At Lounge Bar, all the waiters are hot fashion guys, girls and
boys I mean. Look at Zoe, or Roy. She embodies either the Shirley Temple’s
innocence and the nazi cruelty; her long dark brown hair faded at the end – in
memory of an old blue hair color, now gone – join gracefully the top of her
body with her never ending legs, only interrupted by super shorts and heavy
black boots. He boasts polished tattoos, beard pruned with millimetrical
attention, chequed shirt and blue jeans turned up. Melbourne guys seem to have
a peculiar aesthetic culture which makes them different from the rest of the
continent.
«Have you ever heard of the bogans?»
This is what Dan asks me in one
of my days-off, in front two cold beers. He’s one of my colleagues at Lounge, 19 year-old, rocker features. No, I have no clue
what bogans are.
«Have you ever seen those
strapping guys with horrible tattoos, colored sun glasses, stupid caps and Stubbies
shorts? Well, those are bogans.»
«What does bogan exactly mean?»
«Well, bogan is the Australian
worker class stereotype; they firmly believe in values like the honesty, the
family, the national proud (actually, they are quite obsessed with that stuff);
they are also used to listen to country music and they are not very clean. In
the past, probably, it was the term for people living in the outer suburb of
big cities.»
Before Dan could finish to
pronounce the last three syllabs, Giuliano, Matteo and Domenico magically
appear in front of us. I have a quick glance at them, then at myself, observing
how far we are from the Lounge’s
customers. We wear cheap and tasteless things. Giuliano’s t-shirt is of a
strange blue-police, too large for him, while Matteo’s one is too short. My
dress, actually, it wouldn’t be so bad. The problem are the strappy sandals,
payied just $ 9,00 in a franchise second-hand store, which have started to
unstick before reaching the guy’s house. They litteraly dissembled, until the
point of getting a screw to pin the sandal strip to the wedge cork heel. Who
are the bogans, now?
My friends sit with me and Dan at
the table and we order other beers. Between smoke lines and the bitter taste of
Ale, Dan tells us his story. That is the first time I talk properly with him.
Usually we have such a little time for talking. He says, then, his father has a
Drinking monkey on his back, and him too, but he prefers Smoking.
«In Australia everyone smokes
weed; it’s quite impossible to find someone who doesn’t like it.»
There’s a campaigne spot to rise
awareness about alcohol problems – that I’ve never seen because I’ve never had
a television since I’m in Australia – where you can see, in a typical barbecue
set, a father asking his son for a beer. The camera follows the child going to
the fridge then, as soon as he grabbed a beer, the little guy turns into an
adult so he can repeat in turn the same scenery with his son, and so on:
«We are different from Aussies:
they drink just to get drunk, we drink because of the pleasure to drink», says
Giuliano.
«If you complain until now
because you’re being hard getting drunk!»
Aimlessly, we cruise across the night.
We would like to go in any bar but for the best we need to get a taxi. But taxi
costs too much. So then, after having dinner in a Chinese restaurant for only
$10 each, we all go to Mc Donald for a piss. And, like an Italian motto says,
who doesn’t piss in company is either a thief or a spy. Wait, where’s the
ladies’ toilet? We’re all quite drunk, so we don’t stay on ceremony.
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