Deborah Conway: Pizza
Eddie and Jo are not car salesmen. This was my first assumption, having met them on the first of 2 nights of this shindig we were hired to play at, to launch a luxury car. No, Eddie and Jo, who introduced themselves to me as I muddled my way through the 500 strong crowd in Port Melbourne on Wednesday evening, were in the $2.00 shop business.
Eddie: Deborah, Deborah Conway? I am a huge fan, you’re the reason I came tonight. Are you gonna play Man Overboard? You gotta play that and stick it to these stiffs. Can I buy you a drink, what do you drink? Let me buy you a Cosmopolitan.
Me: What’s in a Cosmopolitan?
Eddie: I dunno know but that’s what they drink on Sex and the City, so it must be good. If it’s free I’ll get it for you and if it’s not I’ll pay for it ‘cos I want to buy you a drink. Will you have a drink now, I’ll get it now. Oh maybe you don’t want to drink before you go on, later, later. Actually I got a spliff in my wallet, how about we go out back? You’re an artist you all do this stuff don’t you. Anyway you gotta play Man Overboard give it to these fucking arseholes. Sorry about the swearing but hey you artists all swear don’t you.
Me: Do you sell cars?
Eddie: No way man.
Me: What do you do?
Eddie: This is Joe (introducing me to his larger, more reticent friend). Me and Joe well we work for this big American firm. They love us, they love us so much that they bought us a BMW 5 series each. We make them a fortune. You know what we do? We go to Trade Fairs and we find shit that people like. Say it’s a glass. We take it to a factory in China and say “see this glass, we want you to make this glass but we only want to pay 40cents for it and we want 100,000 of them. Then we take ‘em back and sell ‘em to all the $2.00 shops. We’re really good at it, we make a killing for them.
Jo: Yeah that’s why they bought us the cars but we’re not happy.
Eddie: No, no we’re not happy, we can see how much money they’re making, they just buy us the cars to shut us up for a while. We’re thinking we should put our houses on a big mortgage and get ourselves set up in our own business. Then we’d be raking it in ourselves. Trouble is we’re too scared. You know I’ve always wanted to meet you. You’re the only reason I came tonight. I’m a huge fan and I’ve never seen you play before.
And with that, it was time to start the set. Sleek and Habib melted back into the crowd, but sure enough moments before we played Man Overboard a pink drink in a Martini glass encrusted with sugar appeared at my feet delivered by the waitress.
Afterwards Gerry Hale said “ the best thing about these corporate gigs is normally you don’t have to do them again”.
added Monday, 20 October, 2003
