Apparently we’d been not just noticed; we’d been observed.
Ready… Steady…
* * *
After Christmas 1985 my parents took me and my brother Pat on our annual beach holiday to Shoal Bay, an area I had first visited with my mother and grandmother five years earlier, as I described in Goodbye Crackernight, on a very special holiday trip indeed turning out as it did to be the very last holiday ever taken by my grandmother, Josie, before she died at the end of 1980, the year I described in my childhood story as the end of my childhood. On that pivotal trip of my young life the three of us had stayed at the iconic Port Stephens Country Club in all its faded glory, a place where my darling Josie had been, aptly, in her absolute element, possibly the last golden moment of her life with her dear daughter and with me, the closest and most devoted of all her grandchildren. Now five years later my parents, Pat and I stayed in our usual unit at the far end of Shoal Bay from the old club.
I’ve often wondered why it is I was never a ‘beach person’…
By contrast, if body-surfing had been an Olympic event, my father would have won medals. A sporty type? When at school in the late 1940s, he had been in Christian Brothers Chatswood’s 1st XV rugby team and its 1st XI cricket team two years in a row. As a young officer in the Royal Australian Navy in the mid-50s he was a star of the exclusive officers-only tennis courts of Sydney Harbour’s Garden Island naval base, on the eve of his marriage to my mother in 1957 no less than Champion of the Roseville Tennis Club and on their honeymoon ship to England he was the ship’s Deck Tennis Champion despite Mum being sea-sick below deck the whole voyage. Watersports? Yes, them too: any type of sailing boat from small to large and exclusively wind-powered craft, never speedboats; anything with a motor requiring not nearly enough marathon effort.
So it was a complete first-time experience for my father, brother and me when we were offered the use of a speedboat by a friend of a family friend who happened to be holidaying in Shoal Bay at the same time as we were. Specifically, we were invited by the owner of the speedboat to try out water-skiing behind it while he sped the boat around the bay off the beach directly in front of the old Port Stephens Country Club.
My father was naturally offered first go at it, the speedboat man initiating my father to the necessary procedure in order to launch on water-skis behind a speedboat as my older brother and I watched on from the water’s edge: With a lifejacket on, you floated in the water at about 20 feet out into the bay, placing each foot into the rubber stirrup of each of two rather cumbersome wooden water-skis, sitting in the water up to your neck, knees drawn up to your chest with your legs and skis out in front of you, the ski tips just breaking the surface of the water. The speedboat then motored slowly past you, as it did the speedboat driver throwing you the tow-rope at the end of which was the hand-grip which you gripped with both hands close to your chest, the tow-rope between your drawn-up knees and skis, the speedboat motoring on and stopping about 40 feet ahead of you, its powerful engine idling. When all was ready as described, the speedboat driver checked back behind him to ensure it was, called ‘Ready?’, you answered ‘Ready’, the speedboat driver then slowly pushing his throttle forward, the speedboat slowly but surely accelerating, its forward movement drawing you on your skis up out of the water and onto its surface, the speedboat increasing in speed and you were water-skiing. Simple.
‘DO be careful, Jo,’ pleaded my mother from a concerned distance. ‘DO be careful…’
All ready as per the instructions, lifejacketed and ski-fitted out in the water up to his neck, tow-rope at the ready between his knees, my father heard ‘Ready?’ from the boat in front, its engine gurgling, he answered ‘Ready’ and the speedboat’s engine put on power.
And my father was drawn up out of the water like a glistening hunchback holding on for dear life in the sun.
Promptly to go, as described in Physics, ‘Arse Over Tip’ in a foaming flail of limbs and water-skis that had to be seen to be believed.
Take 2.
Skis retrieved, placed on, knees up, tips up, boat motors past, rope thrown, handle gripped, ‘Ready?’, ‘Ready…’
Take 2 was, somehow, even worse than Take 1.
Take 3, just for luck I presume, what phrase can describe it?
A White-Water Shambles would perhaps suffice.
My older brother was called, he waded out into the water and exchanged gear with my father looking like he’d just crawled out of an industrial-strength washing machine set to Bananas.
Gear on, assume the position, ‘Ready?’, ‘Ready…’
As the speedboat accelerated directly away from where I stood on the beach, in the bright late morning sun I witnessed just so very clearly how Pat was drawn up and away directly into a Circus Maximus chariot accident from Ben Hur except on water.
He tried again.
And again.
Water-skiing was apparently impossible.
Fuck, it looked hard. And humiliating too…
As a last resort, all hope abandoned, the call went out: ‘Would the other one like a go?’
I looked about me. There was only me. ‘Me?’ I gestured.
‘Um, sure.’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ appealed my mother, ‘he’ll be damaged! Make them stop this, Jo, please, make them stop!’
‘Nah, let him do it,’ breathed my father. ‘Do him good…’
I waded out. Geared up.
‘Ready?’ came the shout from the revving speedboat ahead of me, my eyes at just above water level.
‘Ready…’
And…
GO!
The speedboat snarled, the rope ahead of me went taut.
And pulled me up, up, up out of the water.
And I was water-skiing, standing surely upright as the waters of the bay rushed faster and faster beneath my shiny wooden skis left and right, their polished-smooth undersides going plomp-plomp-plomp-plomp-plomp on the surface of Shoal Bay. As we settled into a fast cruise, I pushed on my right ski to go left, on my left ski to go right back over the foaming wake of the speedboat, and we went into our first left-hand curve round the bay.
Impossible? It wasn’t even hard. Tiring, certainly, as I was too new at it to fully lean back and let my body weight take some of the strain off my arms holding on. But I could do this, no problem.
I’ll never know what my father said as I ripped past them on the beach and into my second lap of the bay but I like to think that, on this site once so dear to my grandmother, on that day a lovely old lady with horn-rimmed glasses and golden hair was looking out her upper-floor window of the Port Stephens Country Club, smiling, and raising her ghostly gin and tonic with lemon out to the bay.
I never came off, only when I wanted to; my arms so tired that I had to let go of the tow-rope on my next pass of the beach.
As I staggered up onto the sand with a water-ski under each arm, neither my brother nor my father exclaimed, ‘Well done!’ or ‘Wow!’ Not even ‘Gosh.’ They just stood there on the sand all silent.
The owner of the speedboat, however, sat down next to me alone on a picnic bench hours later at the bayside barbeque at the end of the day…
‘Justin,’ he put to me, ‘are you telling me, seriously, that you have never water-skied before?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ I said, ‘and thank you for the chance; it was great.’
‘Oh, my pleasure,’ he returned. Then shook his head slightly, ‘But I tell you, Justin, that was one of the most remarkable things I have ever seen.’
And that, Dear Reader, is what the man said.
Calculus
* * *
An ugly word. An ugly subject.
The beginning of advanced mathematics, though I tried so hard I near gave myself a hernia, it was, alas, an academic discipline around which I could not get my head. Given that I had no plans to become a quantity surveyor, actuary or rocket scientist, it remains a matter for voodoo conjecture why I was ever required to waste so m
uch time trying. Yet my HSC mark would depend significantly upon my being able to master it. 1986. We were all glad to see Max Van Cleef as ‘School Captain’ now but my final year at Riverview was shaping up as a Greek tragedy.
I had most recently been awarded the Edmund Gilhooley Memorial Prize for Constant Application and Improvement. Also, get this, the Religion Prize. If only they’d been HSC subjects.
English had been going well: Mr Farrow gave me 20 out of 20 for a hand-in essay on Waiting For Godot, Beckett’s ‘angry young man’ absurdist play about the agony of a human existence waiting around for ‘salvation’ that will never come. Mr Farrow enthused, ‘Excellent, Justin. Excellent. My time here has not been wasted. Just do THAT in your final exams and you’re home safe, my friend.’
‘But I can’t, sir,’ I squinted. ‘I can’t do it in a 3-hour exam.’
‘No,’ he relented. ‘No, I know you can’t… Still,’ he smiled, ‘the HSC’s not everything; you’ve a long life after that and I have every faith that yours will be a beauty.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘My pleasure, mate. I guarantee you something, one thespian to another…’
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘The show will go on.’
‘I certainly hope so, sir.’
‘Mark my words, Juz. Oh, by the way… We’re taking Hamlet on the road: Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth. Interested?’
No business like…
* * *
In order to get home more quickly and begin sobbing into my Calculus homework for several hours before chewing the wallpaper off over my Latin homework, after Saturday afternoon Hamlet-on-Tour rehearsals I would get a lift with Max Van Cleef up Tambourine Bay Road to Lane Cove and then hitch-hike. One Saturday I got as far as the El Rancho where my ride turned off Epping Road and at a familiar set of lights I stuck out my thumb once again. In no time a white van pulled over, its passenger door pushed open for me and I climbed in.
Behind the steering wheel was a clown.
In full clown-face makeup.
He had just come off his shift; he worked at Macquarie Shopping Centre, had a pair of stilts in the back of the van and loved his work…
‘Making people laugh, it makes me happy,’ he said as we drove along. ‘D’y’know it takes 62 facial muscles to frown and only 26 to smile? That’s because Nature wants us, means us to smile. To be happy. Where are you at school?’
‘Riverview.’
‘You’re lucky: The Jesuits are good people, as far as Christians go; teachya to think. Y’know Jesus Christ used humour when engaging the assembled multitudes?’
‘He did?’ I gaped.
‘Yep. The time he was slamming hypocrites… When he said don’t go pointing out the speck in your brother’s eye while ignoring the beam in your own. The freakin’ BEAM. That would have got major laughs from the crowd. As a result they’d fully take home with them his point about the evils of hypocracy… From your perspective, Justin, the most history-changing individual who ever walked the Earth, and here he was making people laugh. Making people smile. A beam was the word he used; Christ was a carpenter by trade, he knew his stuff and he meant a major piece of wood, the kind that keeps up a whole house. A really big bastard of a piece of wood in the hypocrite’s eye whilst pointing out a speck in someone else’s. A major laugh line, that woulda been…’
‘I never thought of it that way.’
‘Well that’s because we’ve so long been sold Christ as if he was too holy to be funny. An’ he clearly wasn’t too holy for that: What he did that day was get the multitudes to get his message in a way they’d fondly remember. Using comedy to slam the way people misuse religion as just a platform to put other people down! Wow, what a showman. Anyway, whatcha doing at school today? It’s Saturday…’
‘Theatre rehearsal. Hamlet.’
‘Ah!’ my clown-faced driver released. ‘The story of a young man who couldn’t make up his mind! Eva thoughta showbiz? For a career… I could tell you a few stories… Huh. Showbiz. One door closes, another slams in y’face. An’ don’t go looking for an agent… Don’t bother withem. They’ll come looking f’you when they see their 15% t’be made. Still, speaking as a comedy professional, they givvya one thing, agents…’
‘What’s that?’
He concentrated hard on the highway ahead. ‘Material.’
He drove me the whole way home to Howard Place where we chatted for a little while longer in his van outside my house, my father weeding the lawn, until I hopped out, thanked the young man with the painted face, waving as he drove away.
My father didn’t look up from his weeding.
‘…Friend of yours, was it?’
The Party Animal
* * *
Though now extinct in the Australian Wilderness, in the mid-1980s there roamed a creature called the Party Animal. Nocturnal, male, insatiable, American varietals of the species wore t-shirts saying ‘No FAT chicks’. The Party Animal was the dying breath of the Pre-Political Correctness Era, a creature whose philosophy and world-view was ‘Party Hard; it could all blow up tomorrow.’ Rarely seen to eat, the Party Animal however imbibed rum and coke from ready-mixed cans in endless quantity and with no apparent health consequence as, due to its teenage, the Party Animal was indestructible. In any case, tomorrow mattered not; only Tonight; the Party Animal lived for the Now. Every late-teen social circle had its Party Animal and ours was Max Van Cleef, who performed his duties with such fervour he needed an Assistant…
‘Justinius Maximus, O lord of the dance, I want The Rolling Stones, I want The Beatles, I want Eric Burdon and The Animals plus whatever go-go gems you see fit to shower upon us and I want them NOW.’
I performed a slight ‘Osric’ flourish: ‘To hear is to believe, my master, O Max-Where-the-Wild-Things-Are…’
‘Have thou thy party mix cassette with thee?’
‘I have it, sire.’
‘This is pleasing to me. Let’s get it ON.’ As I placed the 60s compilation tape into the cassette tray of Germaine Upton-Pitt’s stereo, Max continued for those nearest: ‘We will offer up thanks by way of virgin sacrifice if and when required and hope it will be. The Party. Now. Begins.’
I pressed ‘Play’.
And the ‘cast party’ for the Melbourne leg of our national drama tour went ballistic with the bomb-drop wail into rock guitar chord poundings of Wild Thing by The Troggs.
Staying with Germaine once again, clearly our relationship would be as firm ‘friends’ from now on and in any case by that night she was already showing more than a passing interest in Max Van Cleef. Besides, on that night one of her girlfriends, one of the best dancers I had ever danced with, showed more than a passing interest in me.
What was it with these Melbourne girls?!
I loved their city. And it loved me. Why, in such stark contrast to Sydney, remains for me even now a sparkling mystery.
Making the Cut
* * *
‘Our last hurrah, Juz… Our last hurrah,’ sighed Max in the airliner seat next to mine on our approach to Sydney. He looked out the window at the city scrolling beneath. ‘Now I must get into Medicine.’
‘Not the Law?’ I put to him. ‘Like your dad…’
‘No,’ Max turned to me with fire in his eyes. ‘I wanna make my life’s work the human body — the work of art, Juz, that Da Vinci saw in the human form… Back when they saw Science as Art!’
I had to chuckle, recalling the moment two years previous when Max had personally turned me off Science forever: Rat Dissection in the Science Block. Each boy in the lab having been issued with a freshly-thawed white rat, a dissection board, string and a scalpel, I set about following the printed ‘operation’ instructions to the letter: Surgically gloved and ready, I laid the furry deceased on its back, tied each of its four tiny paws with string, drew each string taut to the nail at each corner of the wooden board, the lifeless creature’s limbs now fully splayed, its abdomen suitably exposed for surgical
incision. Making the initial incision was the hardest, yet, with sweat beads of concentration, I drew the scalpel back in smooth and careful motion from Point A to Point B, then from Point C to D, retracting Incised Edge E to the right, ready for F to the left… ‘Clamp, Nurse…’ ‘Clamp, Doctor…’ When ‘Hey, Juz,’ came a whisper from the desk directly in front of mine. And I looked up to see, side by side and staring at me, a pair of severed rat heads on the desk of Max Van Cleef and the son of a thoracic surgeon in dual hysterics at my dumb-struck expression.
As our TAA T-jet cabin ‘No Smoking’ light blinged on, I exhaled, stubbed out my cigarette in the arm-rest ashtray, and turned back to Max. ‘You’ll get in, won’t you… To Medicine.’
‘Yeah. Probably,’ returned Max. ‘What about you?’
Already crept the need within me for another cigarette. ‘I would love,’ I said, ‘I would dearly love to get in to Communications at the University of Technology…’
‘You’ll be awesome, Juz.’
‘Mate, I’ve gotta get in first.’
Max considered me intently. ‘Don’t think y’will?’
I looked him in the eyes. ‘Mate, I’m scared.’
Now it was I who had Max dumb-struck. ‘YOU, Juz?’ he managed after a moment. ‘Scared?!’ His head wavering slightly, he then looked out the window. ‘Well now I’ve heard everything.’
Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer Page 12