I heard a squeak from the seat beside me and looked across. Jen is pressed back in the burgundy velvet, eyes wide, a look of absolute horror on her face.
My initial impression of meeting Pete: older than me by a few years, he had a lean and hungry look and the physique of a whippet. His hair was cropped to a quarter of an inch, opposing the excessive locks of my brother and I, and, most dramatically, he wore an oversized metal safety pin through his ear.
When my age reached a suffix of teen, I worked after school. Had disposable income. Or rather, had income, and disposed of it. Spent it on records, then cassettes and a Walkman.
The centre of our social universe was Dingley. Two of the more socially sophisticated girls had cool parents who let them throw parties and for this particular party I dressed carefully.
Punk’s rising tide lifted a lot of boats, not all of them worthy but once all the Pistols marketing hoo-ha had drained back out we were, as I now heard, left with some gems. XTC, The Jam, Elvis Costello and The Clash were all great but no one, as I discovered, was quite like Ian Drury.
There were only so many times you could listen to Hurricane, Just Like a Woman, Lay Lady Lay and lots of other songs before the tape ended, was turned over and you get it all again. This went on for about three days.
Although he was from Sydney he wasn’t from my part of town. He was wealthy, connected, lived in a suburb where people had tennis courts, and he wore fashionable corduroy, high-waisted flares.
After Stevo so kindly triggered my discharge from Riverside, I settled in happily with a foster family and went back to school. I told no one about my summer, but I played And She Was nonstop.
If I wasn’t listening to the cassettes via my Walkman, then I was insisting we play them in the car. I didn’t know much about Elvis at this point. I hadn’t seen any of his iconic moves until a kid impersonated him during a segment of Red Faces on Hey Hey It’s Saturday. I figured if that kid could do it, then so could I.
We met for school holiday screenings of La Bamba and Dirty Dancing at the same tech high gym where we painted thick black circles around our eyes and teased our hair until it looked like Jon Bon Jovi’s – ahead of our Rock Eisteddfod pilgrimage to The Royal Melbourne Showgrounds.