So What Do You Reckon?

by Robert G. Barrett

  And of course the endless one-liners. ‘I had a room in a hotel that was so dusty the mice walked round on stilts.’

  ‘It was that long since they changed the bed, I had to get an electric jug and steam the sheets apart.’

  ‘The publican’s wife was that ugly that when they took the dog for a walk, people used to talk to the dog and pat her on the head.’

  One-liners are punishing and they never end.

  I can’t get into those American sit-coms like The Cosby Show. This antiseptic story of some family of niggaz with affluence doesn’t turn me on at all.

  Yet one American show that completely cracks me up is Barney Miller. A bunch of cops in a New York precinct. It’s multicultural humour that’s drier than unbuttered toast. I’d rate it alongside Minder.

  But being a bit bent, I like bent humour, and for bent humour it’s hard to go past cartoonist Gary Larson, whoever and whatever he is. This is metaphysical humour from the fourth dimension.

  I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like Larson. A lot of those American sheilas used to send me his cartoons and I know heaps of people with Larson desk calendars. I’d love to meet him.

  However, now and again you find humour that truly inspires you. Writers need inspiration and if you’re a writer-humourist you can’t go past Hustler magazine for inspiration.

  All flatophiles, sewerage works foremen and fat-and-bone truck drivers read Hustler.

  Many’s the time I’ve put on my old overcoat with the gravy stains and my dirty sandshoes and gone to the second-hand book shops at Central railway to buy old copies of Hustler.

  It must be a good magazine; some redneck in the US shot the editor, Larry Flynt, whom he reckoned was the son of Satan. One Hustler cartoon sat on my office wall for five years.

  Somehow I knew I had to write it into one of my books and I did, in the one that’s coming out. I don’t really know why, maybe it’s just the way the dog is on the bed with its ears and eyes pinned back.

  It reminds me of a dog I used to have. She was a grouse hollow log, a cross bull terrier-kelpie and I thought the world of the fat useless thing.

  So shaggy-dog stories or whatever, I still can’t tell you what’s funny, but I just thought this was the least I could do for old Rosie.

  The editor of this illustrious magazine was talking about coming up and staying at my place for the weekend. He wanted to check out the sights and sounds of Terrigal.

  The possums I feed had smashed all my plates bar one and I’d broken the spare cup so I was forced to drive over to a second-hand shop in The Entrance to get the said editor something to eat from and drink out of while he was here.

  I had two bucks, but the cup and saucer only put me back 70 cents so I had over a dollar to spare and I found a pile of old records.

  One was a ripper — Chartstoppers. 20 Original Stars. 20 Original Hits.

  There were some top tracks on it. Four in the Morning — Faron Young. Rock and Roll Lullaby — B.J. Thomas. Jesu Christo — Kamahl. Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast — Daniel Boone. And lo and behold — a track by John Laws: A Front Row Seat To Hear Old Johnny Sing. All this and more for only a dollar and, with John Laws on it, I knew it had to be good.

  So with the cup, the plate, my grouse record and 30 cents left over, I headed home, where I drank half a bottle of bourbon, swallowed a bucket of prescription pills, boiled up a few angel’s trumpets and got into it.

  What a %*#@! of a %*#@! record. And that track by John Laws I was so keen to hear, it’s one of those, ‘Yeee-hah! Aah quit mah job and jumped a freight to Memphis’ things. The kind of record you’d love if you had two heads, plucked a banjo and your kinsfolk didn’t mind you trying to take your sister’s cherry. It was horrible.

  So I figure — if anybody, even John Bloody Laws, is game enough to go into a record studio and put down a catfish like that and rip a poor starving writer off for an oxford, I’m entitled to say my piece. I needed that dollar a lot more than John Laws does — that’s for sure.

  But what can you say about John Laws OBE? An Australian icon. Idol of thousands and probably the most powerful and influential man in radio, especially when you consider I quote pieces out of his column in Sydney’s Telegraph Mirror to help prop up my own miserable effort.

  Actually, I don’t mind the ‘mongrel’ now and again. I’m not one of his blue-rinse Nazis who think the sun shines out of his skinny arse, but I listen on occasions — especially if he’s got Hawke or some other top pollie in the studio. He talks sense — and that’s a lot more than I can do at times.

  He’s national, so I imagine some People readers in other States have heard him.

  The program starts with a monstrous drum-roll and a fanfare of trumpets that would leave the chariot race in Ben Hur for dead. Then there’s the sound of a rocket ship hurtling through the galaxy to the strains of El Presidenté.

  More fanfare and more sound effects. It’s a cross between the coming of the Messiah and Cleopatra’s entry into Rome. Then it’s: ‘Hello World. This is John Laws.’

  With that intro who else could it be? Someone selling sandwiches? After the hosanna, it’s straight into a plethora of ads followed by a plethora of jingles for the ayatollah of the airwaves.

  ‘He’s the voice. He’s the king. He’s Australia’s number one. He’s so far ahead he’s lonely. He climbed Mt Everest backwards. He invented the radio-telescope. He was the first man on the moon etc. etc.

  Then the punters ring up. Along with their few brief moments to talk to the Messianic mystagogue they might get a rose, a bottle of Cloud Valley wine or a handful of John Laws’ nuts.

  They might also get told to piss off and don’t ring back.

  A likeable kid of about 12 rang up one day and Lawsie gave him a $5000 computer; just like that. For a grouch he can be a strange bloke.

  When the chosen one makes a comment about something a thunderous voice booms in and says, ‘Nobody says it like John Laws. Because there’s only one John Laws.’

  Then Lawsie says something else. In comes the voice: ‘You’ve heard the rest, now hear the best. He’s the voice of Australia. He’s Mr Radio. Nobody but nobody can match John Laws.’

  I reckon if Lawsie broke wind in the studio a voice would come booming in, ‘You’ve heard farts — but nobody farts like John Laws.’

  They go for it, though. Politicians would put their hands up their grandmothers’ dress to get a few minutes on his show.

  I couldn’t class him as a greenie. He seems to be down on people that are for the environment and against woodchipping and other things.

  And I can remember years ago when he had a late-night TV show. He was talking about some environmentalists who spent a few days and nights trying to save a pod of whales that had beached themselves somewhere.

  Lawsie came on all sour-faced and said: ‘Don’t you think these people have gone just a bit too far this time?’

  Bloody Hell! I hope he’s changed his views since then. There are bugger all whales left and what there is the stinking Japanese are trying to harpoon into extinction.

  Yet, paradoxically, he uses arguably Australia’s best singer-songwriter and most popular greenie, John Williamson to do all his jingles. ‘True Blue’ should be Australia’s national anthem.

  He gets up the feminists and various ethnic whingers who love to have a go at him in court at the taxpayers’ expense. The trouble is, he sails a bit too close to the truth for their comfort. His column is very good. Of course different ones in the media have to have a shot at him. He’s a very tall poppy. It’s sort of cool to bag a poor polio victim who’s suddenly got 600 cars, 12 boats, five houses, money to burn and makes his own wine.

  I reckon if you want to collect cars go for it — though I think after Dr Geoffrey Edelsten’s last effort, personalised numberplates are a bit naff.

  But Lawsie will have the last laugh. When he’s sick of it all he’ll retire to his farm, write his autobiography and it will be an automatic best-seller.r />
  Though I can’t say I envy his lifestyle. For all those who idolise him, there are an equal number who think he’s the most loathsome reptile to ever crawl out of a tarpit.

  He might have heaps of money but it’s nice to be able to go places without some idiot having a shot at you, or being surrounded by sycophants trying to get a free plug on your show.

  Money and power aren’t everything. Lawsie likes to quote the Bible now and again and some of his kids have got biblical names. And what did Jesus say in the Bible? ‘For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ But good luck to Lawsie anyway. He’s earned what he’s got.

  There is one thing I do envy about him. It’s a ‘covet thy neighbour’s goods’ type of thing. I’d give my left niagara to get my hands on his record collection.

  Despite the thing I bought for a dollar, every now and again during his show Lawsie throws on some of the best rock’n’roll and country and western tracks I’ve ever heard. For talkback radio, the music’s pretty good.

  I reckon he would have one of the best record collections in Australia. He’d have stuff from all over the world, stuff you’ve never heard of. Imagine getting amongst it!

  I wonder if I sent him a book and wrote to him saying: ‘Dear Mr Laws, I am a poor starving writer living on the Central Coast not far from you. I listen to your show, I’ve got all your records and I dig your poetry. Any chance of coming around to Cloud Valley and taping a few tracks?’

  I wonder how I’d go? No, I reckon knowing my luck, I’d get told to piss off and don’t call back. The most I could expect would be a handful of John Laws’ mouldy old nuts.

  Still, after looking at that Pickering calendar, it couldn’t be any worse than a front-row seat to hear old Johnny sing.

  I imagine there aren’t too many readers out there who at some time in their life haven’t bothered to consult their horoscope in a paper or magazine and taken, if nothing else, a token interest in their star sign.

  Which doesn’t mean you have to be like some poor wallies who won’t leave their house unless the moon is up Uranus or Mickey Mouse is into Pluto. That’s ridic.

  But I take an interested observer’s view of the zodiac. I glance at my horoscope in the morning paper and quite often it can have an uncanny coincidence.

  Like it might say, ‘a pressing source affecting your work and a family relationship will emerge this week’. True. Various cheques from various publishers don’t arrive and I don’t get to eat.

  Then dear mother will ring and give me a blast over the phone. It’s about time I settled down, woke up to myself, stop being such a dill, you’re just like you father, where’s the money you owe me, bleah, bleah.

  I tell you, it’s a bummer when the doctor won’t give the old girl any more tranquillisers.

  Other times your horoscope might say, ‘things are unstable now because of the full moon’. This can also turn out to be true.

  Once I OD’d on angel’s trumpets again and thought I was a werewolf. I was howling away on the deck and the railing gave way and I nearly broke my back.

  I was going all right too, because I live in the Harlem of Terrigal and no-one around here can afford a silver bullet. They threw plenty of half-empty beer cans, plastic bags of dog shit and plonk bottles, but it takes more than that to stop the Bela Lugosi of the Central Coast when he gets a roll on during a full moon.

  But as much as I believe there could be something in people’s star signs or the zodiac, what you read in your daily horoscope is as much coincidence and theory as anything else. And I’ll drop a real good name here to prove my point.

  A Russian scientist. Aleksander Isaacovich Kitaigorodski. He said: ‘A first-rate theory predicts, a second-rate theory forbids, a third-rate theory explains after the event’. So your horoscope is basically a third-rate theory with a bit of 20/20 vision in hindsight thrown in.

  If anyone is remotely interested, I’m a Scorpio. The swingingest, sexiest, most wonderful sign in the zodiac. Vindictive, spiteful, sarcastic, able to leap tall buildings and bear grudges for a lifetime. Then, on the other hand, I’m supposed to appreciate a good laugh and repay favours with almost astounding generosity.

  I like to think we’re the ones with the third eye. Talking with other Scorpios, we seem to see things in people others can’t; unless you’re a Scorpio though, you wouldn’t understand. And haven’t there been some good Scorpios?

  Charles Manson, Terry ‘Mr Asia’ Clarke, Harry M. Miller, John Singleton. A lot of top generals were Scorpios: Rommel, Montgomery, Patton and Colonel David Hackworth, the most decorated living soldier in US military history. He mentions this in his book I keep telling people to read, About Face.

  Picasso and Richard Burton weren’t bad blokes though.

  And talk about Scorpio generosity. The late Richard Burton must have thought Liz Taylor pretty good in the porking department — he bought her a $5 million diamond ring.

  So how do I, a sarcastic Scorpio and possessor of the third eye, find other members of the zodiac without coming across as a zodicist? Do they have similarities?

  I seem to get on good with Aquarians. I’ve been involved with a number of Aquarian women and almost married two. I find them sexy, with this zany, nonchalant sense of humour.

  Then you have Ronald Reagan and Joh Bjelke. You can’t possibly tell me all their scones were done.

  As far as porking goes, the wildest, most uninhibited girl — again — I almost married was a Virgo. Initially, yes. But in the end it was anything goes, no holds barred, anytime, anyplace, anywhere. It was almost too much for a poor, young surfie to handle.

  Geminis are said to have split personalities. I took one out for a while. A nice enough girl sober, but four Bacardis and Coke and she’d start a fight in an empty house.

  Scorpios are said to be the sexy sign of the zodiac and I admit I don’t mind a bit of the other. I’m quite partial. I also never got a knockback from my sweet ladyfriends. If anything it was the other way around.

  I often laugh when I see different women’s groups marching around with signs saying ‘Regain the Night’. When I’d come home from the meatworks after boning 100 forequarters and 100 briskets since 5.30 a.m., they could regain the bloody night, they could regain the rest of the week for all I cared. I couldn’t lift a nightie.

  Despite their alleged sexiness, I’ve always tried to steer clear of affairs with fellow Scorpios. Not out of discrimination or sexual aversion. But say the lady involved became pregnant. Wouldn’t the child involved be an inbred?

  So you’re a sexy Scorpio checking out other Scorpios to see if they have any similarities. My birthday is November 14, and who should have his on the same day? None other than HRH Prince Charles, the future King of England.

  And blow me down if there aren’t some striking similarities. We’ve both got big noses, our ears stick out and we’re both going bald on top. Plus, I read, he likes salami and talks to himself. How about that?

  But there it seems to end. Chilla’s the man who’s supposed to be into conservation and his father, Phil the Greek, is a member of some world wildlife preservation foundation. There wouldn’t be two more trigger-happy Hooray Henrys on the planet.

  They like nothing better than to get out on the royal estate armed to the teeth and blast anything that moves with shotguns. They make the NSW duck season look like a Buddhist picnic.

  It runs in the whole silly bloody family. Edward VIII had his old man’s dogs shot because one of them pissed on his leg.

  When Edward was the Prince of Wales, they came back empty-handed after a day’s shooting and saw this beautiful little deer grazing by the castle. So they blew it to bits. It turned out to be a gift from the people of Alberta, Canada — a symbol of friendship.

  Another royal went hunting, couldn’t find a deer in the fog-shrouded hills so he shot one of the royal ponies.

  They still do it. As good a reason as any to get rid of the monarchy, I suppose.
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  But no. I’ll stick my neck out and say we should retain the monarchy and I’ll fight tooth and nail before I see them change the flag and turn Australia, land that I love, into a republic.

  Not so much out of love for the royal family … but if another one of Queen Elizabeth’s corgis bites her and she dies of rabies and the IRA doesn’t blow Charlie to bits and the gun-crazy, big-eared git makes it to the throne, it’ll be a public holiday on my birthday.

  Which means I can get blind, rotten, shit-your-pants, vomiting drunk and not go to work and no-one can say a word. Could an Australian ask for anything more?

  There was an item in the paper the other day: film producer George Miller, of Kennedy-Miller fame, was said to be the man who discovered Mel Gibson.

  Miller cast him in the first Mad Max movie, then the other two which became box office hits, making Gibson an international superstar.

  ‘He had that something about him,’ Miller is alleged to have said. I took umbrage and offence at this. I also felt like taking a few palings and the front door as well.

  Why? Because I have a world exclusive on the man who discovered Gibson, took him under his wing and launched him on his rise to stardom.

  I should know, because I was offered the part of Gibson’s stand-in in his first movie. And you better believe it.

  As far as actors go I don’t mind Gibson, especially when he gets that nutty look in his eyes and his head kind of oscillates.

  I haven’t seen his latest movie Omelette; I just can’t picture poultry farms in Shakespeare’s day. But I enjoyed Lethal Weapon and its sequel, and I liked all the Mad Max films.

  Though I can’t say I went overboard about The Bounty. But the one movie of Gibson’s that I really dug was that Australian classic Summer City. It was produced and scripted by the man who did discover Mel Gibson — Phil Avalon.

  He’s the unsung hero of Australian films who, in my professional opinion, produces movies that make anything Kennedy-Miller or Fred Schepisi come up with look like Jackie McDonald’s Home Video Show.