Scary Hostellers

Shortly after the sleep-talking incident I had to move rooms in the hostel. If I was a paranoid person I might have assumed I was being moved because of my unusual nocturnal conversations, but the two girls in the room also had to move in order to make way for a group of 4 who had booked the dorm in advance. But when I did move out, the girls went their separate way into a cosy twin room and it became apparent I had been moved into the psychiatric ward of the hostel.

Alarm bells started ringing when I arrived in the new room to find one of the occupants switching dorms. He was all too ready to explain to me that the reason he was moving was not a reallocation due to a prior booking, but he was trying escape from one rather scary inmate who was staying in the room. Clearly the guy moving out had been certified “sane” by the hostel authorities and now had permission to move to a lower security wing - and in his place I was being moved in after having recently identified myself as someone who required “further observation”. The room was on the lowest level of the hostel so if one of us crazies decided to throw ourselves out of the window (or throw someone else out the window) we weren’t too high up so we’d probably survive the fall. Just to make absolutely certain against messy defenestrations they’d also painted the windows shut. I think there may even have been toughened glass, but I didn’t test that out because being wrong would have meant paying a hefty glazier’s bill.

So when this guy moved out – looking pretty shabby and dishevelled – he recounted a chilling tale of what had happened the previous day. Wild eyed, he told me that the other guy had locked himself in the bathroom for 4 hours and hadn’t responded to efforts to rouse him (we had a separate bathroom in the room to keep us isolated from the other prisoners, and presumably so we could be “locked down” in the event of any trouble). Drug use was suspected. He described the scary guy to me and instantly I knew who he was – an unsavoury looking character I’d seen lurking in the shadows in the common room who had been wearing the same “Suicidal Tendencies” T-shirt since he arrived. Lets call him Jack Nicholson, as I never did learn his real name. Looking around his bed I noted several Marvel comic books, “The Lost Boys” on video and a pair of enormous black boots with a skull and cross bones on each toe-cap. I photographed the boots so that in the event of my bloodied corpse being found on the pavement, the police might be able to get clues to the identity of my murderer from my digital camera. The situation was not looking good. The person that was moving out hastily departed, leaving me with one final piece of advice: “You’re alright as long as there are other people in the room with you, just don’t get left alone with him”. The warning reminded me of a bad Hollywood horror movie. I was pretty sure I would see this guy again later, probably crumpled up at the foot of the stairwell after a mysterious unexplained fall.

Once he had left I was on my own in the room. Remembering the warning, I didn’t want to hang around, so threw my stuff under my bed, chucked all my valuables in a locker and secured them with a large padlock. Just when I was about to leave I heard a key scratching at the door and I felt a presence entering the room. I didn’t want to turn round but I was compelled to. Don’t show fear I thought to myself and I greeted Jack Nicholson who was making his way towards me.
“So there’s four of us in the room now.” he said, to no-one in particular.
“Yes, the other guy had to switch rooms.... I think some people had made a booking…” I replied lamely, figuring Jack Nicholson probably already had issues with abandonment and I didn’t wish to drop the other guy in it.
“Oh.” he grunted, before disappearing into the toilet to do some early morning spitting and loud urination. I took this as my cue to finish grabbing my stuff for the day and make a hasty exit, but he was back in the room before I could finish.
“I’m off to get me some brekky-jugs. Breakfast. Burgers for breakfast. I loves me burgers!” he jabbered.
I’ll bet you do, I thought. Burgers made with human flesh probably.
“OK, I’ll see you later” I said, hoping to God that I wouldn’t.
With that and a bit more spitting he left the room leaving me alone again.

That day I did the Sydney Opera House, walked across the Harbour Bridge, went to the aquarium, went up the Sydney Tower and did just about every tourist attraction the city had to offer. I didn’t return to my room until 11pm, and then I went straight to bed.

About midnight Jack Nicholson returned and turned on the light in the room. By this time the other 2 people in the dorm were also in bed, and Jack had a bit of a conversation with himself, repeated his spitting/loud urination routine and then turned in for the night without further incident. Sometime in the night he started talking in his sleep, which presumably was one of the many reasons that he had found himself moved into the isolation ward.

This is a genuine transcript of the conversation he had with the guy in the bed below me (we’ll call him Bob as I don’t know his name). Bob was unaware that Jack was asleep at the time and bless him was probably half asleep himself.

JACK (loudly): Excuse me!
BOB: Yes?
JACK (louder): Excuse me!
BOB (trying to sound cool): What’s going down?
JACK: What are them green things?
A pause
BOB (confused): What??
Another pause
JACK (singing): Puff the ma-gic dra-gon!
Silence

At this point I was rather hoping Jack would carry on with the singing and Bob would continue trying to make sense of it, but I think Bob twigged he didn’t need to participate in the conversation any longer. Sadly Jack turned over and fell silent so I never got to hear the second verse (which is my favourite and talks about Puff’s friend, Jackie Paper, who loved his dragon and would bring him gifts of strings and sealing wax and lots of fancy stuff). I think the sleep talking conclusively settled the drugs question though, as someone had clearly been “puffing the magic dragon” earlier on in the day…