He Died With A Felafel In His Hand (2000) - Plot & Excerpts
This book was amusing, but there were so many incidents that I began to doubt the truth of it. I too lived in shared houses for several years and although there were incidents, nothing on the scale of what happened in this book.I was trying to remember incidents that did happen. Definitely no drugs. But the first group house I lived in – a three bedroom house, but there were up to five people in it at times – would be the closest to those examples in this book. But still nowhere near as wild and no drugs. We were in it for eleven months and only ever held one party, but the police did turn up and tell us to quieten down. And not all the guests were invited, some just turned up. They had been out cruising looking for parties, as many did pre the internet. The only reason we managed to rent the house was because the previous tenants had been kicked out and left it a bit of a mess. (Now, they probably would have fitted into the book.) And one of our group was a policeman, although he was hardly ever there, always off on assignments. In retaliation for being evicted, the previous tenants cut water pipes, left a bag of dead rabbit hanging on the clotheslines and stuffed more whole rabbits down the drains. They left a car wreck in the front garden and bits of car and motorbike parts scattered throughout the garden. The house was furnished, but some of the furniture would collapse regularly. The stove hot plates only worked full on, the oven had to be propped shut with a broom and the fridge iced up so badly it had to be defrosted every second week (ideally it should have been done weekly). And a kitchen cupboard door fell on me. The old fashioned oil heater blew up in a couple of the tenants’ faces as they were attempting to light it, blackening them and the ceiling, because, oh, no, they didn’t need to listen to the serviceman’s instructions on how to light it. I was the only one who did, and therefore the only one who could light it without it blowing up in their face and blackening the ceiling.We had various personalities living in the house. One woman would bring home a different man almost every night, which would be a bit of a problem if she found someone else also sleeping in her room. I never did figure out if she got paid by her “guests”. Another stole from us and was caught wearing someone else’s underwear. She left after she became pregnant. Another I suspect was borderline manic depressive. She would go through periods of giving things away. (I still have a glass jug and matching glasses given to me.) Another had the worst PMT I have ever met. Say anything, no matter how harmless, and she would snap. This same person would borrow money and although she would pay it back the following pay day, she would not get the money from her bank account before that when the person who had loaned her the money said they were now short of cash. “I won’t get money from my bank account,” she’d say. So the person she owed money to would have to get money from their account instead, because they had leant her money so she wouldn’t have to get money from her account. She thought that was quite logical and fair and you were selfish to disagree. The woman with the lease in her name believed even in the dead of winter she should be able to walk around the house in a short sleeved t-shirt and the rest of us would share the excess heating bill so she could. And her bedroom window was partly open for fresh air on the coldest night. She would go out and leave a heater on in her room for hours so it would be warm when she got home. If it happened now I would turn it off, but I was younger then and shy. She also got upset if you changed a blown light bulb, because that deprived her of the thrilling opportunity of asking her boyfriend to do it. One amusing incident happened on one of the rare occasions the policeman tenant was home. He answered the door (not in uniform) with a beer can in his hands. It was one of the previous tenants come to pick up mail. He said to the policeman, “Whatever you do, don’t tell the cops I was here.” It was all I could do not to roll on the floor laughing. The police would regularly call looking for the previous tenants.I shared another house for several years (okay, I was the owner of this one), and this one was fairly tame (no doubt because I was the owner). One tenant I suspect might have been schizophrenic. At times she would not use her name, saying she was only an X. She also kept all her shed hair in a bag in her bedroom which I found creepy, and hardly bathed so that she stunk something awful. For years after she left, her bedroom retained an odour. One tenant only stayed two weeks because she was on the run from an ex-boyfriend who owned about a dozen guns. I accompanied her to the police and she moved out to my relief. Another who only stayed two weeks suffered from epilepsy. What was scary about her was that she had a car licence and drove. I saw her have an attack and it’s scary just thinking about her behind the wheel of a car. Others stayed for years in the house, so I must have been a reasonable landlady. One lady suffered obsessive compulsive disorder. She would foot stomp her way to the bathroom each morning, waking the house, then stomp in the bath. Wouldn’t / couldn’t stop after complaints. She would clean up around us as we cooked. On at least one occasion I came home to the other tenant in tears after being upset by her behaviour. But our house was always very clean while she lived there.Like John Birmingham, I too kept (brief) notes about the other tenants in my diary. I also kept brief notes on the people in other houses in my street. Two households sold heroin, another house was used for storing stolen goods, a local thief lived in another (the son of one of the heroin dealers from one of the previous mentioned houses was like his apprentice), another house contained a paedophile (very sad, his daughter, who he assaulted, was later murdered by her boyfriend). The heroin houses were raided after a chief inspector/superintendent? in the drug squad moved in with my female neighbour and saw the comings and goings. They had a surveillance camera set up and all. A taxi driver was caught too, bringing regular customers. The house holding stolen goods was raided twice, always in the middle of the night. Very dramatic, they would floodlight the house. And if I understood correctly the Maltese lady across the road (never have been able to speak Maltese), a murderer once lived in my house. Maybe that explains the ghost one of my tenants swore haunted us.My street is more gentrified now and I haven’t made notes for years, so my present neighbours can rest easy.I wonder if any of my fellow tenants wrote notes about me?
I vaguely remember watching the 2001 film ‘He Died With A Felafel In His Hand’, starring Noah Taylor. I say ‘vaguely’ because I was probably stoned at the time, my brain compromised in the memory department. I do remember, however, that it was strange. But, then, I like ‘strange’.The book is less strange; more nostalgic. It made me laugh, but it also horrified me. I spent part of my 20s lost in the world of share accommodation, and it wasn’t pretty. Most of it was spent under the influence of drink or drugs, in houses in Sydney that should have been condemned. I remember I would make pacts with the cockroaches. They could roam my room as much as they wanted, but land on my bed and they were dead. They were also goners if they made any noise; the slightest rustle of a plastic bag and STOMP! Also if they flew. Sydney’s flying cockroaches have haunted me since I was a kid, when I would have to venture to the backyard toilet at my dad’s place in Sydney’s inner west in the middle of the night. I can still hear the crackle of creepy crepe wings as they flew at me. ‘He Died With A Felafel In His Hand’ was a fun, light read that took me back to the not so fun, light days of brown couches (yes, I owned one), milk crates (I had several) and bucket bongs. Bucket bongs were a thing in Queensland, Birmingham writes. They were also a thing in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, where my brother had one set up in his room, day and night, after our mum ran away from home with her lesbian lover. And then there were ‘bulbs’. After a girlfriend’s father introduced us to them at 16, we went to Kmart and bought our own cream dispenser, nitrous oxide bulbs and balloons. We had hours of fun until my girlfriend’s stepfather walked in on us one day, after he heard the sound of the cream dispenser as it went off and filled up a balloon, over and over again.“What are you two bloody up ta?” We couldn’t respond, but he cottoned on pretty quick, grabbed the bulb paraphernalia and threw it in the bin. That was the end of that. Probably a good thing, in hindsight.I related when Birmingham wrote: “Always be wary of phrases like, ‘My house is your house. Feel comfortable … Just treat it like your home.” I fell for it once, and before I knew it my housemate had a psychotic meltdown because I’d laughed at a scene on ‘The Simpsons’. Apparently you were not to laugh when he fought with his girlfriend. It was insensitive. I related less to the fish fingers. My cheap meal of choice back in the day was pasta with a sauce made of canned kidney beans and tomatoes, grated cheddar cheese sprinkled on top. It’s the only meal I ever made, because, you know, I loved animals and was vegetarian. Birmingham took me on a journey back to my lost youth. It was some trip. * PS My kids aren’t gonna get away with half as much – I hope!
What do You think about He Died With A Felafel In His Hand (2000)?
I loved this book. Most Australians will be familiar with JB from his various endeavours in many and varied writing fields - blogger, author, columnist and no doubt lot of others. Most Aussies will also be familiar with He Died With a Felafel... from the big screen version of it, starring Noah Taylor (what happened to him, by the way?)The blurb on my copy reads "John Birmingham has lived with 83 people and kept notes on all of them. This is their story." And he has. And it is. In plot terms, there's not a lot else to say, really.HDWAFIHH references, in style and conception, many of the features of classic works of gonzo journalism - there's elements of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there's bits of The Naked Lunch, but the overall effect is completely and utterly Birmingham, who is, in my opinion, one of the country's most versatile writer.Anyway, read it. If you haven't already. It's confronting, hilarious, and for anyone who's ever shared a house with someone, oddly cathartic.
—Anthony Eaton
Hilarious and entertaining. Slightly shocking in places, but fundamentally Australian. Did it make me seriously question whether or not I do want to do the whole sharehouse thing? Yeah...for like, a minute. For the uninitiated, the book is basically Birmingham recounting his own stories of different sharehouses and flatmates he lived with over the years, from Brisbane to Melbourne and places in between. It's more of a reminiscing session than a structured, plot-driven novel, but it's filled with incredible, often so-crazy-they-must-be-true anecdotes about the realities of doing the Aussie sharehouse circuit a couple of decades ago. People tell me that things haven't changed that much though...
—Rosemary Reilly
Sharehousing in Australia13 December 2012tJohn Birmingham wrote so much better when he was writing gonzo journalism rather than the sci-fi books that he seems to have written of late, but then again he seems to sell books, and the books that he did write early on pretty much set him up to the point where he could pretty much write what he wanted to, so I guess more power to him. Anyway, while I do not know what the experience of share housing is in England (and I understand that there is a lot of it there), the feel of this book is that it is distinctly Australian, and having been in a number of sharehouses myself I can seriously relate to what he is describing here (though I must admit he has probably embellished the stories somewhat, but then again why let the truth get in the way of a good yarn?).tI guess I should do what others have done when commenting on this book, and that is talk about some of my sharehousing experiences, and I must admit that I have had a lot. The average time that I have spent in a sharehouse is usually about six months, though there have been a couple where I have lasted about two years (though one of them had a somewhat itinerant population) and the shortest would probably have been about two weeks. Okay, I guess one may need to define the idea of a sharehouse as being one where you are sharing with more than one other person, though sometimes the actually definition of a person living in a house can be rather dubious. One house we had was originally intended for two of us, but as soon as my housemate picked up a girl (he always had to have a girlfriend) she immediately moved in, and then another guy decided to camp in the lounge, and within two days he had brought another friend around as well. Mind you, this particular house lasted two weeks before the police kicked in the door and arrested the lot of us.tThen there were the Findon Flats, a collection of about two hundred flats were while there were only two of us living in the flat, the entire place was like one community: there were always people coming and going. Mind you one of my friends was a small time drug dealer, so that is probably why there were always people coming and going. One of the cool things about living there was that people would come in, hang for about half-an-hour, smoke some weed, and then leave. However, the problem with living with drug dealers is that once somebody hooks onto you as a drug dealer they suddenly become frequent visitors. Oh, and the fact that your flat also becomes a target for thieves seems to outweigh the benefit of getting free drugs.tI also lived in what is pretty much termed as a party house. It was a large, two story, six bedroom house in one of the wealthier parts of Adelaide with a pool and a spa. The problem with the spa was that it always broke down. However, we actually had ten people squeezed into that house at one time, which made using the rather small kitchen an absolute pain. However that house brings back lots of memories, including the parties (which wouldn't be a party unless the cops rocked up at least once, and usually multiple times). I still remember the time that my mate and I decided to cook some pasta using dope butter, and suddenly having the sensation of being stoned hit us so hard that we were literally flat on our back for hours.tThat house came to an end because the landlord simply could not get anybody into the house, and I was too much of a stoner (read lazy and paranoid) to actually attempt to get others to move into the place. We did finish my time in that house with the mother all all parties which only came to an end when my friend almost killed himself by flaking out on a concrete step. That friendship circle also came to an end pretty quickly also since the mother of all hangovers literally turned us all against each other.tHey, I'm still sharehousing, this time in Melbourne, and I do desire to try to keep the tradition of it by not staying in the house for too long. Okay, now that I am 700 km away from my parents, I do not have the luxury of running back to their house when things go wrong, and moving can be a pain. At least I have learnt from my mistakes and can at least prepare myself to consider moving on before things get too bad. However, the problem is that I have found a good church within walking distance, though nothing is ever that permanent, and since Paul the Apostle never really set his roots down anywhere for too long, I don't think I need to either.
—David Sarkies
