In the very early eighties a group of us caroused around Sydney and often times Melbourne… it was a tight knit group and the group that had the most fun. Michael and Michele, joined at the hip, Nick Conroy, Marty Plaza and his beloved Kate, Terry Serio, James and Sally Freud, Jenny Morris and of course sometimes the rest of INXS.
Those days were filled with so much laughing… stupid things we would just laugh at for days on end. For a while, there would be a particular word or phrase that would keep us going. At one particular time it was the name of my great Grandmothers Pekinese… Lofan. That particular one held for nearly twenty years. I can’t tell you how many places I would be with Michael worldwide where that word would communicate so much. We would just say… “Lofan” and somehow that would always size up the situation. It seemed to hold it’s own particularly in LA…
I always looked at my friend with awe at how he always landed on his feet… how easy it all seemed for him. Now I realize that sometimes when things comes so easy when one is young… how much more difficult it is trying to work things out later.
I nagged Michael Hutchence most of his life…I don’t know how he stood it. Not in the very early years, but oh so much later on. One of the main things I nagged him about was that he never called me enough. I’d get particularly bad when he would come to LA and try to get some partying out of the way… knowing I’d give him a hard time… he’d try to get a couple of days in before I knew he was here. In the last 6 months of his life… he called a lot. Sadly I had stopped nagging him by then… I had sort of given up… I didn’t see him that much so I didn’t want to nag him when I did.
Michael’s presence when he was alive need not be explained… all of us experienced that… His presence became hard to deal with upon his death. The confusion and feeling of aloneness that filled Michele Bennet’s house in the days following his death is something I will never forget. Was it us or him… both…
As Michele and I sat somewhat dazed at Michael’s funeral.. .(how weird it is to write that). I could not take my eyes of this young boy perhaps seventeen years old. He was sitting with three friends up to the right of us. I had never seen a young man weep so uncontrollably before. He wept openly, loudly and stayed that way through the whole service. Afterward I introduced myself and told him how moved I had been by his grief. He said that he was a fan and that Michael had always taken the time to talk to him and that he had always made him feel so special…
When I returned from Australia… I was only home a few days and had been expressing my feelings of sadness out loud to my lost friend. I heard a telephone ringing very faintly and no one seemed to be answering it. I then heard that American telephone voice say “If you’d like to make a call please hang up”. This sound continued and I realized that somehow my telephone was dialing itself over and over. This went on until I finally pulled it out of the wall.
During that first year ironically whenever I would feel Michael somehow…there would go my phone again. The phone company said it was impossible that my phone would do that… oh well…
I think of him everyday, I miss his laughter, I miss his sense of humor I miss those conversations where he would always surprise me by having intricate details of a certain piece of history, like he’d just read the Encyclopedia.
I pray to God that he is at peace… I pray everyday.