I fucking hate this song. I didn't listen to that link, and feel free not to yourself. However, this song is an integral part of my housesharing with Ken. I think it may have been the only tape (yes, tape, that's how long ago this was) he owned. He used to play it particularly loud when he was pissed off with me. Which was usually because the house was a mess. When the kitchen was a mess, he would bring home a massive steak and stink the kitchen out with in it revenge. I was a staunch vegetarian at the time. That I can't stand this song is sort of appropriate, because Ken and I vacillate between adoring each other and driving each other insane. I would come home at times to find Ken in the lounge ensconced in porn videos (yes, actual videos that he hired from the sex shop in Katoomba. That is showing our age). He didn't have a VHS player in his room. I'm pretty sure he come home once to catch Jason and I having sex in the lounge, so I suppose we are even.
I loved sharehousing in my 20s. We lived our own version of He Died with a Felafal in his Hand, but I also formed lifelong friendships from it. It's so often mad and chaotic and messy and loud and intrusive but it's also fun and caring and like your own weird family. Moving out of home in suburban Adelaide and into inner city Sydney share housing was quite the step. There was the house where the upstairs bath tub crashed through the floor with someone in it. The flatmate who broke a rib and was sent home ED with panadiene forte, then cracked open a bottle of red, so by the time I came home, he was a grinning idiot unable to move on the couch. I confiscated the wine and threw a blanket over him. He later moved out because he had to go to London to start the Marxist revolution. I'm still waiting for that revolution. The one whom we found dead in her room. That story is rather sad. Another who developed a speed habit, then moved her boyfriend in and painted her room purple whilst I was away on a climbing trip, then just disappeared. John and I spent hours painting the room back to rose pink to get our bond back. That incident did lead me to moving in with Bili and Corisse, so all worked out well.
Ken and I met out of the Mt when I was 17. Apparently he had a massive crush on me, but I was oblivious to that at the time. We were both into climbing cracks, so we set out on a mission to do Boy Racer. We simulclimbed up to the ledge on Syrinx, got rained on, got swooped by birds and stared trepidously at the route. I magnanimously said Ken could go first. He said, oh, no, you can. No really, I mean it, you can have this one. No, no, you can. I made an attempt and bailed off, a gibbering wreck and sent Ken up to save the day. He disappeared out of sight into deadly silence until finally I hear a pitiful sounding "safe". Normally Ken bellows. I battle up after him and as I pop into his sight, he asks if I had cried under that roof, because he had been.
Ken and I have been through rocky rides together in both of our lives. He knew me through my reckless younger years, and my messy 20s coming to terms with trauma. His deep depression in his 40s. I think I may have been the only person he saw outside of his work for a few years there, because I would just turn up from Victoria on his doorstep and insist we go climbing. Until he didn't have the head for climbing anymore and we would just do dinner.
We were both around for many random adventures. He has enough Wendy stories to dine out on for years, as I do Ken stories. He was renowned for getting his kit off. I discovered he has a bald triangle on his perineum courtesy of a day when he decided he would just climb naked. You can't help but notice these things when he is bridging above you. And then every climber on Serenity Crack the day we did it knows all about Ken's adventures in the sex clubs of San Francisco. He doesn't have a quiet voice when he's excited. There was the day when he was guiding a group in Sydney for the Mardi Gras through a canyon, and he cut the arse cheeks out of his wetsuit for the occasion. He made more in tips than his wage that day. We had a party that he couldn't make not long after that, and so we made an alter to Ken out of his wetsuit. Ken has always been a lot of fun and loving in his awkward backhanded fashioned when he's not being a grumpy fucked up bastard (his words!). He's a total contrast of outrageous and blokey, and a soft gooey centre that he's done a lot of work to get in touch with in recent years. I do adore him, and it is fun to talk back to the outrageous and blokey. We have been continually playfighting for nearly 30 years.
Last winter, I finally got Ken back climbing with Bili and Shaun from our old circle from the 90s after his years of exile. It was also the first time I'd seen Shaun in about 15 years. Our day at the cliff was straight back to the old days. The same old bad jokes. The sun was shining, we were laughing, climbing was happening and the world was great.I may have destroyed the Bat Out of Hell tape in a fit of pique. Ken's mostly forgiven me.
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