В Сиднее состоялась презентация третьей книги Макса Истона «Now, Autonomy»

An excerpt from Now, Autonomy by Max Easton Max Easton launched his third novel Now, Autonomy at The Gaelic Club in Surry Hills, Sydney – a place where the characters of his book play punk gigs and plan rebellion. Following performances by Gayab and the legendary DJ Smallcock (aka Lucas Abela) and before the night’s send-off by Tee Vee Repairman, Easton read a passage from Now, Autonomy set in the venue. Read a transcript of that excerpt here. Credit for the monochrome photos featured above to Lauren Eiko. Inside, Sunny helped find a comfortable seat for Pat in the far corner of the venue. They sat him beside a whiteboard that featured a poorly drawn diagram of the human body, labelled with words for body parts written in Gaelic. It was far from where Pat wanted to sit (near his favourite framed picture: a satellite photo of ‘Ireland from space’), Sunny knowing that it was too close to the mixer where Pat would inevitably attempt to help the phoned-in sound tech. Sunny went over to the bar where the booker was finishing the pour of two pints of Guinness, and returned to Pat, fretting about who was going to mind him when it came time for HDPE to play. ‘I can look after myself,’ Pat said unconvincingly and, noticing Sunny’s suspicions, added: ‘Jack’s coming to give me a hand.’ ‘Jack’s coming?’ ‘You met him at The Quarterly.’ ‘Yeah, I know. I remember him.’ ‘He’s the guy with the long grey hair. You called him a tripper?’ ‘Yeah, Pat. I said I knew who he was.’ Pat seemed doubtful, and Sunny realised that it wasn’t exactly that they knew who Jack was, but that they had read so much about him in Pat’s Midnight Star writings that he’d begun to feel like a familiar friend. Pat had the sudden urge to describe all of Jack’s eccentricities, traits that he realised might no longer be obvious to a new acquaintance. From what Pat remembered of the nights at The Quarterly, Jack really did come across as more or less normal, if not uninteresting. He started to explain this to Sunny, about how Jack had a suspiciously complex backstory that became more muddled on retelling by the fact that he might well have been a pathological liar. Pat said that he’d heard so many second-hand stories about him in the twenty years or so that they’d fallen out of touch, stories that ranged from being a part of the plot to paint NO WAR on the sails of the Opera House, to becoming a part of the advertising firm responsible for the NSW Police’s ‘Dob in a Dealer’ campaign. Neither of which had proven to be true. ‘The thing with Jack,’ Pat continued, becoming excitable, ‘was that you didn’t have to make shit up about him. In the time I knew him, he’d become obsessed with satellite dishes and started climbing up the sides of apartment buildings to tear them down. But then that just ended up being a gag, because if it was your birthday he’d give you a satellite dish wrapped in a ribbon. He also said he was a “phreaker”, which sounded insane at first, but then I found out it was a whole subculture of people who knew how to hack phone lines. He’d prank call you all the time as well. So you really didn’t know what was going on. The other thing with him was that he was high all the time. For a little while, he even had a lab in the basement of the Midnight Star where he made his own acid.’ Sunny’s ears perked up. ‘Do you reckon he’s still holding?’ ‘Probably not. I think he got caught out at some point…anyway, he was this gremlin-type figure who’d always be fucking with your head. He was really smart, so whenever he spoke, even if it was completely psycho, you’d be moved to hear him out. But then sometimes he was just tripping so hard that he was genuinely on some other out-of-phase wavelength and you just had to wait until the morning to have a proper conversation with him. There was even a time when everyone thought he was working for ASIO, that he was some kind of plant…’ ‘Like a vicious rumour type thing?’ ‘Yeah. Except it turned out the rumour came from him. He spread it around to see who he could trust.’ ‘Jesus.’ ‘These things are usually funny in hindsight though. Like once he made these mystery caps that were half MDMA and half Viagra that he sold for cheap as a “cocktail”, but no one could figure out what was in it until the end of his DJ set when we realised that the whole time he was remixing songs by The Hard-Ons. In that, he was remixing our hard-ons.’ Sunny tried to act as though they hadn’t already read that story in Pat’s book. ‘Like I said, a good gag, but only in hindsight. I don’t remember laughing when I was trying to have a normal conversation with a boner in my pants.’ Sunny’s chuckle seemed to encourage Pat, who continued on to talk excitedly, his first night out in weeks making him suddenly full of energy. ‘The other thing is…all of this was happening during a time when it was not good to be around anyone who made you paranoid. Everything was fucked-up enough as it was with all the surveillance stuff, and everyone around us had a big opinion of themselves. They thought the government saw us as a subversive terror ring and were waiting for the right time to shut us down. So many protests were organised at the Midnight Star, all these contingents and meetings and sub-committees. Actions against the war in Afghanistan, then Iraq. Fundraisers for the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Film screenings about East Timor or Palestine or all the stuff in Yugoslavia. All these massive protests against globalisation and the WTO. And we’d hold events after the protests too. Everything revolved around the Midnight Star. But as good as Jack was at organising things and bringing energy into the meetings, he’d still be running around being like, “the benefits of working with ASIO outweigh the risks”, and if you didn’t know him you’d freak out. He’d be telling you about how he could play a specific frequency down the phone line to hack conversations and you’d be thinking, there’s every chance he’s gone down the deep end…’ ‘Did he?’ ‘Did he what?’ ‘Did he go down the deep end?’ ‘I don’t think so. I mean he said some weird stuff back then, but as far as I know he never ended up being a Bill Gates COVID microchip type. But still, he used to be the kinda guy where I wouldn’t be able to say for sure.’ ‘Do you want me to find out?’ Pat frowned. ‘How do you mean?’ When Jack joined the two at the table, Sunny tried to test him. They dropped conversation starters like: ‘They installed a new 5G tower near my house, biggest one I’ve seen,’ which Jack winced at. Then Sunny made jokes like, ‘It’s like the Earth, how do you really know it’s a sphere when we depend on NASA for our evidence,’ or Sunny turned up their nose at a glass of water and said, ‘Tap water…too much fluoride.’ To all of these comments, Jack didn’t react. And when Sunny left to set up on stage, Jack turned to Pat and asked: ‘Isn’t that kid a bit young to be a conspiracy nut?’