Pythian Games

- well  eccentric ones anyway

I’m going through one of those strange times in life when the past comes up for review.  Odd fragments of memory are suddenly sailing into conscious awareness for no apparent reason.  The line about visiting bad neighbourhoods in kvwordsmith’s piece about what inspires her propelled me into recollections of times in my life where I did actually visit bad neighbourhoods.  Well eccentric ones anyway.

When I first married in the mid 1970s my husband and I were living as hippy artist types.  We moved into a rooming house in Balmain in Sydney (back before the area became fashionable and expensive).  The house was full of eccentrics.  On the second floor three young people lived in a ménage-a-trios. There was one woman and two guys.  One of the guys made a very good living drawing pornographic graphic comic books.  He had quite a name for himself within that world.  At first when he asked me if I’d like to look at his work I’d bend over technically beautiful drawings to see bizarre sexual exploits.  ‘What do you think,’ the devastatingly handsome artist would ask me with a lecherous grin.  It wasn’t long before I declined to view his work.

The other guy was English and painted exquisitely  beautiful  and romantic works which depicted the woman in the house in the nude.  Roses and lace drifted dreamily in the background.   The paintings were huge and gorgeous but there was something voyeuristic about looking at detailed renditions of a house mate’s naked body.

(Many years later I had a similar experience when a male artist friend invited me to his studio.  Amongst the landscapes he was best known for were huge (and I mean enormous) paintings of the luxuriant and fulsome curves of his wife’s naked buttocks.  As he pulled out painting after painting depicting his wife’s anatomy in glorious detail she stood beside me smiling proudly.)

Back to the rooming house in the 1970s -  In the flat near the front door  lived a strange couple who had recently been released from the local psychiatric clinic.  Mostly they kept to themselves but every full moon the woman went completely crazy.  A young female art student lived in the loft at the top of the building.  The crazy woman was convinced that this girl was after her husband.  The man in question was in his late 40s with his hair in a slicked down comb over.  He was very tall and thin and dressed in baggy second hand suits that were shiny with wear.  Needless to say, the artist girl was not interested but the woman could not be convinced.  For the days around the full moon she would open her door and scream abuse at the girl whenever she saw her.  One particularly bad month the girl was so scared dropped by our flat and asked my husband to escort her past the woman’s door.  As they walked past the woman hurled hair brushes, shoes and kitchen utensils at them.

This woman’s best friend was the alcoholic woman who lived out the back.  She was in her 50s and had skin like leather.  Every day she sat drinking beer in the front garden as the hot Sydney sun beat down remorselessly.  ‘Hot in the sun, isn’t it,’ she crowed whenever I walked past.  I would bite down the urge to say, ‘Well why don’t you move then?

Weird the things you recall sometimes.