And he took a handful of pain-killers, washed them down with a big glass of red wine and headed off.
Now, the problem with saying that under no circumstances was anyone to put anything on his cast was that Richard would immediately start thinking of circumstances to put something on his cast. And so Richard waited outside Dad’s door until he heard him snoring. He then snuck in, put superglue all over the cast and sprinkled it with gold glitter. It was spectacular. A disco-cast straight out of the seventies. It was possibly his most brilliant revenge on Dad yet.
Or at least it would have been, had Dad not rolled over in his sleep and rested his head on his cast. He woke up in the morning with the cast stuck firmly to one of his eyebrows and it is safe to say that over breakfast the shits were well and truly cracked. Dad stormed into the kitchen and, despite limited visibility, made a beeline for Richard.
‘Richard bloody Opie! What the bloody hell were you thinking? My hand is stuck to my bloody head! How! Could! You! Be! So! Stupid!?’
It was these last six words that brought Dad completely undone. He intended their staccato delivery to be punctuated with aggressive hand gestures, but for some insane reason he was attempting to gesticulate with the hand stuck to his head. As such it looked like he was yanking himself around the room by his own eyebrows.
Richard attempted an apology, but couldn’t stop laughing. Nobody could. All the inhabitants of the lodge had now made their way into the kitchen and formed a circle around my father. Their laughter seemed to disorient him and he started wheeling around and lashing out at anyone he could fix his monocular gaze on.
My mother attempted to console him, but was literally crippled with laughter. And when she wasn’t laughing, she was just saying, ‘I’m hissstree, Ronnie. I’m hissstreee.’ The angrier Dad got, the funnier it became. He tried to lash out, but his cast kept taking his forehead with it.
It would be years before my sister and I would either respect or obey my father again. Henceforth if he ever told us to do something, be it tidy our rooms or do our homework we would simply put our hands to our eyebrows and say, ‘Sorry, I didn’t get that.’
Receiving no sympathy from anyone in the lodge, my dad then attempted one of the funniest things in history. He attempted to storm off in a huff, into the snow, with an arm attached to his head. First, he stormed over to the coat rack. He grabbed his beanie and proceeded to hook it over his elbow and stretch the other end over his head. The result was that he appeared to have a large triangular-shaped tumour sticking out the side of his skull. He looked in the mirror and seemed unjustifiably satisfied, as though the ridiculous angle of the beanie was in some way a statement. To my father, if it was possible for a beanie to be rakish, this was it. He then grabbed his parka, put his good arm through one sleeve and began whirling like a dervish. He then stopped abruptly. The empty sleeve kept spinning until he caught it with his good hand, stuffed it into his pocket and stormed off into the snow. Sadly, I don’t think he even heard the applause.
Down at the hospital, he didn’t fare much better. The doctors tried to be sympathetic, but it was impossible. They simply couldn’t stop laughing and therefore were unable to begin removing the cast from my dad’s head.
‘I don’t see what’s so funny. This is a serious medical condition.’
The angrier he got, the more they laughed and so his abuse got louder. Soon word got out around the hospital and a crowd formed.
‘No wonder you’re working on a bloody mountain. None of you could get a job in a real hospital!’
Some doctors were dispatched to get on the phone and tell other doctors who were off duty to get to the hospital immediately. As crowd numbers rose, so too did Dad’s temperature.
‘I’m a pharmacist you know. I’ve got friends in the AMA. I’ll have you all reported to the ombudsman!’
This pitiful threat of mid-level bureaucratic punishment was enough to elicit functioning medical attention and a team of two doctors and two nurses used a solvent to free the skin and a razor to detach the eyebrow. So in the end, my father, who didn’t want to look foolish, was left with a face missing an eyebrow and one arm in plaster cast covered in gold glitter with a solitary eyebrow embedded in it.
At this point it looked as though Richard had won the winter campaign, but my father refused to be beaten. Hell bent on revenge, his plan was simple. Before leaving the hospital he insisted, in return for his not filing a formal complaint, that the doctors give him an eye-patch. An hour later he trudged through the door of the lodge with a forlorn expression on his face, looking for all the world like the saddest yet most flamboyant pirate in history. Everybody crowded around to ask what was wrong.
‘The doctors at the hospital spilled some solvent in my eye trying the get the cast off. I have to have some tests when I get back to Melbourne, but they’re pretty sure I’ve lost the sight in my right eye.’
Of the chorus of sympathy, one anglicised voice spoke louder and more desperately than all the others.
‘Oh dear god, Ron. I am so sorry. I feel dreadful.’
‘Oh, you weren’t to know, Richard. What’s an eye between friends.’
‘No, Ron. You are too forgiving. I promise, and you are all my witnesses, I promise that I will never pull another prank as long as I live.’
At this point Dad looked at Mum and she swears that under that eye patch, she saw him wink.
As always, it was my father’s commitment to the deception that made it truly spectacular. The next morning when the group were heading off skiing, they implored him to come with them but he refused.
‘No, I couldn’t possibly go skiing. Without this eye I’ve got no depth perception. I’d be a danger to myself and others.’
By now the sympathy was off the charts. And rightly so. This was a significant price to pay for a prank. To pull this off, Dad couldn’t ski for the rest of the week. But the best thing was neither could Richard, who made a grand gesture of staying back at the lodge to wait on Dad hand and foot. Peeling him grapes, pouring him expensive wine and feeding him steak cut into individual bite-sized pieces.
To his credit, Dad played the martyr to perfection.
‘Ron, are you comfortable?’
‘Who said that? Come closer into the light. Oh, Richard. I couldn’t see you. Maybe the other eye is going now.’
‘Oh dear. Ron, I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?’
‘More steak?’
Dad kept up the act for a day and a half, until we were leaving. When we got to the car park and were about to drive away, Dad looked over at Richard, lifted his eye-patch and winked at him. He then burst out laughing and drove away.
You might think Dad had won, but he did have to go to work the next day with a cast unevenly caked in glitter and most of an eyebrow stuck in it.
11
Must Have Good Sense
of Humour
I think that the role of my mother in all of this deserves some discussion. I would hate for anyone who reads this book to be under the impression that my mother was an innocent, passive, entertained but often inconvenienced bystander to the shenanigans of her husband. This could not be further from the truth. Pamela Pickering was more than complicit; she was integral. Oftentimes pranks would be her idea, she merely had a great knack for assuming a safe distance after the fact so as to appear neutral. This kept Richard Opie in a constant state of underestimation and my mother in a position of immense power.
Thus many things that would, to most wives, seem senseless, intolerable and childish were, to my mother, cornerstones of her and Dad’s relationship. To fully understand this, I need to tell you about how they met.
My parents met at the Victorian College of Pharmacy in the sixties. Before you entertain any ideas of the Summer of Love and budding young chemists using their lab time to make hospital-grade LSD so strong you could taste sound, I should add that this was the mid-sixties so the strongest thing anyone ever made was a hospital-grade coffee strong enough
to help you cram for exams.
As well as being an outstanding student, my mother Pamela was the celebrated winner of the Miss Pharmacy Pageant. Politeness prevents me from saying in which year she won the coveted title, other than to say A) it was 1965 and B) I’m really sorry, Mum.
Winning Miss Pharmacy posed something of a conundrum for my mother. As an informed feminist, she recognised and supported the theory that beauty pageants of any kind, even in an academic arena like pharmacy college, were demeaning to women and reduced them to a level of purely superficial value. Yet at the same time, it was terribly flattering. Indeed it is very difficult to have a bunch of people think you’re a bit of all right without seeing at least some wisdom in it. She mulled this poser right up until the point that she won, finally realising that no matter how highbrow your effort in the talent portion, the moment you wear a sash it’s very difficult to tell you apart from any other beauty queen.
It was this newly buttressed feminism that stymied a genuine invitation for her to compete in Miss Australia, and also first brought my parents together.
Mum’s first-year pharmacology lecturer was Professor Krauthammer.3 An ancient and cantankerous bully, he clung to his outdated worldview almost as tightly as he clung to his tenure. He had been at the college long enough to remember a time when there were no female students. He really missed that time. And while he had finally made begrudging peace with that fact that he would henceforth be obligated to educate females, he didn’t have to like it and he sure as hell didn’t have to make them feel welcome. If they were going to come into his lecture theatre, they were going to do it on his terms.
And one day these two opposing forces met. Miss Pharmacy, the unlikely feminist, and Professor Krauthammer, the wounded old dinosaur, keen to take some young homo sapiens down with him before the asteroid of progress made final impact. My mum started it, really. She had the gall, nay, the bald-faced temerity to get up one morning and decide to wear jeans to university. I know! In 1965! The outrage! And to be honest, I don’t know what’s more abominable: going to an esteemed institute of learning in what is ostensibly drag, or the fact that she decided it for herself! Either way, when she walked into Krauthammer’s lecture he gladly took it upon himself to focus a particularly hirsute eyeball on her and then to set her straight.
‘If young women want to receive an education, there is little I can do about that. However they will not do it dressed as men. From now on if you must come to my lectures, you will do so in a skirt. And until such time as you are appropriately dressed, I will kindly ask you to leave.’
I don’t care what kind of power-feminist you are; to be scalded like that in front of your peers is nothing short of humiliating. I’m sure that if put in the same position Germaine Greer herself would have gone to water and run out of the room, before composing herself and then heading immediately to ‘Lady Sangster’s House of Petticoats: Feminine Clothing Emporium For Proper Ladies Who Know Their Place’. Which, if memory serves, is pretty much what my mother did.
My dad was in second year, slightly older and something of a natural leader. When he got word of this outrageous episode, he declared that something had to be done. He didn’t really know my mum and wasn’t necessarily a feminist, but he sure did believe in putting the wind up Krauthammer.
The next day my mother wore a dress that would have been better suited to a mourning widow in Victorian England. She entered Krauthammer’s lecture theatre via the rear door and took a low-profile seat towards the back. Despite her obsequious entrance, Krauthammer still managed to spot her, look her up and down and smile to himself, reassured of his status as old guy most in charge of that lecture theatre. As he picked up a piece of chalk, wrote on the board and began to talk, the door to the lecture theatre flew open with an enormous crash. In strode Dad and three friends, resplendent in knee-high skirts.
‘Sorry we’re late, sir. There was a dreadful queue for the ladies’ lav.’
To say that Krauthammer was shocked would be an understatement akin to calling World War Two a ‘hoo-ha’ or the bombing of Hiroshima a ‘nasty business’. He went into a genuine meltdown. There are those who were there that day who distinctly remember a small piece of brain falling out of his head. Others say they saw a puff of steam come out of his ears, which yet more insist was his soul leaving his body. Whichever version of events you believe, one thing is certain: he was no longer in charge of anything.
Completely unable to form words, Krauthammer stormed out of the room. To thunderous applause, Dad and his mates took a flamboyant bow and went out the other door. My mother was left thinking, ‘There’s something about that Ronnie Pickering.’
Professor Krauthammer was never seen or heard from again.
Mum and Dad didn’t see each other too much immediately following the Krauthammer incident. This was mainly because the different year-levels occupied different parts of the college. Their labs were in different buildings and their lockers were in different cloisters. The closest they came to genuine proximity was the three-storey lecture building. First years had lectures in a theatre on the first floor, second years in the middle and third years on the top floor. Each floor entered from a different stairwell and the closest they ever came to interaction was being able to hear the scrapes of chairs being moved around in the other theatres. But while they never had any visual contact, Dad ensured he was never far from Mum’s thoughts.
You see, a few weeks after his cross-dressing heroics, Dad came into possession of a rail coupling. This is the large, extremely heavy, iron doodad that links two train carriages. They weigh about as much as a fully-grown human man and for some baffling reason my father carried one around pharmacy college in a sports bag. His friends understandably asked him why on earth he was hefting locomotive spare parts around the university, to which he would only ever respond, ‘You’ll see.’
There are so many reasons I like this story. For starters, how does someone come into possession of a rail coupling? I have never, in my thirty-something years on this earth, happened upon a rail coupling. In fact the only point of reference I have for what one even looks like is action movies, often set in the Wild West, where various dastardly fiends and dashing do-gooders separate train carriages as part of a greater strategy of evil/good. That said, I could not operate one nor would I have any idea what constitutes a reasonable offer for one on the open market. My father, however, apparently knew exactly where to find one and apparently had some clues for its operation.
I also like the old-world aesthetic of a scheme that requires a rail coupling. Simply by telling the story and mentioning the central prop, the story could not imaginably take place later than 1970. Stories after 1970 involve things like disco, lava-lamps and affordable aeroplane travel. Simply by mentioning a rail coupling the whole thing insinuates that this was a time when the railways were still the backbone of commerce and society. That and it should be filmed in black and white.
The final thing I like, and possibly the most important part of the story, is my dad’s natural flair as a showman. When people made enquiries about what he was up to, he was controlled enough to pique their curiosity even further by being enigmatic. Admittedly the word ‘enigmatic’ is interchangeable here with ‘deranged’, but surely this is a distinction better left to the audience. And the audience at the time were enthralled.
One Monday morning, with heads turning as he passed, Dad would struggle with the sports bag as he went from the tram stop to his locker, from his locker to the cafeteria, then up the four flights of stairs to the second years’ lecture theatre and then up yet more stairs to the middle of the theatre as the first lecture of the day began at eight am.
At exactly fourteen minutes past the hour, Dad lifted the bag to the height of his desk and then dropped it to the floor.
Bonnnnnnnggggggg!
Three levels of lecture theatres became a giant bell-tower and no one was safe. It was monumentally loud. Well beyond Dad’s expectation. The windows sh
ook, the blackboards rattled and more than a few people’s fillings were loosened. As his confused lecturer scanned the room for the source of the disruption, my father’s eyes remained focused on his notebook as he pretended to write notes while working harder than ever to hold back laughter.
When the lecture finished, the whole building was abuzz with excitement. Where had the noise come from? Who was responsible? Amid the kerfuffle, nobody seemed to notice my dad sneak past, limping like Quasimodo under the weight of his sports bag.
The next morning, at exactly fourteen minutes past eight, again Dad lifted the sports bag to the height of his desk and dropped it on the floor. Once again shock and chaos were deployed in equal measure, but this time a few people started to giggle.
At 8.14 the next day, shock and chaos were on the wane, but the laughter grew significantly. Later in the day, some members of the engineering faculty inspected the building to see if there was any structural damage. They found nothing, but suggested there could be something wrong with the pipes.
The next day’s eight am lecture was largely uneventful. That is until the fourteen-minute mark, when the phantom struck again. This time enormous laughter gave way to a smattering of applause. Nonetheless Dad continued to focus on his notepad even though on the inside he was beaming. Later that day the faculty maintenance crew concluded that there was nothing wrong with the pipes, but that the college may want to get someone in to check the heating.
On the Friday morning the lecture began with a guest in attendance. A five-foot tall, sixty-something representative from the Hydro-Temp Hydronic Heating Company who, if his embroidered name tag was to be believed, was named Jock. He was sitting in a chair next to the blackboard and on his face was the look of a person who was listening. Which, incidentally, is identical to the look of a person who suspects, but is not sure, that they have just smelled faeces. At fourteen minutes past the hour, as three floors of students vibrated on the same hilarious frequency, Jock listened, shook his head, turned to the lecturer and said with a broad highland accent, ‘It’s definitely noo the heating.’
Impractical Jokes Page 10