• The Pig’s Arms
  • About
  • The Dump

Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle

~ The Home Pub of the Famous Pink Drinks and Trotter's Ale

Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle

Category Archives: Gregor Stronach

Bumper Christmas Edition 2016 – Gregor’s Book Club Review – the Boible.

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Bible review, book club

 

article-1008553-00d0cacd00000578-481_468x303

Charlton Heston’s parting gesture

Thank you all for coming along last month – the discussion we had on this book was “lively and vigorous”, which is precisely the sort of discourse we all enjoy.

But I just wanted to share with you my own thoughts, without interruption (I’m looking at you, Janice… I don’t care where, or when, you went to private school… and to be honest with you, I’m still not convinced “Presbyterian” is even a real word…)

Anyway… I’ve taken the time and effort to put pen to paper, and I would appreciate it if you would all read this.

“My Review of The Bible” by Gregor….

This book started off reasonably well – with an old guy who was really into arts and crafts, who got some silly putty and a few other bibs and bobs and apparently built an entire universe. That’s pretty amazing.

But you realise pretty soon that he was clearly a bit daft – because it was only once he was finished that he remembered to turn the fucking lights on…

Then he made a naked dude (fast-drying modelling clay was his oeuvre of choice at this point in his career), and then he made a chick (he had to use some of the modelling clay from the dude, though… I think it might have been a bit late in the evening and the craft shops were all shut or something), and then a snake (more modelling clay, but super-easy to make) and some fruit… and then the narrative sort of gets a bit garbled at this point, but the snake and the chick did something gross with the fruit and the old guy was all like “Get off my lawn. And put some fucking pants on…”

So the chick and the dude had to move out of home, and they had two sons… which was always going to be tough, because neither of them had jobs, and I’m not sure the old dude had invented welfare by that stage…

Anyway, the two sons fought, like brothers do, and it all got a bit out of hand and one of them killed the other one… and the old dude was super-angry about it, and was all like “seriously, all of you… fuck off. go away.”

So the only remaining child of the dude and the chick wandered off into the wilderness… and found a woman, who just happened to turn up so they got married (it’s a bit of a major plot hole… but… well… I can’t explain where she came from. Unless she was his sister. Which, is actually kind of gross now that I think about it…)

And from there, it just becomes one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. Mass killings, enslavement of entire races of people, war after war after war… and then, just when you think you can’t handle any more murder and violence, there’s this weird sexy poetry stuff in the middle for no apparent reason… It’s like 50 Shades of Grey.

Violence, Sex, then Violence… and there’s that endless list of “this guy fucked that girl, who gave birth that other guy, who fucked this other girl…” On and on, it went – like two ageing drunks arguing in a pub over who’d slept with the most women.

And then, there’s this *massive* plot twist that *no-one* saw coming in the second half of the book… it turns out that one of the dudes (spoiler alert) is actually the son of the really violent, embittered and emotionally insecure “omniscient being” from the first half of the book!

And, frankly, I’m amazed that the rest of the book wasn’t about how everyone the new guy met spent hour upon hour telling him “Dude, your dad is being kind of a prick…”

Sure, he tries to explain a lot of it away as “you’ve misinterpreted what he was saying when he said it was cool to kill loads and loads of people”, and “well… Lot’s wife was always pretty salty anyway”, and “okay… look… dad was a bit of a drinker, and sometimes he lost his temper and liked to beat his children”…

So he decides to go all hippy… I’ve seen all the pictures…. the beard, the long hair, the kaftan and the sandles… classic hippy fashion. And then he goes “how about we set up some new rules? You know, nice ones. where “we all get to love one another, as I have loved you” he said, winking knowingly to Matthew and Peter…

Matthew was cool about it all, but Peter got all uptight about it and “denied knowing the new guy three times before the cock crowed” – arguably one of the most laboured metaphors in literary history, if you ask me…

But then it all gets violent again, some Roman dude nails the new guy to a stick, then someone pinches his body for medical experiments or something – then the rest of the people he used to hang out with basically write each other lots of letters about what happened

They called this whole section “the epistles of the apostles” – which would have been a completely awesome name for someone’s critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful third solo album in the 1970s, if they hadn’t have used it up 2000 years earlier…

And just when you think it can’t get any weirder, the entire last chapter is clearly someone at the tail end of an acid binge shouting random thoughts into a Dictaphone and forcing their secretary to type it out, word for word, and fax it page by page over to the publisher because they were four months past deadline and no one will get paid if they don’t finish the whole book before church started on Sunday morning…

Overall, I give it one star out of five… just because it would have taken *ages* to write.

It’s really, really long.

General Hunting

06 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

General Hunting, Gregor Stronach

221abeebd7866f758af8fbe66af702d3

General Hunting and Aide de Camp

In this gripping final episode, Gregor comes to grips with a mug

Within seconds of our arrival, the shed door swung open, and a middle-aged man emerged. Clad in more military attire than a North Korean general, he sported so many medals on his chest that he had developed an alarming lean to the left. He was also armed to the teeth. I stopped counting the guns and knives he carried when the combined glint of the sunlight on his medals rendered my temporarily blind.

I lurched forward to introduce myself – but in the time it would take an ordinary mortal to utter the words “stolen valour”, I was intercepted and asked politely, but firmly, to kneel in the dirt and consent to what turned out to be quite an invasive search of my pockets, shirt, torso and genital region. No one, not even an African warlord’s henchman, wanted to touch my anus.

Convinced that I wasn’t carrying a harmful weapon, the leader of the group motioned for me to stand, and extended a hand in welcome.

“I am General Hunting,” the man said. “General Goodwill Hunting.”

The flash of warning that came from Godwin’s eyes suggested that now would not be a good moment to acknowledge what would otherwise have turned out to be the best pun of this entire story.

“I am informed that you are here to enquire about our coffee, yes?” he asked. “I am happy to provide you with coffee. Would you like one kilogram? Ten kilograms? However much you require, I am happy to do business and able to provide whatever quantity you need.”

It sounded like a reasonable business transaction – but Mr Hunting’s use of “air quotes” whenever he mentioned the word “coffee” was beginning to make me “suspicious” of his “good intentions”.

I asked to see the produce. He agreed – and I was led, at gunpoint, into the garden shed, where it turned out that the “air quotes” for “coffee” meant that the “coffee” was, in fact, “cocaine”.

Mr Hunting had established the plantation as a front, using this particular part of Nigeria – long established as a waypoint on trans-African trade routes since around the time that man invented the camel – as a storage facility for high-grade narcotics making their way from South America to various Middle Eastern countries, as well as Portugal.

My hatred of all things Portuguese was, it turns out, well-founded.

After agreeing on a price for one kilogram of “coffee”, I convinced Mr Hunting to let me retire to the vehicle to retrieve the cash, before finalising the transaction. Once free of the confines of the garden shed, I bolted to the car – only to find Godwin alone behind the wheel.

“We need to leave. NOW!” I calmly informed him at the top of my lungs. “We have about 60 seconds before they realize something’s gone really badly wrong and the shooting starts. Where is Ajagbe?”

“Ajagbe is gone,” came the cheerfully despondent reply. “He has joined Boko Haram. He was offered 72 virgins – and despite using my satellite phone to try to negotiate a better deal with our Human Resources department, it was an offer that they were unwilling and unable to match.”

“Dammit… Let’s get moving.”

“I would love to, sir – but I cannot,” Godwin said. “We are waiting on another passenger… a cousin of mine who is a Nigerian prince, requiring safe passage from this region, and help relocating USD$4.8 million in misappropriated foreign aid, stolen from his bank by militant accountants, to fund a coup. I promised his mother, who has been emailing me for months, that I would help at the first available opportunity.”

Part of me died.

I patiently requested information as to Godwin’s cousin’s whereabouts, and mid-answer there came a tap-tap-tap on the window. Peering out, and expecting to take a number of 7.62x39mm rounds of ammunition to the face, I was both amazed and distressed to see him; Dressed to the nines in traditional robes most often associated with horrible Hollywood stereotypes, stood Godwin’s cousin, Mubuku.

He was, understandably, upset by being dragged bodily into the vehicle via the window – but within moments, we were underway, headed for the relative safety of Lagos and my flight back to normality.

We had travelled less than 50km when, through entirely calm and rational discussion delivered at staggering volumes, it was decided that it was completely unsafe for us to be travelling by road with Mubuku, or anyone closely associated with him, in the car. With around 1550km left to drive, I made an executive decision.

They would travel in the boot. I would pretend to be the least offensive white person in the world (a Canadian) and break as many land-speed records as I could getting to the airport. When Godwin and Mukubu vehemently recorded their opposition to the idea, I was left with no choice.

Calmly, and gently, I put one hand on Godwin’s right cheek, and the other on Mukubu’s left cheek. I looked them both in the eye, and spent 45 difficult seconds pounding their heads together until neither of them moved.

Luckily for me, there was plenty of room in the trunk of this particular six-cylinder, luxuriously-appointed Mercedes sedan. Shuffling my luggage to one side, I was able to fit both of these fully grown African men in the trunk – safe in the knowledge that even if they did regain consciousness, the eight-speaker Bose sound system would help keep them entertained until we arrived at our destination.

The drive back to Lagos took a scant 27 hours, the final nine of which were spent in a traffic jam within sight of the airport. While waiting in traffic, I was amazed to discover that someone had managed to steal my shoes without me even realising that they had been able to break into in the car at all.

I happily ditched the Mercedes at the airport carpark, released Godwin and Mubuke from the trunk, placed my bags upon a luggage trolley and spent a good nine minutes swearing at Godwin, calling down the kinds of curses that would have made the authors of the Book of Revelation weep with embarrassment at how paltry their efforts had turned out to be.

Just as I ran out of breath, an explosion rocked the domestic terminal, less than a kilometre away.

“Happy Friday!”, Godwin sobbed.

It was the final straw. I turned on my heel, and strode purposefully away, pausing only momentarily in anguish when I realized that my return ticket was aboard an Air France flight, with three stopovers between here and home. In economy class.

I checked my bags, cleared immigration, and went to endure the unending horrors of a general public boarding lounge in central Africa. Fatigued beyond belief, I sought some form of stimulation… and then saw a sign.

“Café Neo”, it said. The only coffee chain in Africa, and destined to be the Starbucks of the developing world. I walked on what felt like broken limbs and shoes filled with molten glass, and ordered a café latte, one sugar.

The barista, noting my haggard face, worked like a Trojan to produce my coffee – the only coffee I had seen since I set foot in Nigeria, despite the entire reason for coming here in the first place.

He set it down on the counter. I grasped it with both hands, lest my shaking limbs spill even one drop of this precious elixir. I lifted it to my lips, inhaling the heady aromas, and sipped.

It was truly fucking awful.

The writer travelled as a guest of Emirates, and Air France, and lodgings were provided courtesy of the Lagos Oriental Hotel, and the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation.

Just Drive, Godwin…

05 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Coffee, Gregor Stronach, Nigeria

4898511312_541ca9717a_b-630x372

Gregor, roasted, grounds to a halt

Leaving Lagos is like Leaving Las Vegas – interminably long, difficult to experience and by about 20 minutes in, one is left with a profound desire to kill Nicholas Cage and get everything over and done with, but without the sustained horror of watching Elisbath Shue be brutally assaulted via the “tradesman’s entrance” by a college football player, whose name was probably Chad.

But once we had hit the open road, I felt that I could relax, and begin some more background research with Ajagbe’s assistance. I began by asking about Nigeria’s ongoing passion for coffee.

“Oh, yes sir! Nigerians are very much learning to love coffee!” he enthused. “Two entrepreneurs from Lagos have started their own coffee chain, and according to their press releases, they will soon be the Starbucks of Africa! I have been to one of their three shops in Lagos. Neo Café is the best coffee in the whole of Africa!”

He paused.

“Except for Kenya… their coffee is amazing.”

I interrupted his misguided tirade.

“No, no… I want to know about the rich traditional heritage that Nigeria has for growing coffee beans,” I demanded. “I have travelled all this way to find the most exclusive coffee bean in the world, and I want to know its history.”

“Sir… I believe there is something that you must understand,” he replied. “Yes, there is coffee grown in Nigeria. And yes, the UN says that Nigeria is the ninth-largest producer of coffee beans in the world. However, that’s not entirely true. In fact, according to a report from the Nigerian Federal Government, Nigeria has not produced a single coffee bean since 2013. That is why it is so highly prized… because, according to the government, it doesn’t exist – which means no one can export it, which means no one can buy it, which means no one can drink it.”

My heart sank. Quickly revisiting my research on my laptop, I double-checked the Wikipedia links that I had bookmarked for offline viewing. Sure enough, the UN’s assertions about Nigeria turned out to be entirely untrue.

Nigeria is listed as only the 40th-largest coffee-producing nation in the world. And, upon that Wikipedia page, the link that should lead to the entry outlining “Coffee Production in Nigeria” is an ominous red – and the URL confirms that “The Page Does Not Exist.”

Panic set in. Had I been hoodwinked? Sent on a wild goose chase by the anonymous bearded hipsters that haunt my favourite café, Flicking the Bean, which is centrally located on the bustling inner-city shopping, dining and entertainment precinct of Newtown and offers an extensive all-day breakfast menu coupled with friendly service and very reasonable prices, considering all of their food is organic and they don’t charge extra for gluten free?

Worse still, was I currently in a vehicle, headed for the far-flung Sambisa Forest, in search of a coffee plantation that was even more of a phantom than my ability to pay for my incredibly luxurious flight from Sydney to Lagos in the First Class cabin of Emirates airlines, where no request is too difficult for the staff and the dining options make a prolonged and steadfast mockery of every stand-up comedy gag about airline food ever made by the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, who could afford to fly First Class on Emirates but doesn’t because it would completely ruin his ‘what is the ‘dee-yul’… with the peanuts… on airplanes’ jokes?

I needed to think. And I think best when I am asleep – so I took a leaf from every other car-bound person in Nigeria, pretended to be stuck in traffic, closed my eyes and drifted off…

Final Destination

When I opened my eyes, I was greeted by the grinning visage of Godwin, who chirpily announced that we had arrived in Sambisa Forest, where – he assured me – we would find the only viable coffee plantation in Nigeria.

It was owned, Ajagbe went on to explain, by a local warlord whose affiliation with a local jihadist group was a source of only minor concern. This region was “comparatively safe”, Ajagbe said.

“Define ‘comparatively’,” I said.

“Okay… compared to… say… trying to survive on the surface of Venus, this region is considered ‘safe’,” he said.

The Russians have sent more than a dozen probes to the surface of Venus. None of them lasted more than an hour in temperatures that hover around 426 degrees Celsius, coupled with an atmospheric pressure that beats even the depths of the Mariana Trench and incessant showers of almost pure sulphuric acid.

Needless to say, I wasn’t convinced – but I was impressed by Ajagbe’s knowledge of the nearest planet in the solar system to earth. The infomercials I’ve seen must be working – and eating bibles must actually help people learn.

Godwin drove us to our accommodation, a former hunting lodge on the boundary of what is now the Chad Basin National Park, a former safari venue for wealthy Americans with more bullets than empathy, and people called Chad who like to hurt things that they will never, ever have a chance to understand, because they are all Neanderthals with nothing but sexual conquest at any cost on their mind.

Sorry.

These days, according to the literature I found in the reception area of the lodge, the hunting of animals has stopped entirely, and “the only kind of shooting allowed here is with a camera!”

The unmistakable crackle of small arms fire in the near-distance belied that particular claim – and each burst of fire was greeted with the now-familiar cry of “Happy Thursday!”, accompanied by the kind of increasingly guilty looks usually worn by those who know that they’re lying, know that they’ve been found out, but have decided to persist with the ruse on the off chance that the person they are lying to might have a stroke and forget everything that has happened in the past 14 days.

The lodge was, to be kind, a complete shambles. We were met at what passed for a reception area by a surly chap in military greens, brandishing a Soviet-era AK-47 – arguably the most menacing welcome to a hotel that I had received since I attempted to check in at the Rynek Główny hotel in Krakow without offering the requisite bottle of imported vodka to grease the wheels of arranging a room.

For a barely sub-Saharan area, this reception was confusingly frosty.

I found my room, let myself in and was horrified at the state of it. The bedclothes were filthy, and bundled at the foot of the bed, where they had clearly been left by the previous tenant – who, if I were a gambling man, I would bet had less than 24 hours to meet with a doctor before what could only be described as “a catastrophic failure of the bowel” occurred and he shat himself to death.

I marched back to reception, and demanded to know why my room was in such a state.

“The maids… they have all been taken,” was the reply.

“By whom, and to where?” I enquired.

“Boko Haram, and to Paradise,” came the response.

“That’s all fine and dandy… but I’ve done my homework on this region,” I shouted. “It was only a few weeks ago that local Governor Kashim Shettima had pledged millions of Nigerian Naira to help fight chronic unemployment. There must be people lined up for miles to come and work here. Where are they?”

“We cannot employ them because they do not have the required level of education,” I was told.

“Again, I’ve done my research… and that makes no sense!” I exclaimed. “Right now, the student to teacher ratio around here is better than most of the developed world! How can education be so poor, when that is the case?”

“… It’s because Boko Haram have abducted all of the students as well.”

Momentarily flummoxed, I bellowed until Godwin arrived. I suggested quite forcefully that it might be time for me to get to this coffee plantation, get my story, and move on. Nigeria, I told Godwin’s crestfallen face, was becoming my own personal Fall of Saigon. I wanted to take what was obviously an ignominious defeat, portray it as a victory, and fly home as soon as humanly possible – just like the American army in 1975.

We needed to move, and move fast. Godwin, myself and the strangely increasingly-distant Ajagbe got back into the car, and drove for an hour into the wilds of Borno State, the most north-eastern province of Nigeria. The principle exports of Borno State are – for those of you playing Trivial Pursuit while reading this story – rubber, and cocoa. Coffee, it would appear, is a long way down the list. In fact, it is so far down the list, that it doesn’t actually appear on the list – a list which includes words like “sorghum” and “yams”, which are clearly made up by someone who enjoys editing Wikipedia pages when they are drunk and lonely.

So you can imagine my surprise when we stopped in a clearing beside an aluminium garden shed, guarded by four young men who fairly bristled with weaponry. A sign above the aluminium shed clearly read “Simbisa Coffee Concern, Est. 1978” – and there was even a picture of a cappuccino.

Tomorrow:  General Hunting

Loving Lagos

03 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Gregor Stronach, Lagos, Nigeria

 

203949276747

Gregor Conrad takes us deeper into the heart of Africa in search of the elusive bean…

The streets of Lagos fairly hummed with activity, as the residents made their way through the day-to-day activities for which Africa is duly famous. Nigeria is among the more developed African nations, but even still I was surprised at the number of locals who had taken to using cars as their chosen mode of transport.

I asked Godwin how far it was to the hotel.

“It is barely 35 kilometres, sir,” he smiled. “It should not take us longer than four or five hours to get there. If we are lucky, we will beat the peak hour traffic.”

As I contemplated getting out and hiring someone to carry my bags for me as I took the quicker option of walking through the oppressive heat of the afternoon, what sounded suspiciously like an explosion erupted nearby.

“Happy Tuesday!” Godwin beamed. “We do love our fireworks!”

The traffic delay became something of a farce within a very short space of time, and we were rapidly surrounded on all sides by other stationary vehicles. It wasn’t long before the driver in the car next to ours switched off his engine, reclined his seat and went to sleep.

“This man here,” Godwin chuckled. “He has the right idea of sleeping. This traffic is truly awful.”

I asked Godwin why the traffic is so bad.

“Ah yes,” he nodded sagely. “It is mostly because a lot of people like to stop their car and go to sleep. In Nigerian custom, it is considered very impolite to interrupt another person’s sleep with your own problems. That is why they are usually left to sleep.”

“But… surely people only sleep when the traffic is as bad as this…”, I opined.

“This is true, sir, yes,” Godwin replied. “They sleep because the traffic is bad, and the traffic is bad because they sleep. Perhaps one day, we will discover a solution to the problem, and then the traffic will not be so bad.”

Taking my cue from Godwin, who was beginning to open up further about his beloved Nigeria, I began to ask about what life was truly like here. As all experienced travellers, such as myself, will attest – the life of a visitor is often vastly different to the life of the locals.

“Oh, Nigeria is a wonderful place,” he said. “There is much to do and see, with many things that are a lot safer than people will tell you. Why, here in Lagos, the many different cultures that make up our people have become a melting pot!”

On that note, Godwin was quite correct. Nigeria, and Lagos in particular, has become something of a poster child for African economic success. The bustling business district has adopted a very African take on the 1980s Wall Street ethos of “Greed is Good” – and the slogan “Get Very Rich” is in the hearts and minds of its many inhabitants.

Such is the extent to which this has been taken to heart, in 2012 Nigeria’s GDP eclipsed that of South Africa, a nation whose economic growth has been faltering since the fall of Apartheid, according to Godwin. He stopped just short of blaming the former all-white leadership for abandoning the people of South Africa under an onslaught of international outrage over apparent institutionalized racism.

Many people see Lagos as the unofficial capital of Nigeria, an easy mistake to make, largely because Lagos was the capital until 1991, when Abuja became the federally mandated capital of the country. Abuja was chosen, I suspect, because it is just shy of 750km from Lagos, meaning insurgents and would-be military dictators would be far more likely to be dissuaded from staging a coup when they faced driving such a distance in appalling traffic.

I asked Godwin about the reports of rampant crime and social dysfunction, the main reason why Nigeria is often seen as a very dangerous country, which drew a hearty laugh from my guide.

“There is no crime problem here, no,” Godwin laughed. “The Nigerian people have been unfairly categorized as criminals all around the world, but it is simply not true.”

It turned out to be an inopportune time for Godwin to be boasting about his countrymen’s sense of civility. Mere seconds after he had sought to rest my mind assured that Nigeria was safe, two young men quickly and expertly relieved Godwin’s vehicle of its headlights as we waited in the traffic. Needless to say, I was shocked.

“Aren’t you going to do anything about that?” I asked.

“There is not much I can do,” Godwin frowned. “It is a shame to see my fellow Nigerians resorting to such petty thievery. It makes me very, very sad… and it will certainly going to make driving home tonight much, much harder than before. We are not easy people to see in the dark.”

At that moment, another loud boom shook the car, this one much closer than before. Glancing out the window, I could see a large plume of dust and smoke curling up from behind a nearby high-rise building.

“Happy Tuesday!” Godwin shouted glumly, as he peered into the rear vision mirror, watching three more enterprising young men removing his brake lights, before escaping into the throng of pedestrians that now moved freely between the stationary vehicles on the road.

“Are all of the young people here thieves?” I asked Godwin politely.

“No, not all,” Godwin smirked sadly. “Most of Nigerians are honest, hard-working people with steady jobs. My brother, for instance, works for one of my country’s thousands of princes, writing letters to ask for assistance in relocating funds that have been wrongly seized by the military during coup season, which runs from March to October every year.”

“But yes, I shall admit, there are many thieves in my country,” Godwin continued despondently, with a sparkle in his eye. “This, you have already seen for yourself. Please, be careful. They are crafty devils, sir, who would steal the milk from your coffee if you give them half a chance.”

The mention of coffee reminded me of what had prompted my journey, and I asked Godwin when we would be travelling north to find the plantation I sought.

“Tomorrow, we will go,” Godwin sulked buoyantly. “If we are to leave early, we will only catch the end of today’s traffic jam, hopefully before tomorrow’s has a chance to catch up.”

“When we do go north, it is vital that you follow my instructions,” he continued. “Here in the city, it is quite safe.”

Another small explosion sounded somewhere far away.

“Happy Tuesday!” Godwin exclaimed solemnly. “But yes, here in the city is safe. Australians are welcomed here, especially journalists. The only thing I must warn you is that you must never, ever reveal to anyone that you are a homosexual. Nigerian people are not at all tolerant of homosexual people.”

“But I am not a homosexual!” I protested.

“That’s the spirit!” Godwin smiled.

Mildly outraged by Godwin’s complete mischaracterization of my impeccable dress sense, we passed the remaining four hours of traffic jam in silence, arriving at my hotel – the Lagos Oriental, on the far side of the Lagos lagoon from the city itself.

Lagos Lagoon gets its name from the Portuguese word for lakes (lagos) – giving the large body of water here the ridiculous translated name of Lakes Lagoon, and cementing forever my long-held belief that the Portuguese should never have been allowed to name anything, ever.

Speaking of names, it was at this point that I pondered the name of my hotel for a short moment, and decided that the irony of latent racism is lost on the relentlessly cheerful Nigerian people. Oriental? Really? It was probably named by the Portuguese as well. And while we’re on the topic, whoever named Niger deserves to be boxed around the ears – and whoever decided to name the nation of Chad after every football-playing date-rapist from Brisbane with a propensity for stealing other people’s wives also deserves a stern talking-to.

Finally, we reached the hotel. Thanking Godwin, I left the car, and was alarmed that someone had managed to steal the front and rear bumpers of the vehicle without me even noticing it was occurring. I remarked on this particular turn of events, eliciting a world-weary shrug of Godwin’s shoulders, and the remark that this would make it much more difficult to survive crashing into the pedestrians who are very hard to see in the dark.

When Godwin popped open the trunk, and I waved to a porter to fetch my luggage and wheel it upon a trolley into the hotel’s beautifully-appointed reception.

The resulting chase on foot was mercifully brief, and the young man in the borrowed porter’s uniform was promptly and severely thrashed by the side of the road by several very enthusiastic passers-by. I trudged back to the hotel through the African dusk, pushing the luggage trolley and glaring at anyone that came within three feet, and eventually made it to the check-in desk.

“I have a room booked here. I was promised the finest suite in the hotel,” I said.

A nearby explosion and gunfire rattled the building, sending a small shower of plaster dust from the ceiling onto the beautifully polished, solid marble counter in front of me. The desk clerk quickly checked a calendar on the desk, before looking up at me and smiling benignly.

“It would seem that our Happy Tuesday celebrations are in full swing!” he said. “Now, if you would be so kind as to provide a credit card.”

And it was there that I cut him off. I had been warned of Nigerian financial scams, and this brazen approach bore all the hallmarks of a sophisticated attempt to raid my bank account while I slept.

“I am afraid I do not possess a credit card,” I said. “I do not believe in attempting to enjoy anything in life that I do not have the means to purchase outright on my own behalf. Besides – I do believe that this room has been arranged by the office of the NTDC – any and all expenses should be directed to them.”

“As you so desire, sir,” the desk clerk responded, a reply as slick and smooth as silk stockings on the legs of a slightly plump young woman named Mary, who wore them as a special treat for me one evening to a midnight screening of Ishtar. I shall never forget the tactile experience of running my fingertips over her knee, the chill of the air conditioning and the overwhelming pungency of popcorn pervading a cinema utterly devoid of patrons, save for Mary and myself. That should have been the night we consummated our passion, but as my knee-rubbing became more pronounced and my intentions more obvious, a sudden sneeze from the projection booth reminded me that we were not, as I had hoped, alone and unobserved.

Mary should have been my first, but I was cruelly denied, and any subsequent chance to spend hour upon hour exploring her exquisite form was also extinguished when I accidentally reversed over her in the driveway of her parents’ home in Chatswood, such was my hurry to get home and relieve myself of the pent-up sexual pressures of 107 minutes of rather vigorous knee-touching. The relationship would probably have ended there, but for the fact that I spent several long, difficult weeks at her bedside in hospital.

At one point, when her surgeons announced that she was near death and had only minutes to live, I proposed and she gave her consent by blinking twice. We were married 15 minutes later by the hospital chaplain. Three days later, she was released from hospital in a full-body plaster cast that restricted movement for her, and access to the parts of her that a husband might otherwise enjoy. Two days later, I returned from work to find that she had been swept off her feet by a hospital orderly called Chad, whose claim to fame was a brief stint in the second reserves for the Brisbane Broncos, until he was let go following a nightclub scandal, a 17 year old girl, and a quantity of sedatives purloined from Chad’s mother’s medicine cabinet.

But I digress.

“Here is your room key, sir,” the desk clerk said. “The dining room is open from 6:00pm – if you would like to dine downstairs, please call down to reception and we will send an armed escort upstairs to guide you to your table.”

“The lift to you your room is on the far side of the lobby, next to the piano,” he continued. “Go up to the ninth floor, turn right and you will find your room at the far end of the hall. Please… enjoy your stay.”

I strode purposefully across the lobby with my bags, following the desk clerk’s directions, and arrived at the lift just in time to see four extremely ambitious young men attempting to steal the piano. As the door to the lift closed, I could see a crowd gathering, getting ready to administer a beating.

“God speed, you plucky young gents,” I said to myself, and the lift lurched spastically, beginning the final stage of my journey to my room.

The room itself was beyond even my wildest expectations. I had been granted the full amenities of the Presidential Suite, which – in the interests of full disclosure – had been paid for by the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation. The bill for the suite totaled 462,000 Nigerian Naira, per night.

I considered the fact that this was roughly 70 percent of the average Nigerian annual wage, which might sound quite a hefty sum, until one factors in the sheer oppulence this 300-square-metre island of solace, with its sweeping views of Five Cowrie Creek, and features such as the full leather couch, so startlingly red that it resembled a kiss from a high class escort that could comfortably seat seven people.

A king-sized bed awaited me – and I could not help but wonder how many Nigerian princes had slept in this bed before me.

Tomorrow – “North to Destiny”

Barista Wanted… but I’ll settle for a Lawyer.

01 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

deepest Africa, Emirates, gourmet, Nicole Kidman, Nigeria, rarest coffee bean

c05a0d21267143-562fe4e4341ae

 

Inspired by the search for the world’s rarest coffee bean, gourmand and seasoned traveller Gregor Stronach embarks on an epic journey to Africa.

 

Travellers the world over move from place to place for a variety of reasons, each as personal as the documentation they require to return home.

For some, it’s simply the love of the journey. For others, the destination is the real prize. And then there are people like me, who travel in search of something truly unique – a rare gem that sparkles somewhere on our planet, just waiting to be unearthed.

I take my inspiration to travel from often unlikely sources – and this particular adventure is no different: a simple conversation, overheard at my favourite coffee shop, Flicking the Bean, on Newtown’s bustling King Street, in the inner-west of Sydney.

Two young men – both with beards so mighty and impressive that I was quietly sure they could house a family of four and give shelter from a hurricane – were doing what true lovers of coffee often do. They were discussing the latest beans and brews that they had tried – and were indulging, I must admit, in more than a little bit of showboating and one-upmanship.

My interest was piqued when one of the young men proclaimed that he had tried what many consider to be the Holy Grail of coffee – a bean so rare and rich, that only the very best baristas in the world are ever allowed to attempt to extract its heady crema. A trump card had been played.

“Nigerian coffee. Now that’s a bean worth finding…”

“But it’s impossible…” – which sounded less like a declaration of fact, and more like a challenge to my ears.

Intrigued, I took my stolen advice and decided to make a beeline for the most populous nation in Africa, in search of a coffee bean so rare, not even the government of Nigeria will admit that it exists.

I rang my editor, who was delighted to have found someone prepared to travel to Nigeria. While mumbling something very quietly about it becoming “somewhat dangerous” over the past 12 months, he casually mentioned that a contact at Emirates had been in touch.

The Emirates route from Sydney to Lagos was had apparently dipped somewhat in popularity, and Emirates had offered the chance for a journalist to fly in its luxuriously appointed First Class section. I seized the opportunity, of course.

I’d often wondered what it would be like to fly somewhere while lying down, while being waited on hand and foot by a bevvy of unobtainable dusky-skinned beauties. This was the perfect opportunity to find out.

 

Flight or Fight

I had been conditioned as to my expectations about the Emirates “world-leading” First Class travel experience by a couple of things. Firstly, there was the media blitz that seemed to have seen every man and his dog that dared to call themselves a “travel writer” invited on board to savour the splendour of their own personal cabin space, while they flew from Sydney to Abu Dhabi, before being put on the next available Qantas plane (economy class) to fly home again.

I, however, had missed out on this apparent bonanza the first time around, and so I was very pleased to have received this chance to completely independently and impartially review this rare and luxurious experience.

The second, and perhaps most intriguing, revelation about what I was to experience once on board arrived via the utterly enormous, and frankly quite confronting, 15-metre billboard inside the overseas passenger terminal at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith airport.

It features the reclining, silk-clad figure of Australia’s Own Nicole Kidman. The photography is clearly meant to suggest that Ms Kidman is cocooned aboard an Emirates jet in a nest of almost intolerable comfort and relaxation, dreaming happily away about the years she spent married to Tom Cruise.

However, the visual effect looks rather more like she has been kidnapped, drugged and unceremoniously left in the cargo space of a well-appointed courier’s van – destination, and destiny, both highly uncertain in nature.

I made my way through to the ultra-exclusive Emirates lounge, where cool jazz wafted gently into the room, and pin-striped men in pin-striped suits sat quietly whispering to their wives and / or mistresses, glancing around quietly to make sure that they were being noticed by every other pin-striped man in the room. I was, it seemed, the only person travelling alone.

There was no overly-loud announcement that our flight was being called. Instead, eye contact was made by a young woman upon whose head was perched a teeny-tiny fez – the kind an organ grinder’s monkey might have worn on the streets of Little Italy in 1880s New York. With the slightest of nods, I was informed that it was time to board the craft.

Once aboard the Airbus A380-800, one of 59 currently flying for Emirates to 35 destinations around the globe, I was immediately struck by the almost-disquieting levels of deference paid by the flight attendants to the passengers. Any and all requests are met with a charming half-smile, a nod and an assurance – spoken, or otherwise – that no request is too difficult, or will be turned down. Indeed, one might be fooled into believing that this is how life is meant to be. And, for those of us for whom this level of luxury is only just out of reach, it would be an easy trap to fall into.

If I’ve learned anything by travelling the world, it is this: Trimmings are just that.. and a lily, once gilded, is still just a flower.

Tomorrow …. Fellow Travellers

A Bedtime Story

17 Saturday Sep 2016

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Tea Cup Pomeranian, Testicles

ec35923ea6041e3e193fb896bec13434

By Gregor

Once upon a time, from a bedroom suspiciously close to the one that I normally sleep in, there came a series of noises that I suspected weren’t entirely devoid of something marginally more sinister than the usual sounds of my Chinese neighbours snoring, or engaging in the kind of hardcore oxygen-deprivation sex that they appear to enjoy.

Not that it’s my place in the world to judge them for that – whatever floats your boat (or bursts all the blood vessels in your eyes while heightening your sexual experience at the point of clinical climax) – I’m not in any position to draw any valid conclusion about the kind of person I live next door to.

Except for the fact that they own a small, white dog. Pure white, it is. And really, really small.

At first I thought it was some form of ambulatory cleaning equipment – a hypothesis proved incorrect when it actually deposited a series of tiny pellets of shit on my driveway, proving irrefutably that it was designed to do the precise opposite of any cleaning equipment I’ve ever seen before.

The animal in question might appear tangential to this story thus far, but follow along – the high-speed, turd-emitting fluffball plays a starring role in what happened next.

As my neighbours engaged in their usual nocturnal activities, with the gentleman’s shouts of encouragement punctuated in a weird syncopation by the guttural, bilious grunts of a woman in the throes of sexual ecstasy and severe respiratory distress reverberating through the paper-thin adjoining wall of our bedrooms, I crammed my head beneath two pillows in a vain attempt to silence the noise. But the cacophony continued for an hour or more, and I began to fear for the safety of the young lady next door.

Surely, such prolonged attempts to stop her breathing would result in severe brain damage at best – and a suspicious death that would be hard to explain at worst.

But then I heard him shout. “Poko! No!” he bellowed. “Poko!! No!! Fuck off Poko!!”.

I don’t speak Chinese, so I might have the wording slightly wrong here, but above her desperate gasping for breath, along with his near-orgasmic grunts and imploring for Poko to “Fuck Off”, I heard a tiny, tiny noise… the unmistakable sound of a small, furry dog’s razor-sharp teeth puncturing the scrotum of the man choking that poor little pup’s mistress in pursuit of a cheap sexual thrill.

As I said, my Chinese is rusty – but when I heard him shriek the words “不要咬我的睾丸“, I knew that Poko had finally turned out to be useful…

Not only had he bitten through the softest and most sensitive portion of his master’s anatomy, he had achieved what I can only describe as a miracle – the near-cessation of sound from next door.

I fell asleep to the music of gentle sobbing that night – and in the morning, when Poko was shitting in my driveway once again, I rewarded him with a gentle scritching under the chin.

He gave me that weird look that dogs give you when you bother them when they’re pooping – but I could tell from the pattern his tiny little turds made that morning that he was, in his own way, wagging his tail with happiness.

 

Chapter Two: Shamalat from Dagastan

04 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Dagestan, Drugs, Fire

Dagestan: The Land of Mountains

Editors note:  After a party, young Dagestani men visit a hot springs in the middle of no-where which has a flammable fountain of water. Located in the North Caucasus, bordering the Caspian Sea and a Republic of Russia, Dagestan is home to almost 3 million mostly muslim people. Ethnically very diverse, it is made up of several dozen ethnic groups and is Russia’s most heterogeneous republic, where no ethnicity forms a majority. From 2000 until late 2012 Dagestan was subject to a violent Islamic separatist movement that spilled over from neighbouring Chechnya but has now been largely controlled by the Russian Government. Now relatively peaceful Dagestan (which means Land of Mountains) remains one of Russia’s untouched treasures* receiving few visitors. Due to its relative isolation, this beautiful mountainous region has maintained its traditional cultures that have been lost in many other parts of Russia.

* untouched treasures – translation – it’s a fucking godforsaken war zone amongst Russians, Chechnyans and Isil terrorists that makes Iraq look like a walk in the park.

Gregor returns with an incendiary tale 

Shamalat was a stocky little bastard. Barely five foot tall, he packed enough strength to lift a three-seater couch over his shoulder and heave it across a living room.

I know this because I saw him do it. And what made it even more special was the knowledge that he was probably even more stoned than I was when he did it – and I was on the cusp of pissing my pants because I was greening out so badly.

I knew, of course, that something was afoot that day. There’s that feeling that you get, regardless of how badly reality has been damaged through ingestion of substances, that something – somewhere – has gone badly wrong. And I was feeling it from the soles of my feet to the fillings that were rattling like craps dice, deep within my teeth.

Something was about to get well and truly fucked up – and, for seven or eight glorious minutes, I thought that it was probably going to be me.

It was well beyond the normal paranoia that accompanied a heavy session on the bucket bong. This was a visceral, atavistic style of slow-creeping panic. Even Vaughan, who was entirely unflappable thanks to his horrific upbringing and resulting alcoholism, was looking tense.

And when he looked tense, he got this look on his face that said he was trying to evict a grossly enlarged and horribly dry, brick-hard turd.

Think ‘it’s the day after we took all the opiates and now I can’t shit but I really need to and – while we’re discussing this – why the fuck are you in the bathroom while I’m trying to shit?’ … and you’ll get the idea.

Anyway… when Vaughan got nervous, I got nervous. He was our broken little canary in the coalmine. If he took something and it killed him (which happened twice – but both times we managed to punch him in the chest until his heart decided that it wasn’t quite done beating) – that was a good sign for the rest of us that we should probably take whatever it was in half-doses. Just to be safe.

So this particular night began like every other. Barefoot and starving, three of us found ourselves in the living room in Rose Street. Half an ounce of pot sat in a snaplock bag on the coffee table. Next to it sat an eight ball of speed, two casks of white wine and a handful of prescription meds in a small bowl that had been swapped, bargained or purloined from among acquaintances throughout the course of the afternoon.

I fucking loved Tuesdays.

There was no official start to proceedings. No fanfare. It simply began.

Within the hour, it went bad. It always did. The trick to it was to charge through – tough it out, like a concrete-headed boxer whose manager demanded a solid six-round showing so the paycheck looked like it was genuine. No one was expected to win. We just needed to survive.

It was a grim kind of fun. And to turn the boxing analogy through 180 degrees, it was never about hurting anyone else… it was about how much self-inflicted damage we could endure. Three young men, punching themselves repeatedly in the face. It wasn’t a quest for honour. It was a very long run to the edge of an abyss that we believed we understood.

But this night was different. For starters, Sham and Vaughan we both unusually quiet. Normally, they would verbally spar – Vaughan because he thought he was smart, and Sham because he needed to practice his English. Born somewhere in Russia – but Sham called it Dhagastan or some such shit – he sounded like a spy and looked like an adolescent black bear. Short, shaggy-haired and as strong as an angry ox, he is the only guy I’ve ever met that I honestly believed could wrestle a train and emerge victorious.

But he was a friend. Which was a good thing – something we learnt when he’d wrapped a bar stool around a stranger’s head in the pub about a month before.

“He disrespect you – I make him sleep,” Sham said once that violence was complete, flashing a sickening grin, which revealed that dentistry hadn’t quite made its mark in Dagastan.

“I’m pretty sure the word you’re looking for is ‘coma’,” Vaughan helpfully corrected him.

“Ah… Good… Yes,” says Sham. “I make him coma.”

On this particular Tuesday we’re discussing, however, Sham was unusually taciturn. Something was brewing in that horribly ursine brain of his.

There were few rules in the world we inhabited. And the ones that did exist almost exclusively revolved around etiquette – the ‘do’s and don’t’s of drugs’. Over the course of the next 15 minutes, I managed to shatter just about every single one of them.

The first, and perhaps most obvious in hindsight, is that you never – ever – get in the way of an angry Cossack when he’s well into the blackened depths of a profound mental funk. Even a simple ‘You okay there, tiger?’ is likely to end with someone sporting the wrong end of a broken beer bottle in the trachea.

The second is that you should never, ever assume that just because you can hear or see something, that everyone else can hear or see it as well. Which would have been good to remember around about the time that I casually mentioned to Sham that he had set the couch on fire and was somewhere between four and seven minutes away from cooking himself where he sat.

The third – and most telling – is that you should never assume that the people around you have ‘probably had enough, so whatever’s within reach is now fair game’.

Even if the people around you appear to be well and truly ablaze, and hence highly unlikely to want another line or two, on account of what should surely be an urgent desire to ‘stop, drop and roll’ to deal with the flames that are – evidently – consuming them.

But, as everything we were consuming began to kick in, idiocy got the better of me. The rules went out the window.

“Sham…” says I. “Dude… Sham. SHAM!”

From beneath his shaggy black crop of hair came a baleful gaze.

“Hhhwhat?” he uttered, with the word arriving so guttural that it took me a second or two to realize he had answered, and wasn’t merely hocking up the phlegm for which he was (deservedly) quite famous for producing.

“Sham… you okay, dude? You look a little warm…”

“Is fine. Fuck you.”

“You sure? Because it could just be a trick of the light or something, but honestly, dude… I think you might have set yourself on fire…”

“Campfire!” he cried out. “We clap hands. We laugh! We sink sonks and dance!”

“… Sham … for real … you’re sitting in a fire…”

“IS FINE! FUCK YOU!”

Doubt crept into my mind. I could be making this up. Because surely… someone who had managed to light their legs on fire – in polyester track pants, no less – would arguably be a better judge of whether they were actually on fire than me… After all, I was clearly on the other side of the room, well away from the action.

I peered about myopically – the best kind of peering, in my opinion – before my gaze settled on the plate on the coffee table. The one with one last line of something vaguely pink, powdered and of dubious origin.

I looked at Vaughan – who still looked like he was trying to remember something very important.

I looked at Sham – who was, by this stage, clearly on fire.

I looked at the plate. And the drugs on the plate. Then at Vaughan. Then at Sham.

I looked at the plate. And the drugs on the plate. Then at Vaughan. Then at Sham.

I looked at the plate. And the drugs on the plate. Then at Vaughan. Then at Sham.

I took the drugs – kneeling on the floor, I scooped up the $5 note, rolled it into a tight little tube, tested which nostril was most likely to work (the left one…) and before I knew it, the line was gone.

I looked at the plate. And the lack of drugs on the plate. Then at Vaughan. Then at Sham.

Vaughan had vagued out substantially. Sham, on the other hand, had not.

“Was Mine!”

“Dude… Sham… seriously, dude, you’re on fucking fire… are you okay?”

“AM NOT BURNING. THOSE WAS MY DRUG. GIVE THEM BACK.”

If you’ve ever snorted a line of drugs, you’ll know precisely how impossible that request is. If you haven’t ever – then imagine eating a teaspoon of castor sugar, and being asked to spit it back out into a neat little pile – as dry and useful as it was before you put it in your mouth.

If you’ve ever snorted drugs, you’ll also know that – aside from mainlining them into a convenient vein – up your nose is about as rapid a transformation as you can expect between ‘I just took something’ and ‘why aren’t my limbs responding?’.

“GIVE. THEM. BACK.”

“I would if I could but I can’t so they’re gone,” I thought smugly to myself.

Vaughan, to his credit, fucked off at this point. Sham, to my dismay, did not.

[internal monologue time]

‘Tough it out, dude. Tough it out… their gear will wear off soon, and you’ll be fine, as high as nuts and everything will be fine as soon as we put that fucking fire out and how the fuck doesn’t Sham understand that his legs have been on fire for a few minutes now? Something’s not right. Really, really, not right.’

And that’s as far as I got before Vaughan emerged from the next room, wiping vomit from his chin and blinking owlishly through the gloom.

“Sham,” he mumbled. “You’re on fire.”

And it turned out that Sham was, indeed, on fire.

Most of us realised that the usual fug of smoke that hovered in the living room had become unusually thick – and quite extraordinarily pungent.

The scent had a distinct chemical base, combined with marijuana and nicotine, enhanced by subtle top notes of rapidly rendering skin and fat – as if someone had served a dish of ‘slow cooked foam rubber and pork belly on a bed of insanity and rice noodles’ in one of those insufferable pop-up restaurants that people love, even though it means the proprietors could be responsible for an outbreak of dysentery but will never face prosecution because they’ll be in Adelaide before the fourth or fifth victim dies of the squitters.

… I digress.

The living room was filling with smoke. All of us were coughing horribly. Shamalat still hadn’t moved.

Something had to give… and that something was Vaughan.

Summoning all of the grace one could hope to expect from a kangaroo that had just been hit by a truck, Vaughan lurched forward and (as much as I would love to lie, and say ‘in one swift movement’ but it certainly wasn’t the case) grappled with the bong for a very, very long ten seconds before dousing Sham with the fluid it contained.

It made little difference to the flames. It made a lot of difference to Sham.

“The fuck you do?” he bellowed.

Vaughan scampered, as only people called Vaughan can scamper – leaving me alone with a burning Eastern European, and no control over my own limbs. Unable to move, I watched Shamalat discuss his predicament with himself.

“… I am on fire.”

“… This couch is burn me.”

“… The couch must leave”

And it was at that point that Sham stood up, heaved the coffee table aside and lifted one end of the couch to around shoulder-height, before making a run for the front door.

The results were almost inevitable… Sham hit the door like we’ve all hit the floor at various stages of our lives: rapidly, with a loud thud and what seemed like an awful finality.

The collision sent him crashing to the floor. He was left with no avenue of escape – trapped between a front door deadlocked against possible police interference, and a three-seater sofa that was in imminent danger of becoming a suburban Valkyrie farewell to dreams and wishes and drugs.

But Shamalat was not a quitter. Not then, not now, not ever.

Gathering all of his strength, Sham heaved that couch across the room to escape the flames. It landed with a burning ‘whomp’ – shortly followed by Shamalat doing precisely the same.

… The ‘poetic’ ending to this story would have been a Viking-like shout of rage and burning furniture hurtling across the room, before Shamalat absconded smoldering into the night.

Instead, I witnessed Sham hoist that couch to shoulder-height, heave it across the room so that it blocked the front door (and only reasonable external point of exit) before patting out the flames on his legs.

“Fuck fire,” he moaned. “Fuck. Fire.”

…

The following morning, Sham was nowhere to be found. Our couch was still gently emitting what were surely toxic wisps of smoke, and the living room was even more of a grotesque mess than usual.

I tidied up as best I could – by which I mean I shambled back upstairs to steadfastly ignore the detritus of a night gone bad.

…

When Sham resurfaced about a week later at the pub, he was walking like a rodeo champion – bow-legged and more ginger than Lucille Ball.

We all said nothing. The last man who crossed him at the Glengarry Castle Hotel went home with a pool cue lodged somewhere unmentionable… and none of us had the balls to deal with that sort of indignity.

 

 

The Lament of Chinese Ivan

16 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Chinese Ivan

ivan

The Pig’s Arms Welcomes Back Gregor Stronach

 

It’s Chinese Ivan… he’s having a moment.

I’m not entirely sure why I was suddenly involved in this one, because – to be totally honest – I couldn’t give two fucks about Chinese Ivan, his never-ending moments and the insipid dramas he attracted. His life was a bog-swamp of pointless little episodes, to which hard times were drawn like flies to a pile of shit. But we took drugs together – which makes him a friend, a term I use as loosely as possible in this instance.

The hard thing to fathom with him was that there were two very different people living in that inscrutable little body of his.

There was the guy I first met, when both of us were in the depths of a horrible mass-madness acid fuck-up, and it turned out that we were each other’s baseline of normality in a sea of heaving buildings, shit music and friends who were either cloyingly, clingingly concerned for our well-being, or simply wanted to parade us around in the vague hope that our desperately poor states of mind would somehow cement in their own hatchling hangers-on’s minds that by dint of us being cataclysmically fucked up, they themselves might appear marginally more dangerous and cool.

It was a proper, platinum-plated cunt of a night when we met. Chinese Ivan was inches away from jumping from the roof of a terrace house in Chippendale – and I was doing penance in the arms of an off duty policewoman after I misread her signals and helped myself to a myopic gawk down the front of her shirt.

My view of one of the most outstanding nipples I’ve ever seen was interrupted by a slap in the face, accompanied by the unmistakable thud of a body landing in a poorly maintained garden. My face smarting from the blow, I remember peering about like I’d lost my glasses, in time to see a dirty, wiry little man emerge from a rosemary bush, his everything askew.

He walked like a newly-born foal. And, it would seem, flew like a newly-born bird. Paint spattered and bearing the scent of gypsy’s bedclothes, we latched onto each other and rode out the remainder of the gathering by cowering in the laundry, spending hours trying to introduce ourselves. That was fun.

I met the other Ivan a few short days later. And he turned out to be precisely the sort of atavistic fuckhead I hated. His girlfriends all left because he beat them. His friends all left because he stole. The only person who hated Chinese Ivan more than us when he was straight, was him.

And he fucking deserved it. A desperate emotional derelict with little thought and even less conscience, he lurched from high to high by sustaining himself with bouts of aggressive violence, and a penchant for displaying any clash of ideas or ideals by barking out a bilious grunt and spending the next few hours either sulking like a petulant toddler or raging like an MMA fighter in the depths of an upper binge – and either way, he was made almost entirely of fists, ill-will and about as tireless as an Indian cabbie. Make no mistake – he was a venomous, spiteful and dangerous man.

But when he went native, it was a sight to behold. The flecks of paint in his hair and his multi-coloured painting clothes made him look for all the world like Joseph had taken his dreamcoat on a rampage of good will and positive energy.

And when he was high, he was as high as people get. A proper product of manic behavior unchecked by modern psychology, and set free by the kinds of chemicals the CIA are still trying to understand after 70 years of unauthorized, off-the-books experiments.

So when I heard that Chinese Ivan was having a moment, from locals I trusted not to hand me a line of bullshit when things were getting very, very real – I knew that something special was in the works.

“What’s the problem this time?” I asked Tony. Tony shrugged, thought about answering for a moment, decided not to – and then spoke. As an aside, that was Tony’s way… his entire life seemed to be centred around careful, considered thought of the possible outcomes of every decision he made – and then acting in a completely contrary manner.

I don’t know if it was sheer bloody-mindedness, or a direct result of his church-laden, guilt-trip, rosary-reciting and inappropriate-priest-deflecting childhood – but I have never, ever in my life seen a man with nine different kinds of street-smart make so many fuckheaded and godawful decisions.

More on him later… I promise. But for now, I was confronted by Tony’s shambolic appearance, and his breathless exhortations that Chinese Ivan was, in fact, having what would turn out to be the biggest moment of his life.

“I think he thinks he’s dead,” Tony proclaimed around a mouthful of chicken salad sandwich. Small droplets of mayonnaise were flecked at the corners of Tony’s mouth – put food in his hands and he turned into an unapologetic hovering, hoovering pig of a man – and each syllable was punctuated by a short, gelatinous spray of emulsified egg. At that moment, I hated Tony more than I hated Chinese Ivan… and everyone hated Chinese Ivan.

We called him Chinese Ivan because he was Chinese, and not a single one of us could decipher his name when he spoke it, and we had even less chance when that angry little fucker wrote it down. If I had a buck for every napkin he’s handed me in the seven years I’d known him – each one inscribed with either a nonsensical pictogram or an anglicised variant almost devoid of vowels – I’d have enough to buy myself a nice gift of moderate value.

The kind of gift you could happily give a co-worker that you kind of tolerate, even though they really are exquisitely shit at their job, but you can’t take them to task too hard because you know that their chance of securing gainful employment elsewhere would be irredeemably hampered by the fact that they are simply appalling at being even a sad and sorry collection of odious personal habits coupled unmercifully to a desire to do as little as possible at any given moment of the day.

I should mention that we didn’t hate Chinese Ivan for being Chinese. We hated him for being Chinese Ivan.

I raised an eyebrow at Tony, the single gesture both urging him gently to elucidate upon his theory of Chinese Ivan’s current moment, and to remind him that, while I do like mayonnaise, it’s a flavor I prefer to enjoy unmolested by the spittle of others, and not when it’s moving at moderate velocity at my eyes from the mouth of a solidly dirty cunt like Tony.

Tony, as Tony did, got precisely half the message. Pausing only to jam more sandwich into his gaping craw, he told me what has transpired prior to my gentle line of questioning.

“So,” Tony sprayed, “Chinese Ivan has had an odd day, thus far…”

Tony tapered his sentence off towards the end, clearly seeking to judge my level of interest in the anecdote, which he would then weigh against his desire to expend the energy it might take to tell. When I sat stock still, a fleshy gargoyle perched high upon my stool at the counter of the café and saying nothing, Tony’s desire to talk outweighed his obvious need to conserve enough energy to make it to the bathroom and back before ordering more food.

“I saw Chinese Ivan pretty early this morning,” Tony said, leaning closer to me as if to whisper conspiratorially, without so much as lowering the volume of his voice by point whatever-the-fuck of a decibel. Everyone in the place could hear him, so the only appreciable difference in outcome of Tony’s leaning forward was to significantly increase the density and volume of mayonnaise he was depositing into my ear, the dirty fuck.

“Turns out, he needed to go to the bank,” Tony said – the word ‘go’ half-accompanied by a feeble belch of coffee-fouled chicken sandwich breath that carried like an abandoned kite before lodging in my nose and causing a slow, rolling front-flip from by stomach.

“He needed money to pay for something or other – I forget what it was – I think it might have been a washing machine or something suitably banal,” Tony said, pronouncing ‘banal’ in such a fashion that it rhymed with ‘anal’ – triggering a half snort, half laugh. A mayonnaise-laden snarf – most of which I wore with the grim stoicism of a Russian Imperial guard who refuses to leave his post, despite knowing that even one minute more without help would result in losing most of his toes to frostbite in the frigid snow of a St Petersburg winter.

Against all of my better judgment, I nodded.

“And he’s been on a mission to be as complete a motherfucker ever since… Stacey says she saw him at the bank,” Tony said.

It took me about four minutes to figure it out – and it was something that Chinese Ivan and I had actually discussed from time to time, in the depths of our horrific week-long ‘the only reason I can move right now is to take more drugs, or save myself the indignity of shitting my pants right in front of you” binges.

Chinese Ivan often only ever paid attention to point one of that particular worldview. He would, could – and often gleefully – soiled himself to force everyone else from the room so that he could Bogart the gear we left behind. He figured he would shit himself at some point anyway – so it was better to do so early in the piece and benefit materially through the theft of the drugs left behind by those of us whose legs worked sufficiently well to flee the odour.

Fucking hell, I hated that guy sometimes…

But it being Sunday, and his being spotted at the bank, shook loose a memory. One of the early recollections I have of Chinese Ivan was, in a rare moment of lucidity on his part and my own ability to figure out what the fuck he was saying, he posited an interestingly spiritual question.

“Do you ever walk up to an automatic door, and when it doesn’t open, think that you might have died and not realised?”

Sunday. Bank. Automatic Door… He was fucked from the moment he left the house.

And so, it turned out, that was indeed the case. Fronting up to the bank – and lacking the wherewithal to realize that the darkened interior, lack of security guards or worker drones, or other would-be punters meant anything other than “it’s the weekend, shithead… use the ATM” – Chinese Ivan leapt to a properly terrifying conclusion.

He was dead. And he could now do whatever the fuck he wanted to do.

And so it began.

It wasn’t a long walk to the local shops that we called home base… and Chinese Ivan hit every single one of them. The clincher – every single shopkeep between his house and walking distance knew what Chinese Ivan was like, and knew two inalienable truths.

First, he was dangerous when he was clean and sober, and infinitely worse when he wasn’t.

Second, any form of challenge resulted in violence as sudden and devastating as a car accident.

And so, thinking he was dead, he hit nearly every shop he could find. The transgressions varied from stealing chips from diners at the Greasy Shovel, the local fish/chip/burger joint on the corner through to leafing through the pornographic magazines at the newsagent, not-quite-surreptitiously pawing at his non-functional (please don’t ask how I know…) genitals.

None of this was enough to raise the ire of the well-meaning, hard-working shop owners.

But when Chinese Ivan entered our local ‘vintage clothing’ store, took several items of clothing into the change room and built himself an igloo from which he could watch young women disrobe, that something was said.

“Chinese Ivan, what the FUCK ARE YOU DOING?” was the cry. It came from Tara, a local semi-celebrity whose legendary beauty had been eroded by years of drug abuse. She ran the shop – something we all knew she wasn’t happy about, at all. Which meant she suffered fools about as gladly as jihadists suffer journalists with long, white necks.

I can only imagine how jarring that exclamation was… but for someone who evidently believed that they were dead, it would have been a major disruption to their present state of mind. And, as Tara eventually told it, once she’d been released from hospital and sold her doctor-prescribed calmatives to most (if not all) of us – Chinese Ivan did not react well.

With a howl that rivaled a descending single-engined plane in clear distress, Chinese Ivan did three things.

First, he shat himself, like a squid attempting to hide from its predators.

Second, he took flight, bolting from the rear of the store with the speed and grace of a Paralympic athlete.

Third, upon reaching the street, he was hit by a fast-moving taxi. The sound, Tara said, was like someone dropping a watermelon from a reasonable height into a rubbish skip full of glass and screaming Chinese people.…

It took the police about two minutes to arrive. The ambulance another seven.

The council workers didn’t arrive until just after 9am Monday to finish scooping the bits of Chinese Ivan the birds and stray cats hadn’t consumed into a couple of black bin bags, before taking those away to god-knows-where.

I would love to feel sad about this… but I can’t. Because Chinese Ivan died doing what he loved… getting monstrously fucked up and making trouble for everyone, and everything, around him.

For a dead man, he served a purpose – that being a proper, prize-winning degenerate fuck-up, and a short-lived rust-brown stain on Abercrombie Street that was used by the slow, subtle infusion of well-meaning gentrification types to scare their teenage children into a life of sobriety.

It didn’t work.

 

 

Dear Gregor

05 Monday May 2014

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

agony uncle, Gregor

Simianlated Photo of Gregor

Simianlated Photo of Gregor


Why do men have nipples?

Men have nipples for aesthetic purposes. They mainly exist to provide punctuation for the pectoral muscles, and occasionally to make fat men look like hairy women. They also provide an excellent place to attach electrodes during routine questioning of African American suspects in southern police stations.
Without nipples, a man would look like a mannequin, and the less men look like department store dummies, the better… because if we start to take nipples off men, eventually there will be a worldwide glut of nipples on the international market, and the internet pornography industry would die.

Dear Gregor
Why does a grown man who rides motorcycles own an overly cute cat? 

He is either secretly a very soft individual, with a carefully constructed façade of seriousness tempered with a blistering sense of humour, or he might be gay. Take your pick – although I’m leaning towards the first explanation myself.

Dear Gregor
How do I get the hot mamas to like me? 

I would start by putting pants on… you’d be amazed at how quickly your fortunes will turn around once you stop turning up places with your doodle hanging out.

Dear Gregor
How did Tom Arnold end up connected with every movie featuring black people ever?

Tom Arnold had himself declared black for tax purposes in 1992. To celebrate, Tom was awarded the publishing and distribution rights for every single film featuring black actors by Michael Jackson, who has been steadily divesting himself of assets since he was busted for playing ‘touchy touchy’ with some little children. 

Dear Gregor
Why do people look at me funny when I touch them? And can I touch you? 

A hard question… but I think it has something to do with the running sores on your face and limbs. My advice is to eat leafy green vegetables with every meal, and try to get out in the sun a little more. If that doesn’t clear it up, a gentle wash with a lanolin-based soap (preferably one that doesn’t contain glycerine) might help as well.
Another thing to consider is the notion of asking people before you put your hand down the back of their trousers. The excuse that you are simply ‘looking for loose change that might have slipped down the crack in their ass’ won’t go down too well in court.

Dear Gregor
If girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice, how comes they taste of anchovies? 

Try purchasing salt-reduced humans for consumption. I’ve found that by reducing the amount of salt I eat with my humans, my blood pressure has dropped. Sure, salt-reduced humans may be a little more expensive, but given the alternatives – be it a life of heart trouble or having to shell out the big bucks for totally organic human meat – it’s a small price to pay.

Dear Gregor
Why doesn’t my daddy love us anymore? 

Because you’ve been bad. That’s why he left you and mommy alone in the house. He hates you for ruining his life, by burdening him with a responsibility that his weak male ego was unable to bear. It’s also because you look a little too much like the postman.

Dear Gregor
Which came first – the chicken or the egg?

Well, it’s quite obvious that the chicken came first, because without an egg there would be no chickens. No, wait… it was the egg that came first, because without chickens there are no eggs. Shit. Umm. I think they arrived at the same time. Yes. Yes, that’s it… the answer to your question relies upon the order in which you unpack your groceries after a trip to the supermarket.

Dear Gregor
I am a man, yet I struggle to maintain interest in sports. What’s wrong with me? Is there an operation I can have? 

Yes, there is. Try a lobotomy. Then you’ll find baseball the most interesting thing in the world.

If you’ve got a question that you think Gregor might be able to answer, send your question stapled to an A$10 note and your editor will try to remember what the cash was for, but will probably drink it anyway.

This piece first appeared in Gregor’s head, then it moved out and lived at Rum & Mon key for a while until someone put it out on the nature strip for the Council Pick up

Irresponsibility

05 Sunday May 2013

Posted by Therese Trouserzoff in Gregor Stronach

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Gregor Stronach, irresponsibility, Suzuki Bandit 1200s

Suzuki_GSF_1200_Bandit_2006_13_1024x768

Story by Gregor Stronach

As I lay recovering from my recent birthday, where a quiet evening’s drink turned into a beer and acid fuelled weekend of ultimate confusion, I began to formulate many theories on irresponsibility. I feel bad because I drank so much beer. I also feel bad that I have, technically speaking, broken the ridiculous laws that demand that my consciousness remain seated at all times while the carriage is in motion. Why? Because Society would have us believe that being irresponsible is a terrible thing indeed.

Recent major events, both personal and involving the population at large, have given me reason to pause and consider the nature of irresponsibility. It has the twin abilities of making us cry and laugh. Crying is good for the soul, and laugher is, of course, the best medicine there is. Unless you have stitches in your scrotum. Then it’s bad. But even then, irresponsible things can be good, and a quick look will tell you that they’re happening all around us all the time.

I watched in awe as Albert Park was turned into a high-speed demolition derby yet again, by the travelling freak show that is Formula 1 motor racing. I love motor racing, but really – is it a good idea to be showing vehicles travelling in excess of 300 km/h on what are, essentially, public roads? Not to be outdone, some idiot came up with the idea of cramming celebrities into Minis and setting them loose on the track.

Everyone knows that celebrities, particularly Aussie celebrities, are competitive to the point of self-harm when it comes to getting their share of the limited exposure the Australian media can offer. Given half a chance, you’ll find them stepping over each other’s dead bodies in the street to get their heads on TV. Hell – they’ll even stoop to posing nude in ‘art’ magazine Black+White for a career boosting moment of pervy fame.

So giving them moderately powerful small cars and letting them try to kill each other live on national TV was probably not the most responsible thing to do.

We’ve seen irresponsibility recently in the Australian state of New South Wales’ politics as well. I question the responsibility of the two major parties trying desperately to one-up each other on the level of punishments that they’re willing to force the judiciary to mete out to hapless criminals. But God bless the Greens in New South Wales for their visionary policy that will neatly remove the seedy side of purchasing party drugs. No one’s gonna vote for them for suggesting that the state legalise pills and speed, but bless them for giving it a go. I really do think that once they manage to crowbar Cheech and Chong from their policy committee, they’ll finally begin to get somewhere. Until then, the paperless office is ought but a nightmare for the Greens – skinning up a joint with no paper is going to be a big ask, people.

My personal life has taken an irresponsible turn as well. I was granted my unrestricted motorcycle licence, merely for achieving the milestone of turning 30 years of age. Having been restricted to riding 250cc bikes, some of which are plenty fast enough, I suddenly found myself aboard what can only be described as one of the most irresponsible pieces of machinery in the world – a Suzuki Bandit 1200 S.

It sounds impressive if you know what I’m talking about, but if don’t, just consider this. Small Korean cars are being shipped to Australia for sale to secretaries and wives with 1.3-litre engines. This bike’s engine is a 1.2-litre. The main difference between the two machines is the weight. A small Korean car with a 1.3-litre engine weighs about 1200kg. The Suzuki weighs in at 220kg.

The short explanation of these facts – the Suzuki goes fast. The long explanation, for anyone still with me here, is that it accelerates like a jet fighter, and has a tendency to take off like one too. I did an enormous wheelie out the front of my parents house whilst trying to show off the bike’s abilities. I made it home in record time from my folks house, despite having to stop and clean out my trousers.

A touch of irresponsibility isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s important to keep our inner child alive. Not to the extent that Michael Jackson would have you believe, but life without a shade of irresponsibility would be like living in a mausoleum.

But the level to which some of us exercise our irresponsibility is a tad over the top. For example, dragging an entire geographically isolated nation of questionable economic and political power into a war on the other side of the globe for interests that are clearly never going to be high on our list of priorities is a bit much.

Sadly, as with everything fun in life, it appears that moderation is once again the key.

First published by Rum & Monkey  back when men were men.

← Older posts

Patrons Posts

  • Better Quality Spam and Physical Spyware August 16, 2022
  • Elvis August 15, 2022
  • B Camel Sauce August 13, 2022
  • Vale Olivia Newton John August 9, 2022
  • Stash Wyslouch … or this is what happens when bluegrass descends into jazz August 7, 2022
  • Neil Young – On the Beach plus. August 5, 2022
  • The Future is Kong Foo Sing August 5, 2022
  • Unsuccessful Models Auditioning for Rodin’s Thinker August 4, 2022
  • In the Kitchen with Vivienne – 3 Special Occasions August 3, 2022

We've been hit...

  • 688,088 times

Blogroll

  • atomou the Greek philosopher and the ancient Greek stage
  • Crikey
  • Gerard & Helvi Oosterman
  • Hello World Walk along with Me
  • Hungs World
  • Lehan Winifred Ramsay
  • Neville Cole
  • Politics 101
  • Sandshoe
  • the political sword

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 374 other followers

Rooms athe Pigs Arms

The Old Stuff

  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Archives

Website Powered by WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle
    • Join 374 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...