Car Crash

by Lech Blaine

  After Allan dropped out of high school, my mother got him his first job, as a furniture removalist, while my father was still getting laughed out of clubhouses across Ipswich for suggesting his 166-centimetre nephew would play football for Queensland and, one day, Australia. ‘Are your eyes painted on?’ they said. ‘He’s a friggin’ midget!’

  Dad had a history-making chip on his shoulder. He was pissed off about missed opportunities, and craved greatness in the next generation of the Blaine bloodline. Allan Langer was a part-time athlete and full-time council worker when selectors picked him to play the first game of the 1987 State of Origin. ‘Alfie’ starred from the get-go, picking up Man of the Match in the series decider.

  Nineteen ninety-two was indisputably the happiest year of my father’s life. On the fourth Sunday of spring, Allan Langer captained the Brisbane Broncos to the first of consecutive premierships against the St George Dragons, whipping the cream of Sydney’s establishment.

  ‘You little beaut-ay!’ Dad sang while feeding me mashed bananas and himself a Johnnie Walker and Diet Coke. That scruffy Australian battler was the father of a son and the uncle of a gun.

  My parents sold the lease of the Wondai Hotel. Mum got paid a few dollars an hour to be a 24/7 psychologist to six children. Dad got a part-time job as a bartender at the Wondai Bowls and Golf Club. They ploughed their life savings into a cheap acre of red dirt, where they planted a removable home that used to be a maternity hospital.

  Every Sunday for a month, my brothers filled the tray of a one-tonne Falcon ute with turf from the Murgon Meatworks. My father drove the cargo home so they could mask the drought-stricken earth around the house. He had thick forearms and tanned, muscly calves. ‘Mowing the lawn’s better than watchin’ porn,’ he’d say.

  At night, Mum and Dad checked my cot as though it harboured a million-dollar bill. During the day, six overprotective foster siblings studied every burp, piss, fart and shit with wonder and unspoken envy. ‘Mum,’ they cried, fighting over me. ‘It’s my turn to hold him!’

  The slew of days and nights turned me into a toddler, but my novelty didn’t wear off. I remember an island of green grass in an ocean of red dirt. The sound of buzzing flies and squealing springs on a trampoline. The scent of beer on Dad’s thick, tickling fingers, and the whiff of menthol cigarettes from Mum’s insistent kisses.

  ‘Mummy didn’t have any babies come from her tummy until a little boy named Lech Jack Thomas,’ she cooed, a lullaby that never grew old. ‘Everyone was so happy the day that Bubby Jack was born, but especially Mummy and Daddy. He made up for the sad times, because his face made Mummy feel warm and fuzzy in the tummy.’

  The adoration was unsustainable. I’d never be loved so unconditionally again. This set me up for daily heartbreaks in the real world, where no one responded with quite the same level of amazement.

  We moved to Toowoomba in 1996. My father bought a cheap hotel lease. My mother – who didn’t want to leave the bush – ferried six foster children in a small bus. Dad and I drove separately. I sat in the front passenger seat of a black Ford Falcon with a moon roof. We passed farms that hadn’t yet been subdivided, and the slight bend in the highway where my life would spiral out of control.

  Toowoomba was treated to its wettest year since 1893. I remember pissing rain and hissing winds. The Country Club Hotel was stubbornly rundown, a fitting reflection of the suburb, Mort Estate, which was filled with boarding houses and council flats. The customers were tradies and railway workers with loose bowels and foul mouths. They drank cheap schooners until the sun went down. Then the shot glasses came out and their red necks got hot underneath blue collars.

  ‘Oi, two-pot screamer,’ my father declared to a man speaking lewdly to the barmaid during happy hour. ‘Pull your head in, before I do it for ya.’

  I was forever running from the publican to the bookkeeper. In the office, my mother kept a secret stash of sweeties: milkos, strawberry and creams, chicos and pineapples. She raised seven kids while speed-reading half a dozen novels a week, and could recite ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ verbatim, like a bush poetry jukebox: ‘… the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me, as they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste.’

  We had matching hazel green eyes and generalised anxiety, but my mother was never the same after moving to the Big Smoke. She didn’t like the density of bodies and the condescension of rich agricultural types from old money. During the wettest year since Federation, mosquitoes provided a convenient alibi for clinical depression – she blamed lethargy on Ross River fever.

  Although Dad had the gift of the gab, he was minimalist, not a chatterbox like me.

  He said, ‘Life’s a mixed bag of shit.’

  He said, ‘Death’s a one-horse race.’

  He said, ‘Pity’s the last straw of pride.’

  My father’s poisons of choice included steak-and-bacon sandwiches, snags, rissoles, T-bones, lamb cutlets, rib fillets, deep-fried potatoes, meat pies and sausage rolls. I never saw him eat so much as a chicken nugget or a fish finger, such was his fidelity to red meat.

  ‘Chicken’s for women,’ he told me. ‘Fish is for Christians.’

  ‘What about salad?’ I asked.

  ‘Do I look like a friggin’ guinea pig?’

  Upstairs, when he took a rare break from the bar, a drape of flab hung from the bottom of his Jackie Howe singlets, worn with footy shorts and thongs. His heels cracked under so much weight and yellowed from the application of Rawleigh’s Antiseptic Salve, giving him a perpetually sterile scent. For man and beast, it said on the tin.

  One Sunday afternoon, the licensee evicted a trio of skinheads because a member of the gang was underage. A few hours later, I was bouncing a football around the plastic-wrapped pallets of XXXX Gold and Victoria Bitter. The nu-metal enthusiasts returned with reinforcements.

  ‘Fuck you and your grandson,’ said one.

  I was five. My father was nearly fifty. Half a dozen heavily tattooed teenagers stood on the footpath.

  ‘Say that to my face, ya Nazis,’ he said, so they did.

  Dad went for a quick knockout but missed, before tripping backwards on a gutter. The punks kicked the shit out of him within touching distance of me. A plasterer rushed out from the bar and king-hit the ringleader.

  Afterwards, we sat in the coldroom waiting for the police to make a routine visit. My father applied a cool can of VB to a bleeding eye socket. I was mesmerised not by violence, but by the sight of a humiliated tough guy.

  ‘I’d love to see them throw a punch one on one,’ he said. ‘A bunch of gutless wonders.’

  That year, he suffered a life-threatening heart attack. In the hospital’s smoking area, my mother’s hands were shaking. ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m worried, honey. Dad’s heart is in a bad way.’

  I’d never set foot inside a church, but I spent the next week praying to God and negotiating Dad’s entry to heaven.

  ‘What happens after we die?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sweet stuff-all,’

  he said. ‘We’ll be meat for the worms.’

  Dad came home in a hospital bracelet, compression socks and with fresh scars on a shaved chest. I whipped myself into panic about the fact one day he’d be dead. The interesting thing about my routine retreat into the master bedroom between midnight and sunrise is that my tough-as-nails father didn’t tell me to grow some balls.

  ‘You’re a big boy now,’ said my mother.

  But Dad pulled my small body into a stomach that just kept going, a grizzly bear harbouring a koala. ‘Leave him alone,’ he said. ‘He isn’t doing you any harm.’ I knew that I’d rather cease breathing than be alive without him.

  In 1998, I was a six-year-old obsessed with professional wrestling and rugby league. My parents had paid $70,000 for a dilapidated worker’s cottage. Firewood was piled in a dead garden bed beside the ping-pong table in the carport. I was
n’t strong enough to lift the axe, so I watched my brothers chop kindling atop a metal plate on the concrete driveway, limbs thick with muscle.

  ‘You don’t pee sitting down, do ya?’ they would enquire when I burst into tears if they didn’t hand over the Super Nintendo control.

  ‘Mummy’s boy!’ my sisters would sing whenever I ran to the matriarch after a disagreement on the trampoline.

  ‘Are you a man or a mouse?’ my father would ask.

  ‘I’m a m-m-man!’ I cried in my high-pitched stutter, an impediment that appeared whenever I got flustered.

  At the 1998 NRL grand final, I was dressed from head to toe in maroon and yellow, as the Broncos defeated the Bulldogs 38–12. Allan Langer was made captain of Australia. On TV, I watched the haka being performed by enormous Kiwis. Luckily, my father had X-ray vision for the internal organs of other men. He pointed at the biggest, meanest rival forward. ‘Relax,’ he said. ‘That guy’s got a heart the size of a split pea.’

  Meanwhile, during pre-season training for the under-sevens, it became tragically apparent that the Blaine rugby league gene had gone on strike during my conception.

  ‘You’re gonna catch a cold out on the sting!’ yelled my father, the team manager. ‘Take a run up the guts.’

  After winning four grand finals in seven years, Allan Langer dramatically announced his retirement, relocating to play for a team in the north of England.

  In the second season, my puppy fat was no longer adorable: I was certifiably obese, thanks to a strict diet of steak sandwiches, while the other boys were even leaner and more bloodthirsty than before.

  My brother Steven carried all of my father’s athletic expectations. He won St Mary’s Best and Fairest over Johnathan Thurston and Jaiman Lowe, two future NRL stars. Dad brought his prized horseracing binoculars to Steven’s games and made me magnify my brother’s textbook defensive style.

  ‘See how he creases blokes with the point of his shoulder?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘No hands! Imagine they’ve been amputated off.’

  The issue, in his words, was I had shoulders like a brown snake. I couldn’t sleep before my final game of the season, visualising a boy with bleeding shoulderblades. I volunteered to warm the bench after suffering a panic attack in the dressing sheds.

  ‘What’s wrong with ya?’ asked the relieved coach, who was forced by protocol to rotate the weaker players with the best.

  ‘I don’t feel good in the guts.’

  ‘Ya got the runs?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  My father knew I didn’t have diarrhoea, but he played along with the charade. We left before the half-time siren. He’d spent thirty years coaching rugby league players and had seen enough to know that his son wasn’t one.

  ‘Next year you should go back to playing hockey with your sisters,’ he said. ‘Don’t do something unless it’s fun.’

  At home, I flung my underwhelming body onto my bed. The anguish blared from both lungs like a full-time siren. Mum rushed in from the Hills Hoist and hugged me. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  I told her that Dad wanted me to retire from football. ‘I’ve got a heart the size of split pea,’ I said.

  My mother tried to comfort me without betraying an underlying glee that I was more like her than my father. ‘Don’t be silly. You’ve got the biggest heart of any little boy that I’ve ever met! It’s a blessing to feel all of those feelings.’

  ‘Why can’t I crease people like Steven?’

  ‘Because you aren’t Steven. You’re Lech.’

  Without denying the possibility I might one day play halfback for the Brisbane Broncos, Mum explained that everyone was born with a different gift. ‘You’ve got a brain that’s wider than the sky,’ said the stay-at-home poet, plagiarising Emily Dickinson. ‘It’s deeper than the sea.’

  ‘I don’t want a big brain. I want big guns!’

  ‘I know, baby. But one day you’ll work out that all the muscles in the world aren’t worth an imagination like yours.’

  Quitting rugby league heralded my improvised identity as an extroverted bookworm. On the way to cricket practice, my father and I ate sausage rolls smothered in tomato sauce, washed down with strawberry milk. I covered my nose with zinc and bowled leg spin off three steps like my hero Shane Warne.

  ‘I smell b-b-blood, fellas!’ I spluttered, while glowering at the puzzled batsmen like they were on death row.

  On Sunday afternoons, I went to Toowoomba Library with my mother, who generally dressed in second-hand jeans and sneakers from Lifeline, where she volunteered twice a week.

  ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff, baby,’ said my mother, despite logging the most prosaic facts about me in a diary.

  ‘Why do you write all that stuff?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I don’t want to forget anything.’

  Mum preferred to write down arguments over shouting them. I grew up hearing her read other people’s perfect sentences to me. And slowly but certainly I was converted to a life of reading and writing, just as she had been.

  Dad sold the pub and bought the corner store across the road from my public primary school – a man who lived a hundred kilometres an hour trying to stay alive by slowing down. It was the worst financial investment of his life. Families started fleeing the suburb due to a series of ghastly murders. The reluctant shopkeeper spent his new career bartering with junkies over the price of Chiko Rolls, selling Hustler to underage teens and putting cigarettes on tick for destitute pensioners.

  I was delighted by the development, because we’d never spent so much uninterrupted time together. Dad studied form guides and made calls to the TAB, but the bets were bad more often than good. To improve his mood, I peppered him with the names of athletes and politicians from encyclopaedias. John Curtin and Don Bradman. Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali. Nelson Mandela and Imran Khan.

  ‘Taking it easy’s for wimps,’ he said.

  Dad loved the Beatles, the Australian Labor Party and the Maroons, Queensland’s rugby league team. He delivered sermons on a holy trinity of duos that made the skin on my forearms tingle: John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, Wally Lewis and Allan Langer. ‘They were better together,’ he said. ‘Like you and me.’

  But it was clear that he preferred Lennon’s dark charisma over McCartney’s choirboy perfectionism, Hawke’s common touch over Keating’s intellect, Langer’s enigmatic brilliance over Lewis’s persistent physicality.

  ‘Who would ya rather have a beer with?’ he asked a nine-year-old who had never tasted alcohol.

  ‘Hawkie!’

  ‘There’s your answer.’

  ‘What was Keating like?’

  Dad, that 140-kilogram totem of masculinity, would pucker his lips and swivel his wrist in the air, insinuating that Keating was a sheila. ‘Bloody good treasurer. But he’d rather be at the Opera House than Belmore Oval.’

  My father preferred doers to thinkers, loose cannons to tall poppies, larrikins to wowsers. He wanted me to be brilliant without thinking I was better than battlers like him.

  ‘Why did you call me Lech?’ I asked, never getting sick of the gleam that appeared in his tired eyes.

  ‘Lech Wałęsa is a hero. Trade unionist like your Pop. A sparkie who rewrote history. Because people believed in the rights of the worker! That’s what we need, mate. A Lech Wałęsa – or a Lech Blaine – who stands up for the battlers. Unlike that rat Little Johnny Howard.’

  He burst into an anthem for the proletariat. ‘Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever!’

  ‘For the union makes us strong!’ I chimed in.

  That year, 2001, Queensland seemed on a hiding to nothing in the State of Origin. The Maroons had lost all three matches of the previous series. They won the first game of the current series before getting flogged in the second. No halves were available for the decider.

  Nobody had ever been picked from England before, but coach Wayne Bennett
– whom my father called ‘the Svengali of Lang Park’ – selected a 35-year-old Allan Langer to be halfback, booking flights under a fake name.

  ‘Shut the gates!’ said Dad. ‘It’s an old-fashioned ambush!’

  Using scissors and glue, I collated every single article about the resurrection of Allan Langer into a scrapbook. The southern media called my cousin too unfit, too old for the huge New South Wales forward pack.

  Dad and I made a high-octane pilgrimage from the country to the state capital, blood pulsing to the drumbeat of history. On the highway, we listened to a shock jock brag about how Queensland were inferior ‘on paper’.

  ‘Lucky rugby league isn’t played on paper, ya muppets,’ the driver roared into the air-conditioning vent.

  I wanted to prove that life was more meaningful when captured in words, so I opened my notebook and recited a poem I’d been writing called ‘The Ballad of a Battler’, plagiarising the cadence of ‘Bradman’ by Paul Kelly:

  history wasn’t meant to star men like them

  the old coach was a tall and skinny Svengali

  the bald halfback was smaller than Napoleon

  but he had a heart the size of Ali!

  My father’s eyes glinted with bewilderment and glee. He slapped the steering wheel like I’d just cracked Fermat’s theorem, rendering him responsible for a genius. ‘You’re a better poet than Banjo Paterson!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, slightly embarrassed.

  ‘Ya mum’s son, aren’t ya? More brains than brawn.’

  My father stopped to drop five hundred on the underdogs to win by thirteen-plus.

  A payout would triple the savings in my Dollarmites account. ‘You hold onto it, Banjo,’ he said, folding and passing me the betting slip for good luck. ‘I’ll give ya half if we get up.’

  At Queen Elizabeth II Stadium, the crowd was gripped by adrenaline and apprehension. With my father’s horseracing binoculars, I watched maroon jerseys blow through smoke at the end of a tunnel. The two of us stood with 50,000 others and screamed obscenely.