Much like a real H&K, the water pistols had to be ordered from Germany though clandestine channels. Richard sent order forms to European business contacts and made payments in Deutsche marks to offshore accounts with sinister names like the Strasbourg Feuerwaffe Novelti Korp. He then waited months for delivery. Just as he had begun to give up hope, they arrived one May morning in 1987 in a small timber crate that had to be opened with a crowbar in undeniably theatrical style.
And these babies were worth the wait. Made of a solid metal construction, the replicas were no less impressive than the German originals and if the words ‘state of the art’ can be applied to water pistols, this is what they were. The designers had done away with the laborious and altogether embarrassing pump system so often forced upon the recreational water pistoleer. There is no greater indignity than having the perfect ambush undermined by a firing action that makes you look like your masturbating the detached arm of a gaily-coloured robot. In contrast, the German uber-pistol was completely battery-powered, meaning that it would fire continuously at the mere depression of the trigger. Not only that, but it had removable ammo clips which could be filled with water and instantly replaced should you run dry. But by far their greatest feature was that they had a small speaker built into the barrel and when you pulled the trigger they made a loud and very realistic machine gun noise.
How loud and how realistic cannot be underestimated. The sound was deafening, terrifying and spectacular. This brought with it an unforseen bonus feature. If you fired at someone with this water pistol, you would not only wet your target, but they would immediately wet themselves as well. Richard had a fairly good feeling that these weapons represented a water-war endgame of sorts. They couldn’t be topped. When he unleashed them on Dad the current feud would, for all intents and purposes, be over.
Richard had the means; he simply needed the opportunity. It came one Saturday. As was their custom in the late eighties and early nineties, Dad and Richard were with their friend Ian enjoying an afternoon of watching the St Kilda football club get unceremoniously destroyed at Moorabbin Oval. I’m fairly sure that none of the men actually barracked for the Saints, but the ground (known colloquially as ‘the Cage’) was less than ten minutes from home and they all liked football for football’s sake. They could stand in the outer, drink beer, yell at umpires and be at home or the local Chinese restaurant by five-thirty. When you feel no emotion for the team being consistently pummelled into the notorious Moorabbin mud, that makes for a pretty good afternoon.
The Cage was also the location of the pinnacle of my football career. After years of hard work and handball drills at my local Vic Kick Footy Clinic, I was given the opportunity to play in a little league match during the half-time break of a St Kilda game. Being a relative local, I was drafted to play for the Saints. They weren’t my team. I was and will always be an Essendon man. But on this occasion that didn’t bother me. That, I reassured myself, was just the way footy was now, what with pre-season drafts and salary caps. You had to play where you were sent. Besides, I was eleven years old, had shiny new boots and was pretty sure that I was one talent scout away from snapping the winning goal in a VFL grand final. I wasn’t going to miss that opportunity by being precious about whose guernsey I was wearing.
The game itself was a low scoring affair. While the ground was actual size, we were not. We barely had the legs to run the ball to our forward line, let alone the strength to keep it there long enough to score. Our adversaries were the Bulldogs from the tough western suburb of Footscray. They seemed to be fitter than us, which we put down to their time spent evading police. By half-time we were down by three unanswered goals and things were looking dire. As the coach gave us a pep talk, I couldn’t help but think my time to impress the talent scouts was rapidly escaping—a pretty heavy thought to wrestle with over an orange and a cup of cordial. The pressure was amplified by the fact that the change of ends had placed me in the outer forward pocket, directly in front of Dad, Richard and Ian. My pulse became quicker and audible as I resolved that, come what may, I would have an impact on the game.
It didn’t take long. Moments after the centre bounce, Sammy Austen took possession of the ball and burst through the pack faster than I had ever seen him run. This I put down to an abject fear of being caught by the thugs in pursuit. He spotted me on a lead, slammed the ball on his boot and breathed a sigh of relief at the fact that without the ball, he just might not get bashed.
The ball sailed towards me and time stood still. Every scratch match, marking practice and skills drill boiled down to this one moment. I was perfectly poised to realise every childhood sporting dream I had ever known. Or at least I was, until my opponent planted two hands firmly in my back and sent me to the ground, before taking the mark that was clearly meant for me. No whistle was blown. No free kick was awarded. Time reanimated and my heart sank.
Furious at the injustice, I stood on the mark with my arms in the air, painfully aware of Dad and Richard’s gaze. As my opposition number took his kick, I turned around to see where it went. It was a particularly sluggish attempt and barely made the ten-metre journey from his boot to the back of my head, knocking me to the ground and rebounding towards the boundary line. Tim Baker, the one player on our team who was actually any good, effortlessly scooped the ball up in one hand, evaded two defenders and snapped a belter of a goal running at full tilt and only a couple of feet from the pocket boundary. The crowd erupted. And by that I mean a tipsy Richard yelled from the boundary, ‘That’s using your head, Charles.’
Those gathered around, laughed.
On the verge of tears I turned to tell Richard to shut up, but stopped myself as I caught sight of my dad. He was smiling. Not at Richard’s joke, but at me. We went down to Footscray by seven goals to one, but I felt like a winner.
If this were the only momentous personal event to take place at the Cage, it would still hold a special place in the hearts of Richard, Dad and myself. But, as I mentioned, another afternoon at the Cage was particularly memorable, and that was because a conversation which took place in the outer over a few beers was the catalyst for an act of all-out war.
The afternoon the war was reignited, the pummelling of the Saints had been particularly extensive and by the time Ian had gone on the half-time beer run, Richard had started to make plans for the evening.
‘So, Ron, what are the plans for this evening? Cheryl’s out for the night. Your place or mine?’
With his almost regal accent and effortless turn of phrase, Richard could sound distinguished in any situation. The fact that Richard was standing next to a man who had opted to urinate against the boundary fence rather than take on the grandstand urinal queue did remarkably little to reduce that distinction. As if swept up in Richard’s pomp, Dad forgot himself and gave a dangerously honest answer.
‘Well actually, Richard, Pammy has organised a bit of a dinner party for tonight. So . . .’ Richard didn’t need to hear the ‘so’.
‘Perfect, Ron! Sounds delightful. I’ll grab some wine, be round by seven, let’s make a night of it.’
‘Ah . . . no. You see, Richard; there are fairly limited numbers. Pammy’s already prepared the meal, so I’m afraid we’ll have to give it a miss tonight.’
‘What if I don’t eat?’
‘That could become a little awkward.’
‘I’ll bring my own meal then. Maybe get some Chinese.’
‘Look, Richard, we can go out next week, but tonight we’re going to have to leave it.’
Richard did his best to look hurt by the rejection. In between affected pouts and world standard moping, he threw in some precision martyr work.
‘Oh . . . I see . . . No, that’s fine, Ron. I hope you have a lovely evening . . . Don’t you worry about your old pal Richard . . . Your best friend . . . he’ll just stay home tonight . . . alone . . . reading a particularly lonely novel.’
He may even have managed to squeeze out a solitary tear. All the while in his head he
was thinking, ‘Oh you little beauty’.
On the way home from the footy Richard and Ian hatched a plot. Ian was essential to Richard’s scheme and not merely because he had ordered two water pistols. You see, Ian was a builder and had done a bit of work on our kitchen and so he knew where the fuse box was.
A Pamela Pickering dinner party is a sight to behold. My mum’s passion for food is matched only by her love of meticulous planning and her drive to be a good host.
She would start with the guest list. Four was too few; twelve too many. Eight was ideal but ten was fine. She would carefully consider which friends and couples would complement others. More importantly, she vigilantly kept track of who had had a falling out with whom and could instantly calculate which combinations could turn septic within the first half hour. Her guests could always be confident that if they RSVP’d in the affirmative, they would be perfectly suited to the rest of the people there.
Each meal had one simple responsibility: to be better than the last. And to achieve this, nothing was left to chance. If a dish was served at a Pamela Pickering dinner party, it was never for the first time. On a Saturday night when guests commented that their individual racks of lamb were both crispy and succulent, they had no idea that for the preceding week the Pickerings had eaten nothing but racks of lamb. On Monday night the racks had delivered on succulence, but the crumbs were soggy.
On Tuesday we achieved crispiness of crumb, but the meat was dry. Wednesday had seen an experimental glaze that all had agreed was a mistake never to be spoken of again. On Thursday the crumb to rack ratios had been adjusted to achieve a result that was passable, and on Friday’s full dress rehearsal, the lamb was perfect. On the day, Suzie’s responsibility was to assist in setting the perfect table. She would polish silver, fold napkins and arrange plates with a care and attention to detail that I could never muster. Accordingly, my job was to not touch anything and put away my damned skateboard.
My dad had three dinner party responsibilities: stay out of the kitchen, serve the perfect wine to match the food and, when people had overstayed their welcome, play Frank Sinatra really loudly and begin cleaning the dishes.
The result of all of this preparation was a well-oiled machine that created a dinner party environment where you simply had to turn up to have the best evening you could recall.
And this particular dinner party was no exception. Cocktails and canapés had seamlessly progressed to a broccoli and pumpkin soup that, it was agreed, all but defied science. The broccoli was contained in a green-coloured soup and the pumpkin in an altogether separate orange-coloured soup and they met exactly in the middle of the bowl along a shared border of cream. The result looked like a pie chart for an election in which the orange party and the green party had run a dead-heat for the Democratic Republic of Soup. And the pundits were unanimous, hung parliament or not, the outcome was delicious.
Through entrée, the diners enjoyed a spirited debate about whether Elvis would have lived longer had he taken the lead role he was offered in Rebel Without a Cause instead of making Kissing Cousins and Girl Crazy. To wit: did the dreadful mismanagement of Colonel Tom Parker eventually kill Elvis Presley? As complicated as this sounds, it is a conversation my mother could have predicted. She matched a known Elvis buff with a known kitsch film buff, sitting directly opposite a man whose American cousin would ship the latest collectible Sun Session recordings of the King to my dad. The only unknown quantity in the room were the parents of my best friend from school but in all honesty, they just seemed happy to be out.
The main course was served to considerable applause. Each person had an individual trout, baked in paper. The diners celebrated how perfectly tender the fish was without being overcooked. Rest assured I had eaten some disappointing trout that week. Silence was called for, a toast was made and this dinner party was well on track to deliver as the best one yet.
And then, halfway through main course, all the lights went out.
A brief silence followed, but it was soon broken by the occasional tinkle of cutlery on plate or the surreptitious slosh of misdirected wine missing mouths. The dinner party was making a valiant attempt to carry on, confidently expecting power to resume at any moment.
‘What’s the matter, Ron? Didn’t pay the electricity bill?’
Polite chuckles were stopped in their tracks by the almighty thud of a shoulder being applied at full force to the dining room door.
Richard and Ian burst into the dining room, stockings over their heads, water pistols in their hands, bellowing threats at the diners.
‘Nobody move! This is a stick-up!’
There were five couples seated around the dinner table. Before the assailants even got to the word ‘stick-up’ all the men had hit the floor, leaving the women to take the fire. All except for my father, who, my mother is adamant, used her as a human shield.
‘Just do as we say, and nobody gets hurt!’
There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that some guests soiled themselves without a shot being fired. What is for certain, is that panic struck the group with gusto, and people weren’t going to calm down any time soon.
‘Oh, god. Please don’t hurt us.’
‘Please, take me. Just don’t hurt my wife.’
‘Who robs a dinner party?’
‘Who cares, Peter? Just do as they say.’
‘Does anyone else smell urine?’
Ian, one of only two people in the room who knew the machine guns were fake and that the gunmen were close personal friends of the hosts, found the whole situation very amusing. He began to laugh. The harder he tried to hold it in, the harder he laughed. Before long he was out of control and the mood of the room shifted one step closer to despair.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Are we going to die?’
‘Please, just tell us what you want!’
‘Come to think of it, I can smell urine.’
By now Ian was doing his best impression of a drain but Richard remained silent. He may have been planning his next move. Or perhaps more likely he realised that a machine gun wielding, stocking-faced robber that begins laughing hysterically immediately transitions in the eyes of the hostages from threatening to maniacal. Either way, he decided someone had to break the tension.
‘All right, everyone be quiet!’
Unsurprisingly, this did little to calm anyone. If anything it made things worse. They now had to huddle in silence and just listen to the laughter.
It was around then Richard started to sense that the plan was going awry. What was meant to be a simple retaliation for a harmless joke had rapidly become a full-blown hostage situation. By this point in the prank, people were meant to be laughing. As it was, the only person laughing was a lunatic with a gun, apparently wearing a disguise so that any unlikely survivors couldn’t identify him. It had become a bona fide trauma and anyone with even the most entry-level legal training could tell you that the whole situation became pretty much illegal the moment Richard and Ian said ‘this is a stick-up’.
Richard decided it was time to give his joke some kind of punch line and get the hell out before someone called the cops.
‘Is Ronnie Pickering here?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve been giving some people a hard time, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So is there someone you want to say sorry to?’
My dad desperately tried to figure out who he had crossed that would go to this much trouble to retaliate. I’d like to say he knew instantly that it was Richard but, frankly, the possibilities were endless. It could have been Jeff, the pharmaceutical courier, who almost had a cardiac episode when Dad put a tiger snake skin in a return delivery. It could have been Mary, the shop assistant, who kept finding a very realistic severed hand in her hand bag so often that she stopped bringing a bag to work. Hell, I wouldn’t have put it past my mother. After a long think, the penny dropped.
RONALD PICKERING
Pict
ured showcasing his 1991 collection of FASH ION FOR THE BLIND. This particular ensemble has been known to cause headaches and nausea in the fully sighted.
RICHARD OPIE
Formidable adversary and master of disguise. Seen here at a summer barbecue, he is almost indistinguishable from his surrounds. It took many party-goers the entire afternoon to realise he was even there.
PEACETIME
My sister took this photo of (left to right): Mum, myself, Dad, Richard, Cheryl and Richard’s dog Thabi. The happy, peaceful proximity of all parties leads me to assume this was snapped before the war began.
MUM, RICHARD, FRIENDS ROBBIE AND HARRY, DAD AND CHERYL
I have included this photo as a historical document that I want on permanent record. Not because it highlights two fine examples of eighties knitwear, but rather because it highlights the look my parents and their friends had on their faces throughout my childhood.
WANTED FOR BREAKING, ENTERING AND ALMOST EXITING
Richard Opie and Ian Jackson, seen here in custody after a bungled dinner party hold-up. It is unclear from eyewitness accounts if their blue moustaches were drawn on before or after the raid.
HUDAR
Me and my best friend, Hudar. Hudar’s alive-state indicates the photo could have been taken either before or after the hold-up.
SEATS OF POWER
Dad and I are seen here in the planning phase of our artistic venture. Such is our focus and dedication we are seemingly unaware of the camera’s presence.
THE DAFFO DILS OF WAR
Installation piece by Pickering and Son. Materials: reclaimed toilet bowl, daffodils and dirt. Value: priceless.
NO BUSINESS LIKE IT
Impractical Jokes Page 4