Car Crash

by Lech Blaine

  My father dropped me to a sleepover at Big Red’s farm. I swigged from a triumphant stubbie of XXXX Gold. ‘Nothin’ tastes better than winner’s piss,’ he grinned.

  Unbeknown to him, my supervised consumption of alcohol was only a matinee: Big Red’s older brother Terry was having a party for the first football team. I had stashed a bottle of Bundaberg rum and a packet of Winfield Blues in my backpack while cleaning the pub.

  Big Red and I set up a tent in a paddock. We mixed the rum with ginger ale and infiltrated the party as soon as it was too dark for Red’s parents to see us.

  Around the bonfire, seniors toasted the novelty of a chain-smoking thirteen-year-old who sculled beer like Bob Hawke. ‘Come on, the blue and the white!’ I shouted, before crushing a tin of XXXX Bitter down my gullet.

  At dawn, I awoke on a haybale, half my eyebrow gone thanks to a Gillette razor. Unwisely, I decided to lose the surviving eyebrow before my father’s arrival. ‘Did you try to root a lawn mower?’ he asked.

  The following Saturday, I attended the Toowoomba eight-ball banquet at Rumours, a local function centre. My father, as president of the association, pressed the flesh with his bickering constituents while my shitfaced teammates supplied a minor with Jim Beam cans.

  ‘It’s one of my proudest moments,’ Dad said, in a post-dinner address, ‘to win a grand final with my young bloke.’

  After collecting the premiership trophy, I betrayed my inebriation by slurring ‘Eagle Rock’ in karaoke, dropping my trousers during the chorus like I’d seen so many drunks do. The room hooted with amusement at the coronation of a precocious rogue. Then I regurgitated five cans of Jim Beam and Coke across the stage.

  The level of outrage from onlookers correlated closely with whether or not they belonged to the rival clique counting the numbers against the president.

  ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ was all that my hungover father said the next day. ‘Or she’ll skin the both of us.’

  On Monday morning, the sports section of the local paper featured a leak from one of Dad’s anonymous rivals, alleging that he had allowed underage drinking at the banquet. Dad immediately lodged his resignation.

  My mother didn’t need an investigation to guess the identity of the legless adolescent. ‘I don’t want my son to be known as the town drunk,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe he wouldn’t drink so much if you weren’t half-sloshed most nights,’ said my father.

  ‘Thomas, don’t you dare make this about my drinking,’ Mum screeched tearfully. ‘You let him get away with murder. And one day he’s going to get hurt.’

  I was officially grounded, and spent a rainless wet season working in the bottle-o of the Bernborough Tavern, Dad’s most profitable business yet. It was named after a famous dead racehorse and situated on the main strip of Oakey, a glum town in the guts of Pauline Hanson country. My job was to restack cartons using the forklift and wrap tallies in newspaper to keep them refrigerated.

  On the daily pilgrimage between the suburbs and the bush, hurtling past drought-stricken farm paddocks, my increasingly reclusive mother complained about being treated as a chauffeur for the teenage employee of a husband she rarely saw anymore. ‘I’m just a cog in his machine,’ she said, ‘until he doesn’t need me.’

  I plugged in headphones and muted her gripes with the iPod paid for by her adversary. Steven’s Nirvana and Pearl Jam mixtapes provided a segue to the Pixies, the Stooges and the Smiths. I wrote down couplets in a notepad and imagined myself singing them with the same sexual tension as Morrissey or Iggy Pop.

  This musical awakening coincided with my breakthrough ejaculation. My god! I finally understood what all the fuss was about. The junior bottle-shop attendant spent every spare moment in the cold room with a People magazine while jerking off into one of the brown paper bags that we used for wine bottles.

  ‘You’re gonna get frostbite in there,’ said my father when he came downstairs from the front bar.

  ‘It’s too hot out here,’ I said.

  The hardest part of the job was asking for proof of age from abattoir workers, whose Southern Cross tattoos matched their Love It or Leave It bumper stickers.

  ‘Suck my dick, ya unborn-lookin’ little cunt!’ said one customer, in reference to my vandalised eyebrows.

  It was the unforgettable summer of the Cronulla riots. I was the closest source of XXXX Gold and Bundaberg rum and Coke cans, as Alan Jones – Oakey’s most famous national export – whipped the local neo-Nazis into a frenzy.

  ‘I’ll tell you what they should do,’ said one deadbeat regular. ‘Round all these shitskins up and drown ’em.’

  ‘You’re a Nazi!’ I said.

  ‘You’re a poofter,’ he spat.

  Each day, the clearest dissenting voice of compassion was a refugee advocate named Ian Rintoul, who defended boat people on the news. I tracked down his Hotmail address, and we became pen pals. Rintoul sent reams of socialist magazines featuring diatribes against the Iraq War and offshore detention.

  ‘There’s no difference between Labor and Liberal,’ I said to my father on the way home one night.

  ‘That’s real easy to say,’ he said, aghast at my rising nihilism. ‘You’ve never worked a hard day in your life.’

  My identity crisis continued into the new school year. Now that my sporting career was over, I defected from the jocks to a motley crew of musicians and drama students, ignoring pleas from Big Red, Nick and Tim to remain faithful.

  Most controversially from my father’s perspective, I registered a moral opposition to horseracing. ‘It’s quite inhumane,’ I said, when he asked if I wanted to come watch one of his new thoroughbreds run.

  ‘Inhumane. I’ll tell ya what’s inhumane – thinking everyone’s an inbred ’cept for you. Wake up to yourself.’

  That year, 2006, the culture war between us engulfed the whole district. As dams edged towards empty, the mayor – an environmentalist named Dianne Thorley – tried to introduce recycled sewage water. Due to her short hair and a gruff voice, she was accused of being a lesbian. Clive Berghofer, a real estate developer, joined forces with Lyle Shelton, a Pentecostal on council. Their slogan was simple: IT’S OKAY TO VOTE NO.

  ‘We are known as the Garden City,’ said Berghofer, a high-school dropout who’d subdivided 10,000 blocks of land. ‘Now we are the Shit City or Poowoomba.’

  After the release of An Inconvenient Truth, which I watched with self-righteousness, 62 per cent of my home town voted no to recycled water based on fake news funded by a megalomaniac millionaire. Capitalism and Christianity waged a scatological battle against science.

  I can’t wait to escape this place, I wrote to Rintoul.

  That summer, I returned to the bottle-o a different boy to the one of the Christmas before. On a Sunday afternoon, ‘This Charming Man’ by the Smiths jangled as I served a farmer, who suffered an anaphylactic reaction.

  ‘Are you one of those faggots?’ he asked.

  Mercifully, the door to the front bar swung open, revealing my brother John. ‘What’s goin’ on?’ he asked, detecting the tension from the customer’s disgusted lips and the attendant’s blushing cheeks.

  ‘He called me a faggot,’ I said.

  ‘Why don’t you call me a faggot,’ he said, before landing a clean punch on the customer’s chin. ‘Ya faggot!’

  A feeling of safety and shame followed the quarrel. Did my reliance on John’s muscle make me any better than the bigot? ‘Thanks, mate,’ I said.

  Morrissey kept whining. John slapped the laptop shut like it contained a virus, and put my pink-tipped copy of Plath’s The Bell Jar in the drawer with the porn magazines. ‘Cut that shit out around here,’ he said.

  I didn’t think that I was gay, but had faced persistent suspicions about this possibility since growing my hair long and carrying a book with me everywhere.

  My mother had recently brought home a second-hand hardcover called Treasury of Great Short Stories. ‘So that was the end of that marriage,’ read
the final sentence of an eight-page masterpiece by Virginia Woolf.

  Hemingway bored me, but I loved Fitzgerald, because he allowed the kinds of emotions that I’d learned to repress to erupt above the surface. Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ led me to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I borrowed from Toowoomba Library. In the bottle-o, I suffered the rapture of having my specific alienation captured by an Irish stranger ninety years earlier. My Grade Ten English teacher, Mr Shaw, was a wisp of a man with a feminine inflection. He suggested that I enter a statewide writing competition. I won with a short story about a woman who dreams of murdering her father, the philandering prime minister.

  ‘This isn’t a little hobby,’ he said conspiratorially in the hallway after school. ‘A university degree in literature and writing could turn you into something special.’

  I had sixteen aunties and uncles, and ten of them hadn’t made it past primary school. Only one had reached Grade Ten. To compensate, my father wanted me to study something magnificent like law or economics.

  At the halfway mark of Grade Ten, on the way home from a careers seminar with my feuding parents, I announced that I intended to study English literature.

  ‘That’s exactly what I would have done!’ said Mum. ‘Don’t worry about money. Do what you love.’

  In the rear-view mirror, a king saw his legacy disappearing. He was appalled that I was becoming a nervous bookworm who preferred creativity and solitude to popularity and profit. In other words, my mother’s son.

  ‘I thought you wanted to be the PM,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t just be the prime minister.’

  Dad didn’t believe that I needed to literally be prime minister, but that I was raising a white flag to my enemies by not wanting to participate in the political process. ‘There’s no point pissing in from outside the tent.’

  The 2007 election provided us with an opportunity to reconcile. We handed out how-to-vote cards for Labor at one of the most right-wing polling booths in the country. ‘Your face will be on the signs one day,’ said my father, trying to reignite my political ambitions.

  That night, I wore a Che Guevara t-shirt and red Converse to Sizzler for dinner with John and Dad. Dad proposed a toast during the cheese-bread entrée. ‘To Mr Howard,’ he said. ‘Suck shit, dickhead.’

  John was only twenty-four, but he had three daughters and a mortgage. He was my father’s second-in-charge at the family business, and one of ‘Howard’s battlers’ – a new generation of working-class conservatives.

  ‘Kevin Rudd will fuck this country,’ he said. ‘You may as well open the floodgates to boat people.’

  ‘You sound like Pauline Hanson,’ I said.

  ‘She says what a lot of people are thinking.’

  ‘So you’re a Nazi now, too?’

  John’s feelings came from his mouth in a stream, and I could tell that he’d been dwelling on them. ‘Do-gooders are ruining this country,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s a racist nowadays. And it’ll be people like me with real jobs who pay for all the damage. While smug cunts like you are jerking each other off at university.’

  I tried to hold back the tears that welled in my eyes whenever I got into a fight with the men in my family.

  ‘Solidarity forever!’ my father sang, aiming to inflame John, or to induce a truce between the two of us. But I knew he had more in common with his tough bartender son than with me, and that Kevin Rudd had more in common with John Howard than with Nick Cave or David Malouf.

  ‘For the union makes us strong,’ I whispered.

  Deep down, the only people I felt solidarity with were my favourite musicians and writers. I wanted to be an artist, not a son, brother, mate, Australian, larrikin. But in the dusk of John Howard’s reign, when the mundane suffocated the sublime, my dreams felt like treason.

  Blank Volcanoes

  I came of age on the grave of a volcano. There was no saving me from the flames.

  By December 2007, Hannah had graduated and hightailed it to Brisbane. Trent was on a fishing trawler somewhere. Rebecca and Steven had moved interstate. John lived five minutes away, with his own family.

  ‘I’ll have too much time on my hands,’ said Mum.

  Summer was the season for people to stop playing dumb. Before Christmas, my father announced that he was moving out too. The s-word was never mentioned, let alone the petrifying d-word. ‘Your mum and me are taking a breather,’ was all Dad said.

  ‘You’re splitting the sheets?’ I asked.

  ‘Let’s just take this one week at a time.’

  Dad left everything except the ute, a suitcase of clothes and fifty items of sporting memorabilia. He moved into the private quarters of the Drayton Tavern, a rundown pub in a rough suburb.

  ‘You can’t take it to the grave,’ my mother cried during the rumpus-room debates about their doomed marriage.

  Dying with an intact modest property empire was precisely what my father had in mind. Fresh from a triple heart bypass, he offered his wife a debtless family home in exchange for all the rental properties and bank repayments. He was terrified of having a final, fatal heart attack and my inheritance getting squandered.

  ‘She’s a great lady, ya mum,’ he said. ‘Such a shame. I wish it could be different. She’s a bloody good woman.’

  I interpreted his leaving as a vote of no confidence in me, and decided I wanted to be prime minister again.

  That summer, I spent every spare moment at Tim’s nuclear home in Middle Ridge, with parents who didn’t seem sick of their son. His friendship was the only safe bet in a life filled with flakes. At night, we binged on slapstick comedies, before sunburnt days playing backyard cricket and one-on-one football.

  ‘You’re a prop trapped in a halfback’s body,’ he said.

  I convinced Tim to stay at St Mary’s until graduation, rather than dropping out to finish his bricklaying apprenticeship. In return, I defected back to sit with the rugby league players on the first day of Grade Eleven. ‘Penis!’ we shouted, until the loudest got sent to the Responsible Thinking Classroom for detention.

  The class chameleon went on holidays as a sarcastic artist and came back as a sensitive new-age jock. I tried to plug the round hole of my father’s departure and my mother’s depression with the square peg of high-school popularity.

  After Dad left, Mum’s weekly carton of Bundaberg rum and Coke became a daily six-pack. A foster carer whose love for troubled children had won official recognition from the government could now barely make eye contact with her only biological child. ‘My arthritis gets bad in the afternoons,’ she said, asking if I could get lifts home from school.

  Eventually, I called bullshit on her continued excuses, sending an email from my laptop in the granny flat to the desktop computer in the poolroom.

  Mum, it is time to talk about your drinking. You are a different woman to the one who I loved growing up. I’m no longer receiving an adequate standard of parenting.

  I was gripped by the delusion that her drinking drove my father away, rather than the more convoluted truth that she drank to pacify anxiety about the psychological Titanic of their marriage. The final paragraph of my ultimatum was an olive branch shot from a cannon.

  We need to work together to make things better, because I don’t want to remember you as an alcoholic.

  Mum never responded or mentioned the email. We skirted each other with expertise. When we did cross paths, I detailed my father’s complaints to fresh effect; Mum shrank away in tears. I slunk off to the granny flat. She felt betrayed. I was bitter that her nervous breakdown had been reserved for me.

  On a Saturday afternoon, I went to watch Tim, Nick and Big Red play for the Souths Tigers, my old team.

  ‘DEEE-FENCE!’ chanted a father. ‘DEEE-FENCE!’

  Nick had left St Mary’s for Downlands at the start of that year. I sat on the sidelines with Henry and Dom, two of Nick’s fresh connections, as my dependable friend scored an impressive three tries.

  ‘Are you c
oming to the afterparty, Blaine Train?’ asked Henry, offering a nickname like we’d known each other since preschool.

  ‘I don’t want to start a fight,’ I said.

  There was a history of brawls between Downlands and St Mary’s boys at parties and socials. St Mary’s were generally the gatecrashers and instigators. But for once, my absence of muscles was an advantage.

  ‘You’re coming,’ snickered Henry. ‘Pre-drinks are at Nick’s.’

  I’d been planning to attend a St Mary’s gathering with the same old faces. But a shindig at a mansion with my new mates, plus another hundred strangers, was irresistible.

  ‘I just got my licence,’ said Dom. ‘Get a lift with us.’

  After the game, I got into the people-mover belonging to Dom’s parents, beside a bruised Nick. He had no issue with me riding the coattails of his social prestige.

  ‘I love you, Blainey,’ he said. ‘Shit, you’re funny.’

  50 Cent’s ‘In Da Club’ blasted from the speakers, segueing into ‘Lollipop’ by Lil Wayne. A revving engine and a carful of laughter was a panacea for my sense of rejection.

  In the summer that followed, I spent every spare moment at Nick’s expanding McMansion in Toowoomba’s northwestern sprawl. His tradie father had added a bedroom, a bar, a rumpus room and a pool since I had first stayed over as a wowed ten-year-old. It was now a halfway house for private-school students on holidays.

  come over right now, Nick messaged me. hurry up!!!!!!

  I arrived with a carton of cheap beers and watched Nick and Henry finish a gym workout in the home cinema.

  ‘Do you feel the burn?’ asked Nick.

  ‘I feel it!’ said Henry. ‘God, I feel the burn.’

  Henry was a smash hit with the opposite sex.

  ‘Give me your six-pack,’

  I said, ‘and I’d be unstoppable.’

  ‘You don’t need a six-pack if you have a personality,’ he said. ‘Girls want someone who can talk to them.’

  ‘Are you the love guru?’