When we first got there, we didn’t have any grand ideas about what we were going to do with it, we just sat there and started drinking. I’d have the van there, and after a few beers someone would say, ‘it would look good if we did this’, and we’d get the tools out and start. We just started building shit the more we drank.
We raided the Lounge because they were renovating, and took most of the seats and tables they’d thrown in the dumpster. They had no idea who’d taken it. Because St Jerome’s was so small, they probably didn’t think you could fit anything in there.
I brought some blinds down and we hung them up, but they were a metre too long. We didn’t have anything to cut them down to size with, so Jerome started cutting them with scissors. I said, ‘dude, you’re fucking up my blinds.’ And he said, ‘shut up, they’ll be right, they’ll be right.’ They were 1970s white venetian blinds. We didn’t have any idea what we were doing.
I would leave every Monday morning open to do work at St Jerome’s because the joint would be trashed. People used to try and rip out everything — chairs, tables. Everything was screwed, bolted or glued down. If it wasn’t easily replaceable there was no point in having it. All the power blew once. But there was still power in the toilets. So we just started running everything from there. It was our new power source.
When the toilets burst it was like a horror movie. It was pitch black and the lights were flickering (the lights used to dim every now and again when something was going on in Swanston Street). The toilets must have been clogging up for days, and it started coming out from the pipe that Cam had blocked to stop the sewage leaking. There was poo going everywhere down the main area. When everyone noticed it they opened the big door to get out, but then people started coming back because the night was going off.
We were building the Worker’s Club by that time, and the plumber there was just a young kid, about 18. He went out there at midnight, and reckons he’s never ever seen anything like it. We spoke about it on the Monday, and he said, ‘I cannot believe people didn’t leave. I thought people would be running, but people were walking back in, and I couldn’t actually get in.’
Shit just used to fall. Alfredo and I put a tarp over the back area. Jerome and I went and got it from this dodgy bloke in St Albans or Sunshine. Within three months there was pigeon shit everywhere on it. And when it started stretching and getting old, people used to bring their umbrellas and sit under it, because they knew they’d get pigeon shit on them. Why would people do that?
You’d get Alfredo to do something one week and it would be 100 bucks, the next week it would be exactly the same thing, and it would be 600 bucks. We’d ask him why and he’d say, ‘you woke me up.’
Alfredo and I busted the wall open to make way for Shit Town. We whacked a lintel in, but someone pushed it out. Then Sparky and I DJ’d there on Thursday night. It was called Gay Gay Straight (I was the straight one), and it was the biggest gay night on a Thursday for months, until the joint got closed down. Everything was so illegal about it. It used to rain in there, and people just got showered because there was no cover. It would be pissing down and dust and water would be falling into your drink.
We slapped that together for pretty much next to nothing and opened the doors. We took power off Myer again by working live and wiring up to another switch, and then to another till the whole joint was running. Then one day it blew, and we had to break in and change the fuse because we were drawing too much. That’s when the generators came in.
Alfredo and I went to Nightingale’s and bought two generators because there was no power anymore. They had shut it down. We’d changed the fuse a couple of times, and then they boarded up and locked up everything, and we couldn’t get in. We used to hook up from the hot water service of the Chinese shop across the road. We put mats down so you couldn’t see the cable and the cars would drive over it. The generators were running the fridges and all the lamps and lighting. We’d sucked a lot of power off Myer until it couldn’t take it anymore. It was still a good year before it closed after that. The staff had to jump in cabs and take jerry cans to the petrol station. They would reek of petrol all day.