I Ain’t Saying I’m a Gold Digger, I’m Just Saying I’m a Cotton Picker

Word had got ‘round Emerald that a dab hand machine operator was covering hectares faster than a rabbit on a speedboat.  Church goers stared at him in awe as if he was the Virgin Mary lactating by the altar. Cattle stood to attention as he parted the snowy blanket like Moses did the Arctic. He would volunteer at the local nursing home, spinning yarns to yearning ears over morning tea as his legend grew, only to be forgotten, then replayed, and so forth. But people can be fickle as well as forgetful and recognising that his small town celebrity status probably wouldn’t last forever, he turned his back on the fame to focus on the cotton.

I’ve often said that there’s nothing purer than post-harvest ploughing. That first turn of the soil after a long barren spell, revitalising the very earth we tread on. I get hard just thinking about it. Too much? Well imagine you were buried alive for months on end and nobody knew, the dirt pressing against your chest as if you were a packet of crisps at the bottom of a shopping bag full of canned tomatoes (Don’t ask me what I’m cooking). Now picture the utter relief that same pack of Tayto must feel when a fat kid tasked with putting away the groceries grasps the crisps first. I was now that fat kid. Insects blinded by the beaming light of the Queensland sun were given a second chance. Surfacing worms wriggled free gasping for air. Gracious wombats gathered ‘round the tractor as the kookaburra serenaded their rescued families. And there I was, the giver of life, perched high in my John Deere, proud as punch. If only the hawks hadn’t noticed. Like a gang of women at a tin of biscuits, my new friends were torn asunder. Damn you cruel world, damn you straight to hell!

You see, at this point, all the cotton had been harvested. Four million dollars’ worth of raw, unadulterated, fluffy goodness, hoovered up the snout of the picker and baled out the other side. Like Charlie Sheen if he had the shits I suppose. Anyway, I was busy prepping the paddocks for next years’ season. Long days spent traversing rolling fields as wedge tailed eagles taught their young to fly over my head (I’m sure they could fly over other things too). It was peaceful, if not coma inducing, and apart from the odd breakdown to interrupt the monotony, there wasn’t much to write home about. That was, until one evening, I heard murmurs over my old transistor radio. Between the crackles of a cooked connection the words latch, trailer and pivot two tickled my fancy just enough to prise me from my precious field in order to investigate.

It’s the screams that still haunt me the most. Desperate drawn-out screeches of terror echoed ‘round the pivot. And there they lay, bodies strewn across the dusty road, legs contorted as if put together by a toddler who found them in a kinder surprise. Family members looked on helpless, mournful eyes blatantly casting guilt my way. Don’t be staring at me like that ya hefty pricks. I was a machine operator, and a damn good one at that. If it was my job to secure the latch on the trailer, it would’ve been done with the utmost care. But it was an outside job, and they’d shat the bed. Seventeen cattle, a year old if they were a day, thrown out the back of the truck at devastating speed. A proposed road trip to pastures new may as well have been a sky diving expedition without a parachute. Fetch the rifle Johnny. Play us another one farmer Mike. I’d need a machine gun to get through this amount of meat. And I couldn’t exactly take the Steinbeck approach either. Turn ‘round sweet cow and remember our happy place, luscious grasslands filled with rabbits and ketchup and BANG. Meanwhile his mates are watching on in horror thinking, this chap’s mad as a brush. And who was I kidding anyway? I’m no killer. I unintentionally murdered hundreds of ladybirds in a jar once, and sure my kill death ratio in Call of Duty earned me the nickname ‘The Ace’, but murder a herd of cattle? I feel guilty carving a Sunday roast. I’ll leave this one to you Mike, but don’t worry, I’ll plough those fields ‘til the cows come home.

Back at the ranch it was nothing but clean country living. On the upper deck I acted as Margy’s personal chef and she my surrogate mother. She had an acid tongue and an open mind which I greatly admired and without her I probably wouldn’t have survived. Below her, her brother Pat had proved a wily mentor. I’d packed in my role as his drinking partner for a gym membership, much to his disapproval, but no matter how many times he called me a poof, he always gave me a bottle of frozen rain water to soften the blow. In fairness, he was dead right. There I was prancing around with a set of heavy pom poms in the mirrored house of vanity when the man opposite me used to lift horses up by the bollocks for stepping out of line. One of those horses eventually got his revenge though, throwing Pat from a height at his Codenwarra ranch, shattering his pelvis, hip socket, collar bone and three ribs in the process.  An early but hard-earned retirement ensued for a man who’d once led a 33 day drove of 875 head of steers from Clermont to Roma, all 500 miles covered on horseback. But his adventures had shortened in distance considerably and I made it my business to drop him down to happy hour at the Emerald Hotel as often as I could. Not quite a cattle drove, but I was taking the horse to water and this lad didn’t need any encouragement. His local bar had just been allocated a stripper, or won one… I’m not sure how that works? It had caused quite the stir among the regulars but she was hidden behind a curtain out back, and at a vulgar twenty dollars a show, myself and Pat weren’t interested. He’d acquainted me with a few ladies with questionable testosterone levels as it was so I was quite happy to stick to a schooner of Gold and the role of getaway driver. And who needed her anyway? The real entertainment was out front atop the high stools as Pat and his band of merry men shared tales of yore. All I had to do was cop a bit of flak for being Irish and there I was with front row seats to the best show in town. Auyagoin?

 

 

Shrimped in the Vortex

They say fortune favours the brave but try telling him that having plucked up the courage to talk to the festival goddess only for her to turn out to be the best friend of the girl he was with the night before. With The Killers providing the soundtrack (they’re actually still alright), the boy they called Dag was banished from Molly’s chamber to the dank reality of a festival escaping him. We plodded back to our camp deflated, resigned to an anti-climactic return to Dublin and a hangover capable of taking the whole plane down with us.  We’d saturated our WhatsApp group in preparation but all the Rice Crispy bars in the world couldn’t save us now. We were doomed… and then the musically inclined freaks and geeks convention threw us a doggy life.

From nowhere the sanctity of our circle was invaded by balloons- hundreds of them, our marquee threatening to launch into space at the hands of a Pixar fanatic claiming to be a Balloonatic. Transfixed, we clung to the coat tails of euphoria in vain, our intruder less stimulating than we’d hoped. But as the old saying goes, don’t judge a Balloonatic until you’ve told him to leave. Grasping a knife from a mystery pocket, he slashed the dreams of every helium balloon hoping to fly that night and oddly, we fed off it. I looked to the Dag with a glint in my eye as I could see the strength in his paw returning. There was no need to say anything. We were going on an adventure.

In the distance an illuminated tree growing from the sunroof of a Volkswagen Beetle caught our eye. We knew our cars. The thud of the base shot the lights from leaf to leaf as a rave emerged at the foot of the evergreen. There was life in this festival yet. From the trippers to those that couldn’t get up again, we’d stumbled across an apocalypse. A body of a girl rose from the abyss peering up at us through her conjunctivitis. She was Irish, and you could tell she was excited to see us by the way her head bobbled. As words failed her, our eyes focussed. Like zombies to fire the crowd gathered by the insufferable beat box, motionless and dribbling. If this was a nursery rhyme, then this porridge was long passed overcooked and our meal lay elsewhere.

We walked for miles yet nothing seemed to get closer. We never questioned the way because we didn’t know where we were going. At least that was my story, until we arrived. Greeted by Mike and his bag of brown crystals, we had found Wiggle’s friend Natalie’s camp.  No Natalie here, a guy dressed as a lion tried to introduce himself but his best efforts were hampered by an evacuation of the mind. Out from his lap perked up a blonde astronomer, keen to assemble our star signs before we went any further. Blatantly ignoring her we moved on to SteveO from Jackass dressed like he was auditioning for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. It was hard to tell if he was smiling or suffering but I reckon he liked us. Beside him, Mitch from Modern Family and his fictitious nearby girlfriend. We swapped nonsensical blabbering that seemed important at the time and shared an American Pie style fraternal nod as if to say we’d found our people. And then came the Australian with the elephant.

He appeared from the darkness like Steve Irwin reincarnate carrying the lifeless beast on his shoulder.  I bet you boys have never seen anyone fist an elephant before? He was right. Staged like an Amsterdam sex show (or so I’ve heard), the lights came down on a violent act of anal jackhammering. The elephant’s trunk seemed to perform a satisfactory Mexican wave as we split our sides laughing in disbelief. I’m bloody shrimped after that fellas. He sat down beside us as we extended our olive bag but despite his infectious laugh it was hard to ignore the elephant in the room. Before we could pry, an Indian with a bathmat for a cape came to save the day. Brown Batman, the Aussie yelled, and so it stuck. The more we licked our palms clean of the brown dust the better it seemed to get. The elephant grew bigger, the Aussie louder, even Mike developed a voice. What do you call an Irishman sitting outside? Paddy O’Furniture. SteveO’s brain was visibly melting, Mitch was up and down to his imaginary girlfriend and Brown Batman’s facial expression had frozen in time.

Missed a spot.

Things reached a momentary lull as we looked to each other to establish some sense of reality. I bet you boys have never seen anyone head an elephant before? Hold off on the reality. Taking rectal examinations to unseen new levels, the crocodile hunter drove his head up that elephant’s arse like you would a firework to a helpless cat on Halloween. He pulled out sweaty and satisfied and sat back down among us as if nothing had happened. That would’ve made more sense. At this stage we’d given up on Mitch, only spotting him dancing like a spastic hawk long after the heading. He returned in denial, stuck with the ball and chain don’t you know. He’s shrimped. As verbal assaults gathered pace, SteveO nonchalantly took centre stage. Anyone have any toilet paper? I just shit myself. As the boy in the striped pyjamas walked off into the moonlight with a hand full of his own shite, Brown Batman had been promoted to Black Batman and we needed to get the fuck out of there before our situation became permanent. We said our goodbyes, much to the dismay of Aussie Steve. You can’t leave me with these cunts! We had to.

When we got back to our camp our attempts to tell everyone about Narnia seemed to make it all the more improbable. Like retired soccer players harping on about the glory days, all we wanted was to get back in the dressing room. So as if just to prove to ourselves that all this weird shit actually happened, we went back. And there they were, shrimping more than ever. The elephant. Roscco ride the elephant. He approached it tentatively, not wanting to startle it but as he went to mount it the dumb brute collapsed from under him. He’s fucked man. In fact he was Styrofoam, revealed to us by an enemy camper who literally tore the hole off it minutes later, much to Mitch’s horror.  I don’t even want you guys to meet her. You’re animals. We were certainly something alright.

As the sun rose Natalie popped her head out from the tent. Turns out we were in the right place, but our time had come to leave. We walked back in silence trying to process it all. Each of us had front row seats to the freak show. If we thought a little less of ourselves, maybe we’d admit we were part of it. Played leading roles even? We left the theatre behind wondering if any of it were real, facing down the barrel of a daunting clean up. Amongst the carnage we found the popped balloons, and for the first time in a long time, we were normal.

 

Part III – The Road To A New Year

New Year’s Eve. Dublin. The year? Sure they’re all the same. The ultimate hallmark night out in the city. Half the Christmas street lights have frozen to death and yet there you are, forking out twenty quid to suffer frostbite in the queue of your weekly haunt just to see if you can count from one to ten backwards. Most of the night is spent trying to get a ‘Happy New Year’ text through to your Mam as you battle the dreaded network congestion.  What do you mean that’s just me? By the time you’ve managed to get a drink at the bar for that cute girl you were dancing with, she’s already been picked up, married, popped out two kids and is struggling with a mortgage on her overpriced flat. It’s tough going but sure neck that gin and tonic and act like she was never there.

One of my few fond memories of New Year’s Eve came during a torrential downpour. I had the wisdom to bring out an umbrella. Imagine. Huddled under it with my mate Rossco, smug looks on the pair of us like a man that slipped a deadly fart passed a packed congregation, we watched on as evacuated streets came awash with rain water and fake tan, only for an opportunistic taxi driver to swoop in too close to the curb and drench us beneath the cover of our defence. What could we do only break our holes laughing? Indeed if you’re not ringing a bell or downing a pint, there’s not much to do on New Year’s in Dublin. But this year I wasn’t in Dublin. Instead I’d got my hands on a camping ticket to the Falls Music Festival at sunny Byron Bay, and for once, I believed the hype.

What I couldn’t believe, however, was that one of the girls had set up a personalised Facebook group detailing every requirement necessary for the ultimate camping experience months in advance. I was unaccustomed to such levels of preparation but clearly I was alone in my bewilderment. You see, I had only travelled with my beloved friends from home and we were about as useful as Bruce Jenner’s condoms. Years ago on a tour of Spain we arrived in Bilbao and hopped in a taxi, only to discover that none of us knew where we were staying. I had a great book of useful Spanish phrases that I left in Ireland. Would’ve been ideal. Anyway, a few international calls later we’d found our hotel, but on that same trip we also went to a music festival. It was in Valencia and it was called Benicassim.

We arrived by bus from Barcelona on a sweltering afternoon, hungover and dehydrated. Looks like we’re camping in the poxy Sahara Desert. Battling the reluctant dirt with the strength of an ailing midget, we managed to pitch our tents just about deep enough to stop the ants from stealing them in the middle of the night. Nothing better than a cheap, warm can of Spanish piss to celebrate.  With the eye of the sun now slowly burning away my spirit like Hank Scorpio’s laser, I could feel myself fading towards the depths of hell. I made a limp dart towards the toilets but lost my vision along the way. Drowning in my own sweat, my mate didn’t believe that I had gone blind from dehydration as I implored him to take my hand and walk me all of four feet to the portaloo. To this day I swear that if poor ol’ Choco had left me hanging I would’ve collapsed and shat myself and probably gone viral all at once. Discovering a nearby cold shower soon after probably saved my life. And yet here I am still questioning the need for planning an event so far in advance.

So back to these camping essentials. Have you ever rocked up late to a festival and your mates have already looked after the set-up arrangement?  That feeling of hope as you approach. Multiple marquees, iced baths brimming with beers, barbeque fired up, sound system better than main stage and a hot tub on the back deck. Then you stroll passed that mirage to find your actual tent; half caved in under a lingering, solitary rain cloud and accompanied by an unwelcomed shite on your doorstep. Bless. Well this time the mirage seemed a possibility. Days before hitting the road to Byron, the boys were busy in the kitchen making mammoth amounts of chicken pesto pasta to last the week. We had continental breakfasts prepared for each morning and enough toilet paper not to have to worry about square usage. We had tarps, marquees, bean bags, coolers. We even had mangos.

All that was missing was our party treats and this is where Australian festival organisers get it so wrong. Permitting no outside alcohol and charging extortionate prices for mid-strength beers at the venue leads ticket holders, mostly scrounging students, to boldly sneak in their own resources.  A can of light beer would run a patron seven dollars. Buying five would be the equivalent price of purchasing twenty four outside the venue.  Having already paid over five hundred dollars for admission, what other choice do you have other than to supply your own stock. I’m just being realistic and here’s the major issue. Such is the extent of the rigorous bag searches at the gate, the smaller the item, the easier it is to sneak in. Therefore, spirits take precedence over beer. Nothing better than a few rums to start off a session relying on stamina, says the lad seen kicking off at six and choking on his own vomit at seven. And that’s where drugs come in.

En route to the Byron Parklands from Brisbane, the trippers among us can avail of a quick detour to Nimbin, the herbal garden of Australia’s east coast. It hosted of the 1973 Aquarius Festival. The event was obviously ‘highly’ successful because some of the psychedelic souls in attendance decided to never go home and instead created their own alternative wonderland amongst the trees. Although the village hasn’t quite retained its original hippie vibe, it remains a smoker’s delight and in terms of picking up a festival care package, you can see the smoke for miles. I’m not going to tell you how we passed the search or how our treats went unnoticed by the sniffer dogs. I mean… I’m not saying that we went to Nimbin. Sure seven dollar mid-strength beers- bargain! I don’t need to be intoxicated to have fun. Mammy wasn’t born yesterday John. She’ll soon find out.