Working Class Boy

by Barnes, Jimmy

  I was getting better at singing too. John turned me on to an album by Edgar Winter’s White Trash called Roadwork. I listened to it every night for a year. I was like a sponge. Every note they sang I copied. I learned how to scream from the singers on this record. Johnny and Edgar Winter, Jerry La Croix, these were the singers I wanted to be like, wild Texan and Louisiana boys who did whatever they wanted and screamed like banshees. They played loud and fast and soulful and I made up my mind that when I found a band, this was how we would play. Well, loud and fast would do. It might take a bit longer to find some soul. Especially when you didn’t know where to look or what you were looking for.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  what are we going to do now?

  Like most young men, Mick and I were obsessed with sex, but unlike most young men our age, where we lived there was no shortage of sex to be had.

  The girls we knew came from the same sort of homes we did and all they wanted to do was escape them and get some control in their lives and they thought that sex gave them that control. Unfortunately, we thought the same thing.

  We were constantly looking for girls who would make us feel good about ourselves, even if it was just for a second. Most of the guys were too screwed up to be able to talk to girls and this led to more fighting than fucking but I found it easier to talk to girls than I did to guys. Girls didn’t want to beat people senseless. They just wanted to feel someone cared about them, even if it was only for a short time, and I was the same.

  So whenever we were at parties or the pub or even the centre, and all the guys would be beating their chests and getting too drunk to speak, I always found myself talking to the girls. This seemed a much better thing to do than smashing beer bottles into other guys’ faces. I had found my calling.

  * * *

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘None of your business, Mum,’ Mick said as he got to the door. I was already sitting in his car, waiting for him.

  ‘You better be home early tonight. You’ve got work tomorrow and you better go or your dad will kill you.’

  ‘That drunken old bastard wouldn’t even know if I was alive.’

  ‘Don’t talk that way about your dad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Your dad loves you, Mick. He just has a few problems.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Fuck him.’

  ‘Have a good night, son, and be good. You two look after each other, okay boys?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’

  Mick ran across the lawn and into the waiting car.

  ‘What are we going to do tonight?’ Mick asked.

  ‘I’ve got no money again and I don’t get paid until Thursday.’ This was becoming the usual answer from me. Just like my dad really: I got paid and the next day it was gone. And I had to make do until the next payday came around.

  ‘I just stole fifty bucks from my mum’s purse. Let’s get some acid,’ Mick said as he wound down the car window and turned up the music on the radio.

  ‘Get It On’ by T-Rex screamed across the night as he spun the wheels of his car and we left his mum waving at us in a cloud of dust.

  His mum always looked a little sad to me. She was sweet but didn’t have a clue what her son got up to once he left the front door. I don’t think many of our parents really knew what went on. I don’t think many of them really cared either.

  It was like getting a weight lifted off your shoulders when you walked out of the door. No more nagging and lectures, no more yelling. You were free to do what you wanted and answer to no one. Free to tear apart the town or anything else that got in your way.

  ‘Gino’s going to be at the pool hall and he has some really good acid. He’ll sell us some.’

  Gino was a mad Italian lad. He was the only Italian, in fact the only non-British guy, hanging around with us. We used to drive into the city to fight with the Greeks and Italians on the weekends. But Gino had to work really hard to get accepted. He was crazy. He would dress like the manikins in John Martin’s, the local department store. Then he’d sneak in and stand in the windows with the other manikins. We would all be standing around outside laughing. When he got bored he would grab something he wanted from the window display and walk straight out. He was so brazen he never got caught. He could steal anything that wasn’t nailed down.

  One night he came driving through the car park at the shops, standing on the roof of his car. His car, by the way, was an S series Valiant, a very woggy-looking car but it looked good on him. This night he had rigged up ropes to steer the car. He was funny wild and all the chicks liked him. And he knew where to get good drugs. He could fight too and wasn’t scared of anybody.

  Tonight would be a typical night in Elizabeth. Get a few drinks into us, take any drugs we could find. Fight with anybody we didn’t know that dared to walk through the shops and try and find some chicks.

  We never stayed home. Most of us had to escape something at home. Who wants to see their mum and dad fighting every night?

  So it was out to the shops, get as mindless as we could and find someone to kill.

  * * *

  It was after one of the shows at the community centre that Kim, a girl who had been a friend of ours for a while, turned up. Now we didn’t go out or anything but we were part of the same gang. I don’t think we’d ever thought about each other all that much before that night. We just got on well and had a good laugh together and liked to get drunk with all our friends.

  Somehow at the end of the night it ended up just me and her.

  ‘Shall I walk up the street with you?’ I asked ever so casually.

  ‘Yeah, that’ll be good.’ She smiled at me as if she knew what I was thinking.

  I don’t know if she was so impressed by the show that she could no longer keep her hands off me. I knew I hadn’t been struck by a bolt of lightning when I looked into her eyes. I suspect that it was that we both had just drunk a little too much. And in the heat of the moment, heat being the operative word here, we ended up getting way too close.

  We made out behind the shops at Elizabeth Field. Somewhere between the milk crates and the security doors. It wasn’t romantic and the earth didn’t move for either of us. We did it because that’s what we thought we were supposed to do. We straightened up our clothes and then started to walk home.

  We were both a bit awkward and didn’t really know what to say to each other, especially after what had just happened. So there wasn’t a lot of talking going on.

  We passed a place that sold motorbikes and I turned and said, ‘I’m going to get enough money to buy one of those one day and then I’m out of here for good. This place is a hole and I feel like I’m dying here.’

  ‘I want to get out of here too. We could go together.’

  We both knew that I would never be able to afford to buy a bike. The only way we were leaving was on foot and it wouldn’t be together.

  Kim was a good girl and I got the feeling that we weren’t that much different from each other. Just like me she drank hoping it would make her feel better about herself. But in the end it didn’t. Like me she drank until she felt nothing at all. We both stayed out as late as we could because we didn’t have anything to go home for. And like me she thought that if someone liked you for a little while it was better than nothing at all.

  ‘Goodnight Kim. That was fun. Maybe I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Yeah it was fun. Goodnight.’

  Next time I saw Kim she told me she had missed her period. I was shocked.

  ‘What’s a period?’ I asked. Only joking. Even back then I made jokes when I was panicking. It was more like, ‘Oh my god. What are we going to do now?’

  It wasn’t like I shouldn’t have expected this to happen at some point. I had been sleeping with different girls every night, sometimes two or three girls in the same night, and using no protection. But I was shocked anyway.

  I had heard stories about girls trying to trap boys by getting pregnant. A few of my mates who hung around
the centre shops had married girls because they thought it was the right thing to do. It never worked out.

  Kim wasn’t like that. This was no trap. She was as shocked as me. We didn’t want to get married, we didn’t even want to go steady. I’m not that sure we even wanted to fool around that much to start with. It just happened. We were both totally unprepared to deal with something as important as a baby. We were only about sixteen.

  My first thought was to run away. If I ran away, maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with it. But I couldn’t run away. I had nowhere to go. I had tried to run away from home and it didn’t help that much. But running is something that I became good at. I have been running all my life. The thing I’ve learned about running is that as soon as you stumble or stop, whatever is behind you will catch up to you or at least get close enough to grab onto you. Then the trouble starts.

  We didn’t speak for a while. I think we were both hoping it would go away. But nothing goes away until you deal with it.

  I would see Kim out with the gang and she would look pale and her stomach was starting to show. We didn’t talk to each other while there was anyone else around.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she would whisper to me when no one was listening.

  But I had no answers. I started to avoid her. I couldn’t look at her.

  We were still running around the shops, hanging out with the gang. I was still drinking. Still fighting. Still playing music. And behind all of this was the looming worry of the responsibility for another human being. We weren’t ready. I didn’t grow up at all when I got the news. I just got more scared.

  I was scared of facing up to life, as I guess any young man would be. But more than this, I was scared of being responsible for bringing a baby into this world. The same world that had been a painful place for me. No one deserved to go through the kind of life that Kim and I had but here we were bringing an innocent child into a world we didn’t really understand.

  What were we thinking? We weren’t thinking at all it seemed.

  We knew we would have to tell our parents but we put it off as long as we could. I thought this was going to be the hardest day of my life but it wasn’t really. My parents and Kim’s had both come from poor backgrounds. Wild kids regularly got themselves into trouble where we came from. They weren’t as shocked as we were. But I could see that same look on Reg’s face that I’d seen a lot of times before. I had let him down again.

  Instead we listened to what everybody was telling us:

  ‘You’re too young to have a baby. You’ll never be able to look after a child.’

  ‘You’re still kids yourselves. The baby will suffer.’

  My mum immediately wanted to adopt the baby. ‘Let me look after the wean. I’ll give it a good home and you can still see it whenever you like,’ she said in her warmest Glaswegian mum voice. I hadn’t heard this voice since I was two.

  But Kim’s mum thought that would be wrong. I agree with her now but probably not for the same reasons as she had. Mum had had enough trouble trying to bring us up. It wouldn’t have been fair to do that to any poor unsuspecting baby.

  Kim’s mum was the next to come up with a plan. ‘The way I see fings, this baby, God bless its little heart, should be adopted out. Give the little fing a chance in life. What have you got to offer it? Nuffin’. And it would be too hard on you two young ones if the baby is around.’

  Something about the English accent makes me suspicious. It’s genetic I think. But it all sounded reasonable at the time.

  Without telling any of my family, Kim’s mum adopted the baby. This was completely the opposite to what she had said was the best thing to do. She decided the child was never to know who his real parents were. Just for his own good.

  I should have been ready to change and become a man and start to deal with the consequences of my actions but instead I returned to life as if it had never happened. Learning nothing and not growing at all.

  This was one more thing that I would try to shove to the back of my head, knowing full well that I knew better. The guilt brought another layer of darkness into my life. I had done the wrong thing again.

  I don’t know if Kim’s mum did the right thing at the time or not, but one thing I do know. The world seems to have a way of making things work out. As frightening as it was at the time, it was one of the most important moments in my life.

  My son David came into the world on 6 August 1973. It was a time of confusion and fear for me, but from the moment he arrived, he was a beautiful human being and he brought nothing but joy to everyone around him.

  I watched his progress from a distance. He wasn’t allowed to know who I was. And I tried to pretend not to care. I didn’t have a lot to offer him at that time when I look back on things. Apart from Reg – who maybe came along a bit late – my parental role models hadn’t really been the best so I have no idea what I would have done had things ended up differently. David spent his childhood without a father. I can never change that or make it up to him. I was allowed to pop in occasionally to see him playing. But I could never get too close. The situation, Kim’s mum, and my own fear stopped me getting close to my son. I know now how great that loss was. He needed a dad. If I could go back in time I would spend every minute I could with him.

  But you can’t go back. You can’t live life regretting what was or wasn’t. All I can do is go forward and make things right now.

  It was only once I became famous that suddenly it appeared to others and myself that I had something to offer him.

  I would go over to Kim’s mum’s house and be introduced: ‘David, this is Jim. He’s a good friend of the family. Why don’t you go and spend the day with him and get to know him a bit.’

  It must have been very strange for the young lad. One minute he’s playing around the house, next he’s going off for the day with his bleary-eyed, leather jacket-wearing uncle. He probably couldn’t work out what side of the family I was connected to. Must be the distant Scottish relatives that no one ever spoke about.

  As he got older we even started to spend weekends together. This was hard for us. We didn’t really know what to say to each other. I tried to make things as easy for him as I could. David was always a gentle boy. He was soft and caring. He made it easy for both of us.

  I don’t need to say too much more about this time. Not to you guys anyway.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  you’ll hear more if you shut up

  By this time, I wanted to leave school and was looking for work. When I say looking for work, I’ve got to say I didn’t look very hard. I only needed a little bit of money, enough to get trashed with my mates. I realised no one was going to give me a job with a future. Because I had no future. I had no plans.

  At school there were supposed to be people who came around and gave career guidance but they never came near me or gave me any advice. The only thing I remember anyone telling me was to leave school as quickly as possible and get a job in a factory. No talk of university or extra study or anything. Just get a job. Didn’t matter what it was, just get a job. I think the teachers by this point just wanted me out of their hair and away from the school, as far away as possible. They’d done all they could. I was a lost cause.

  Reg didn’t want me to leave school without getting an apprenticeship. ‘Son, you’re going nowhere without a trade. I don’t want you to leave school without one. You need a job to fall back on when you are ready to settle down.’

  He really didn’t want me to leave school at all.

  ‘I’m really worried about the way you’re turning out, Jim.’ I know he’d all but given up on me, but he was still worried.

  ‘I don’t want you to be a good-for-nothing like your friends.’ I was probably already worse than any of them by that time.

  He insisted on making me apply for a few different apprenticeships. I never expected to actually get a reply from anyone but I sent them out anyway to keep him happy. He was a good guy and I owed it to him to at least
try to improve myself after all he had given me.

  Now, every good boy I knew . . . let me just clarify that, I didn’t know too many good boys. But the ones I did know wanted to be mechanics or carpenters or the like but I didn’t really care. I had no real interest in any job at all. I thought that there was a good chance that I would be working in a factory for the rest of my life. And I didn’t know or care how long that life would be. I thought that whatever happened would be out of my control.

  But lo and behold, in early 1973 I got one reply to all of my many applications. The letter was from the South Australian Railways. They wanted me to become an apprentice moulder. Now I wasn’t really sure what a moulder was, but I was ready to take any offer that made Reg happy.

  ‘Hey Dad, I got an answer to my applications for an apprenticeship,’ I announced one night at dinner. ‘It’s with the South Australian Railways. I’m going to be a moulder.’

  ‘That’s so good, son. I’m proud of you. You’ll thank me for pushing you into this one day. You mark my words, Jim.’

  They seemed to like me at the railways and I got the job. They must have been really desperate. One minute I had no future, the next I had a chance to make my name in the coveted world of metallurgy. I was already staying out all night most nights. And I soon found that I had to pull my head in a little if I was to get through life in this line of work. It involved, among other things, pouring molten metal at about two thousand degrees centigrade and could be very dangerous with shaky hands.

  I found, like I did with most things, that with very little effort I was pretty good at it. I might even have a future that would work for me if I made an effort, and I did for a while. Not for long though. Soon I was distracted again by girls, booze, drugs and music. These seemed to be the only things that interested me and the only things that I would make an effort for.