77 hours of Supanova; Day three (sunday) - Part 2

Closing time was dawning, or actually dusking, it was drawing near all the same.
I was on a look out for Ian Gould, proprietor of Ace comics, my preferred Brisbane store when it came to the magazine. I had a smattering of books left but wanted the satisfaction of leaving Brisbane with none. But Ian wasn’t coming back and Paul wasn’t prepared to stand in for the boss man.

Cool Hand Weber was jonesing to go. He was packing up books, folding table clothes and generally packing crap away. I offloaded a handful of mags to Dee’s Comics in Canberra and booked. Jelly wrestling started at 6, it was just past that. But we gotta eats. Back to the old favourite New York Slice. The blister in the roof of my mouth had heeled over so to keep my mouth on edge it was time for more hot greasy pizza.
Chomp, Bang blister popped, my margarita needed a bit more of a blood taste. We walked and scoffed pizza.

I like pubs and clubs with stairs, that claustrophobic brightly lite enclosure where you have to make that exertion up a couple of flights of stairs and then everything opens up, dark, wide, loud - contrasts are kewl. On to drinks.
The band was playing, we spied a pool, with jelly in it. It was one of those blow up kiddie pools sitting in the middle of a roped off area. It was all outside, open air.
People milled, me and cool hand weber, went for drinks and grabbed some stools inside by the empty dance floor. it was 6:30 and we were the first ones there. Tonia Walden soon walked in. Then there were three. The music was quite loud. I’m slightly deaf in one ear and coupled by having speech recognition disorder, which is like verbal dyslexia, talking in clubs gets tricky for me. But I persisted. We chatted over drinks and then the wrestling started.
We moved over and got ringside. It stalled since the participants weren’t ready. Apparently it was all volunteers, not professional jelly wrestlers. The whole thing had been running weekly for months, tonight it was special because one of the organisers was leaving, going onto better things, I believe mud wrestling or the sumo suit wrestling. Good luck to her. Finally it begun, two guys vs two girls tag team.
Within minutes tonia, cool hand weber and myself were covered in jelly.
It actually was kind of dull after the first few minutes, its hard to believe yes. Dull.

6:45 I wonder where everyone is?
7:10 Where is everyone?
7:30 Where are those arseholes?
7:40 Motherfucking cunts! stand me up I’ll show them!
7:41 Hey you made it great!

Travis, Wendy, Stewart, Jason, Nicola, Timtam, bassist from the strokes, Carissa, Travis, Ben, Karen, Andy, Felicity, Ben Hutchings, Simon, Niel

In a bigger group it was more fun. Boobies were already out by this time, the 3 girls on one guy matches were way better because the poor blokes got pummelled. (the opposite of those three guys vs one girl movies that I hear about). “Jelly” flew everywhere, best bit was the people who were wearing black looked like they were piggy in the middle of a circle jerk. For some reason I had a lot of jelly spatterings on my crotch, which dried like they had been to the George Michael Dry Cleaning service. Tops got lost early by the wrestlers, but it took some time for guys to be dacked. The first dude, a guy on his buck’s night, struggled something fierce, it took the girls awhile. Dackee number 2, was stripped in 30 seconds, the dude was a button on a fur coat. One of the guys remarked (not saying who) that it made them feel better about themselves. I always bring up the point that the Greeks always portrayed their gods with small wangs, and the whole idea of gods is to try and be like them, maybe there is something in small dickery. On a comics front Dr Manhattan was hung like a gnat, but he was all powerful all knowing, maybe Alan Moore and those greeks knew that its not size that matters but how you use it. I don’t know, its all a moot point because I have a massive cock of DOOOM!

Ahem

Naked guy then just hung out nude for ages until security used brooms to push him into the showers and to get dressed.

At first I was sceptical on who would volunteer for it, but by the end I was considering ‘shit I’d have a go at that’. Amongst friends yes, but I didn’t really need to show the Australian comic community I fought like a girl. Plus who would I fight?

At about 9 it wound up. Everyone decided that it was dinner time, so we all headed towards Chinatown (right next door). We circled two tables and ordered. I was with Cool Hand Weber, Andy, Nicola, Tim Tam, Carissa, Neil, Tonia, the other table had the rest.

Since me and Cool Hand Weber had already eaten, we ordered seperate from the banquet meal everyone else was into, also lessons learnt those banquet meals always have too much food and we may be able to scrounge left overs.

We ordered satay (the fried variety which i don't dig so much) and these really nice peppered quails. i usually do quails in the bacon wrap thing or in resturants i'll have them grilled, but this was good too. Our sponge of the banquet meal got nixed when Cool Hand grabbed a chopstick of noodles (we were waiting for our steamed rice) and Carissa started exclaiming 'you'll have to put money in for that, you'll have to put money in for that'. Cool hand Weber regurged up the 3 noodles he ate and put them back on the plate.

i was not tipsy enough and i wanted wine. i can never figure out what to drink with chinese food, i would suspect it would be white but i don't drink white wine, in my book its the diet coke of the viticultural world.
but i did spy red chinese wine - i called the waitress over

"is the Chinese wine like sake?"
"no no no"
"is it made from grape or rice?"
"rice"
"like sake?"
"no no no"
"ok, what's it like?"
"its um yellow and um..."
"can i get a taste"
she scampered off. returning
"no"
"ok just bring the bottle it'll be fine"
She seemed apprehensive like i wouldn't like it. She brought back a dodgy looking screw cap bottle from the late 70s, it had side burns on it. She had a bucket of warm water.
"you drink warm"
"like sake?"
"no no no"
Apparently sake killed her family and she disavowed any knowledge of sake.

Everyone got a shot glass, with a lime wedge, a bit of sugar and the 'yellow' rice wine which looked suspiciously red.

And people turned their noses up at it. crazy. i took a sip. it was gold, like sake without the nail polish remover afterburn. I swigged the rest. it was great. the rest, who apparently had spent the night before shooting vodka, got freaked out by it. Losers. me, cool hand weber (who wasn't supposed to be drinking) Andy kept drinking. though at 18% alcohol the 3/4 of the bottle left was going to cause trouble, so 8 more glasses for the other table. they feaked out too, except for ben Hutchings who joined us and drank like men.

"kai Po"

the traditional cantonese drinking salutation as i read in Jackie Chan's autobiography

kai po

another round

kai po

another round.

Tim Tam (voice actor of some sort) had tim tams which he shared around. but this distracted from

kai po

another round

We were the only ones left in the resturant, the bill got dumped, we paid and

kai po

that was it.

We were heading back to Birdie birdie birdie num num num, when there was mutiny, "we don't want to go back there" Sniff. "Its ok, the jelly wrestling's done for the night" "we wanna go somewhere else" Sniff. Sigh. there's always one or two.
resident party man andy led us to another club, we walked in and people walked out again.
"we're going back to the hotel" Sniff

Sigh

So we bid adiew to them all, it had been a great weekend. it was nosing 10;30. rissa as she left told us the cult fiction guys (kevin and cole) were meeting us (the group being most of whom were bailing) at birdie birdie num nums. i kept suggesting the Lucksmiths, which was met with eyerolls and shoulder shrugs. then i suggested we see a band, there's a three piece from melbourne playing.

but we did the right thing, getting stood up is bad, especially if you are an out of towner so me cool hand Weber and Andy went back to birdie birdie birdie num num num nums. They weren't hard to spot. We sat in the relative quiet of the outdoor patio and talked superhero comics, interior redecorating, criticism and the 'scene'. the chinese red wine was hitting me at this point and the bouncer was shooing people inside, for the outdoor patio was being closed for the night. It was way too loud to talk and having a dance with kev, cole, andy and cool hand weber was too weird, even for me. So we skulled beers and split
kev and cole stayed behind.

on the footpath we said later to andy and made our way to cool hand Weber's illegally parked starlet of swoosh.