HAVING hooks for hands has its advantages. Children think you're a pirate. Women like men with metal, apparently.
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"It's easier to pick up girls with hooks," Tom Nash says.
Nash, 33, makes electronic dance music on his computer, wearing out keyboards with his prosthetics. As DJ Hookie, Nash is also one of the hottest DJs on the Sydney club scene.
On Friday DJ Hookie and his offsider Disorder, are at Albury’s ONE Nightclub.
He has four prosthetic limbs and is refreshingly frank.
About people: "People are annoying. Music is an escape from humans."
About paralympians: "I dislike people who tow the company line and disabled people are notorious for this. 'You can do anything' and all that sort of shit, it's not true. You can't do anything."
He wants one day to give talks about life and disability but is loath to become a motivational speaker.
"There are people who can do very little but you've got to be realistic and remain positive as well," he says. "I could be a demotivational speaker."
He is tired of talking about how he lost his arms and legs. But happy to be asked just about anything.
It's the people who don't ask who annoy him.
The parents who shush children in the supermarket. "I missed the meeting where it was decided offending people was a bad thing. I'll offend people at any given opportunity," he says. "Parents reprimanding a child for asking a question or pointing, creates a generation of people who fear talking about things they don't understand.
"If somebody saw what I had been through and the fact I was positive about it, I would rather them think: 'Yeah, human beings can get through shit like this and so can I.'"
He lost his limbs in 2001 after contracting meningococcal disease and as he lay in pain in a hospital bed his mind moved: from "Woe is me" to "Get on with it."
"I'm not saying I like talking to people but, on principle, people should be able to ask what they want. If they don't, the idea that this person is helpless or in a depressive situation will perpetuate itself," he says.
He is at home with lights flashing and music thumping in the club.
Nash sweats and holds his hooks high. "Losing my hands was a big thing because what it meant, rather than losing my independence, was that I couldn't play music anymore," he says.
He retaught himself to play guitar. "I'm stubborn. I knew I could never play like I used to but I felt if I could cross that boundary it would give me the internal motivation and knowledge to know my will was limitless."
Now he likes writing dance music that has no destination. "It can free you up to be more creative," he says.
"When you are playing a great set it is an untouchable experience. Music is a release. It makes me feel comfortable being alive."
