Rob Schenk,
Postie/Doorman
I’ve known Jerome for 20 years. I remember the first time he took me to St Jerome’s and said, ‘I’ve bought this’. I laughed because it looked like a bit of a shithole, and it was pretty small. ‘It’s just for us’, he said. ‘It’s just for the boys, so we can all meet up and drink somewhere.’ And that’s how it was. Then all of a sudden it went massive. I don’t think there ever was a time when it was just the boys, there was always other people there. It was always packed, even on a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
I’m a postie in St Albans, and one time they were doing the hard rubbish, which they do once a year. Jerome said, ‘Next time that happens, ring me.’ So I rang him, and that’s where he got all the furniture for the pub.
I was a bouncer there for about 10 weeks. I was going to Bali and I wasn’t getting any overtime at my original work. So Jerome said, ‘why don’t you work the door?’ I didn’t like it because it was stressful — I’m letting people in and I can’t even drink! I’m normally in there getting mental with everyone else.
I saw a couple walking down that stinky laneway. ‘Romantic,’ I thought. It was just me on my own. I said to the couple, ‘Have you had much to drink?’ He was a bit nervous and he said, ‘no, no, we’ve just come from dinner and had a bottle of wine.’ I said, ‘what? A whole bottle of wine?’ And he said, a bit nervous, ‘yeh, that’s all we’ve had.’ And I said, ‘well you can’t come in like that. Go round the corner there, and next door to the Mercure hotel is a bar. Go and drink six pots in a row, come back, and then I’ll let you in.’ He looked at me real strange.
Because I’m a postie, I used to go hardcore and finish early. I was in St Jerome’s by 12 and drinking longnecks sitting in the laneway up till stupid o’clock. Then the cops made it hard — you couldn’t drink in the laneway, and all that sort of stuff.
Jerome just amazes me. Before Laneway Festival, we went to the Big Day Out and he said, ‘one day I’m going to do my own festival.’ And he did it. Same with St Jerome’s. He said, ‘I’m going to get myself a little bar.’ Because everyone was wondering, ‘oh, where should we go tonight?’ That’s one thing about Jerome, he does it when he says it.
I miss the joint because it was somewhere we could walk in with pyjamas on or a suit and no one would really know the difference. That’s how it was. And I like that because I don’t want to get spruced up to go to a club and have people look me up and down. The place had everything, because you had the uni students just up the road come, and the David Jones crew. The toilets stank like crap, but it just worked. I mean, my parents went there and loved it. They’re pretty full on, German background is all I’ve got to say. But they liked it. It was different.
We used to get together at Christmas time, go to Chinatown and have yum cha, then go drink at St Jerome’s. Now we don’t do that anymore, we go to Long Room. It’s nothing like playing football in the laneway, skateboarding, getting rubber balls and throwing them on the ground to see if you could hit the Mercure hotel. It was pretty crazy shit.