“Hey are you going to Big Day Out next year? I wouldn’t miss it for anything. I wouldn’t miss it if my own mother died. You should come, we’re all going. You probably don’t want to hang around me too much though because I’m kind of embarrassing. You know how at every festival, there’s that one dude who’s taken acid and dingoes and smoked a spliff, and he’s lurching around the dance floor, leaning on strangers, and everyone’s all DUDE, ARE YOU OKAY? because he’s turned completely grey and can’t speak and looks like he died three days ago? That’s me. I’m that guy. Pass me the ashtray?”

You can read more about Andre at ilivewithcrazypeople

I once lived with a guy who grew up in Kuwait and would talk about his childhood late at night when he was drunk.

One evening, a few of us gathered as he described a horrifying incident in which his father had beaten him severely for leaving a smudge on his black Mercedes.

“I don’t understand, why did he hit you?” I asked, shocked by the scale of such a beating.

“Well I had to clean his cars every week, and if they weren’t spotless by dinner, I got into big trouble,” he replied.

“That’s awful,” I commented.

“It’s okay, I got him back,” he said with a smile.

“What did you do?” my friend asked, “Did you scratch his car or something?”

“No,” he said, glancing around the room mischievously. “I killed his dog.”

Roughly eight seconds of complete silence passed, before I cleared my throat and asked, “How?”

“Well,” my housemate continued, “I waited until he went to work, and then I locked his dog inside the Merc. By the time my dad finished his shift, that dog was swollen up like a motherfucking beach ball!!”

Then he roared with laughter. My friend, an avid lover of animals, picked up her bag and left immediately, while I busied myself clearing away our empty glasses.

When I was younger I used to go to church with a family who had a son with autism. My memories of him are vague at best. He was obsessed with space ships, trains and video games, and would often sit alone repeating the same phrases over and over.

As he got older, he began exhibiting more unruly types of behaviour. They started out small enough – a tendency to break things or overeat. His parents locked all their cupboards and kept him away from the kitchen. Things obviously worsened, however, as he entered early adulthood, because the last thing I heard was that his family had put him into full-time professional care.

“Why did they do that?” I asked my physio, who was a reliable source of church gossip.

“Well, he was becoming a little difficult to handle,” she replied, digging her knuckles into my abdomen.

“But what did he do?” I pressed.

“Oh he would just get upset easily and then do inappropriate things,” she said.

“Can you give me an example?” I asked. I was dying from curiosity. What did this boy do when he got mad? I was imagining physical violence, tantrums, or perhaps even some public masturbation for shock value. The truth, however, was even more spectacular.

“Okay, here’s one,” the physio said. “Last month their whole family went to Perth for somebody’s birthday. When they were due to come home, their flight was delayed for four hours. The boy got upset, and when they tried to calm him down, he became angry. So he bit his own arm until it started bleeding, then he went around wiping the blood on other people and screaming into their faces.”

“That’s fucked up,” I marvelled.

“Please don’t swear in my house,” she replied. “Now, roll over.”

What follows is a list of direct quotes from somebody who will be known as Mark, because that is his name. I have not edited these in any way, I simply sit next to him at the pub and write down everything he says.

• “That hill was so fucking steep. It was like Columbine, but instead of murders, it was geography.”
• “I put it on Facebook, a.k.a. internet.”
• “Damn right, I’m awesome as shit. Do you want to see a stunt?” *inserts whole schooner inside his mouth*
• “Hi, I’m Mark. I’m a mad cunt.”
• “It is completely normal and natural for a woman to secrete approximately one teaspoon of fluid from her vagina per day. What? Yeah, get me a beer.”
• “You know what? If I’ve got shoes on, and I’m inside, I’ll walk outside to piss in the garden. It’s not like I’m saving water or being lazy or some shit, I just like pissing in the garden. It just feels natural.”
• “I don’t do drugs, drugs do me.”
• “You know when you take shit drugs and you’re like, Last night was awesome as shit… but last night is also today?”
• “I took acid once. I got lost in this fucking underground carpark for four hours.”
• “I took acid once at Fred Caterson Reserve. I ate heaps of chili because I thought I was hungry, then my mouth was burning, so I went for a walk. Then I was staring at the moon, yelling COME AND GET ME, FREDDO PEDDO. But nothing happened.“
• “Fuck, we’re awesome. I just ate raw chicken and then I tried to purge behind the Mobil service station. I tried hard, fingers down my windpipe. Here, I’ll show you.”
• “I would give head like a motherfucker, trust me. I’m not gay. I don’t want to suck cock, but fuck I’d be good at it.”
• “When I sue you, I’m gonna make some money. Write that down. Damn right, I’m gonna make some money.”
• “The bartender can suck my dick for all I care. Full gag on it.”
• “Men only want three things from a woman. You want someone who does the sexy times, someone who cooks, and someone who cleans. I don’t want to be rude, but I’m pretty sure all you’re going to do is the sexy times. Now that’s important, but it’s not everything.”
• “I just hate it when people talk about dead people. It makes me feel awkward. Is this going on your blog?”

When I was in year nine, every weekend I told my parents, “I’m staying at <insert friend’s name>’s house tonight.” Then I got drunk in a park and passed out on somebody’s couch or in the backseat of a nearby car.

One week I made the error of including a movie in my lie. “Bye, Mum,” I said, walking out the door, “I’m going to see Panic Room with my bible study group.”

Then I went to a school friend’s boyfriend’s share house, smoked bongs with a bunch of uni students, and built a tower out of empty UDL cans.

When I got home, my parents asked me if I’d enjoyed the movie.

“It was okay,” I said, not wanting to rave about it too much in case they decided to see it. And then, on a roll, I proceeded to fabricate an entire synopsis of the film. My rationale behind this was that if I told my parents everything that happened in the movie, they wouldn’t bother going to see it. I hadn’t even seen the preview prior to this, so my account of the movie was inspired by the title alone and was about as accurate as a James Frey novel. I gave extensive descriptions of the characters and made sure to detail all the plot developments, and then I re-enacted several scenes, using a set of Babushka dolls my aunt had given us for Christmas.

“I heard there’s a big twist at the end,” my mother said, “What’s the twist?”

“Jodie Foster is a robot,” I answered confidently.

“Well, that sounds like quite a film,” my dad said when I had finished. “And if you didn’t smell like a grow house, I would probably believe you.”

“Am I grounded?” I asked, leaning against a book shelf to steady myself.

“No, that was entertaining enough to redeem you this time,” Dad said, “But if you come home this stoned ever again, I will enrol you in aqua aerobics classes with your mother.”

And sometimes it’s better to let your co-workers think you are a victim of domestic abuse, because that is less embarrassing than the skanky, horrible truth.

My brother has been dead for nearly 4 years now. This is how it happened…

It was a dark and stormy night during my first year of uni. But I didn’t know that, because I was drunk off my guts at some underground club in King’s Cross. As is usually the way that these things happen, I found myself staring into the mirror in a bathroom at the Moulin Rouge and wondering who had smeared all my eye make up onto my cheeks.

You’re drunk, my reflection said, Go home.

And so I stumbled up the stairs, out onto the street, and realised that it was 3am (the witching hour, and also taxi change-over time), pissing down with rain, and I had lost my friends at some stage of the night. Unphased, I wandered up and down Darlinghurst Road a few times looking for a cab or similar form of transport, and trying to stay under shelter. Suddenly it began to pour. There was hail and thunder and strong winds. I realised, very abruptly, that my feet were in the worst pain they had ever experienced. I had roughly $7 in my purse, I was too drunk to write a text message without keeping one eye closed, and I was getting yelled at for loitering outside clubs.

Eventually I found a bus stop and sat inside it, in the weak hope that a bus might arrive and take me somewhere dry. Sheets of rain blew inside and soaked me as I methodically rang everyone in my phone book. All my friends were either asleep or too drunk to drive, and none of my acquaintances owed me any favours. I left a series of slurred, abusive voice mail messages, then apologised and begged people to call me back. My parents were out of town and I didn’t have any other relatives’ phone numbers handy. I considered committing some sort of crime so that I could catch a ride with the police, or throwing myself in front of a car in order to get taken to hospital in an ambulance and then tucked into a warm bed by nurses. I suddenly felt very young and small and officially fucked.

As I sat in the bus stop on Macleay Street in the pouring rain and tried not to cry, a transvestite hooker came and sat next to me.

“I’m Jean,” it said, as I shifted away on the seat.

“I make jewellery,” it added, holding out an arm full of bangles and track marks.

“Maybe I can help you get home?” it offered with a wink as I turned away and frantically dialled my brother’s number.

“What?” he answered, awake and sober.

“Chris, I’m stranded in the cross in a thunderstorm in a bus shelter with some junkie jewellery-making eternal question and there are no cabs. Please come and get me. You’re my big brother – you have to do this.”

“What’s an eternal question?” he asked.

“It’s when you can’t tell whether a person is male or female,” I explained, “Will you pick me up?”

“Nah…” he said, “I think I’m just gonna go to bed, I’m pretty tired.” And he hung up.

As I stared at my phone in disbelief, the hooker asked me whether my brother was coming to pick us up.

“I have no brother,” I corrected it, and walked out into the rain.

Believe it or not, I once dated somebody with a questionable friendship circle. They were nice enough boys, but they had a habit of going to the pub on Friday night and waking up on Sunday morning.

One such Sunday morning, I was requested to pick up a few of the boys and transport them to a BBQ. And so I was happily driving along, enjoying the sunshine and attempting to ignore the smell of hangover in my backseat, when a certain gentleman named Daniel grabbed my arm. “PULL OVER” he said, opening the car door.

I sat in my car and waited while Daniel vomited profusely on somebody’s rose bushes and swore in between heaves. “Cunt.. Haaaggguuhh.. Fucking.. ggarrhgh.. Mother.. snergggh.” And then I waited while he turned on the nearby garden hose and held it over his head, washing off the spew that had splashed onto his face and shirt. “What a fucking yak!” he declared, chunks of vomit flying as he violently shook out his hair, not unlike some kind of wildebeest.

It was then that we both noticed the young couple and their children, sitting on their front porch and staring at the rose bushes, untouched bowls of cereal in front of them.

Somewhere around grade 10, my friends and I started hanging around a particular group of guys. They were mostly apprentices who’d dropped out of school and they hung around our local shopping centre when they finished work in the afternoons. We caught the bus there after class and smoked cigarettes on the loading docks in our private school uniforms while these guys tried to source pot and mooch free pizza. They were the type of guys who considered taking a dump on somebody who was passed out at a party as “witty.”

When I stopped going to house parties and got drunk in bars instead, I fell out a little with these guys. I still saw them around, but when I did, I pretended not to know them. But after uni, our circles started overlapping again and I decided to give one of the boy’s house parties another go. Maybe they had grown up, toned down their behaviour and learned not to be so silly?

The party was going well. Nobody had spun a bottle or stuck their hands down my pants, the bathroom didn’t smell like vomit, and the police hadn’t visited. Then around midnight, the boys began passing around glow sticks.

“Are we going to a rave?” I asked.

“Not quite – wait and see,” somebody named Willo winked at me.

Each guy pulled down his jeans, cracked open his glow stick, and rubbed the contents onto his penis. Then they ran in a line down the dark street and shouted out to all the neighbours. Bleary eyed citizens shuffled to their bedroom windows and looked out to see a trail of bobbing wangs lit up and making their way past their rose bushes.

The boys then ran back to our yard and threw themselves one by one into the pool, screaming, “IT BURNS! FUCK, IT BURNS..”