∆ george + the decrepitude of the chairs

George and I shared a house on Stephenson St, Richmond - a street made famous by the Cherry Tree Hotel, the brothels and the residencies of the Pettingills, [one of Melbourne's most notorious crime families.] [A friend of mine has recently written a play set in this very street. Called Talking Bone, it centres around the matriarch: Kath Pettingill.]

Many and various were our adventures there. We backed onto about seven train lines, so perhaps noise was a factor in diverting our good judgement, but I prefer to think it was the dangerous electricity that arced between us.

Having persuaded the real estate agent into renting us the house, our first act was to organise a house-warming. In our innocence, we wanted it to be the biggest, craziest party Melbourne had ever seen. Having few friends, we photocopied handbills and pasted them around town, then set our minds to a theme..

Over the next few weeks we collected kitchen chairs from hard rubbish piles and wherever else we could find them. Mouldy, filth-encrusted, disintegrating chairs on which only a drunken or decerebrated person would consider setting himself. We cleared the small back yard of a vegetable patch which the previous occupant must have lovingly cared for, and sorted the chairs around a circular space - to give the impression of an arena.

But what was to be the entertainment?

Early one Sunday morning we went to Victoria Market and somehow managed to purchase a medium sized pig from a dealer for forty dollars. My memory grows hazy here, but we succeeded in forcing the beast into George's car and got it home in time for the revelry. The pig would stand in our arena and the guests would seat themselves and observe in fascination.

Here my memory blurs even further. I know that many extremely undesirable types turned up. Large threatening people who - when I briefly peeked into my bedroom - I saw urgently tearing apart my wardrobe in the vigorous spirit of wholesale destruction. And of the pig? I don't think many were satisfied to just sit and watch it. George said he saw an obese bikie making off with it down the back lane at about six in the morning.

It must have been an awful party. And to make matters worse, someone stole a doona which my mother had bought me the week before. She was quietly furious. Just as she was when I returned her beloved blender...

"When you bring things back, they look like they're a thousand years years old. How is that even possible?"

Once, I returned her car with the wipers sticking out at ninety degrees from the windshield. I avoided her questions, blaming it on my current girlfriend, [which was usually enough to satisfy her.] Truth was, this girlfriend had been parasitically clamped to the bonnet of my car and I had been sharply accelerating and braking in order to dislodge her. I woke in jail the next morning, but that's another story. [Luckily, I just made it to an early interview at 3RRR, just round the corner.]

Regarding the party: I never again trusted the general public to be interesting.

But here's the point I've been trying to get to...

We were left with about fifty kitchen chairs and owed it to ourselves to think of something appropriate to do with them. I don't recall who finally came up with the idea, but it was a good one.

At 4 am one weekday morning, we starting making trips down the railway line to South Yarra station, each carrying as many of the soiled chairs as we could handle. South Yarra is a large, neat old fashioned station in a salubrious part of town, and just over the river from Richmond.

Well before the first train, we had transported all the chairs to the city-bound platforms and lined them up with great care beside the legitimate passenger benches.

Rotten, moist, stinking old chairs, bursting with earwigs and slaters, perfectly arranged in groups of five. As official looking as we could manage. If only we had photos... Perhaps we do, I must ask George.

We giggled for weeks about that. What did the passengers think? Had they assumed the railways were attempting to offer them extra comfort in the crowded peak hours? Did the stationmasters think their superiors had imported the seats as a stop gap measure - to temporarily ease a platform crowding issue...?

We would never know. A few days later, George performed a reconnaissance and there was no sign of our fifty chairs ...