by Barry Heard
But now, I knew I would spend it in no time if I couldn’t find cheap rent and part-time work. I had relations in Melbourne. My Auntie Merri and Uncle Gordon offered me a room with a shared kitchen and bathroom above their shop in Middle Park. They had a business below, which sold records and television sets. It was close to a railway station and an oval, and only five miles from the city. Above the shop were two bedrooms, and an old lady lived in the other room. She kept to herself, we organised separate times for the kitchen and bathroom, and it worked well.
Next, I needed an income. I tried the pub across the road, cafés, and service stations, but I had no experience and was too old. Owners didn’t like paying an adult wage to inexperienced people. I sat for my taxi licence and managed to pass, but couldn’t get a cab for two months. I was stuck.
Then, one day I heard there was some part-time work at the South Melbourne markets if you fronted about 4.00am and hung around. The first morning I hung around for two hours with no luck. I didn’t have a car, so I’d jogged there. It was while I was jogging back home that I called into a service station and asked the bloke for a drink of water. We got chatting, and I asked him about a job. Like the others, he shook his head but was curious. He asked questions, and I enjoyed the light conversation. He pushed me about my past. When he found out I’d been in the army, he eyed me suspiciously.
‘Can you handle yourself?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Well, I’m fit,’ I answered.
‘Have ya had dealings with the cops?’ he pressed.
Well, I knew Grunter and I’d had minor dealings …
‘Can you keep your mouth shut?’
‘Yep,’ I said cautiously.
‘I’ll give you a try tomorrow, Saturday,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the ropes, OK?’
Sounded good to me. It would only be a fifteen-minute jog, and weekend work really suited me. I’ll call him Ted. He was fair, paid well, and hired me after one day. I had full-time weekend work fourteen hours on a Saturday, and ten hours on a Sunday. If all went well, Ted told me, I would be running the place after a short trial because he hadn’t had a break in five years.
The first day, everything was going well. It was easy to learn the pumps and the till, and I knew about checking oil and tyres from the farm. I cleaned everybody’s windscreen. So far so good, but every now and then a car would pull in.
‘No charge Baz … remember him,’ Ted would mutter.
‘OK, but what about reading the meters at night and balancing the till?’
‘Just make a note of the cost when there’s no charge. Write it on a bit of paper, and put it in the till, Baz.’
I was learning a lot and taking home enough money to pay the rent with a bit left over, so I didn’t ask any more questions.
MELBOURNE LESSONS
I TURNED UP NERVOUSLY for classes at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Hundreds of young people milled around chatting like magpies. I tried not to stare at what they were all wearing. There were women in long dresses with a frill around the bottom, and others in very short skirts, beads on their ankles and wrists, and extra long ones looped around their necks. Everyone wore dark glasses. Men and women were in tops trimmed with artificial fur, with thongs or sandals on their feet. I’d never seen anybody dressed like this, yet somehow they all looked the same.
As for me, I felt completely out of place in a white shirt, a pair of sports trousers, and riding boots. The sheer mass of people overwhelmed me, and I stood off to one side and tried to work out where I had to attend lectures in this rabbit warren. Eventually I located the right room, sat down, and waited. I had caught a train and a tram to RMIT, and I wasn’t sure how long it would take, so I was fifteen minutes early. Finally, other students started to wander in. Almost an hour later, an attempt at a roll call was made.
There were fifteen of us. Several eyed me suspiciously. They probably thought I was a lecturer, dressed as I was and a lot older than them anyway. Initially the course co-ordinator asked us to raise our hands if we had had farm experience. Two hands went up. One bloke was off a farm, but had spent most of his time away in a private school. That left me. Further questions identified me as the only one without a year-twelve certificate.
We were introduced to the subjects. Only hydraulics and accounting had me concerned, as I had no idea what they were about. We were given timetables and assignments, and left ready to start the next day. There was a dash for the coffee shop; everyone seemed to know where it was. I tagged along and sat in a chair on my own in a corner. One of the students, only a couple of years younger than I was, came over, and we began to chat. Suddenly a large group of about fifty students burst in and demanded everyone’s attention. They were recruiting fellow brothers and sisters for a student rally to show solidarity with Hanoi and protest our country’s involvement in Vietnam. I left immediately. Back in my flat, I busied myself looking in the paper for a pushbike. The train and tram were too slow, and I needed to be mobile.
Apart from making rations edible in the middle of the jungle, I had no idea how to cook. At first, I thought a few tins of spaghetti and loaves of bread would see me through for the first week, but I soon realised that if I was to keep my savings intact I would need a few more dollars to cover living expenses. Auntie Merri knew a woman who ran a hotel in the heart of Melbourne; she rang her and arranged for me to start there on Thursday nights. I was cautiously pleased. Things seemed to be working out. I had Albert Park Lake to jog around, paid work, and a course to keep me occupied. Through that first week of study I took a lot of notes and kept to myself. I went to the coffee shop just once more with the other students, but found their air of authority and knowledge a bit intimidating. Too often, the topic of Vietnam arose and I kept quiet. I spent a lot of time in the library.
Thursday, I finished lectures at 4.00pm and found my way to the pub for my first day at my new job. After putting on a clean shirt and giving myself a quick brush down, I was introduced to the boss, who turned out to be a very nice woman and a lifelong friend of my aunt’s.
I was to be a waiter in the upstairs Ladies’ Lounge, where I met the other staff, was handed a tray, and told to ‘mingle’. In no time, I was collecting orders and trying to remember bizarre names for cocktails. The staff was entirely male: three barmen and two waiters. It went OK. I didn’t say much to the patrons; I was more concerned about carrying seven drinks on a tray at once. At knockoff time, I sat with the staff and had a quiet cold beer.
‘Not many tips tonight, Baz?’ said one bloke. ‘Gunna be a low pay packet.’
‘Tips?’ I frowned. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘You have to rely on tips, Baz. The customers expect service, and the tips pay for the extra staff the boss puts on.’ He laughed. ‘The money is shit.’
He was right; the money was shit. I went home disappointed, knowing I’d have to look for another job. The following Thursday night, though, the owner pulled me aside and gave me some advice.
‘Look, as a waiter, you’re efficient at getting orders, but you have no interaction with the customers, Barry,’ she said.
I tried. Early on in the evening, I would smile politely and answer questions asked of me. As the night wore on, the clientele would relax and their chatter would increase, and I would try my halting compliments on them. The other staff would whisper a customer’s name in my ear … I’d never done this before, and it wasn’t easy.
‘That’s a nice dress, Marilyn,’ I’d say awkwardly.
‘Had your hair done? It suits you, Amy.’
‘Gee, you look attractive tonight, Doris.’
‘Haven’t seen you for a while. Nice to have you back, Beryl.’
I thought I sounded lame but — bugger me — it worked. The tips started coming in and I got a lot of cute smiles. But I had to think carefully before I spoke; my swearing was still a problem. My pay packet had doubled, but still wasn’t quite enough to survive on. However, my boss revealed strategy number two. I wasn�
�t very keen on the idea.
‘Let them get to know a little about you, Baz,’ she said. ‘After all, you’re a classic case of a poor, deserving student.’
I didn’t like the sound of this. Since I had returned from Vietnam, I hadn’t befriended one person. The women who frequented the lounge were my age or older, and most worked, ran a business, or had come in for a day’s shopping while Dad babysat the kids after work.
I mingled and smiled. But when someone asked, ‘How’re things?’ Or ‘Keep’n busy?’ I awkwardly replied that I was struggling with my studies. Wow! Did this create some interest. I didn’t look like a student. I was quiet, and looked more like thirty-three than twenty-three. My mother, in fact, had said I looked about thirty-five when I got home from Vietnam.
Questions came from everywhere.
‘How do you manage to study fulltime?’
‘You left school at fifteen?’
‘You ride a pushbike everywhere?’
‘You’ve just come back from Vietnam?’
My boss had volunteered that information about me, and it really pissed me off. Admitting to being a Vietnam veteran had brought me nothing but unnecessary grief and hassles. But these women were different. They sensed I had difficulty with the fact, and they rarely mentioned it beyond commenting that it must have been hard. During my early, isolated time in Melbourne, these women were an important group of people to me, and they never knew it. The tips poured in, and I had enough income to buy food and put a little aside.
I had settled into a good routine, and my studies were going well. In subjects involving stock or farming, I realised I was learning nothing new. Because of my old job at Topbar, the farm I had worked on, I breezed through anything involving stock, pastures, chemicals, fertilisers, weed control, animal husbandry, and bloodlines. This gave me more time to study accounting and hydraulics, which I’d never encountered before. I passed my first-term exams.
Meanwhile, my job at the service station with Ted took on a whole new dimension. One day I turned up to find there was a sign out in front of the workshop: ‘New Mechanic on Duty.’
It seemed I had a new title. Ted wanted me to service all vehicles and run the station from Saturday morning to Sunday night. I was furious. I called him a dickhead, and told him to jam it.
‘Just hang on, Baz,’ Ted said when I complained. ‘I’ll show you the ropes first, then bitch if you want.’
The ropes were very simple:
• Check the oil. If low, top it up and charge extra. If black, drain, replace, and charge double extra. (No new filter.)
• Paint each tyre with black, and tick with a piece of chalk. (This was a stroke of genius — the customers often remarked how thorough I was.)
• Clean the battery terminals and cover them with grease.
• Clean the windscreen. Put a new service sticker on. Spray the inside of the car with upholstery fragrance.
That was a full service. I could do four vehicles an hour. The customer was charged the going two-hour rate, and gave Ted nothing but good feedback. To top it all off, bloody Ted introduced me to Doug, a shady-looking mate of his he wanted to re-hire to work the driveway, with me as the boss. Ted assured me he was a good worker.
‘Just watch him with the till,’ he said in a low voice. ‘He’s a thief; he’ll flog anything.’ Look who’s talking, I thought.
The ethical dilemma presented by working for a thief raised its head for a full thirty seconds: better money, being my own boss, and supervising a moron with the brains of a stunned plover made me see sense.
‘OK, Ted,’ I said finally. ‘I’ll give it a go.’
Shagger, a new kid fresh from a stint behind bars, now operated the pumps. Doug did oil, water, windscreens, and tyre checks. Any spare time he had, he helped Shagger on the pumps. I worked out a system. Any free petrol, Doug or Shagger had to get my approval. I would walk over and read the meter, then write the amounts on a slip of paper. Every night, it was solely my job to read the pumps, balance the money, and wait for Ted to collect his earnings and then lock up. You could see Doug was annoyed with this arrangement. For a while, I could appease him with free ice creams, free petrol, and free footy tickets, because some of the local VFL footballers were regulars and got free petrol. The local police were regulars and often came in for a yak when I was servicing vehicles. After watching me working for a while one day, one of them asked, ‘Don’t you check the gearbox oil?’
They’d obviously guessed I didn’t know what I was doing.
‘If you want your own vehicles done,’ I replied, ‘I suggest you find a mechanic.’ They both just smiled. ‘Bloody Ted,’ one of them said. ‘He’s a gem, eh?’
But I could tell Doug wasn’t happy. He had a scowl on his face that was the thin-eyed look of a bully. I sensed he resented the fact that I was his boss because I was younger, and that the cops came and spoke to me. I wasn’t looking for a new friend, though. I didn’t care what he thought as long as he did his job.
The trick Doug played on me in the end had a bigger effect than he could have ever imagined. But it got what he wanted: a reaction from me.
Now, Ted had insisted that every car I serviced be driven into the workshop and put up on the ramp or hoist, because that looked good for business. Then, after the vehicle was hoisted up, a steel safety pipe would swing down to stop the hoist from falling if the hydraulics failed. While it was up there, I painted the tyres and applied the famous ‘Ted tick’, as I called it. I would swing up the safety bar and let the car down, check the oil, and grease the battery terminals and, bingo, the full service was finished. I was in the middle of this job, and had just painted the two tyres on one side and was ducking under the car to move to the other side, when the hoist crashed down and jammed onto the safety pipe. Instinctively I dived to my left, crashing into the open toolbox I never used, cutting my neck.
The car was still wobbling on the ramps about five feet off the ground when I looked up. I got up, and heard a loud laugh.
‘Fuckwit! Date licka!’
It was Doug. My rage was instantaneous. I grabbed a heavy adjustable spanner and walked over to him.
‘You ever frighten me like that again and I will smash your pathetic undershot jaw with this spanner, you fuck’n moron.’
He tried to eyeball me, and failed. By now I was inches from his face and snarled, ‘Answer me, ya weak prick.’
I wanted an apology. He just stared. Enraged, I lifted the spanner to swing it when his eyes widened and he stepped back, mumbling something I knew to be an apology from the pitiful expression on his face. He turned and walked off. I grabbed a can of soft drink and went to sit in the office, where Shagger helped me put a bandage around my neck and cleaned up my back. I started to shudder. My stomach pains were piercing, stabbing bolts. I tried to keep my head up; I had to watch for Doug. I knew if he came over now I would be history. My rage had left me, and I felt only frightened and exhausted. Trying to remain composed, I walked stiffly outside and went to the toilet. My bowels deposited a foul-stinking soup of diarrhoea into the bowl. I returned to the workshop, my clean shirt wet with sweat, and buried myself in a frenzy of work that had me so exhausted that that night, when I finally jogged home, I simply collapsed onto my bed and didn’t move for hours.
If nothing else, I hoped my business with Doug was over. It worried me that he might try again, but I decided that, if he did, I would leave and get another job.
Then, another surprise: shady blokes who called into the service station selling stolen merchandise. The stories you hear about flashing greatcoats and dodgy characters, I can assure you, are true. Even Doug could work out that what they were selling was hot. He knew most of the blokes who came calling. My first experience was with a shifty bastard selling batteries who came into the service area carrying what looked like a carton of grog.
‘Wanna buy some batteries, mate?’ he said, opening the carton. ‘I’ve got some more on the truck.’
Ted never gav
e me a phone number to contact him, so I was on my own.
‘How much?’ I asked.
His price was a quarter of what we charged in the shop. I told him the boss was away. ‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘ I wanted to give Ted first offer.’
Doug had already hinted that everything in the shop was lifted. I slowly realised that all our suppliers were criminals, and part of a larger supply network. I paid the bloke for 25 batteries, and Ted was pleased when he came in to collect the takings that night.
‘Baz, you catch on quick, son. That’s Dregs; he’s a regular supplier. You’ll meet a few others over time.’
So now I was a crim? Great … what would mum think if she ever found out? But at least I was actually banking money.
RMIT was changing. Student protests against Vietnam were growing, and I was relieved that I had said nothing and that no one was aware of my past. I kept to myself and kept occupied. The only day that was a bother was Wednesday, a sports day in which most students participated. Longing for a bit of social contact, I gave footy a try and went to the first training run, managing to get a game with the amateurs. We played against other institutions; it looked like a lot of fun, but I was having trouble fitting in. About the fourth week into the competition, there was a minor hiccup. The umpire hadn’t turned up. Both sides were changed and ready to run onto the ground. Still no umpire, so the captains met and suddenly they were looking at me. Admittedly, I had about six years’ experience as a player, and was the oldest bloke in the two sides.
‘Baz, could you umpire the game, mate?’
‘OK,’ I said.
I took off my jumper and put on an old shirt. Someone produced a whistle, and I jogged onto the ground. I had got to know most of the blokes on my side over the weeks, and assumed umpiring would be no big deal. Five minutes into the game, I blew the whistle and awarded an opposition bloke a free kick.