When Laura answers the door I can’t believe how much better she looks. She’s still fucked on prescription drugs and red wine but she’s got dressed and bought a new grey knitted dress and a pair of white knee high leather boots. I’m impressed and I show it by raising my eyebrows and digging my hands deep into my pockets. I’ve never tired of looking at Laura, it’s the closest sensation to love for me. The house smells of grass. She tells me I look tired. I walk in.

The renovations are incomplete, giving the house that slightly fucked-up chic look, synonymous with inner city warehouse apartments. There’s something about broken plaster that gets my pulse racing. The lounge is set up exactly the same as it was in her, our, last place. The big red leather couch, the coffee table with the knife marks, the black and white portable TV, her progressive literature and a stereo that will only pump out British Indie anthems. The Stone Roses are on again. I’ve always thought it was ironic that the lead singer ended up in a cell with Doctor Shipman the Hippocratic serial killer.

She pours me a glass of wine and the next thing I know I’m kissing her bright red mouth and rubbing my crotch while thinking about The Stone Roses disappointing second album. I can never concentrate on sex because my mind is constantly questioning everything at once. I can’t relax and listen to a song without dissecting its influences and cultural relevance. Laura knows I’m not concentrating, so she withdraws and tells me she was released from hospital yesterday and that the ambulance cost $800. I take a sip from my wine and tell Laura that for that kind of price you’d at least expect a free bar.

The last time I was in an ambulance, it was snowing. I’d done a back flip off a couch and landed, left hand first, on a pint glass. There was blood pissing everywhere. Big Stu went mental because it was a new carpet. The ambulance took ages to get to me because Saturday nights always belong to the scalp hunters. By the time I got to accident and emergency, I’d lost so much blood that I abused some nurses then passed out. When I woke up Dr Phil was on the TV and I wanted to be asleep again.

Laura is what Sylphia Plath would have been as a marketing executive. She always jumps to the end. Nothing is straightforward for Laura. For example: she has this little white fluffy dog called Snuffy. Snuffy represents the centre of Laura’s universe; all she ever talks about is how she’ll fall apart the day Snuffy dies. She once spent $3,000 on vet bills after he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. When asked why, she replied ‘he’s my baby’.

When we finish the bottle of wine I ask her why she tried to kill herself. She tells me that she’s in love with me and couldn’t bear to see me in bed with another woman. I tell her that Valium doesn’t kill you but it does make you less anxious. She concurs rotating the hospital nametag on her right wrist. There’s something sexy about white wine and sleeping pills, the way they make you think of fallen Hollywood starlets, and the sound of static in the background. Laura should have been a child star instead of a marketing guru. I should have been less of a cunt but I can’t help myself these days. Snuffy jumps up on my lap and licks my nose. He’s a WWF wrestler trapped in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s  body. Laura smiles and sighs, like Snuffy’s our baby, and I’ve been away on business.

I’ve not been away on business but I have been rather active of late. As well as being a copywriter for a Public Relations firm I also abuse people’s trust with alarming regularity. Some people have called me a sociopath but that’s a bit too dramatic and panders to their own sense of drama and tragedy. I’ve always wanted to fuck Lady Macbeth, she’s everything a woman should be; violent, calculating, supportive, and barren.

I abuse trust in a way that can only be described as emotional abandonment no. I wasn’t beaten or bullied as a child and my parents were nearly as good as the parents from Family Ties. My Mum even looks a bit like Meredith Baxter, only shorter with crooked teeth and irritable bowel syndrome. I didn’t mean to let Laura down, in fact, deep down I’m madly in love with her but too narcissistic to acknowledge such a strong emotional connection to somebody who’s not me or looks like me. I instantly admire and respect people who look a bit like me. It’s a problem.

I was lured away from Laura by a portly blonde chick with a penchant for firearms and Christianity. One minute we were meeting each other for the first time at a party, the next I was licking her out in a broom cupboard with a trapped cat. Her name is Alice and she’s convinced that Dustin Hoffman is her Dad. Laura caught Alice and I in bed together at my place yesterday morning. Laura staged a dawn raid based on information received from my flatmate who’s in love with Laura and wants to take her and Snuffy to Krufts one year. Alice and I were asleep when Laura walked into my bedroom. We were definitely awake by the time the police were called. Laura was cautioned by a detached policewoman and told to ‘fuck off home’.  She went home via the doctor’s.

Alice thinks Laura’s a walking cliché. They know each other from some women’s group they’re both in, some shit to do with wolves. When I read Iron John I went out to the forest with some friends to commune with nature but I was attacked by some wasps and vowed never to return. You should always fuck strangers. I put my hand on Laura’s lap and tell her I’m here for her and Snuffy. She laughs in my face, then suggests we go to the pub for vodka shots. She also wants to pick up some amyl nitrate from the sex shop. I tell her that amyl is bad for her. She attaches Snuffy’s lead and we leave arm in arm.

*                              *                            *

Club X is brilliant. Laura smiles more when we’re around pornography. I go straight to the S&M section because I have a very low threshold of pain. Laura hovers around the Lesbian section stealing glances at me, as I read the back cover of a DVD called In Booty Bound. It’s about a young cheerleader’s voyage of discovery through the dark world of bondage, where she discovers a talent for domination and humiliation. Her teacher, an older woman from Zimbabwe, shows her the ropes and in doing so opens the young girl’s eyes to a new world of possibilities. Fuck, it sounds like the bondage version of Sophie’s World.

Laura buys her amyl and takes a sniff of it, before falling down and knocking over an impressive display of butt plugs from around the world. I help her up and we head for the door. As we’re leaving the shop, an assistant asks us not to come back. I nod politely and help Laura navigate her way through the large rectangular hole in the wall. Outside it’s home time for normal people. The trams are packed and the traffic is slowed to a standstill. Across the road some school kids are smoking and trying to look cool in red school uniforms. If Sydney Road were an actor it would be a mixture between Bob Hoskins and Sophia Loren.

We stumble down to a pub, which is known, like almost every pub in Melbourne, for its excellent Chicken Parmas. I’m not a fan of the Parma. For a few dollars more you can enjoy a porterhouse steak with mushroom sauce. However, the Parma does come with a free pot, which invariably makes decision making problematic.  As it’s a rather dull day, I decide to go for the all day breakfast. I guide Laura into the bar and on to a stool. I order two vodka shots and two pots of draught. It’s at this point that I realise I’ve made a serious error of judgement. Alice is the barmaid. Blondes always pull the indignant face better than brunettes. Laura hands Alice the amyl and we leave. I expect a scene but am sadly disappointed when Alice changes the channel on the TV and opens a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. Maybe I read too much into the situation.

Outside on the pavement, Laura can’t believe I took her to Alice’s pub and slaps my face in front of the school kids, who laugh loudly and light up more cigarettes. I shrug and tell Laura I have a memory like a sieve but I can’t work out if I did it intentionally or not. She tells me I’m stupidly insensitive. I think I genuinely forgot Alice had started working there but it’s so hard to tell these days. Laura doesn’t believe me. I’m not even sure if I believe me anymore. Laura screams something crass into my face and staggers off down the road. Two minutes later, I see her being thrown out of the sex shop. I hail a taxi. One of the school kids calls me a faggot. There should be rain during moments like this. The taxi pulls into the kerb. I watch as Snuffy bites the man from the sex shop, then Alice comes out to tell me the Simpson’s are on.

They buried John yesterday. He was my first friend and not the last. In my memories, he was the man with the wooden spoon, dancing into his own fresh oblivion.

You only meet one or two great people in your life; fighters for decency, advocates of morality and people who don’t care what you think of them because they believe in themselves. Now, that’s a rarity.

John loved music and music loved John. He was my first friend. I remember the time that my mother told me that John wasn’t like the rest of us. That John was different, an unusual man with a heart of a lion but the brain of a child.

John had Down’s Syndrome. When I was a kid I didn’t see the syndrome, I just saw my brilliant Uncle and his vivid imagination. He was the inventor of games, the keeper of strange yet brilliant insights into a world I’ll never understand.

I loved and continue to love John. When I heard that he had Alzheimer’s Disease I thought there must be no God. And I’m right. What decent Prime Mover could do that to such a decent man? The word ‘fair’ means nothing to me now. I believe in people and people have nothing to do with God, or the conception of such an entity. We are flesh and blood and what we do is paramount to our sense of fulfillment.

John loved being John. Who the fuck can match that? Nobody. Why? Because we’re all wrapped up in our perception of ourselves. John didn’t care about that. John heard the music, picked up his wooden spoon and danced, immersed in the music of his body. He was the maker of music and the DJ that gladdens the ears.

I can see his face now. He’s up on a dance floor beyond our ken, dancing, not caring and bewildered by the reactions to his death.

He lived a good life. A righteous life. The kind of life that I can’t match.

I can see you John. You’re dancing in Newton Villa, wooden spoon in hand and wondering why the rest of us can’t be as happy as you are. Now, that must be confusing. Being happy in the face of a so-called disability must be awe inspiring.

John. You’re loved. You’re the DJ of decency. You’re in my heart forever brother.

Dance on my friend. Be happy.