Car Crash

by Lech Blaine

  ‘The crowd to a man is standing to welcome home Allan Langer,’ said the commentator to those watching at home. ‘Former Australian captain playing his thirty-first Origin. Twenty-two test matches, 240 premiership games, and four times a grand final victor. Alfie is back in town!’

  My father and I ate hot dogs and shared a carton of chips. ‘Feed the weak pricks!’ he said.

  That night, Queensland executed Bennett’s ingenious game plan: bash the Blues and give the ball to Allan Langer, state larrikin, leading to a 40–14 thrashing of the establishment. The bald bombshell sidestepped and ducked under two huge but lumbering NSW forwards, planting the ball on the white line, in an act of unorthodox yet sublime physical virtuosity.

  My father was mesmerised by this masterpiece, like Beethoven had been raised from the dead to play piano for Mozart, or da Vinci to paint Marilyn Monroe. Tears streamed down beaming cheeks. I’d never seen him cry.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Alfie’s got spiders on him tonight.’

  During the next week, while grubbering my weather-damaged Steeden, I visualised a packed stadium chanting LECH! LECH! LECH! after I led the Labor Party to an upset victory at the 2030 election. Before dinner, my father grinned at his dreamy son reading from an almanac of Australian prime ministers.

  ‘You’ll be in there one day,’ he said, seeing himself as having a Midas touch for greatness.

  ‘No way,’ I said.

  ‘Mate, that’s what they said about Alf! Back yourself.’

  He had a point. A young poet’s dream to be the prime minister didn’t seem more implausible than my cousin becoming Queensland’s greatest halfback of all time. Rationally, it was better odds. Politics didn’t require innate physical greatness. I just needed to be me: a know-it-all who loved the sound of my own voice, the sight of a huge crowd and the romance of an underdog.

  St Mary’s was where sensitive young men went to become good blokes with ripped biceps and high libidos. It was a budget private school for the taciturn sons of aspirational Catholics. My atheist father didn’t have a godly ligament in his body, but he believed in tough love.

  ‘It’ll harden him up a bit,’ I overheard him telling my mother, who suggested I might apply for an academic scholarship at the highfalutin’ Grammar School.

  ‘What difference does it make if we don’t have to pay?’ she asked.

  ‘Alan Jones went to Grammar,’ he said. ‘My son isn’t becoming one of them silver-spoon-fed dickheads.’

  St Mary’s didn’t just cut down tall poppies – they were shredded. On that first day at the Christian Brothers school, I made the sign of the cross for the first time and mumbled my way through the Lord’s Prayer. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name …’

  I was the only class member who hadn’t been baptised, which I kept secret by accepting the sacrament at Mass. Mrs McCarthy asked me to introduce myself and tell everyone what I wanted to be when I grew up.

  ‘I want to play for Q-Q-Queensland,’ I stammered.

  ‘You’ll need to lose some k-k-kilos,’ someone whispered, to widespread laughter.

  ‘Tell us the most interesting thing about you,’ said Mrs McCarthy.

  ‘My cousin is Alfie Langer!’ I said.

  This was why Nick showed the fat kid pity at morning tea. His grandfather had played rugby league for St George and cricket for New South Wales. He recruited me to sit with the football players, including Big Red, a shy, gargantuan front-rower with flaming red hair. Big Red’s maternal grandad had played prop for the Kangaroos, and his paternal grandfather had been a prop for the Wallabies.

  I followed my father’s advice. ‘It’s like jail,’ he’d told me that morning. ‘Become best mates with the biggest bloke.’

  My father had sold the shop and secured the lease of the Metropole Hotel for free, because it was so rundown and renowned for violence that no one else was game. His business model was to scrape up the lowest scum from a swamp. ‘Someone’s got to take their money,’ he said.

  A pothead Dolly Parton lookalike named Sharon hosted open mics on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons. I considered myself a Cold Chisel cover artist, studying their lyrics like Shakespeare had written them. This prepubescent Jimmy Barnes serenaded the plastered tradies with ‘Flame Trees’ and ‘Khe Sanh’.

  ‘G’day, mate,’ I barked at the assembled barflies each afternoon. I played eight-ball with my tie loosened and shirt untucked until my mother arrived for dinner.

  ‘Ya boy’s a shark, Tommy,’ said a deadbeat regular I cleaned up. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  My brother John was an A-grade champion and state rep. Dad was a champion B-grader, and president of the local eight-ball and darts associations. He didn’t hand out trophies for preying on blokes who couldn’t shoot straight. ‘Pity the competition’s weak as piss,’ he said.

  On a Sunday afternoon, in the mugs’ competition, I made it to the final eight before capitulating on the black ball. I shrieked and spat and threw the cue into the rack, refusing to shake my opponent’s hand. My father banned me from playing eight-ball for a month.

  ‘You need to learn how to lose like a man,’ he said. ‘I don’t care how bad you choke: always shake the other bloke’s hand.’

  This was Stoicism 101. There was no more important quality in a man than making eye contact with heartbreak.

  By the age of eleven, with the lucky country entering the seventh year of John Howard’s prime ministership, I was totally beholden to a holy trinity of influences: Christianity, masculinity and capitalism. Thanks to the mining and property booms, my parents were now technically middle-class. They went from having nothing but the lease of a rundown pub to owning six fixer-upper investment properties.

  ‘You can’t look a gift horse in the mouth,’ said my father, who was astounded that the bank kept offering him more mortgages at such low interest rates.

  ‘How many do you need to be happy?’ asked Mum, who objected to the basic morality of property investment.

  ‘How long’s a piece of string?’ he asked.

  My father assuaged his sense of class betrayal by becoming president of a virulently left-wing branch of the Labor Party, fighting for the rights of blue-collar workers and against the privatisation of state assets.

  On Saturday afternoons, following cricket, we attended open homes before doing a tour of our booming rentals. It was like the scene in The Lion King where Mufasa shows Simba all he will inherit. Dad made a parade of the privilege he was killing himself to give me.

  ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘one day this will all be yours.’

  My father never questioned whether this – a house of cards built on negative gearing and low interest rates – was something I wanted. He had all my desires for me.

  Sitting in the front passenger seat, I felt protected from the threats of my father’s type 2 diabetes and escalating stress. Dad left his mobile phone on silent in the glove box as a sign of love. I never felt less anxious than I did in those precious hours we spent alone together.

  The rental prices outgrew the repayments, and there were only three kids left at home, so we inspected a six-bedroom home in the lower middle-class suburb of Glenvale. One Evergreen Court. The bathrooms had exhaust fans and heat lamps.

  ‘This is way too fancy for us,’ said my mother.

  ‘Not anymore,’ said my father.

  The contract settled just before Christmas 2003. I felt like the winner of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The poolroom featured a brand-new eight-ball table, with walls adorned by portraits of Allan Langer and my siblings in Queensland and Australian jerseys.

  A jacuzzi sat on the back patio. I vibrated in that gratuitous spa beside an affluent battler. The summer breeze collected petrol fumes from the road, dog shit from the lawn and lavender scent from clothes drying on the line.

  ‘You wouldn’t be dead for quids, would ya?’ he said.

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘This is living.’

  Mum
and Dad had traded the low expectations of postwar council estates for the intolerable options of 21st-century suburbia. They were ‘cashed-up bogans’, rich enough to buy a house with a dishwasher and separate rooms for the married couple, who still looked and sounded true to their blue-collar bloodlines.

  I earned my inheritance by cleaning the pub for five dollars an hour. Steven and John had turned the private quarters upstairs into a downtown bachelor pad. One morning, my dead-eyed father and I crept past bedrooms that stank of cologne, perfume and body fluids. ‘Steve’s quality over quantity,’ he whispered. ‘John’s a numbers man. He’d root anything with a pulse, that bloke.’

  My brothers were chalk and cheese, yet enviable in unique ways. Six-packed Steven played rugby league for the Australian university team and got high distinctions in accounting. John threw in a roofing apprenticeship to work as a bartender at the Metropole. He was a six-foot, 105-kilogram prop forward who punched people for fun.

  ‘If you could get Steve’s looks and John’s gift of the gab with the women,’ said Dad, ‘you’d be laughing.’

  This didn’t need to be said: my plan for adolescence was to streamline Steven’s OCD perfectionism and John’s self-destructive charisma into the dream son.

  ‘What were your brothers like?’ I asked.

  My father and I changed kegs and cleaned the beer lines. He told me that Ted had been a boxer in the navy, George a housepainter and pugnacious rugby league star. Larrikins with quick fists and big swinging dicks.

  ‘That’s one of life’s greatest mysteries,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  My father wasn’t too proud to admit that the two of us had been lumbered with underwhelming phalluses by comparison. ‘Your uncles had longer cocks than Phar Lap. The two of us drew the short straw.’

  I tried to tip crates of cans and bottles into metal drums without leaking bin juice onto my feet. The shattering glass made a cacophony with the scattering pigeons that covered the back alley in a thick layer of bird shit. I emptied ashtrays and replaced the soaked beer mats and coasters, while daydreaming about the girls I might one day root if I became buffer and better hung.

  After emptying the pokies, I retired to the upstairs office, where I studied my brother’s porn collections. But nothing happened no matter how much I masturbated, except sharp frustration about the lack of pleasure.

  At a routine flu shot, I raised the issue with Dr Rattray, the family GP. I didn’t know that he’d just prescribed Lexapro to my mother for the bouts of unhappiness that had followed her blossoming prosperity like hayfever.

  The doctor pulled my foreskin back with gloved fingers and gave a shy cock his unconvincing tick of approval.

  ‘This is actually just about average,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, the boys with the median penises aren’t the ones flashing them.’

  ‘Is there anything else I can do?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, you could lose a few kilos. You’re still a little bit over-weight at the moment. And that’s not doing you any favours when you look in the bathroom mirror.’

  I went on a detox from meat pies, steak sandwiches and soft drinks, subsisting on Weet-Bix for breakfast, a green apple for morning tea, and rice cakes and tinned tuna for lunch.

  I supplemented my diet with a summer fitness kick. My sister Hannah – captain of the Queensland hockey team – aspired to Olympic gold. ‘You need to do burpees while everyone else is sunbaking,’ she said.

  We spent Boxing Day on a brutal boot camp in the front yard. I did push-ups and sit-ups in the scorching sun, and hill sprints with my neck and arms poked through a garbage bag like a jockey before final weigh-in.

  ‘You’ve been training the house down,’ said Dad, nose burnt from lawn bowls. ‘I can barely recognise ya!’

  ‘I don’t love you any more or less than before,’ said my mother, but I’d stopped paying her much attention.

  My mediocre rugby league career was to peak at the age of twelve. Our coach, Mr Manthey, was the same age as Allan Langer, but the schoolboy prodigy had never cracked first grade at the Brisbane Broncos due to four straight knee reconstructions. ‘It’s a shame,’ he told me. ‘I was never the same player.’

  I was determined to make the St Mary’s under-twelve As. My tear ducts had been plugged and the stutter was gone. Unfortunately, I still had the size of a halfback and the speed of a slow front-rower. But I had a secret weapon at the trials: my best mate Big Red. The star player let the class clown repeatedly upend him defensively, while moaning like I’d pierced his spleen.

  ‘Lech Blaine!’ said Mr Manthey. ‘That’s textbook defence.’

  On Monday morning, my name was the final entry on the noticeboard. 17: Lech Blaine. Mr Manthey was the first coach to glimpse my true abilities: thanks to thousands of hours watching games, I processed the plays in slow motion, divining tactics and outcomes.

  ‘I don’t need you to be Big Red or Nick,’ he said. ‘I want you to come onto the field, make your tackles and tell the team what you see three sets ahead.’

  There was another benefit of my rope-a-dope approach to suffering physical punishment: watching the benchwarmer get folded like a card table a few times fired up the genuine superstars like Big Red and Nick.

  ‘Always take the next hit-up after Big Red,’ said Dad. ‘That kid’s a unit! You’ll be like a cyclist in a slipstream.’

  In the statewide quarterfinals, we played at the sacred North Ipswich Reserve, where Allan Langer had debuted for the Ipswich Jets at seventeen. I savoured the smell of strapping tape and Deep Heat, the taste of Gatorade in a plastic mouthguard, the scrape of a Steeden headgear.

  My father’s arms were folded over a puffy chest. ‘They can’t run without legs!’ he shouted in a foghorn voice.

  It’s hard to distil the beauty and brutality of rugby league. A potential black hole sat waiting at the end of each tackle. I played through a fractured finger, before coming off on suspicion of a concussion, with a black eye from a stray boot. But for once my job was done.

  ‘Players’ player goes to Lech Blaine,’ said Mr Manthey in the locker room, where I led the victory song of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. My face and body throbbed, but group approval was the greatest painkiller of all.

  ‘You had an absolute blinder, mate,’ said my father.

  Football was about drama and adrenaline, karma and kinship. I chased the basic belonging of a male body racing through space towards adoration and oblivion.

  For my thirteenth birthday, Dad organised a private dinner at Hog’s Breath Café. ‘Two rib fillets,’ he said to the waitress with a wink. ‘Medium rare, Diane sauce.’

  Embarrassed by my dramatic weight loss, Dad had joined a gym and lost 20 kilograms. ‘Train hard,’ he said. ‘But play harder.’

  Dad illustrated the difference between illicit drugs and the garden-variety vices that paid for my private school fees by topping up my Diet Coke with his Scotch.

  ‘Marijuana will give ya schizophrenia,’ he whispered.

  ‘I’m not gonna be some druggo!’ I said.

  ‘How about you swear on your mum’s life,’ he said, so we shook hands on my fidelity to binge drinking.

  During the summer holidays, when the pub doors were locked and the publican was counting the tills, he slipped me a fifty to deposit into whichever pokie machine was overdue to pay out. The logbook of major jackpot winners was filled with his creative aliases.

  ‘Five-dollar spins,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way to win.’

  My record-breaking collection was on a horseracing-themed machine called Spring Carnival. Pleasure lit up between my brain cells like a fireworks display. I wished that the free games and hypnotic jingles never finished.

  ‘You little beaut-ay!’ my father sang.

  I started high school sporting a hairstyle known as the St Mary’s bird nest, mix of mohawk and mullet. Tim had a matching haircut, except without my rat’s tail. His parents were Catholics from working-class stock.
We became best friends in the intense way of young men allocating their preferences within a vast marketplace.

  ‘That ratty is filthy,’ he said. ‘I respect it.’

  ‘It’s part of my religious beliefs.’

  ‘Boganism?’

  Before we got our ID photos taken, the assistant principal ruthlessly amputated my rat’s tail with scissors from the science lab. It was an emphatically bad omen. My hard-fought status as a footy jock was short-lived. I had a hundred fresh potential contenders, and most of them had spent the summer profiting from puberty.

  ‘Hey, pretty boy,’ shouted Mr Canning, who’d coached Steven at the height of his schoolboy stardom. ‘Didn’t your brother teach you how to hit with your shoulders?’

  After the trials, my name was recited in the Cs rather than the As with Big Red, Nick and Tim. I ambushed Mr Canning outside his office. ‘I had a bad day,’ I said. ‘I just need another go.’

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You’ve got great ball skills. But you’re slower than a stoned snail.’

  At the end of that season, I decided to retire from rugby league, a jaded, failed athlete at thirteen. I directed all of my sporting ambitions into eight-ball. My father and I entered a team with two Papua New Guineans from the Oakey Meatworks.

  My anti-marijuana father would drive home after drinking eight or nine Scotch and Cokes in a white Ford Falcon ute with red personalised number plates: TOM. ‘I’m sober as a judge,’ he’d say.

  The grand final was on home turf at the Metropole. I secretly slipped half a nip of vodka into my orange juice as a nerve relaxant. Liquor made a worryguts unbeatable.

  Dad – the team captain – nominated me for the tiebreaker. I fell behind off the break but clawed back onto the black. The opponent snookered me. I chalked the tip of the cue three times and hit the white ball on the top right to make it spin left off the cush. The white skewed through a thin slit past two smalls. The black dropped in the hole and filled the chip in my soul.

  ‘Go you good thing!’ said Dad, clapping theatrically.