The toilets got clogged up. There was a pit there that needed to be regularly cleaned out, and it overflowed. So someone decided to flush the toilet but they must have stuck a toilet roll down there or something and all of a sudden a load of shit is coming out of the toilet. All this shit and toilet paper is flowing down onto the dance floor and people are dancing in it! I walked in there and thought, ‘what the hell is that smell?’ Everyone’s carrying on like there’s no tomorrow and their feet have got shit all over them, with toilet paper hanging from the toes. I stood on the decking, and that’s where I stayed, watching all those idiots dancing in shit. I had to clean it up. But the good thing about it was they left about 2:30 in the morning and I made sure I didn’t get there until about seven, so all the shit was dry. I brought my gumboots, got the high-pressure hose and pushed it straight out the door.
Sam and Ben Totty, they’re good drinkers. One night I rocked up to the bar and it was closed. I opened up the roller door out the back and they’re sleeping on the floor. They gave me the biggest fright because Sam had long hair, and I thought he was a homeless guy squatting out the back. I said to him, ‘hey, get the fuck out of here before I call the police.’ And he turned around and said, ‘hey Mark, how’s it going?’ ‘Shit mate, you scared the shit out of me. You look like Jesus Christ with that beard and long hair. All you need is a cross man and you’d be complete.’
He asked what the time was and I told him it was 10 past five in the morning. ‘Just in time for another drink!’ He said, and got up and started drinking again.
We sell goats from our farm, and Jerome wanted to buy one for his friend’s wedding. So we had to drive with a dead goat in the boot of our car to his place from the farm. We left early in the morning because we didn’t want to get pulled over by the police with a skinned goat in the back of our vehicle wrapped up in plastic bags. When we got to his place it was about four in the morning. Jerome was upstairs, and when he heard us coming he called out, ‘hey, have you got the goat?’ Meanwhile, my brother had pulled it out of the boot, and it looked like a dead body hanging over his shoulder. ‘Keep it quiet!’
We were carrying the goat upstairs, when Jerome realised, ‘oh shit, I’ve got to take this on a two-hour drive. Will it fit in an esky?’ I told him, ‘No way it’s going to fit in an esky.’ He ended up picking up another esky that was pretty long, so there he was driving away with four legs sticking out of this esky in the back of his BMW scratching the back window.
Some time later, my brother and I were out drinking and eating at Sister Bella’s when the barman told us, ‘you’ve gotta pay.’ My brother told him to relax, that we know Jerome. ‘Yeah, everybody knows Jerome,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s gotta pay.’ My brother kept going, ‘Do you know who we are? We’re the cleaners.’ He wouldn’t let it go, so we told him to make out an IOU to Jerome for a free goat. And that’s how we paid.
One time I was cleaning the bar and these guys rocked out from underneath the basement. I thought, ‘where the hell did these guys come out from?’ They ended up being a couple of guys from Myer who had followed one of the electrical wires, which had led them to the bar. And he said, ‘There’s been a wire that’s been illegally tapped into Myer.’ ‘Okay mate,’ I said, ‘I don’t know about that I’m just the cleaner.’ We took down each other’s names and as soon as they left I rang up Jerome and said, ‘look, they’ve found the wire.’ Jerome never paid for electricity for the seven years at St. Jerome’s, or hot water. He had tapped into Myer and got free electricity for the last seven years, he never got a bill. Then Myer sold the building and were going to put apartments in. That’s when they found the wire and followed it back to St. Jerome’s. There was no meter, so they cut his power off, literally just cut the wire, and then he had to go buy two generators to run the bar.