by Tom Dusevic
I’d overcompensated and under-rehearsed, and fallen short. The searchlight was pure hubris, as if trying to touch every lucky soul with my magic.
Things went askew straight after ‘I believe’, sliding into Malcolm Fraser life-wasn’t-meant-to-be-easy mode. ‘I believe’ was also my father’s catchphrase, the prelude to a dissertation on the issue of the moment. After I said, ‘I believe’, I paused, thought of him in the audience and smiled. I’d like to think the opening ‘Australia’ was solid. Had I stopped right there, I would at least have secured the patriots’ vote. In Sharlene’s kind opinion the phrase ‘and then Mum got a second car’, about halfway through this road accident of a speech, connected well with women in the audience.
I was competing against two boys who spoke beautifully, perhaps because they had spent a lot of time away from Lakemba. Peter had just come back to St John’s after several years in England, while nineteen-year-old Charles had emigrated from that tiny part of Lebanon where people sound like British lords reared at Swiss boarding schools speaking on the BBC.
‘You know,’ he’d said to me wistfully, above the screeching of the playground, ‘in Lebanon you can ski in the morning and in the afternoon be swimming in the Mediterranean.’
I’d never met a person who could ski. Snow and sun: inconceivable. In the MoD’s English class Charles, old cock, uttered the word ‘flowers’ in a manner that would have marked Laurence Olivier as vulgar.
‘Have you read Khalil Gibran? The Prophet? You should, Tom, he’s marvellous.’
We responded to his fine sensibilities in the only way we knew: ‘Hey Charles, do you go to the pub on weekends?’
To us Charles was an alien from a distant place and another time. Which was true. A nasty war had brutalised his beloved Beirut, but not his gentleness or refinement. He was a reminder of the world beyond Lakemba. Charles and Mohammed, at either end of a displaced cohort, spatiotemporal astronauts floating off in an expanding diaspora. My LEB/837 epiphany was now making sense: there were 837 varieties here; there was no archetypal Leb, rather an entire civilisation had turned up in Lakemba. Charles was as typical as Mop, Harpo, Fast Eddie, Chids, Yaz, Kaz or Baz. Over the years, St John’s most likely educated 837 types of ‘Elias’ alone: redheads we called ‘Blue’, top brains, footy stars, basketball magicians, disco boys, sly bookies and one who stole cars and, later on, carried a gun. Leb bread, cedar tree logo, wicked cursing, Bulldogs mania and strict mums were the clichés we clung to, in much the way others reduced ‘Aussies’ to Vegemite, meat pies, Holdens and convicts, a term that caught me with a jolt the first time I heard it at school.
The eisteddfod was the MoD’s baby. There were instrumental, verse, solo and group sections on the program. I’d won the junior public speaking a few years earlier, collecting a gold statue shaped like an Oscar for ‘Bigfoot’ (final, pregnant line: ‘Then – and only then – will the mystery of Bigfoot be solved’). That category did not warrant competition on the big night. But the experience taught me about rhythm in speech, hence the melodramatic pauses in my Hawke oration on Australia’s future. I should have stolen his mate-speak, instead of colliding into a TWU-driven truck at the crossroads.
Senior public speaking was the blue-ribbon event. Everyone in our English class had to give a speech; there were several rounds until three finalists emerged. A week before the final, the MoD drove us to Roselands – where else – for a fitting at Grace Bros. formal hire in frilly shirts, bow ties and suits. Charles wore brown; I was in shining silver; Peter in sky blue. For punters, these were the ‘correct weight’ placings as well, although the silver fop should have been swabbed.
Bankstown Civic Centre was the school’s prime venue. A few months later we had our speech night and awards presentation, the finale to our years at St John’s. I made a valedictory address, in plain voice, thanking people who had devoted themselves to the life of the school. Some of the shine was taken off the evening when, a few weeks later, I heard about a boy in Year Eight and his mum playing ‘Spot the Aussie’ when prefects were presented to students and parents for the last time.
‘Wog. Wog. Wog. Wog. Wog. Wog ….’ and on they went, loud enough for others to hear, until the wog count reached fifteen. We had twenty-three prefects. When academic prizes were announced, mother and son could not have kept up with the wog procession. I was incensed by the slur, out of character at a school like St John’s, where children of migrants had excelled in every way and had embraced its ethos.
Was I naïve, insensitive to people who found it difficult to fit in? Sure, fitting in was rewarded and standing apart was discouraged, subtly and unsubtly. Yet wog had been appropriated, watered down, relegated to irony and tribalism. It was the last bastion of the racist clod. I pitied the poor boy, his stupid mother, and their hard hearts; sad and threatened, blind to the glory of what was happening around them in a country that had taken the path to multiculturalism. Early, unsure days at the crossroads, but the wog boys and girls of my era would soon become the backbone of the parish, coach footy and netball teams, start businesses and adapt traditions worth keeping to a new era.
Supercoach asked me if I’d like to work at the school over the summer. Just when I thought I was out of St John’s, a free agent, I’m pulled back in. Spending money beckons. Details aren’t important.
‘It’s a big job, Wombles,’ he said. ‘We need someone to polish all the floors in the school.’
We went into a Year Eight classroom outside his poky, ground-floor office. ‘Now, see all this stuff on the lino: chewy, dried gunk? Get rid of it with a paint scraper. Then, remove the old polish by putting a chemical on the floor, brushing it off clean with this.’
He rolls out a plug-in beast, a push-along buzz-saw on wheels, handlebars like a scooter, with a grip device that unleashes a frenzied rotation. It’s a devilish partner, with the potential to drag you around the floor any way it feels like responding to the electric moment: step and a hop, cha cha cha.
‘You then make sure the floor is clean, probably with water and a mop, then let it dry, before you apply the wax. Then you put on a buffing attachment to this machine and bring the floor to a shine.’
‘Sounds like a lot of work. How much are you going to pay me?’
‘What about 100 at first, then see how it goes?’
If it takes me twenty hours, that’s 5 an hour. Hard to know how quickly I can do it. But initially I’m only thinking about what I can buy, money having dried up after Tata’s retirement.
‘Perhaps we can renegotiate after I’ve done a few classrooms. What about the desks? What am I supposed to do with them?’
‘I’d suggest you move all the desks to one side of the classroom, do half the floor, then move everything back to the other side. Why not get Seneka or Sam to share the work with you?’
Share. Are you kidding? This was my gig. I didn’t want either of them stealing my action, especially Wally. He’d cut in on the milk run years ago and was now spending time with Sharlene, who’d fallen out of like with me.
‘Just good friends,’ she said, handing back the school captain’s badge I’d given her in a dizzy moment when the year ended.
I would do this ‘big job’ by myself, no matter what. Supercoach handed me the keys to the school. I approached the task the way Joso had taught me: the Dalmatian way. It’s hot. Don’t be in a hurry. Lie down. Think this through. You don’t want to go madly at it and have to redo the job. I mapped it out, visualising the steps, anticipating the pitfalls, tallying up a time schedule. Let that sit a while. 100. Okay, up to the shops for a can of Coke. I’d need music, because I couldn’t do this on an empty brain. Both England and West Indies were touring Australia, a Test and one-day bonanza after the end of World Series Cricket, and so I’d want to listen to the cricket as well. In the staffroom I found a bulky radio-cassette player. Big and ugly, scarred with splotches of paint, it became my booming offsider.
My mates, boys and girls, were bumming around at the local
pools or Roselands, getting the train to Cronulla, drinking sparkling wine mid-morning in the park and spinning the bottle, while I was dancing around classrooms with a demented, jumpy polishing machine. It would take me four weeks to do the job, as extra rooms were added. I had branched out into the lucrative sub-specialty of parquetry (looks great, takes less time than lino). In between golf games, Supercoach would check in or drive me to inner-city warehouses for more cleaning supplies and equipment.
The squat two-seater desks, heavy lidded and with backrests, were like solid-wood scrum machines; to clear space in a tight area I had to stack them. First, I’d get my arms and shoulders under the desk. Breathe, engage, up and over to the other side of the classroom. This was honest, shirt-off, hard labour; it strengthened wrists, toned arms, built shoulders, stripped down the love handles – not that I was aware of it. I was the prototype Karate Kid, sweaty in boardshorts, still fifteen, going about my toil, oblivious to the long-haul benefits of solving logistical problems, having three rooms on the go, maintaining the equipment, managing my time, ordering supplies, keeping the client in the loop and negotiating pay.
This floor-polishing caper was living large compared with, say, carting olive oil on your head the way Milenka had done or hard-working Joe’s cornflake kiln. Joso could not move after a day in the canefields, cinder black and pants starched stiff. Mozzie-blown and blistered, he may have sung romantic couplets about the old and new country to his mates in the tin and timber bunkhouse.
Joso’s had enough running on empty, He’s come to the land of gin and plenty.
The north-facing classrooms in January were baking ovens. No wonder they didn’t have school then. Rolling up blinds and opening windows was inviting nature to roast me – the chemical odours just weren’t worth the high. That summer, I paid attention to the sun’s movements; spurned, I also dwelt on the words to ‘Roxanne’, ‘Walking on the Moon’, ‘Message in a Bottle’ and ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’. For ‘So Lonely’, I’d grab two brushes, Mr Castagnet-style, and bash out the chorus drum progression like Stewart Copeland. The best new tune was ‘Tusk’ by Fleetwood Mac, usually more Sam’s West Coast sound than mine, but the song was unlike any on the folksy, smooth Rumours LP that had come out a few years earlier. ‘Tusk’ delivered a full-body workout and required several loose props: mop, bucket and empty bottle.
Like disco, I tried to resist. Fleetwood Bloody Mac. But I was not strong enough. The music chooses you. On ‘Tusk’, a tribal beat thumps at your heart, gut-chants of gibberish filling your ears. You begin chest clapping the time, six to the bar, as if wading into a Balkan wedding. In the video Stevie Nicks twirls a baton straight into the demented horns of the USC Trojan Marching Band at Dodger Stadium; trumpets and bones take over, feet on the move, romping the room like an unrestrained preschooler. The 1970s were dissolving right there, in the bucket, on the floor.
These were the work songs of a one-man chain gang. People considered me a social person. Here I discovered I enjoyed solitude as well, needed to be alone, finding it a source of random impulses and therapeutic, existential thoughts. It was like being in the post-op darkness again. Or gazing through my treasured bay window at the old house. Or lazing on the grass with Tata at Canterbury Pool. Plus this was a paid gig. I let my mind roam wild in the mid-range between repetitive work and a protective wall of noise.
Like a DJ, I was beat-matching to a slower tempo, winding down on a big year to a metabolic and meditative state of just being. I’m sure I talked to myself. I hadn’t had the time to properly digest the commotion of life and my stumbles: Maryanne, Sharlene and the incursion by Emerald Jane. Don’t get the shit beaten out of you again. I was putting the past to rest, as well as hacking my way through to what was next. Where was I now? Where was I going? Disaster. Enrichment.
Singing like Sting about empty beds and cold winds, I was sprung by a teacher who’d come to work in January.
It was a violation. Get Hawkey on the line. I downed tools, worked to rule. But it wasn’t only break-up numbers I was demolishing. I belted through Aussie solos such as Mental as Anything’s ‘The Nips are Getting Bigger’ and ‘Comin’ Home’ by the Radiators, with its sex-by-numbers intro of doors, fires and sweet desires.
You could comfortably slip and slide on my sweet-looking floors.
‘This place’, as the Brothers referred to St John’s in weepy moments, was spiffy. By design, the last place I polished was the room I started in, six years earlier: 5 Blue. I’m comin’ home, babe! Mr Castagnet was long gone. Egor and Mrs Gannon, too. I wondered if the strap would hurt as much as it did then. An era was over. Boys in my class were now starting apprenticeships as plumbers, fitters, electricians, carpenters and, at very long odds, a would-be jockey. The new blinds are down, room semi-dark and cool. A bell. Jab. Jab. Jab. Cross. Nostalgia is pushing off the ropes. Hey you, Rope-a-Dope Ali! Rumbling in the jungle, a butterfly and a bee.
Wally turned seventeen in November and qualified for his driver’s licence before school went into summer recess. His mother drove a cream Ford Fairlane with a brown-skin top. Wally borrowed it at every opportunity so we could cruise around. This vaulted us up the social scale; most people we knew were fifteen going on sixteen.
Wally was my main man all the way. We’d gone from bikes to skateboards, to sitting on street corners late into the night. Wheels, bread, all I need now is a fine lady. We went to Sharlene’s for a barbecue and met her uncle Jack, a De La Salle Brother at Benilde, the Bankstown school Wally and I had been accepted to for Years Eleven and Twelve. Sharlene was heading to Nazareth College, the senior girls’ school next door to ours.
‘Are you Sam’s brother?’ asked Jack, whose ordained name was Celestine. ‘He is a very good student. What’s he going to do at university?’
‘He wants to do science at Sydney, physics and maths. I think he’ll get the marks to do whatever he wants, even medicine.’
I’d missed the big story – it wouldn’t be the last time – while a dancing slave to my floor-polishing: Wally and Sharlene were now a couple. She was really going out with him. They’d tried to be sensitive to my feelings but, when it came, the news was not easy to take. I was one of the last to know, of those who would want to know. Sharlene and I had agreed to see each other less often after tumbling apart. There was no point blowing two friendships over this development. Besides, how could she resist the coolest guy in school? I never could.
Wally would also borrow his ‘uncle’ Don’s Kombi to take mates on day trips to Whale Beach and Avalon. Filling the Kombi’s tank at a BP station in Belmore, Wally saw a white Fiat Bambino 500, price 500. On a whim, he bought it, checking his mum would make up a shortfall in funds. The Fiat had a soft-cover sunroof that I poked my head through as we puttered around the neighbourhood. But the Bambino was a tempestuous infant and constantly broke down. We’d be forced to nurse it home. Wally became a bush mechanic, fixing his baby with whatever did the job. He was lucky Don was a proper mechanic, with a garage full of parts. The day before we started at Benilde, we scooted down the school’s long driveway, saying hi to Uncle Jack. He introduced us to Brother Leo, the principal; we were covered in grease and oil, kings of the road, jammin’ and wailing to reggae on a portable music player.
‘Lakemba boys!’ Brother Leo said, shaking his head.
‘Belmore actually,’ I replied. ‘See you tomorrow, Brother.’
Wally crunched it into first and zipped down the drive. I popped my head through the sunroof when we got to Chapel Road, checking to make sure we were clear to make the tricky right-hand turn across the traffic flow.
Wally and I had often stayed out late in our vest-parkas in winter, singlets or bare-chested in summer to watch the street life, have a rollie cigarette or beer; more pensioners at the club than louts on the tear. From where we sat in the gutter, we saw ragged blondes in heels and short skirts jumping out of cars, engines still running, to score from an Italian dealer in York Street. We called him ‘Sugar Man’ aft
er the Rodriguez song we listened to incessantly.
Junkies made the trip at all hours; no one ever came back from the dealer looking happy – heads down, jumpy, keen to get out of there as soon as possible. It took a while for me, a child police snitch, to get a sense of the action. Wally understood immediately and had crafted elaborate stories about the rag-tag clientele and what was going on in Sugar Man’s house, under the nose of elderly parents. In Wally’s telling, the dealer had done time in Long Bay jail, lost custody of his kids and was sleeping in the bedroom he’d occupied as a teenager. We sat there at all hours, on stake-out, believing a major police bust was imminent and we would have front-row seats.
‘That guy’s her pimp, for sure,’ Wally said of a bloke in a muscle shirt, smoking a fag, sitting in a Valiant Charger that a woman had just exited. ‘She’s going off to buy smack from Sugar Man.’ Although, strictly, in the song the dealer offers pills, cocaine and marijuana.
The woman came back in a hurry, agitated, and seemed to slump into her seat. It looked like they were arguing as the car burned its tyres in a loud, snarling take-off. Hey Charger!
‘I reckon she came back empty-handed,’ Wally said.
We thought of ourselves as the Gutter Rats, on the edge of a gritty parade, feeling the cross-currents of a world out of reach.
‘What do you want to do when school is over?’ I’d asked Wally. Never in the same class, I had little sense of his academic abilities.
‘I’m going to drive around Australia in a van,’ he said. ‘I’m also thinking of becoming a park ranger or marine biologist.’
‘I’m not going to uni,’ I said. ‘You can go straight into newspapers from school, like my cousin did. But she says it’s almost impossible to get a job at the Herald or Sun and most people start off in the local papers or in the country and work their way up.’