Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer Read online

  About the author

  Justin Sheedy was born in 1968 and grew up in North Epping in Sydney’s north-west suburbs. He was educated by the Little Sisters of No Mercy, then by the Jesuits, and obtained a degree in fine arts. He worked as a go-go dancer, also in radio production, as well as for the Australian Public Service though has since made a full recovery. If you have ever worked in the public service, you will understand. If you still do work in the public service, Justin remembers you, so you better have been nice to him as he’s writing books now. This is his fourth.

  He lives in Sydney.

  He loves fireworks.

  First published in Australia 2014

  Copyright © Justin Sheedy 2014

  Cover design: Justin Sheedy

  Typesetting: Working Type

  (www.workingtype.com.au)

  The right of Justin Sheedy to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Sheedy, Justin

  Memoirs of a Go Go Dancer

  ISBN: 9781742984797 (ebook)

  Digital edition distributed by

  Port Campbell Press

  www.portcampbellpress.com.au

  Conversion by Winking Billy

  For Justin Roche

  A beautiful life gone too soon to the next

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One: A is for

  The Most Fearsome Man in the World

  The Toughest Boy in the School

  ‘He’s Not the Messiah…’

  The Best Teacher in the World

  Agogos

  Chapter Two: All downhill from here

  The Cleverest Boy in the School

  1984

  May I have this dance?

  Crimes of Fashion

  The Opposite of Hairstyle

  HHEOWWWWH!

  The British Invasion

  Something divinely ours

  Chapter Three: Girls’ Own Stories

  Rock and Roll

  A long way to the top

  M.A.D.

  The Rarest of the Rare

  The Cruelest of the Cruel

  The show goes on

  Chapter Four: The Worst Job in the World

  The Priest Who Shot the Cow

  The Enchanted City

  Chapter Five: Winds of Change

  Dear Mads

  ‘Folk Dancer’

  BISH — BISH — BISH

  Get Me Out of Here

  Angry Young Man

  Chapter Six: Wel-come Back

  Born to be wild

  Company… Camp it — UP!

  Work Experience

  Dear Juz

  Neville

  When All Hope Is Lost

  Chapter Seven: Melbourne Beauty

  Ready… Steady

  Calculus

  No business like

  The Party Animal

  Making the Cut

  The Worst Invention of All Time

  All that Glitters

  Where’s Francis?

  Muck-Up Day

  Blackout

  Chapter Eight: The Big Ugly Number

  Tracksuit Haven

  Breathing Out. Breathing In

  Drugs

  The Information Revolution

  The Most Beautiful Building in the World

  Newboy

  A Warm Welcome

  The Kindness of Strangers

  Boys

  The Vocational Guidance Counsellor

  Chapter Nine: The Plastic Inevitable

  The Grim Reaper

  The First Ever Call Centre

  Sorry

  The Cage

  The Valhalla

  The King of Go-Go

  Manning

  15 Minutes of Fame

  Emma’s List

  Chapter Ten: Do YOU know this boy?

  Bicentennial!

  A Foreign Affair

  Celebrayshurn orva Nay-shurn

  Hons

  Radio Skid Row

  Roy & H.G.

  Live! IN the Studio!

  May I have this dance?

  Chapter Eleven: Honours

  Wake In Fright

  And The Wall came tumbling down

  An Enemy of the State

  It’s up to YOU, New-town, New-town

  The Oxford

  Rock And Roll

  Vale, Peter

  A Fork in the Road

  The Thing About Fireworks

  Epilogue

  1983.

  Crackernight was gone.

  Gone, the Australian fireworks festival that since my grandmother’s day had one night a year shot the infinite normality of the suburbs with utter magic. Though a clutch of last-gasp fire crackers was still obtainable, this night that had annually rivalled my birthday and Christmas was celebrated no more.

  Gone was the coloured ball-shooting, Roman candle showering, exploding whistle skyrocketing, stars-come-down-from-the-heavens cornerstone of my childhood whose magical history and sad demise I sought to portray in Goodbye Crackernight, prequel to this book. Gone was my childhood, and puberty had pounced like a great big galloping Pimply Thing. This, the decade of my teens, would be a search for new fireworks…

  This was the 1980s, the time of Miami Vice and of the unspeakable fashion crimes it spawned. A time of ‘Who shot JR?’ and Rowan Atkinson seething, ‘Give me a gun, I’ll shoot the bloody lot of ’em!’ The ‘Me Generation’ was beset by ‘Greenies’ and that rarest of Australian creatures, the Charismatic Prime Minister, emerged from presumed extinction in the wild. Films were so bad that The Breakfast Club was called a good one in a decade so pop-culturally lame it cried out for any other decade. The Cold War got white-hot, we marched in the streets, and a wall came tumbling down.

  I saw most of that decade through the eyes of a schoolboy running the gauntlet of one of the world’s classic exclusive private schools with all its trademark ‘character-forming’ highs and lows. For me, it was a time of self-definition, of Rock and Roll, of resistance, of joy and pain, a decade filled with that most wonderful and terrifying of all things known to Man. GIRLS. And my first job out of school, as you will see, would turn out to be a rather interesting one…

  Enjoy with me now these Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer!

  A is for…

  * * *

  A is for Adolescence. A is for Acne. Yes, Childhood was firmly over. I was the first in my class to get zits, and, as it turned out, just about the last kid at uni to lose them.

  I had apparently been considered a decent-looking child… ‘Cute’ had been the word used by the 1970s blue-and-green-eye-shadowed friends of my older sister Bridget. And not, I think, cute as in ‘ugly but interesting’ (as I am now) but as in a smiling child with the wavy hair and baby blues so fashionable in the 70s, and in those baby blues already a clear and present sparkle up at teenage girls. However…

  The seemingly overnight physical transformation endured by some boys in the ‘growth spurt’ moment between childhood and adolescence can be remarkable. And not in a nice way. Okay, the change in me wasn’t quite the screaming, howling man-to-wolf face transformation of the 1981 hit film American Werewolf In London but it certainly was along those lines.

  Just when a boy needs his emerging sexuality to find warm reception which it will if he can simp
ly relax and be himself thus harmonising him with the Universe and all its forces, Puberty renders this impossible. Utterly.

  My wavy hair turned tightly and greasily wiry: if let go to any length, an ‘Afro’. Think Kramer from Seinfeld and his ‘high hair’. I now had it. The wind no longer blew in my hair, it whistled through it.

  Apparently my skull grew outwards but my eyes stayed where they were, as a result now looking recessed in my head with shadowy rings beneath them as if from perpetual strain.

  And though I never had really serious acne like some kids, my spots were persistent: My first pimple came up through virgin clear skin just beneath my right nostril and took the decision that day that it simply wouldn’t be happy unless ten-thousand relatives should inhabit the general area over the next half-dozen-odd years.

  So, surely enough, I began adolescence feeling as if standing in the doorway of a long-anticipated party with an elephant’s trunk instead of a nose. Quite splendidly set up for social disaster. I quite probably didn’t look as bad as I felt but I felt like I did, that shot my confidence down so low that sparrows had to kneel down to get a good look and do you know what all the clear-skin miracle creams, lotions and pills in the entire Solar System achieve?

  Bugger. All.

  The Most Fearsome Man in the World

  * * *

  I had got in to Sydney’s Saint Ignatius College Riverview as, firstly, I’d proven an obsessive hard worker at my previous schools, my last teacher having supplied me with a written reference maintaining that I could juggle soot, secondly because my parents were practising Catholics of unsurpassed parish commitment. Having sat and passed Riverview’s entrance exam, I had attended the entrance interview where my whole family was also interviewed and where I’d successfully fielded the question from the interiewing Jesuit priest: ‘So, Justin. Would you say you’re “spiritual”?’ As described in Goodbye Crackernight, in my first year at Riverview I survived its famous school bully, had unlike him found Latin easy, I’d gained the respect of McBone and his hard-as-nails Boarding House inmates, scored a try or two in Rugby Union and ended the year as Dux of the Junior School.

  But then came the Senior School…

  Whose junior form was infamously presided over by a Form Master who far and wide went by the nickname of Bulls. If there exists a Riverview old boy who claims he wasn’t shitting himself at the prospect of this man then that Riverview old boy is a liar.

  With a few months to go before my first scheduled near-death experience of this man, I sought out a trusted friend of my father known to be a Riverview old boy himself and asked him for advice re this ‘Bulls’, the great and terrible. My father’s friend took my enquiry perfectly seriously too and answered with a knowing yet reassuring smile: ‘Oh, Peter Bulham? Justin, you just get on old Bulls’ right side and he will back — you — all the way… I promise you.’

  So you’ll be just as relieved as I was at our first Form Assembly before the great Bulls to discover that in-the-flesh he turned out to be…

  Even scarier than any of us could possibly have imagined.

  Sort of like the massive ‘Cave-Troll’ creature in Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Rings, except Bulls wasn’t computer-generated imagery, he was real. Look up ‘infernal rage’ in the dictionary, it’s got his picture. ‘Fulminating fury’, same. This guy was a human volcano. Every morning, I’m not sure what he was raging about or why but he was constantly berserk at us. The form was five classrooms of about forty kids each, each classroom opening up to the next with a wooden room divider pulled back so that five classrooms in a row could be berserked-at over a very loud public address system with speakers in all five classrooms. Even from my desk way up the back of classroom number five I was a nervous wreck.

  Other teachers trapped on the spot as ‘assistant’ form masters did their professional level-best not to wince at Bulls’ wilder moments which were regular. He was fond of quoting from the First Letter of St. Paul to the Kardashians or something, ‘Be thou either hot or be thou cold but if thou be luke-warm I will VOMIT THEE FROM MY MOUTHHHHH…’, unquote, and he reeled this one off many times. This was Bulls.

  Riverview College was situated on a large estate of manicured lawns and wild bushland, as the name suggests, right by the Lane Cove River which flows into Sydney Harbour. In the golden light of late afternoon, the sky mirrored deep blue on the water, bushland and waterside mansions on the far shore, here the sport of rowing was a one-hundred year tradition in which I was desperate to take part. On my very first attempt at it I was placed by a rowing coach into the ‘stroke’ or lead rower position of four boys in a long, low wooden boat called a ‘tub’, my task being to set and keep a steady rowing rhythm or stroke on my heavy wooden oar whilst maintaining perfect, centred balance with the three rowers on sliding seats in line directly behind me. Easy.

  It was a Class-A nightmare. The hardest thing in the world next to juggling soot.

  As the boat pencilled along through the water, having pulled your oar back to your stomach you then pushed the oar handle down onto your lap to lift the oar blade back up out of the fast-rushing water. However the slightest sideways loss of balance towards the oar meant that the blade would not lift up out of the fast-rushing water, the instant and unavoidable consequence being that you would ‘catch a crab’, or have the oar handle jabbed heavily and painfully right into your stomach. The whole four-rower stroke of the boat being then ruined, the tirade of abuse from behind you only added to your physical humiliation. After a few late afternoons of this, I was informed that I had not passed rowing muster and should perhaps try cross-country running instead.

  Crushed lower than an ant with self-esteem issues, the very next morning I dragged my shattered dream to the office of the rowing Head-Coach.

  Bulls. The Great and Terrible. Himself.

  And knocked on his door…

  ‘Sir,’ I trembled, ‘I know I did really badly out there on the river… But, well, sir, rowing was really important to me. I really, really wanted to be part of it. More than anything.’

  The most fearsome man in the world raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Sheedy…’ he sat back in his chair, as he continued his voice soft and sincere, ‘if you truly want to do it that badly, we’ll find a place for you. Don’t you worry… I’ve got a lot of time for you, son. A lot.’

  Bulls. The Great and Terrible.

  Who I will always remember as the man who made our entry to a place like Riverview exactly what it should have been. A unique and utterly remarkable experience. Where dreams were taken seriously. Where the Individual mattered. And was championed.

  The Toughest Boy in the School

  * * *

  When at Marist Brothers Eastwood, I, the nerdiest boy in the school, had become inseparable from the toughest boy in the school, Jim Stone, who was having sex with girls at age 12 because he looked 18. I had by now lost contact with Jim who, I think, at age 13 had become a nightclub bouncer. Yet we had been living proof that opposites attract and exactly the same thing happened at Riverview…

  Francis Phelan was, like me, of only average height and build, yet unlike me was made of granite. With curly, orange-tinged hair, his eyes were the kind that size up any situation immediately. I’m not into ‘past lives’ but if they exist then this kid had been an SAS sergeant. Living on a rural property in Sydney’s far north-west, his father was simply an older version of Francis and, with a hard smile, was always shadowy about what he did or perhaps had done for a career. Okay, I assume Mr Phelan hadn’t been a captain in the SAS but when Francis and I prepared to set out from their bush-side home one night for a few days camping armed with bows and arrows and air rifles, Mr Phelan didn’t say, ‘What on earth do you need those for?’ Instead, he nodded and said, ‘Well, I can see you’ll be alright.’

  We spent a few days at the far end of their rugged property, shooting at mean yellow-eyed Indian Myna birds which, unlike me, Francis hit and killed with every shot — a no
n-native pest, he assured, and serious threat to native birds like the Spangled Drongo, one of which we saw with its beautiful white-spangled dark blue breast. By night we would have a campfire in whose glow we’d drink from a small bottle of rum supplied by an older friend of Francis, who, dropping by to make sure we were okay and enjoying ourselves, also supplied the first pornographic magazines I had ever laid eyes on. Back at Marist Brothers, Jim Stone had supplied me with Playboy magazines featuring the first ladies-with-no-clothes-on I’d ever seen but these publications of Francis’s older friend displayed naked ladies having things done to them by naked men!

  ‘Gawwwd! Is THAT how it works, is it?!’

  At school, Francis was the cool head who quietly advised me one morning between classrooms that I should desist from whining to the teaching staff about the unfairness of everything all the time. I trusted Francis, said I’d do my best, he winked and slapped me on the back.