by Lech Blaine
In the 1960s, my father had owned a house-painting business with his brother George. Now Dad delivered a tutorial about stripping wallpaper, refusing to take the easy way out and hire a steamer from Bunnings.
We saturated plasterboards with a foolproof concoction of hot water and a white powder, waiting for the material to soak through so we could remove it with scrapers. I imagined that ripping down the wallpaper would be akin to unwrapping Christmas presents. It was more like trying to remove permanent marker from a whiteboard with a tissue and spit – and each room contained five whiteboards brimming with black Nikko.
‘Come on, ya mongrel!’ my singlet-wearing father grunted while dripping with sweat, as if we were shearing sheep in one of my mother’s favourite Banjo Paterson poems.
Low-slung footy shorts revealed the purple bruise running from hamstring to hip. The origin story of those permanently burst blood vessels had changed repeatedly over the years. Sometimes one of his sisters had pushed him off a moving truck. Other occasions it had happened when he was a pro wrestler, or a soldier in Vietnam. I could never get a serious answer.
‘How did you actually break your hip?’ I asked, deciding that he owed me some sincerity for the grit.
‘It was a meatworks injury,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you that.’
‘Plus a million other things.’
‘Bloody hell then,’ he said. ‘Strap yourself in.’
My father was the youngest of eleven siblings, and the first educated past primary school. He attended Bremer State High on a scholarship and displayed a natural aptitude for mathematics. ‘Back in those days, you didn’t need a university degree for a good job. I could’ve got a cadetship at the bank with my grades.’
Pop Blaine was unimpressed with those white-collar flights of fancy. A banker! Don’t be a wanker, Tommy. Grade Eight became Dad’s matriculation. A real job was secured at the Ipswich abattoir.
Inside the slaughterhouse, carcasses swung from an overhead line. My father spent his weekdays wielding a knife from a raised concrete platform. The accident happened when he was sixteen, almost the same age I was in the car crash. He slipped on blood and shit from the eviscerated animals, and fell two and a half metres directly onto his hip. A shattered pelvis broke the skin like a hot knife through butter.
‘It was so horrific,’ he said, ‘that I couldn’t really feel anything for a few minutes. And then I just started howling from the agony.’
At the public hospital, an infection nearly killed him. He spent six months convalescing. Dad’s six adoring sisters plied him with a constant stream of comfort food: meat pies, sausage rolls, potato bakes. He packed on twenty kilograms, and a gammy leg ended up two inches shorter than the other.
‘And that’s when Allan Langer was born,’ he said. ‘End of July. I was in the surgery ward; your Auntie Rita was in the maternity ward. The circle of life!’
Unable to run, Dad retired from rugby league, and resigned himself to sports such as darts, pool, golf and bowls. The high-school dropout couldn’t wear a white collar due to a lack of education. This was how he became a jack-of-all-trades: not due to entrepreneurship, but as a means of survival.
Dad went into business with George. George was a great housepainter; Dad was brilliant with figures. But they couldn’t keep the band together without wanting to kill each other. Dad accused him of being too loose with money; George called him a pencil-pushing skirt.
Dad quit, believing that he could eclipse his brother in riches. He bought a petrol station, then a newsagency, then a taxi, doing well enough for himself, but not as well as Uncle George, who became a millionaire through the painting business my father deserted.
‘That prick was kissed on the dick by good luck,’ he said.
I realised that Dad had been me. He was the underwhelming youngest son, a self-loathing benchwarmer, compensating for deep inferiority with crippling ambitions. We both coveted the love of a tough father and the respect of older brothers, due to a sly envy hiding behind all the pisstakes and mythmaking bluster.
That night, Dad watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? followed by the news. In my bedroom, I read Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery, whose work was recommended by the musician and poet David Berman.
… The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim through the eyes
And still return safely to its nest?
Most of the time, I had no idea what Ashbery was going on about – not unlike the blundering drunks at the pub when I was growing up, whose non sequiturs I had pretended to understand. But even Ashbery’s gibberish made more sense than the bland, linear bullshit emitting from the TV.
The prevalence of those grey flakes falling?
They are sun motes. You have slept in the sun
longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.
I couldn’t imagine anything nobler than baffling the world with poetry. Yet I’d wasted so much stress and spit cloaking myself as a down-to-earth bloke.
The next day, I returned to the wallpaper with a vengeance.
‘Sounds like George gave you a hard time,’ I said.
My father chuckled. ‘Yeah, he was a hard bastard.’
‘Is that why you gave me such a hard time?’ I asked.
My father’s eyes shot sideways from the wallpaper, brows furrowing to the bridge of his nose. ‘Give you a hard time … What did you get a hard time about?’
I offered the first example that came to mind: at the age of six, when I announced my retirement from swimming after the second lesson. He told me that I needed to be more like my brothers.
‘It wasn’t a personal preference,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t swim.’
‘Mate, take my word for it. We fostered kids with brain damage who had more of a dig at swimming backstroke than you did.’
I spent the next few hours stripping the wallpaper with a productive hostility. Silently, I pored over all the times after I quit playing football that my father petitioned me to ‘have a go’ and stop spending all my spare time reading books and listening to music.
‘You hated the fact that I wasn’t Steven,’ I said.
Dad had listened to the thesis of fatherly bastardry with mostly dubious amusement until the invocation of my older brother. ‘You’re kidding, aren’t ya? I named you after Lech Wałęsa, not Wally Lewis. You wanted to be the rugby league star.’
‘That would’ve been the only way to get your attention.’
‘What a crock of shit.’
‘When did you ever encourage me to be creative?’
‘I bought you an acoustic guitar. Wasted all that money on piano lessons. Begged you to join the school musicals. To be creative. But in a team! You wanted to be the star of the show. Or you pulled the pin.’
An unreliable narrator was learning how two people can have different interpretations of the same event, how we can translate identical languages into love or pain depending on point of view. Emotions can’t be trusted as far as you can throw them.
‘Deadset,’ he said. ‘You could read The Sydney Morning Herald front to back as a nine-year-old.’
‘Why wasn’t that enough?’ I asked.
‘It was more than enough for me.’
Dad confessed to worrying that my foster siblings would interpret as favouritism the biological son being allowed to quit if he wasn’t gifted at something.
‘It’s all right to be ordinary, too. Like your father.’
‘I don’t think you’re ordinary,’ I said.
‘I don’t need you to pump my tyres up, buddy. I’ve just never understood why you went to war with yourself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can read books and still watch sport. It’s a piece of piss.’
My puberty was spent deciding which identity was the real me and which the alter ego. The artist saw the larrikin as a shallow socialite. The larrikin saw the artist as a miserable elitist. Why did I need to pick sides?
; It took three days to strip the house of wallpaper, and roughly the same amount of time to cover it with two fresh coats of paint.
‘Now we’re cooking with gas,’ Dad said.
Using a Stanley knife, we carved lino into squares. Then we heated the patches with a hairdryer, before excising them with scrapers.
Underneath the lino were impenetrable layers of papier-mâche that had been left to harden for five decades, a booby trap to test the mental fortitude of the money-hungry gentrifier who tried to remove it. Blaine & Son dedicated two days to removing the stubborn substance with bucketloads of toxic chemicals.
‘Come on, you bastard,’ my father grumbled in the sunroom.
On a Thursday evening in the final week of June, a cabal of trade unionists and Labor Party powerbrokers met for dinner in the nation’s capital to stage a coup against the prime minister.
My father and I were nearly finished: all that needed to be done by my court appearance was varnishing the timber floors. We watched TV, warmed by a gas heater.
Smoke signals started blowing from The 7:30 Report. Dad rang an old mate who was on the state Labor executive, hanging up after a blunt chat. ‘The goose is cooked, my friend,’ he announced. ‘The numbers are done. Gillard has the right and most of the left. It’s a classic factional stitch-up.’
Kevin Rudd – with whom I’d been interning until my nervous breakdown – was about to be replaced like old wallpaper by Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister.
My father and I watched the world’s first political uprising triggered by climate change, too excited for sleep. I was loyal to Kevin07. Dad sided with the unionists who ruthlessly knifed him. ‘Solidarity forever!’ he sang over a Diet Coke. ‘For the union makes us strong.’
‘I’m not sure that jingle will win over swinging voters.’
‘I didn’t mind Ruddy. But Gillard is a champion. We’ll have a true believer in the Lodge. Haven’t had one since Hawkie.’
‘Keating popularised that phrase.’
We went to bed after midnight and woke up later than usual. My father boiled a pot of tea. I made an instant coffee plus three Weet-Bix with skim milk. I watched Dad prick his finger for a blood glucose test.
‘Well, I reckon Ruddy’s seat might be coming up for pre-selection. You should throw your hat into the ring.’
‘Politics seems a bit meaningless at the moment.’
What I meant was that I could no longer imagine repeating soundbites each day for five decades. In some form, my life would be dedicated to crystallising the complexity of existence, not denying it.
‘Never say never,’ said my father.
‘Never. My political career was over before it started.’
‘Is that because you got done for drink driving?’
‘Well, it doesn’t look great on the résumé.’
‘Getting kicked out of that strip club won Rudd the election.’
I confessed to my father I wanted to study literature if I went back to university, rather than scheming about the quickest way to win a safe seat.
‘You don’t need to be PM,’ he said. ‘Do whatever makes you want to wake up. Become a poet. Or a housepainter. But do something. Otherwise you’ll lose the plot.’
The confidence of his proclamation offended me.
‘I’ve just been trying to stay alive,’ I said.
‘Has it been that bad?’ Dad asked.
‘Honestly? Yesterday was the first day in a month that I haven’t felt the impulse to flog your car and drive it into the quarry.’
‘I’m happy you didn’t,’ he said. ‘Not just because I love that car. You’ve still got the world at your feet.’
‘I don’t think you can relate to what I’ve been through.’
‘That’s not true.’
For morning tea, Dad made raisin toast. Talkback radio was blowing up. Professional chauvinists had begun their campaign of outrage against a female PM.
‘I lost my parents a few years apart,’ he said.
‘Yeah, I know that.’
Dad occasionally alluded to the death of his parents. But I’d never known my mother’s parents either, so his orphanhood didn’t seem unusual to me, just one more unfortunate aspect of growing up without money.
‘Dad was stronger than an ox,’ he said. ‘Big blacksmith hands. Could’ve killed people with them. But he never laid a finger on us kids.’
My father studied outstretched palms. Hands that seemed so huge to me were now revealed as puny in his eyes.
‘What about your mum?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I got some good floggings from her! She was a tough old girl. But soft on the inside. I was the youngest, so I got a lot of love.’ My father put down his toast, face distorted by anguish. ‘I was thirteen when she kicked the bucket. Way too young to see something like that.’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Let’s have a cuppa,’ he said.
Dad poured two cups, while telling me how one of his mum’s ingrown toenails had become badly infected, as if the contamination had happened last week, not five decades ago. ‘Last thing she said was, “I might not have a big toe when you come home from school, Tommy. Take one last look before you go.”’
At the hospital, during the routine procedure, her already volatile blood pressure went through the roof. She suffered a brain haemorrhage, blood dissolving every memory from two world wars and sixteen childbirths.
‘Me and your Auntie Lil went to the ward that arvo after school. Your Nan was a vegetable. So they stitched a metal clip through her tongue and lip to stop her from choking. We just watched her drip in a pool of drool and shit till she gave up.’
That Friday was the dawn of unprecedented vulnerability. At the halfway mark of a boom that turned blacksmiths and meat-workers into real estate investors, Australia had a doomed new prime minister, triggering a decade of leadership coups. Meanwhile, I saw through a thick crust to the source of my father’s toughness.
‘I was shell-shocked, if I’m honest,’ he said. ‘Then the old man started losing it. He’d burst into my room after midnight. Drag me to the front steps. “Good news, me little mate!” he’d say. “Your mum’s coming home!”’
‘Was he drunk?’ I asked.
‘Nope. Didn’t touch a drop of grog. All in his head.’
Dad suffered the injury at the meatworks three years later. He was sentenced to six months’ detention a floor above the ward where his mother died, meaning his father avoided the hospital. Then Pop suffered major kidney failure, and died downstairs from his crippled son.
‘I wanted the doctors to just keep pumping me with more drugs until all that pain went away,’ said my father. ‘So don’t tell me I don’t know what it’s like.’
The death of his parents meant working eighty hours a week to keep at bay his existential dread. Real estate was about his only biological child and what might one day become mine, so that I’d never get left with nothing.
‘Life’s not perfect,’ he said. ‘But it’s a million times better than killin’ yourself. That’s like comparing stepping on chewing gum to stepping in dog shit.’
My father’s public openness and private unknowability had always puzzled me. I’d been too young to appreciate how a man can spend five decades steadying himself against the dead. I understood him now, the heir to his aloofness. We kept people at a distance for dear life, so that it hurt less if they disappeared.
A year after wishing he was out of his misery, Dad’s oldest brother, Jack, the new patriarch of the family, died of a heart attack at thirty-nine. My father had lost his mother, father and brother in the space of five years.
And then, like in a Hollywood movie, he won the lottery. He limped into Mr Fish’s newsagency in Ipswich, fresh from getting the pins in his hip removed, and bought a Golden Casket ticket. The next day, there was no disputing the matching numbers on his docket.
My father splurged on a 1968 Ford Falcon sedan and put the rest in savings, a
nest egg that would grow large enough for him to buy a petrol station.
‘It was the happiest day of my life,’ he said. ‘Until you were born, of course. I picked up your Auntie Lil in this gleaming gold XT Falcon. Six-pack between us.’
My father grinned as if his foot was still on the accelerator, before realising that it was an unsuitable happy-ever-after for a car crash survivor charged with drink driving.
‘My point is luck. I don’t believe anything happens for a reason. But I trust maths. And the law of averages.’
‘That’s the thing,’ I said. ‘I won the lottery just by being alive.’
My father pondered that line of thinking, before smiling at me, locating a nearby specimen for his thesis about loss and luck: I was his counterargument to killing myself.
‘Luck doesn’t happen just once,’ he said.
I grew dizzy from six hours of huffing paint fumes while discovering history’s hidden repetitions, muffled by the human capacity for miscommunication.
‘So you’re saying I should buy a lotto ticket?’ I asked.
‘What I’m saying is that if you swim through shit creek for long enough, something is going to make it worth the effort. And sooner than you think, too.’
Performance Anxiety
On a Monday morning, I faced the Toowoomba Magistrates Court. My criminal barrister rifled through my file with a startling calmness.
‘It’s not bipolar?’ he asked. ‘Or PTSD?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Just depression.’
‘I can work with depression.’
We went over the narrative and possible sentences. I would most likely lose my licence for at least a year and receive a hefty fine, but might avoid a conviction.
The barrister put on his obligatory wig.
‘Okay, it’s showtime,’ he said.
Dad and I followed him up the courthouse steps. I put my wallet and iPhone into a plastic crate and held my breath as uninterested guards scanned for weapons with a metal detector. Most of us smuggled in nothing but the ugliness of experiences we wanted to flee from.