Diary – Love at Cumbersome Corner Pt 1

Love at Cumbersome Corner

By Bruce Williams

In the inner-Sydney suburb of Cumbersome, where nothing goes terribly right, and nothing goes terribly wrong, the people on the main drag talk of nothing but love. Cumbersome, uptown from Camperdown and around the corner from Erskineville; roundly ignored by Newtown, and far less lovely than Leichhardt.

In Cumbersome, they talk of love as if it were a close relative recently deceased; or a sworn enemy way too strong and way too close. Or maybe a big pay-day just around the corner. But in Cumbersome, just around the corner is somewhere else altogether. A small place with a big heart: Cumbersome, where I live and make my home with Betty my wife, and our two girls, Sam and Ellen.

This obsession with love may have something to do with the Cumbersome Apollo, the oldest music venue in the inner west. Jeff Buckley played their, and the Blind Boys of Alabama. You am I, and the Wiggles. Surrounded by residential blocks with no off-street parking, the Apollo leads a precarious existence, forever under the eye and ear of the city fathers of Marrickville and South Sydney. So the Apollo is sound-proofed to the max, sound-proofed to within an inch of its life.

Which means that all those reverberations of all those love songs are held tight inside, night after night, every, every night – until the punters spill out onto the footpath, the vibrations carried in their chest, and steaming from their lungs. Dripping like sweat from their skin and their clothes, to enter the emotional ecology of Cumbersome.

Is it any wonder’

At the Viceroy Hotel, there’s a photograph of Darren, a dead patron, the frame resting on a donated doiley, on top of the pie warmer.

The hotel staff loved him. He was never in a fight. He was never rude. He kept his clothes and his hair clean. And, although I never saw him eat anything other than the free bar pizza laid on each Saturday arvo, he had the look of someone who got his three squares each day.

And what he also did each day, was come to the Viceroy from open to close, and spend every spare cent (not every cent, mind, but every spare cent) on beer and the gallopers. And the staff of the Viceroy loved him.

I order two pies and cross the carpet to the table of damp coasters, where Fred is arriving from the bar with two schooners.

A friend of mine since childhood, Fred is visiting Cumbersome from his flat in Glebe, where the pubs serve several brands of Apple Cider, where light rail is passé , and where love is a mystery that no one wants to pursue.

It’s not like that in Cumbersome