Jackson's Ephemera

Dale Lowry, 2017.

We used to go on these aimless drives in Blackie’s Fairlane. We never really went anywhere – just drove through the bottle-o and then around the suburbs with a couple of six packs on board. Sometimes we’d look for skate spots, even though I was skating less and less by that point. We’d pull up to some school on a dead Sunday afternoon and try to skate a handrail or something, but mainly just roll around half-drunk and dumbstruck in the heat. Blackie occupying the nearest payphone, locked into sporadic searches for money and people who never really surfaced. Not when I was around anyway.

I think we were somewhere on Alexander Drive when this tape was playing. Blackie driving (he always drove) with Ryan Kern in the front seat and me in the back, both of us steadily working on the Swan Draught. Ryan read the liner notes and explained that we were listening to a live set from Black Orpheus recorded at Camp’s Family Restaurant in St Louis in 2004. I wondered what kind of restaurant it was; whether there really were families in attendance and what they must have thought of Black Orpheus’s plainly terrible, shouted poetry and clanging, riff-less guitar. I thought of Mass Teen Suicide and their fabled early shows, booked under different names at unsuspecting wine bars and sporting clubs. I imagined it as a kind of performance art unto itself; these sedate venues torn apart and transfigured by violent walls of feedback, besieged by a roiling crush of leather jackets…

Blackie stopped at the lights. Took the cig out of his mouth and blew out the first words he’d uttered in half an hour.

What is this shit?

I dunno, Ryan said. I got it in a haul from some distro in Melbourne.

Blackie drained the last of his Emu Draft and put the empty can back into the cup holder. Nick [Holland] told me once that’s why Blackie was always driving. It kept him on the lights.

What’s on the B-side, he said.

Ryan looked at the liner notes. From memory, half an hour of some Czech bloke fiddling around with arpeggios in his bedroom, he said.

Blackie hit eject. Tossed the tape over his shoulder without looking back.

She’s all yours, Dale, he said.

Ryan shrugged his shoulders and handed me the case. The cover bore a xeroxed picture of some sort of gemstone. Minus, I guessed, was on the B-side. I debated whether or not to toss it out the window, but instead I tucked it in my jacket and mentally calculated where it would sit on my alphabetised shelves.

Let’s hear something else, Ryan said. He opened the glove compartment and started rifling through a mass of half empty blister packs and what appeared to be legal documents.

Blackie stared out the window. In cocos-palmed yards the shadows were starting to grow. A motorbike howled past us as the light turned green.

Nah, he said. Just leave it.