Melbourne - Jan 2007
Enough circular postings and on with the show. Before reading this you might want to refresh your memory by reading the following: nut bag. So there I was in Melbourne house sitting for Declan & Jules. The memory of Michael Palmer and the anger at the lost money was slowly subsiding when I receive a flurry of texts from the nutter himself. He says he's going to come over to Melbourne from Christchurch, NZ to give me the cash personally along with some vitals I had left in a hostel in Christchurch. Hmmm, not the actions of a man with a firm grasp of the sanity stick. I said not to waste his (errr...my) money and simply wire the cash and don't worry about the bag of porridge and two cans of sardines, I'd pick up some ample replacements with the cash when he sent it (like he would!).
Some days later there's a knock on the door and sure enough, there stands Michael Palmer in all his unhinged fruit-loopedness. Bloody Hell! (He had got the address from the bulk email I sent out with my Aussie details prior to Christmas and neglected to delete his email address from.) He has the meagre provisions he's salvaged from the Christchurch hostel with him. Oh good. Of course he doesn't have the cash although there's plenty of talk along the lines of 'I'll get Rita to wire it over to me tomorrow'. (By the way, Rita's his ex-girlfriend that he left in the lurch back in Oregon, who is about as impressed with his behaviour as I am...so that's really likely.) The thing is, and you're probably there before me, he's just flown from Christchurch, NZ to Melbourne Australia in January, a period when airfares don't generally come free with three vouchers from the back of a packet of Shreddies.
So here he is, looking for accommodation in Melbourne, as brassic as a Tibetan monk with a gambling habit and on the doorstep of the house I am staying in. Naturally I tell him he can't stay whereby there's a lengthy 'discussion' in which my feelings shift from outright jaw-dropping flabbergastedness, to anger, to being a little uneasy, to being not a little scared (he's about 6ft 2"). We come to a compromise on going to collect his bags that he has deposited at the Crown Plaza Hotel on his 'walk' from the airport. The airport is about 25kms from town down a motorway! Unlikely he walked. Why his bags have been deposited at the Crown Plaza is anyone's guess. In fact where his bags actually are is anyone's guess as at this point I am getting the impression, probably much as you are, that Michael Palmer speak with forked tongue.
Here I didn't make the wisest of decisions (again) and agreed to go with him and get the bags from wherever they may be...on bikes. This poor decision was compounded by the fact that he took Jules' smart town bike with gears and I had what was called the 'Crack' bike (as in drug pusher's vehicle) - no gears, soft tyres and wobbly wheels. We set off...and then he took off. I couldn't keep up and lost him in the streets of Albert Park heading into town and what I feared would be straight towards Melbourne's Market for Recently Stolen Bicycles. I was a 'little bit' annoyed but had no other option but to return to the house and call the Crown Plaza Hotel to say they may have a deranged lunatic on a stolen bike arriving at their premises and that could they please apprehend him and, after giving him a discreet 'shoeing' in a back room, have him arrested for crimes against humanity not to mention sanity.
Here things again didn't go quite to 'plan', as after obtaining the number for the Crown Plaza Hotel, I got trapped in the dreaded phone loop: Press 1 for New Reservations, Press 2 to Change an Existing Reservation, Press 3 to hear these options again etc. There was no 'Press 4 if you'd like us to perform an arrest on a money thieving, psycho ding-a-ling who has stolen your friend's bike'. Odd that.
After several fruitless attempts to speak with someone at the Crown Plaza (preferably a man-mountain of a someone with a passion for extracting finger nails after knocking out teeth) I gave up and started considering the Police. It was at this point that there was a knocking on the rear gate and there was Michael Palmer complete with bike and his bags complaining that he had fallen off the bike and thought he may have broken a rib. As you'd imagine this was nothing compared to what I would like to do to him. Suffice to say 'the handle came off'. He was typically unperturbed and tried to blame me for not keeping up. Oooooooo.
It was at this point that any thought of retrieving my money left my head for good and was overtaken by the thought that I would gladly pay another $300 to be rid of this odoriferous weirdo. Getting shot of him proved to be as mammoth a task as I imagined it would and took me most of the afternoon. Like I said, I didn't want to rattle his cage too much, him knowing where I was staying and also him being considerably bigger than me and naturally possessing the renowned strength of a madman. He feigned to be asleep in a garden chair at one point and I did end up physically having to bat him over the head to 'wake him up' although I gave him plenty of warnings I was going to do this (I thought that might make him less angry). I also had to prevent him putting on a shirt of mine that he had taken from the washing line. He said all his clothes were dirty and as I wouldn't let him use the washing machine, he needed to borrow it. Errr...I d-o-n-'-t t-h-i-n-k s-o. It was at this point that I started looking for a heavy blunt instrument.
In the end it was the lure of buying him a drink that got him out of the garden. I chose a pub a long way away, bought one drink for us both and then walked away briskly without looking back taking a rather convoluted route home. Over that final drink he was veering between crying like a baby, apologising for his actions, bemoaning the fact he had lost his girlfriend (Rita, if you ever read this, move house, change your name and dye your hair and never open your door without looking through the spy hole!), proclaiming how liberating it was to have no money at all (this was a rather galling comment given his debt to me but I let it pass at this point), and him trying to chat girls up in the bar.
Sure enough, he rocked up at the house the next day with accusations that I had stolen his phone and more absurdly his wallet, like that would be any good given his penury and particularly ironic given his comments about being happiest with no money. I talked to him through the screen door and then refused to answer his knocks, hollers of apology and invites to go for a drink (I presume he was also inviting me to pay as well...that was jolly kind of him). I left a stern note on the door telling him where to go in no uncertain terms and thankfully, that was the last I saw or heard of Michael Palmer. A queerer incident I could not have dreamt up and one I would dearly not like to experience again.
Apart from the loss of $300 the incident has also created somewhat of a black mark in my copy book with Declan & Jules who were understandably not overly impressed when they heard of my unwelcome visitor to their home. With hind sight I would have done things a little differently. I hope the rift can be healed and my apologies to them for potentially putting their home at risk of goodness knows what.
Let this be a lesson to one and all...but mostly to me...again.
============THE END==========
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