Batteries and shaving cream
I’d been on a bit of a roll of putting out newsletters (two in the space of a week, whoa), but then this next one I’d been sitting on. Recently it was the 5 year anniversary since my friend Shane Collins passed away. When I say ‘My’ friend I mean ‘Our’ friend, which is more accurate to who he was. At first, the newsletter seemed like a good spot for two bits of writing I’d been sitting on, but I started to second guess it.
My thoughts starting being ‘maybe this should be private, and ‘does this really fit with being a comedian?’. On the other side, I wanted to feel okay writing about someone who meant a lot to me and my friends; not everything has to be a muck around. The first thing was written not long after he passed, I’ve added some reflection to it looking back. The second is a situation I found myself in trying to get a Hawaiian shirt for Shane’s funeral.
Miss you mate.
Time Flew
I remember first meeting Shane properly after a show we’d all been at. We’d ended up at karaoke bar/pool hall Charltons. I was having a rough go of things at the time and I don’t know if anyone knew it. It was that time of night where you were really drunk, surrounded by people, but fully aware of your own sadness; I must have had a bit of a sulky expression on my face at that stage in the night. Shane flew in from the bar, handed me a beer out of the blue and clinked his one with mine. He didn’t know me well then, he didn’t have to know me, but in that moment I felt like he could see me for who I was and wanted to let me know I was in the right place and around the right people. It was simple, but it meant a lot.
Over time I wonder if I’ve conflated our meeting with the rest of the time we knew each other, turned the memory into something I want it to be, more cinematic; I have a tendency to do that. I keep accessing the memory and by virtue of that fact I keep changing it. Maybe that’s okay.
The last time I went to Brisbane before Shane passed, he came down from the coast to watch my band. I didn’t let on how cool it felt that he liked my band and took the time to come hang out to watch us; I wish I had’ve. I remember him saying how much he like a particular lyric I wrote and now when I think of that line I just see him singing it back to me in the street outside of the Crowbar in the valley.
I always think about this Blueline medic lyric “it stands that in a house you helped to build, you're guaranteed of a place to be”, that’s how it was to know and be around Shane. Shane made sure you knew you were important and knew you had a place. That place was next to him with his big arm around you.
Funeral Shirt
I wrote the following up and spoke about it on Josh Earl’s Podcast Don’t You Know Who I Am?.
My friend Shane passed a few years ago. For the funeral, the plan is for everyone to get the same pink Hawaii party shirt with flamingos on it that he used to wear. It’s like a nice fun thing on what’s going to be a sad day.
It was cheap shirt, $15 from Lowes. A few people found the shirts, but they’d stopped making them, so I resigned to not getting one. Two days before we’re about to fly up for the funeral I’m driving near home and I see a guy wearing it in the car park of the KFC in Northcote. I pull off the road sharply and I yelled out to the bloke. He looks about 40 odd. The first thing he says to me is “I’m not looking to buy man”, I said “I’m actually looking to buy something off you”. I tell him this story about my mate who just passed away, the plan for the shirts, ask if he’d part with it, and I can pay him. We go back and forth, I’m pouring my heart out, he’s telling me the shirt was given to him by his sister and he’s also about to go out, he can’t give it to me. I say “look, it would mean a lot to me, but if you can’t you can’t, but here’s my number if you change your mind” and I head off.
He texts me the next day, says he’d be keen, but would need to be compensated as the shirt means a lot to him. We go back and forth about it and agree on $60 bucks. I said I can meet him along high street. He texts me to say he’ll be at this TAB type pub in Preston. Later that day, I’m waiting in my car out the front of the pub and he says he’s actually down the street at the 7/11 if I want to come there instead. I meet him, he gives me the shirt, but also he’s not wearing a shirt at all so I think he wore the shirt to meet me. I give him the cash as I’m about to go he asks me if I’m looking to buy anything else. An odd question given what our transaction was about. He opens a plastic bag, there’s about 10 packets of batteries and 10 cans of shaving cream. I tell him ‘I’m right for batteries and shaving cream at the moment’. I thank him again for the shirt and head off.
I come home victorious that I have found the shirt, but it has got quite a stench. My housemate Jess helps me douse it in all laundry cleaning stuff we have and we wash the shit out of it. Later that evening Jess tells me our friend Vinnie, one of Shane’s best mates, hasn’t been able to get one of the shirts, so I say he can have the shirt.
We all fly up to the sunny coast, it’s the day of the funeral, I see Vinnie and he’s not wearing the shirt, most people aren’t wearing the shirts. Turns out the idea had kind of dropped off in the time between the initial plan and the day because of how hard the shirts were to get, a fact I knew more than anyone.
Content Corner will be back next edition.
As always, thank you for reading.