My hometown, to me, is like one huge safety blanket. Electric in winter; thin cotton in summer. It houses all the intricate details you could find in a Vivaldi composition, whilst being broadcasted on community radio through the conduit of a 1980s Holden car radio. Februarys are so seamless that you would hardly know if cancer came knocking on your mouth, and the moment that June slams ice on your windows, you feel as safe and as isolated as Perth in her ‘50s. 

Therefore, when I was heading for a rendezvous in China three years ago and came across a dodgy-looking factory, I was severely struck deep within my humanity machine. The same cogs were tinkered with when I saw a woman being harassed on the streets of some indistinct district in Paris. There was also the mental makeup of an eighty year old Japanese cook in a café, deep in the concrete, neon glow of Osaka, who had that much arthritis his hands look liked bird’s nests; made me ponder rather deeply. 

If I was to have found these things in my own backyard, I would have been furious, inquisitive but forgetful, but for them to have touched me in countries, in micro worlds, in other people’s lives, it made the idea that the queerest things happen behind closed doors imprint itself on my mind. 

The following question is what came into my mind after the three months I spent overseas. Although it doesn’t make any sense now, what I need to remember is that I had been affected by alcohol and the melancholia from the twenty-fourth consecutive hangover, which had obviously played its part. The question was: Why would misfortune happen in the universe if I wasn’t always there to acknowledge it? 

On returning home I would find that at least once, sometimes thirty times, a week I would stare into the face of someone I had been talking to and try and work out what sad, cruel, filthy, unnerving, exciting, perplexing, erotic, illegal, beautiful, compassionate things they did behind closed doors. 

Dwelling, only sometimes, for too long on this would make me feel stronger about this bogus reality than with their known one. Why the hell not?  

Anyway, that’s where Rick comes into being I guess: filling a void that was created not for the stars above the middleclass, or the destitute people living below but for the neighbours; the people who shop at Safeway and watch Friday night football, the underdogs who may be doing something really bloody interesting but not interesting enough to stick around for. 

They’re vainglorious, sycophantic, obsequious, yet pretty. They drive nice cars, talk with a plum in their mouth, and yet stink of stale goon. They’re the bloody interesting unknown gadabouts.