Though we told ourselves the pool was for Damon, we even referred to it as Damon’s pool, we nevertheless felt pretty damned smug about it. The house was falling down around us, the garden was a wilderness but we had the best pool-to-be in the neighbourhood, no doubtski aboutski!
To cut a long story short, I was doing the sausages and chops on the barbecue when Damon had a go at Brett, who, unthinkingly, gave him a playful shove. Damon lost his balance and, moving rapidly backwards, fell into the deep end of the empty pool. I hit the bottom of the pool so soon after him that, for years, we used to say that I caught him as he bounced. But Damon was badly hurt and we soon discovered that his left knee and arm had taken the brunt of the fall.
We rushed him to hospital where he was given a massive transfusion, but his knee and elbow bled for nearly three weeks and both limbs would never be the same again. The elbow eventually stiffened so that Damon forever afterwards was unable to straighten his arm fully, but it was the knee which became a constant source of bleeding and brought him a great deal of pain. In one fall, he had done ten years’ damage to it. The pool, which was meant to keep his growing limbs straight and true, had brought him undone even before he was able to swim in it.
When the hospital suggested that a calliper was necessary to give the knee a chance, to stop the incessant bleeding and, with it, the pain, we agreed without thinking. With our past experience of Sir Splutter Grunt we really should have known better.
Damon wore that horrible calliper, dragging it around without complaining much, for two years until it grew too small for him and we decided to visit an orthopaedic specialist to have him examined privately. We wanted to find out if something less rigid and physically limiting might be made to replace the heavy iron rods. It was apparent that Damon’s leg had atrophied and was markedly thinner than his right leg. We’d worried about this and had been told that this was perfectly natural. As the price of saving the knee, some atrophy was to be expected and, though the leg might never fully return to normal size, it would eventually be strong again.
Through means I don’t recall, the specialist we saw was a noted professor of orthopaedics at a well-known teaching hospital. To my shame I don’t remember his name, though I recall that interview as traumatic in every little detail. The doctor was a big, raw-boned man with a shock of sandy hair and fierce, bushy eyebrows. He asked us why Damon was wearing a calliper. “Why is this leg atrophied?” He removed the calliper and dropped it on the floor next to the examination couch on which Damon was lying. Then he held Damon’s thin little leg below the knee and, using both of his hands, he worked his big thumbs into the slack, useless calf muscle.
I was confused by the question. “Well, because of that,” I pointed to the floor, “…the calliper, doctor.”
“No, no,” he said impatiently, “why did the leg atrophy?”
Confused, I pointed to the calliper again. “It was a perfectly good leg until his knee went and he was made to wear that.” I then told him about the empty pool accident two years previously and the subsequent constant bleeding in the knee. He looked down at the ugly worn boot with its inserted callipers. Without Damon’s little stick leg to give it life, it seemed like something created to do deliberate physical harm.
“Did it work?” he asked.
I was forced to admit we didn’t know, but Benita added that Damon still got plenty of bleeds in this particular knee, many more than occurred in the right leg.
The professor grunted and turned his back to us and started to examine Damon. During the course of the examination, I sensed that his demeanour was changing. The short grunts he had begun with had become sighs, then huffs, then little expostulations of air and gruff growls.
He turned and faced us, and I saw that his face had grown quite red. If what followed wasn’t a medical breakthrough, it was certainly a breakthrough in doctor –patient communication.
“Those bastards have destroyed your son’s leg!”
His anger was such that he was now shaking; he stood at attention in his long, white jacket, with fists clenched tightly at his side, as though he were trying to avoid bursting into little bits. Then it came again, his voice loud and angry and he pointed directly at me.
“For Christ’s sake! You should have known better! This lad will never again walk without a pronounced limp; the knee is totally fused and without any movement. His left leg is shorter than the other and will continue to atrophy and its usefulness has been greatly reduced!”
He was shouting at us. “In my opinion, the calliper would not have stopped a single bloody bleed!” He gulped, pausing for a single moment, “In all probability, it would have caused a great many to occur!”
He stopped, shook his head and sighed, though it was more a wince than a sigh and seemed designed to bring his temper back under control. “I’m sorry, Mr and Mrs…” he dropped his chin and brought his forefinger and thumb up to pinch at his frown, trying to recall our surname.
“Courtenay,” I said softly, not quite knowing what next to expect from this big, angry man standing over us.
He brought his hand down from his head, his open palm facing us in a gesture of reconciliation. “I apologise, Mr and Mrs Courtenay. How could you have possibly known? I’m quite wrong, I apologise.” Then he added, “It’s this damned place; after a while you think everyone you see is an incompetent bloody doctor or intern.” He brought his hand up again and wiped the back of it across his mouth. “I know you can’t tell me who the stupid, callous men are who did this to your beautiful boy. Even if you did I wouldn’t be able to do anything but, on behalf of the medical profession, I apologise and I am deeply ashamed.”
Damon, who had not yet spoken, looked up at the professor and then pointed to the calliper on the floor. “At least wearing it I could sometimes kick a ball, sir,” he said.
Six
Politics, Sim the Man and Beating the Needle Ban.
The chairman of McCann Erickson, the American advertising company for which I worked, was a naturalised Australian named Sim Rubensohn. He was small, irascible and walked with a pronounced limp which was caused by a car accident when he attempted to drive home too drunk and senseless to leave his big American car, the “Yank Tank", and call a cab.
Rubensohn had sold his own advertising company to the giant McCann Erickson when, in the sixties, international expansion of Madison Avenue advertising agencies became the popular thing to do and global marketing was the catch-phrase of international business.
An alcoholic in remission, Rubensohn was simply the most difficult and unreasonable man I have ever met. His more or less sole job in the agency, apart from being the chairman, was to run one or two very large accounts at chairman to chairman level and the advertising and election affairs of the Australian Labor Party, the political party in office in the mid sixties in the state of New South Wales and, also, in long-term opposition in federal politics.
Sim ran his ill-tempered life at top speed and expected everyone working with him to fit into his time schedule, which was to start at seven a.m. each morning. This wasn’t too bad, except that he left work promptly at four p.m. to tend his magnificent camellia and Japanese garden at his property in Dural, an outlying district some thirty kilometres from the city.
With a roar of the big, green V12 Jaguar, over whose steering wheel the diminutive Sim could barely see, he would head for the hills, leaving behind sufficient work to keep his minions working back, often until late at night. Overnight was the longest time frame in which Sim could think; he expected every task to be completed by seven the following morning when his new working day began.
Despite his small, lopsided size, Rubensohn was tough, an ex-alcoholic and ex-gambler who, when forced to give up both vices, fell into a foul mood from which he never recovered. Despatch boys, since grown into senior account executives in the agency, spoke in awe of Sim’s previous gambling exploits. They bragged of having been part of the regular Monday morning delivery of a brown paper parce
l the size of a shoe box to an SP bookmaker to settle Sim’s losses at the weekend races. The SP bookmaker would make them stand as witness as he carefully counted the ten-pound notes, handing back Sim’s marker to the boy at the correct conclusion. Occasionally, the traffic would be the other way, the despatch boy would arrive empty-handed and leave with a couple of shoe boxes crammed with cash in the form of big denomination notes.
But mostly it was a one-way traffic, to pay the bookmaker. Sim was a great tactician with a brilliant, political brain, but he was a lousy drunk and an even worse gambler. When he mixed both he was a disaster. He had eventually to choose between drink and power. Power was the more intoxicating, he loved it even more than the bottle. Not the kind that goes on parade, rather the stuff that remains unseen and lasts; faceless power, that makes and breaks and casts no shadow where it walks. Power usually needs money to back it and Sim was giving too much of his to the SP bookies, so he was forced to give up gambling as well as drink.
Gambling and its contingent sin, prostitution, had become so institutionalised in New South Wales that they were hardly regarded as crime at all, but rather more as the tidy and profitable containment of bad, though inevitable, social conduct. It was a grand life and somewhere in all of this was Sim Rubensohn, the kingmaker.
Sim the Man, as he was known in some circles, pulled a great many of the strings and he also ran the political advertising for the party. I was the unfortunate person picked by him to work on the Labor Party account. That is, I was expected to run the creative department of the agency as well as work on Labor advertising. My days, already long, grew progressively longer and I, increasingly, neglected my wife and growing family.
Running a political advertising account is not unusual in an advertising agency. For a few weeks prior to elections the agency works hard, but the money is good and comes in a lump sum, so it is very profitable. Under Sim Rubensohn, however, it was nothing of the sort. It was a year in and year out business with elections only being the most impossibly frenetic part. Sim didn’t take a brief and then go away and make a few advertisements. Sim told the party what to say, how to say it and when to say it; he also personally raised the money in order to say it in the newspapers, on radio and television.
Sim knew everyone in politics and the unions, he knew all their scams and who was getting what and how and, finally, how much. He never abused this position or betrayed a confidence. Most importantly, he also never asked for advertising funds but made himself personally responsible for raising the money to run the Labor advertising campaign at election time. This gave him enormous power and influence in the party. Sim was the money box.
In this money-raising quest he was a remorseless, greatly feared operator with a long and dangerous memory. Moreover, he wasn’t on the take himself and, while he was ruthless as a money collector, he was known to be utterly discreet; a favour promised to an anonymous, though generous, industrial or business donor was always delivered on time and in good measure.
Whereas no Labor politician would have trusted the man who sat beside him in parliament, even though they had probably raced billy carts together in the same working-class street, they all trusted Sim. They discussed things with him and they told him everything. Sim could move upwards or downwards or sideways in the party room; in broad terms, he was a Labor Godfather.
This was Tammany Hall politics in the best, second and third generation local Irish tradition. It was curious, therefore, that the man most trusted by the socialist party to deliver them to power and glory was a tiny Jewish alcoholic with a gammy leg, who was born in Cape Town, South Africa.
Alas, I was the man under Sim most trusted to deliver the advertising designed to do all this. During the months leading up to a state or federal election, Sim regarded me as his personal twenty-four-hour property. This continued for five years and I was to get to know every aspect of local state politics in that time, including the sergeant who operated as the bag man, for Sim reckoned, quite logically, that a part of the “extra salary” the politicians paid themselves should go towards their re-election.
These were perhaps the most difficult years of my working life and also the most exhilarating. I quite often hated Sim with a passion, but I loved the way he got things done and the power he exercised. I admired his pure selfishness, how he let nothing and nobody stand in his way. With Sim, everything was possible, you just had to know which button to press, who to call and what to say. It was a marvellous exercise in the power of quiet and persistent malevolence. The results were achieved through discreet suggestion; a gentle reminder of an indiscreet incident in the past, always carefully couched with a promise for the future. Sim would threaten a man with a promise. The technique was simple: I know something about you. I need something from you. I have something for you. He called this the Holy Trinity of Political Persuasion and he was its ultimate master.
With Sim an election campaign was a war declared, where the rules went out the window and the winner took all. Coming into politics at this level I found I had to grow up awfully fast but that elections were a source of pure adrenalin. I was completely caught up and, as usual, I soon had my priorities totally screwed up.
All this happened before Damon was born and I was neglecting my young family shamelessly in the name of building a career. By the time Damon came along in 1966 we’d lost the NSW Labor account after holding it for twenty-four years and we were still in the political wilderness with the federal Labor Party.
Sim may have seen me as a new force in political copywriting, but my record was pretty dismal – I’d lost two out of three elections we’d fought. In 1968, with Damon not yet two years old, three state elections took place – New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland – the first in February, the next in March and the Queensland election in August. Sim was relentless. More often than not, I would get home after midnight from mixing a radio or television track or getting a newspaper advertisement to the paper just before the midnight deadline. I’d arrive home bleary-eyed, my stomach soured from too much beer and cheap fried food taken on the run, knowing I faced the likely event of a rip-roaring row with Benita.
I’d crash into bed to be wakened an hour or so later by Damon crying. Twenty minutes later we’d be on our way to the hospital, where we’d spend much of the remainder of the night in watching the good Doctor Gett put the dreaded needle in.
I’d practise at home. I’d pump up Damon’s little arm with a tourniquet until the veins at the back of his hand and in the crease of his arm started to surface, the tiny little serpents of his distress, blue against his smooth, white skin. Then, with the tip of my forefinger and with my eyes closed, I’d trace the direction of each vein until I knew the length and direction of every transfusable vein in both his hands and along the inside of his arms. We simply never gave up hoping that one day, when he was old enough, Damon would do his own transfusions in his own home.
To claim that I became involved with Sim Rubensohn and politics as a part of an astute career plan would be lying. I wasn’t politically minded; in fact politics had made me flee my own country. I found myself simply seconded to the job. To have refused to work with the cantankerous Rubensohn of the eternally bad spleen would have put my precious little career in jeopardy. The poor boy in me was still too frightened to chance it on his own. I needed the security a big multinational advertising agency afforded me and, perhaps more honestly, I loved the recognition it gave me. I was the youngest and the brightest working for one of the biggest and now, with Sim Rubensohn, the fiercest.
Sim had me by the short and curlies from the first moment he summoned me to his over-large office with its genuine Louis Quinze furniture and antique kilims, and he never gave up tugging. His greatest strength was that he was an utter and complete bastard without a breath of compassion in his entire person. Sim proceeded to work me like a dog and I responded like a dog, mostly wagging my tail trying to please my master; doing as I was told when I was told to do it, without muc
h regard for my family or my wife, who was trying to cope with three children conceived within five years.
In fact, at first, I liked meeting the rich, the powerful and the corrupt and it seemed that I had a real talent for writing political advertising, since only the legendary Percy “Pip” Cogger had ever lasted more than one election with Rubensohn.
But after five years, with a federal and several state elections behind me, coupled with my normal work as the creative director of the agency, I was just about worn out. By now I was totally disenchanted with politicians and politics, my family life was in tatters, my drinking getting steadily worse and, moreover, I was beginning to realise that I was losing my sense of self. I, too, was beginning to turn into a political animal of the kind I saw around me, the mediocre men who ran on a high octane mixture of power and fear and who constantly compromised their integrity to gain more than they were legitimately entitled to receive.
The phone at home would begin ringing at five a.m. when Rubensohn made his first calls of the day, so that my first impression of most days was an irascible, high-pitched voice barking instructions at me. Quite often I’d still be trying to get Damon back to bed from hospital when the first call came. Sim never said “please” or “thank you” and he never introduced himself, he simply barked out his demands and accepted a polite, acquiescent reply prior to slamming the phone down in your ear. I had no idea whether he knew of Damon’s condition. Rubensohn was interested only in the things he could use; being aware that I had a chronically ill child was probably not to his advantage to know.
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