Misfits and Me: Collected Non-fiction

By Mandy Sayer

I fell in love with my first misfit at the age of three. He was a disabled man in a wheelchair who sold newspapers every afternoon outside the Empire Hotel in Annandale. Whenever I glimpsed him in the distance I would break into a run, jump onto his lap, and smother him with kisses.

Misfits and Me represents a selection of Mandy Sayer's non-fiction writing from the past twenty years. Each essay has been chosen to reflect a different aspect of Mandy's attraction to Australia's misfits and outsiders, with those who live in the shadows of our society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781742244334

Mandy Sayer

Mandy Sayer has written several books of fiction and nonfiction. Her awards include the Vogel Literary Award, the National Biography Award, the South Australian Premier’s Award for Nonfiction, the Age Book of the Year for Nonfiction and the Davitt Award for Young Adult Fiction. Sayer is a regular columnist for the Australian newspaper and the Wentworth Courier. She lives in Sydney.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Prelude

I fell in love with my first misfit at the age of three. He was a disabled man in a wheelchair who sold newspapers every afternoon outside the Empire Hotel in Annandale, Sydney. Whenever I glimpsed him in the distance I would break into a run, jump onto his lap and smother him with kisses. I nicknamed him ‘Lurch’, after a television character I also loved, the tall, taciturn butler on The Addams Family. In my mind, the two men were one, and whenever Lurch the butler exited a scene on the screen, I would hang out the living room window and strain to see him on the street. Misfits have intrigued me ever since.

Misfits often have a history of trying to fit into the dominant culture, but to an extent have failed or have grown disillusioned. As a child, my father spent the first seven years of his life in hospital, enduring scores of primitive surgeries to mend his cleft lip and cleft palate, and had no formal education (or socialisation) until his release. His concerned parents placed him in a private school, where he was later warned by the principal that if he didn’t play football, he wouldn’t be able to mix in general society. Already, at the age of nine, he’d given up trying to assimilate into ‘general society’, preferring instead the solitary study of music. My husband Louis, who at the age of twelve suffered a near-fatal head accident and had to learn to speak again, has often told that when he was a young man he just ‘wanted to be normal’, and would study the gestures and habits of other people so as to appear to be one of them.

Exclusion from society can at times be painful, but under the right circumstances it can also become a form of freedom. The disenfranchised create small niches of power wherever and whenever they can – and it is within these niches that they exercise imagination, resilience and creativity. For example, I have two elderly cousins – brother and sister – who have lived together for decades in their late mother’s art deco house (see ‘The Hordes’). They have also inherited their mother’s obsession with hoarding, so much so that they use a Kookaburra stove as a dispensary, and stacks of old newspapers for shelving. Another example would be Don Miller, featured in the essay ‘Flying High’, a gifted elderly chemist who would rather cook meth for a Lebanese bikie gang than run his own business, because it satisfied his boundless curiosity. Misfits find ways to take advantage of their outsider status to make more meaningful lives for themselves and others. Misfits don’t undermine the status quo; they tend to ignore it.

From my experience, misfits are devoid of self-pity and are usually quite inventive. My younger brother, for example, used to take two breaks a day from his job as a housepainter to perform dialysis on himself with a portable machine in the back seat of his car (further discussed in ‘The Gift of Life’). Another example would be Aboriginal Elder Tony Bower, who drives around NSW in a mobile marijuana dispensary, giving away cannabis oil tinctures that he makes himself to sufferers of cancer, multiple sclerosis, depression, diabetes – all the while risking arrest and jail. In ‘The Tincture of Health’, he claims, ‘I’ve explained to the government and the cops that I am Aboriginal and it is against my culture to refuse help or comfort to someone in need’.

Misfits usually have no choice but to live within the fissures of modern society, where they largely remain unnoticed and invisible, unless one of them breaks the law too many times. Some, but not all, are damaged – either physically, emotionally, or psychologically – and find unique ways of coping with their difference.

Occasionally, an outsider status can be conferred on a town or a particular area – and unofficially becomes a geographical misfit. The various settings that are referenced in this collection certainly earn this moniker. Darlinghurst and Kings Cross embody tales of transitory lives – transgressive writers and transvestite shop keepers; Apia, Samoa, features feral dogs, serial killers, dengue fever and local standover men; New Orleans tells true stories of professional warlocks, tap dancing street kids, and of a city that has the longest social calendar yet shortest lifespan in America.

Misfits are not self-consciously unusual, or deliberately trying to be ‘different’. Due to the accidents of birth, class, genetic inheritance and environment, they often have no choice: both nature and nurture conspire to spawn a genuine outsider. My feature-length profile on Nick Cave, for example, did not make the cut for this collection. Sure, Cave is talented, innovative and individual, but any transgressive or ‘misfitting’ behaviour is likely to be self-conscious and is enacted to polish his bad-boy persona. True misfits rarely worry about reputation or material reward, and tend to live in the present moment.

Moreover, in my experience, creative misfits have little regard for fame, riches or their ‘artistic legacy’, but are consumed instead with merely perfecting the book, the composition or the painting they’re currently working on, which is discussed at length in ‘Letter to a Young Novelist’ and in the final essay, ‘Shaun Prescott: Modern Misfit’. Although he does not appear in this book, Ian Fairweather is a fine example of my definition of a creative misfit: content to live out his last years alone in a hut on Bribie Island, while continuing to paint daily his distinctive landscapes. Painter John Brack, who is discussed in ‘Satirists of Suburbia’, toiled away in obscurity for forty years, and was forced to earn his living by teaching art at the National Gallery. In the 1980s, when his paintings finally began selling for high prices after decades of commercial failure, he began to panic. At the time he confessed that, ‘If I’m going to be so popular, I feel uneasy, so I must paint a picture that is A) unpopular and B) unsaleable’.

Typically, misfits don’t play by the rules, but tend to create their own ones. Teenage carjackers Jamie and Leeyah, for example, featured in ‘Girls Gone Wild’, once told me that they don’t just rob anyone: ‘Like, we wouldn’t have stolen the car if there’d been a baby in the back, or if it’d been an old person driving … We do have ethics, you know!’ Similarly, the elderly people referenced in ‘Flying High’, who supplement their old-age pensions by dealing drugs, all told me individually that their one rule is that they never sell to minors.

Many misfits are loners at heart, but if they are lucky enough to find a kindred spirit or community, they end up treasuring it. The neighbours living in a Sydney Public Housing block, discussed in ‘People Power at Ponderosa’, are classic examples of misfits curating a supportive and family-like community with very few resources and no support from the outside world. And misfits know how to improvise with and adapt to situations that would leave a non-misfit paralysed: these same neighbours deal with a junkie resident who runs his noisy washing machine day and night by breaking into the building’s switch box and turning the junkie’s electricity off.

‘Eccentric’, ‘Bohemian’ and ‘off-beat’ are adjectives that insiders always use to describe outsiders. The modifiers usually contain a pejorative subtext: it’s not so much a fear of ‘the other’, but a dis-missal of ‘the other’, and much of this indifference is based on class. A few years ago, when I was struggling financially, a publisher gave me some unsolicited advice: ‘If you want to be successful, write a novel about the middle-aged and the middle class.’ Even today, somehow the experiences of the advantaged in our culture are perceived to be more significant than those of the welfare and working classes.

Coverage of the #MeToo movement is a case in point: in Australia, more than one woman a week is murdered by her husband or partner, but news outlets and social media are much more concerned with the comparatively minor problems of rich and famous actresses. Frankly, I don’t care if a musical theatre performer flashed a woman backstage, or if an actor followed his co-star into the bathroom. I care about a young friend called Polly, who, while suffering post-natal internal injuries that required the use of a colostomy bag, was raped repeatedly by the sadistic father of her newborn child. Or my friend, Marie, who was bashed every day by her husband for twenty-two years. Or the 714 cases of sexual offence involving children under the age of sixteen during the past five years in the Northern Territory. Where are the hashtags acknowledging them?

***

I find myself drawn to misfits because I have felt like an outsider for most of my life. By the age of fourteen, I’d endured severe domestic violence, homelessness, sexual abuse at the hands of a teacher and my stepfather, and had attended twelve public schools throughout three states. Every time I began a new school, to avoid being bullied, I had to suppress my background and create a public persona, one that concurred with the kinds of kids with whom I had to keep company. When that didn’t work I would hide in the library. Any nascent friendships would wither, because some drama in my home life would see my family packing up and moving yet again. In short, I became an unwitting loner, trying in vain to fit in to each subsequent situation, whether it be a new school, another homeless shelter, or the couch of my mother’s latest boyfriend.

As a teenager, I learned to tap dance and escaped into the thrilling, nomadic world of street performers, and later travelled throughout the US as part of a double act with my jazz drummer father. Upon entering Indiana University, however, I became a loner again, finding myself the only 25-year-old freshman, and the only Australian, in a class of Midwestern American high school graduates. At the time I was living in a small town, with my African-American husband, only twenty miles away from the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.

It has only occurred to me recently that I am a wife who’s never had children, a traveller who’s never learned to drive, and an academic who’s never held a permanent university position. The only time I feel truly comfortable is when I’m in the company of other outsiders. Misfits amuse me, provoke me and make me feel secure.

Or, to mangle a well-known saying: ‘Mis(fit)ery loves company.’

LIFE

People Power at Ponderosa

(2017)

‘You know how we can tell that someone has died?’ asks Woolley, standing in the corridor of his Public Housing building. He nods at the door of the apartment adjacent to his own unit. ‘Flies on the door handle. The flies always figure it out before the smell gets going’. Woolley tells me that last week he noticed the insects buzzing around his neighbour’s lock and called the police, who broke in to the flat to discover the corpse of Peter, in his early fifties, who hadn’t been seen for three days.

‘He was a bit of a conspiracy theorist’, adds Woolley, the unofficial caretaker of the building. ‘He reckoned JFK was murdered by the Mob’.

Woolley, however, suspects no foul play in the death of his neighbour. Now there is a sign on the door, posted by the authorities, warning that the interior has been contaminated and that no one should enter until it has been detoxified by forensic cleaners.

‘Probably an overdose’, he murmurs.

Residents call the building ‘Ponderosa’, in reference to the ranch on long-running US TV western Bonanza. It’s a block of twenty-four studio apartments in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, built in the 1970s, filled with single disability and aged pensioners. All but one survive on Centrelink payments and donations from charities. The majority, Woolley tells me, have no family support.

It’s now ten days until Christmas, but he is ambivalent about organising the annual party because four of the building’s residents are in hospital and the recent passing of his neighbour puts Ponderosa’s death toll for the year at three (thus far). ‘You don’t want to plan Christmas too far ahead, because you don’t know who’s going to die between now and then’.

Woolley leads me into his studio filled with clothing racks and his collection of vintage Hawaiian shirts. A three-quarter bed is wedged into an alcove. A flat-screen TV is mounted on the wall, below a small round table. It’s a tight squeeze, even for one person. I ask him about the actual size of the unit. He shrugs and replies, ‘Nine paces by five paces. That’s how I measure it’.

We walk out into his small, private courtyard and he shows me a huge freezer he’s installed under the awning, where anyone in the building is welcome to store their frozen goods. In order to provide round-the-clock access, Woolley has removed three palings from his fence so his neighbours can duck in and out without disturbing him.

As we walk back inside, 84-year-old Don, who lives upstairs, limps through the open door carrying a steaming plate of fish and chips. He delivers it to the kitchen counter. Don is the unofficial chef for six other Ponderosa dwellers who are either too ill or too lazy to cook a hot meal at night.

‘Sunday is a baked dinner’, Don says, leaning against the wall and lighting a cigarette. ‘Wednesday is spaghetti bolognaise, or lasagne. And Friday is fish and chips’.

‘Three good square meals a week’, adds Woolley. ‘That’s enough to keep us going’.

Every Friday morning, Don gets up, collects his shopping trolley and limps fifteen minutes to the local outlet of the charity OzHarvest, where he selects donated fruits and vegetables for his various neighbours. ‘I know that Jose likes Asian greens. And Butch loves kiwifruit. I know what everyone wants so I can pick up stuff for them’.

‘And on Fridays we do the washing up and return the plates to Don’, adds Woolley. ‘And we check his fridge to see what he needs’.

‘Do you charge people for the meals?’ I ask.

Don smiles and glances at Woolley.

‘We’ve got a kind of bartering system’, says Woolley. ‘It’s all based on reciprocity’.

He tells me that some years ago the residents of Ponderosa worked out a plan that would benefit them all – and one that would remove the need to constantly borrow and repay money to each other. ‘For example, we all buy the same cask wine – Golden Oak, $12 for 4 litres from the cellars down the road’.

‘Sometimes it’s $10’, chimes in Don. ‘When it’s on special’. ‘We all smoke the same tobacco – Endless Blue – and use the same papers, Tally-Hos’.

‘It’s an open-door policy … ’ adds Don, stubbing out his cigarette.

I glance at Woolley, hoping he’ll further explain the scheme. ‘… so we can walk in and out of each other’s apartments. Say if I run out of wine, I can stroll into someone else’s place and help myself. Same with tobacco. And food. And they can let themselves in to my place, without having to find me’. The ninety-year-olds are housed on the second floor, so they have level access to street exits. Woolley also tells me that all the men in the building have swapped three sets of keys, so that no one is accidentally locked out of his unit.

‘And when one of us goes to hospital’, he adds, ‘the rest of us sneak into the empty apartment and clean it all up – like a bunch of elves!’

Sixteen years ago, when Woolley and Don first moved in, the side garden was denuded and filled with trash. Drug dealers stalked the security gates. When Woolley called the police, he was referred to Public Housing, and when he called the department he was always referred back to the police. So Woolley and his neighbours decided to take matters into their own hands, marshalling sentries at the windows above the security gates. Whenever a dealer was spotted lurking outside, he’d be pelted with rocks and buckets of water. After a month or so, the block was free of both junkies and dealers.

It was then that Woolley, Don and their new friends set about turning the building’s common property into a sanctuary. They cleared the garden, planted trees and ferns, and set up tables and chairs in the shade. Now, it exudes the cool green light of a tropical rainforest.

‘There’s a Chinese guy upstairs’, says Woolley. ‘He’s eighty-six – and we call him Jose’.

‘Why do you call him Jose?’

Woolley grins and lights a rollie. ‘’Cause he’s always hosing the garden. We’ve sort of given him permission to use a fire hose on the third floor. He stands in the corridor and waters the plants from there. You see, we’re only supposed to use the hose in the event of a fire. But because Jose is Chinese, we figure that if he ever got into trouble from the authorities he could pretend that he doesn’t speak English’.

As Don bids goodbye and disappears into the corridor, Woolley sprinkles his hot dinner with water and pops it into the oven on low.

At night, Ponderosa becomes an amplifier for the many frustrations of the neighbourhood. A guy upstairs has been yelling obscenities over his balcony for five hours. Woolley tells me that he and a neighbour have been warring for days, but no one can remember how it started exactly. Bottles and glasses shatter on the street; car alarms wail; and, just before midnight, I can hear somebody spewing. Soon, police sirens are howling over the shouts of neighbours.

‘Raid’, says Woolley, calmly, topping up his drink. ‘The house two doors up – they’re always getting busted’.

Nine Days Until Christmas

The front door swings open. ‘You there, Woolley?’ cries a man in an urgent voice. ‘Woolley, are you there?’

I look up to see a solid, dark-haired man, wearing sunglasses, peering down at me, sporting a wide, maniacal grin.

Woolley rises from his chair and introduces me to Leo, who, at the age of forty-eight, is the ‘baby’ of the building. They’ve been close friends since Leo moved in to Ponderosa fifteen years ago. Every morning, he arrives at Woolley’s the same time – nine-thirty – and they walk around to a local pub to buy takeaway coffees.

Today is no different. Woolley grabs his mobile phone and they disappear out the door together. I stay behind to await the arrival of a health inspector. Woolley has told me that five units have been badly affected by mould and has already shown me a photograph on his phone of an 87-year-old man slumped on a bed, with the wall behind him furred with mildew.

‘Maybe we can paint over it’, says Woolley, as he and Leo return with the coffees.

‘You can’t paint over mould’, I say. ‘It’ll make it even worse’.

‘Well, it’ll look a lot better’, Woolley reasons. ‘You know, some of these blokes don’t have much time’.

We wait for the health inspector. Leo, who is on the autism spectrum, tells me a little of his life. He was born in Australia to Italian parents who returned to Naples when he was two years old. He grew up speaking fluent Italian. When he was eleven, however, his family moved back to Australia and Leo struggled to adapt both culturally and linguistically. Hence, when he speaks English, he is compelled to state everything twice.

‘When he speaks Italian’, says Woolley, ‘he only says things once’.

Leo does his bit for the Ponderosa community by repairing second-hand mobile phones and giving them to neighbours.

‘Everyone gets a basic Nokia when they move in’, explains Woolley. ‘And we get them all on the same plan. Thirty bucks a month. It’s cheaper than a landline’.

Suddenly, what looks like water or weak tea begins falling past the open door and into the courtyard. It continues for eight or ten seconds and stops as abruptly as it began.

‘When we get junkies in here’, announces Leo, ‘it wrecks everything’. After repeating the statement, Leo lets Woolley pick up the story.

‘Since Junkie John moved in two months ago, the cops have been called twice and Bikie Dan, who lives upstairs, has stabbed him once’. Woolley sips his coffee slowly and lights up a rollie.

‘Was that just someone pissing over the balcony?’ I ask.

Woolley replies by rolling his eyes and shrugging. He goes on to explain that Junkie John supports his habit by stealing luggage from the carousels at Sydney airport. ‘The only problem’, he continues, ‘is that John’s a clean freak. As soon as he moved in, he ripped up the carpet of his unit and dumped it in the garden. And he had his own washer and dryer in his unit going 24/7, laundering all the stolen clothes and luggage before he sold them on’.

Leo chimes in – twice – that John also threw his television from his balcony and damaged the herbs that Jose had planted. And one day, a neighbour grew so tired of the noise of the washer and dryer, he got up in the middle of the night, broke in to the power box and secretly turned the junkie’s electricity off. So the junkie moved in to the communal laundry, sleeping there and monopolising the three available washing machines.

‘And he lives off eggs boiled in an electric jug!’ adds Woolley, shaking his head.

We hear footsteps outside and turn towards the open door, anticipating the health inspector. But it’s only a neighbour on his way upstairs.

‘So how else do you cope’, I ask, ‘when you’re living on such a tight budget?’

‘Lowes!’ announces Leo enthusiastically. ‘Lowes!’

Woolley tells me that all the male residents of Ponderosa have secured a loyalty card from Lowes department store. ‘During sales, it’s 15 per cent off. You can get a whole new wardrobe for seventy bucks!’

‘Tell her about the toilet paper!’ enthuses Leo. ‘Tell her about the toilet paper!’

Woolley laughs and explains to me that a few years ago, several residents of the building used to raid the expensive restaurants and bars in the area and steal rolls of high-quality Sorbent. They would then meet at a local pub with their bounties and pretend it was an Addicts Anonymous meeting.

Woolley stands up and strikes an embarrassed pose. ‘My name is Henry and I’m a spendthrift. It’s been six weeks since I bought my last roll of toilet paper’.

Leo laughs and slaps the table. ‘So we gotta have a Christmas Party this year, Woolley! We’ll have it at your place’. Leo gets