakable thump, thump and cries of bad teenage sex. The walls were paper thin. This is one memory, I thought, I could do without. Although I admired the fact that these kids had the stamina and sheer good times determination to stay awake all night. Later, T wondered how they could rent a room while being so young. In a cash-strapped town like Butte, I suspected that the Finlan would rent out to toddlers if they could produce a credit card. More of a mystery to me was where their parents thought they had been for the evening. Crawling home at 7.00 in the morning, stinking of cigarette smoke and alcohol, ruffled hair and clothes, what possible story could they produce? Out cow-tipping all night?

Back to Basin: lesbian capital of Montana

Sunday morning was, as I knew it would be, painful. After checking out, we eventually found one of the diner’s that the bargirl had recommended. Cheerful mom and pop ’60s decor, shiny red leather stools, the smell of pancakes and coffee. After a cup of weak coffee (weak to Australians, who are used to Italian style cardiac arrest concentrations of caffeine), my hangover felt temporarily cushioned. We both ordered the vegetarian omelete, which sounded promising as it listed broccoli and cauliflower as two of its ingredients; but no, when the gigantic egg mound arrived, all the vegetables had been thoroughly fried then strangled in two kinds of cheese, including the ubiquitous fluro cheddar kind. I ate my rye toast, picked out all the vegetables I could recognise, and once again left most of my meal on the plate.

Hitching back to Basin required trudging a long way down the highway as it led out of town, to the turn off to Interstate 15. The sun was now high in the sky, my head ached. Once again, I felt how conspicuous we were, two women with thumbs out trudging down the road. I asked the angels and guides to protect us, make sure we got home safely. Later, T told me she had done the same thing.

A red car turned around when it saw us, and pulled up. Two very dodgy looking guys with tattoos, wrap around sunglasses and faint smell of beer leaned out of the car and grinned. “Basin? Oh yeah, we uh, just were talking about going there. Its got a bar we could all go to.” T and I looked at each other and shook our head: we’ll just keep walking thanks.

That was rattling, but at least it proved we could just refuse to put ourselves in a dangerous situation. After picking up some groceries and much needed painkillers, we eventually made the on-ramp to 15. I noticed another figure further up the ramp, hitching. That made me feel better, less of a freak. Within minutes, an SUV pulled up – a sketchy, unshaved guy as a passenger, but a peaceful looking Indian with a welcoming smile behind the wheel. We checked each other’s look to see if we should take it, but we both felt it would be ok.

The journey back was dominated by Mr Sketchy, who was clearly an ex-junkie or speedfreak, proclaiming loudly about nothing and everything. I wished he would shut up and let the Indian guy speak, who was calm and thoughtful – he was from the Blackfoot reservation, his son was training in Basin to be a volunteer firefighter for the season. T and I both wanted to know more about local native Indian culture. But Mr Sketchy wouldn’t shut up: “Won’t be any f**n fires this season” he cried maniacally at his friend, laughing loudly. ” Too much f**n rain! Too much f**n rain!” and then, swivelling around to bore his eyes into mine, “Hey, you know Basin is the LESBIAN CAPITAL OF MONTANA?”

Tanya and I couldn’t help but laugh nervously. “Really?”

“Oh yeah. Bunch of bush bumpers down there man! Oh boy, bunch of BUSH BUMPERS!”

It was a huge relief when we were dropped off outside the refuge and waved goodbye to our lift. I pitied the quiet Indian guy who was going to have to put up with his friend’s ranting all the way to Helena. And although T and I got to have our much needed night on the town, and arrived back in one piece, nevertheless neither of us really wanted to have to hitchhike again. That was one teenage experience we were happy to leave now in the past!

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