My dad was unwelcome for different reasons. On more than one occasion he had snuck into the house while a session was in progress and tampered with the shoes. Initially he was amused enough just to move the shoes to the opposite side of the hallway, achieving a subtle sense of disorientation. One week he stepped things up a bit, moving them out of the house and onto the front lawn before laying them down in a perfect circular formation that would have made Busby Berkeley proud. But, as with all things my father does, the stakes were inevitably raised. One week he replaced everyone’s shoes with muddy football boots. The following week they were replaced by an assortment of children’s roller-skates, ballet shoes, gumboots and school sandals. And the following week nothing at all happened, largely because Dad had received more than one threat of physical violence. I’ve got to tell you, for a suburban guided mediation group, they sure could kick off.
Wednesday nights were special for Richard for a different reason. With Cheryl confined to the sitting room, Richard had the rest of the house to himself and for exactly an hour he employed a little guided meditation of his own. Richard’s version of the cave involved a hot bath, a generous pour of single malt and ABC Classic FM, with its unique mix of history’s great composers and announcers so soporific they have been known to put themselves to sleep. Beside a window overlooking a softly lit fernery, Richard would lie back in the bath, drink his whisky, close his eyes and drift off to a very special cave of his own. This was Richard time.
But one evening in 1993 it was also Gavin time. Dad snuck past the shoes in the front hallway—fighting the urge to swap them all with snorkels and flippers—tiptoed past the bathroom, through the living room and out into the back garden. Gavin, who was tucked under Dad’s arm, remained smiling and impressively quiet. The two made their way around the side of the house and to the edge of the fernery, where they stopped and waited for confirmation that Richard was at his most vulnerable.
After a few minutes of Tchaikovsky, Dad began to hear Richard’s accompanying aria in snore sharp major. He then carefully placed Gavin in the middle of the fernery facing into the window.
By all accounts the sound Richard made when he realised he had company was loud enough to reverberate into the depths of the cave of even the most resilient meditator. All attempts to reach any kind of enlightenment were promptly postponed until next week and Cheryl hastened her way to the bathroom, fully expecting to find that her husband had accidentally electrocuted himself. What she found was no less terrifying.
Richard’s ‘Ohmygodsweetlordshitgavinohbloodyron!’ had been accompanied by a spasm of fear that saw his whisky somersault into the bath and his transistor radio go flying across the room before smashing in the corner. Soap, shampoo and back-scrubbers had also been spread over a large area and a towel rack had taken leave of its wall mount. The overall result was a mess that looked like someone had indeed met their end, but had not given up without a fight.
The mess was the second thing she noticed as she entered the room. The first being one of Australian football’s brightest stars standing at the window holding a football over his crotch.
‘Ohmygodsweetlordshitgavinohbloodyron!’
Once she had landed and taken in the chaos, she was relieved to find her husband naked, muttering to himself and fishing around in the bath for an empty whisky tumbler. His dignity had apparently been washed away like so much single malt.
‘Look at you, Richard. This has got to stop.’
‘Cheryl. The only way that this is going to stop is if someone puts an end to it.’
‘So you’re going to quit all this nonsense?’
‘God no, Cheryl. I couldn’t possibly admit defeat after a brazen attack like this. All I said was that for this to end, someone will need to end it. I never said it would be me.’
Cheryl immediately fled to her cave.
In a way, Richard was right. The coming months saw a number of harmless pranks come and go. Dad received a strippergram at work for his birthday, Richard’s driveway was the site for an unoffical scout bottle drive, our house received unsanctioned Christmas decorations and the favour was immediately returned. What was clear was that this would never end unless something monumental ended it. But not even Richard, the bathtub prophet could have seen it coming.
13
Operation Lovely Rita—Part 1
I will admit that I am at least partially responsible for what happens next. You see, in January 1994, I read an article in our local newspaper saying that the council would be replacing all of their old analog parking meters with newfangled electronic ones. According to the article, the existing system of inserting a prescribed number of coins in return for parking had become insufficient to satisfy the needs of the modern motorist. Apparently what the parker of Today desired was a small digital display and the added step of printing a small paper ticket to be displayed on the dashboard. Thankfully this ticket would be printed on paper so thin that the action of closing the door would invariably cause it to blow onto the floor. The cutting-edge driver would then have the pleasure of fossicking around for their keys, unlocking the door, returning the ticket to the dash and then attempting the seemingly impossible task of closing the door gently. The electronic parking meter would add value to the overall parking experience that conventional parking meters could only dream of, as well as being squarer, uglier and more impersonal.
What was of most interest to me, however, was that immediately following this great leap forward, the council would be auctioning off all of their old parking meters. The article said that they would be ranging in price, condition and quality. At the time I wondered exactly how much variety there could be in parking meters. I also wondered if Dad found the whole idea of a parking meter auction as ludicrous as I did.
‘Hey, Dad. Take a look at this. What kind of losers would go to a parking meter auction?’
It turns out the Pickerings are exactly the kind of losers who would go to a parking meter auction.
It also turns out, if I may say so, that the kinds of losers who go to parking meter auctions are a rather special breed of losers. As in category nine, off the Richter, put them in a time capsule to show losers of the future how it’s done type losers. These are the people trainspotters make jokes about. Gathered in a council maintenance shed-cum-auction hall, were tweed caps and coke-bottle glasses as far as the eye could see. Slippers outnumbered shoes 2 to 1 and after a quick scan I calculated that eighty per cent of the crowd had some kind of stain on their pants. I’ve been to nursing homes with better stats than that. One look at this circus-worthy collection of freaks should have told us that we had gone too far.
Yet none of this entered Dad’s focused mind. He quickly became something of a self-declared parking meter afficionado and once three or four lots had gone under the hammer, he created a checklist of what represents value in a second-hand parking meter. For those interested in making a similar purchase the list included the condition of the paint job, whether it was still in working order and, above all, what colour it was. Grey, he concluded, was too common to hold value in the competitive market of parking meter resale. But not yellows and reds: now that’s where the money was! Brighter, more noticeable colours, he surmised, were rarer, more appealing to parking meter enthusiasts and all but guaranteed to appreciate in value. Once Dad had this idea in his head he set about proving the theory with his own money, getting involved in a heavy bidding war for a parking meter simply because it was red.
When lot six was opened to bids, a lot of hands went up early. Clearly Dad was on to something. But above the seven dollar mark the competition thinned out rapidly, with most of the interested parties rightly judging that with nearly four hundred parking meters in the catalogue and less than a hundred and fifty people in the room, there was a very good chance they could secure the parking meter of their dreams at a price that suited their lifestyle (that being the lifestyle of a bespectacled weirdo with stains on their pants). Dad had two main competitors: a m
an wearing army fatigue trousers with a ski jumper; and the only person I have ever seen wear a reefer jacket and cravat with grey tracksuit pants. These were losers to be reckoned with.
Dad’s strategy was to bid confidently and without hesitation, creating in his opposition the impression that his infinite funds were matched only by his infinite enthusiasm for this particular parking meter. This was the ‘intimidate them with genuine idiocy’ strategy. As the price sailed past ten dollars, twenty and well into the mid-thirties, it became clear that both G.I. Mental and Captain Reefer Madness shared the same strategy. Clear to everyone, that is, except my father who had officially ceased thinking.
Once the bidding got above forty dollars, Dad refined his strategy. Enthusiasm wasn’t enough—this would take recklessness. With no prompting from the auctioneer, Dad started making bids at five-dollar increments. This in no way intimidated his opposition, who continued to bid in one-dollar units. In fact it didn’t change the course of the auction at all, other than to make the meter ridiculously expensive as quickly as possible and make the auctioneer’s job of keeping tally much harder.
At seventy-five dollars, G.I. Mental dropped out with a fairly theatrical, ‘this is bloody ridiculous’. If you are to take only one thing from this story, it should be this: when someone wearing camouflage cargo pants and a woollen ski jumper with snowflakes and pine trees knitted into it suggests that your behaviour is beyond that of a reasonable person, it is time to stop and take a good hard look at yourself.
You will be unsurprised to learn that my father neither stopped nor took said hard look. As far as he was concerned, his strategy of non compos mentis bidding had just paid dividends, effectively removing fifty per cent of his competition. He dropped his bid increases back to a dollar and focused his gaze on the only remaining imbecile that stood in his way.
At ninety dollars, I decided that someone here had to be a grown-up.
‘Dad. The guy in the reefer isn’t going to stop.’
‘I don’t fear the Reefer, son.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ I thought. ‘We’ve lost him.’
When the price clipped over the one-hundred-dollar mark, even Captain Reefer Madness began to realise this was out of control. Or at least that is what I inferred from his developing something of a twitch whereby he would almost cluck like a hen before each bid. When the bidding reached one hundred and ten the clucking became more pronounced and was accompanied by an involuntary stamp of the foot. I seemed to be the only person in the room concerned by this. Everyone else remained calm. They’d seen it all before. Clearly these were seasoned losers.
When the hammer finally came down, we were the proud owners of a fully operational, second-hand, red parking meter at the bargain basement price of one hundred and twenty-seven dollars. Some would say that was too much to spend on a parking meter. Others would say that one hundred and twenty-seven dollars for a parking meter of that quality represents serious value. Where you stand on that issue rests largely on whether you are the kind of industrial-strength loser that would attend a parking meter auction.
So we had a parking meter. What wasn’t certain was why. After some debate in the car on the way home, we decided that the logical thing to do with a parking meter would be to cement it into Richard’s driveway. That way he would be the only person on his street that had to pay to park at his own house. The parking meter was placed in our shed and would stay there until we had the means and opportunity to execute what had become known as Operation Lovely Rita.
Over the coming months, Operation Lovely Rita took on an air of near-mythic importance. My father, whose favourite films include Dam Busters and The Dirty Dozen, saw this as his opportunity to pull off one of the great strategic manoeuvres of the soon-to-be-ending century. It was imperative that it be discussed in strictly hushed tones, with nobody outside our immediate family being trusted with the information.
‘I was over at Grandma and Grampa’s today and—’
‘You didn’t tell them about Operation Lovely Rita, did you?’
‘Not really.’
‘What do you mean “not really”?’
‘I might have told them we bought a parking meter.’
‘Charles Anthony Pickering.’
I knew he was furious because he’d rolled out my full name.
‘How many times have I told you? All information regarding the planning and execution of Operation Lovely Rita is on a strictly need to know basis. And unless you live under this roof, you don’t need to know.’
‘But it’s Grandma and Grampa.’
‘Loose lips sink ships, son.’
‘Yeah, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t—’ ‘What do loose lips do?’
‘They sink ships.’
‘That’s right. They sink ships. And I will not have any ships sunk on my watch.’
Needless to say significant security and intelligence threats like my ailing grandfather and eternally good-natured grandmother would never sneak under our radar again. What we completely failed to be concerned about was the steady escalation of the operational blueprint.
A month to the day after the auction, Dad came home from work excited.
‘Come out to the car, champ. I’ve got something to show you.’
He had something in the boot, wrapped in a blanket and caked in mud. At first glimpse it looked like a leg he’d dug up from a shallow bush grave. The only thing that stopped me believing that it could be was that Dad was so cheerful and excited to show it off to me. He opened the blanket to reveal a metal cylinder about a meter long, with four handles spaced evenly around one end and a propeller-shaped blade system at the other. It looked like a cross between a jackhammer and a corkscrew.
‘What is it, Dad?’
‘That, my son, is a rotary fencepost digger. It will dig straight down, bringing excess dirt to the surface and it will do it ten times faster than a shovel.’
I was going to ask where the hell he’d gotten a rotary fencepost digger from, but thought better of it. I’d seen a parking meter auction. I didn’t even want to imagine the freaks at a rotary fencepost digger auction. Country losers. Imagine the stains on their pants.
A fortnight later Dad returned home from work, again excited and again with something to show me. Sticking out of the boot this time was our bright red parking meter, now welded to the end of a long steel pole. Dad was visibly proud.
‘So, exactly how long is the pole, Dad?’
‘Eight feet.’
‘Isn’t eight feet a bit excessive?’
‘I don’t think so. Not if we cement it four feet down.’
‘Well, we do have a rotary fencepost digger.’
‘Exactly, my boy!’
We now had all we needed other than opportunity, and settled in for what turned out to be an excruciating four-month wait for our chance to strike. You see, we deemed the installation of a parking meter to be a major project with the potential to cause something of a commotion. As such we felt it best to execute the plan at a time we knew Richard wouldn’t be home and preferably late at night to minimise the suspicions of neighbours. In retrospect, the first part of this theory makes perfect sense. The second does not. Waiting for Richard to go away on business before excavating his garden is a very logical strategy. For starters it would enable us to use his hose to make the concrete, not to mention allowing us to carry out the digging over multiple nights should we encounter any difficulties. But thinking that scurrying about with digging equipment in the middle of the night would minimise neighbourhood suspicion is utter lunacy. If you do something nefarious in broad daylight, you may look slightly shifty. If you do it at night, you may as well be wearing T-shirts that say ‘I’m guilty and will not be requiring legal representation’.
It’s a lot like stealing a piano. My grandma used to tell me the story of two men who stole a grand piano from a department store during business hours. They parked a truck out the front and walked inside, carrying clipboards and wearing overall
s. They went straight to the assistant manager of the music department, pointed to the biggest Steinway on the floor and said, ‘We’re here for the piano. Your manager told us to come and pick it up.’ While the hapless assistant manager signed the shipping form on the clipboard, he directed the sales staff to help load the piano into the truck. Then they all shook hands, exchanged pleasantries and the truck drove off down the road. The next day when the manager came in he turned to his assistant and said, ‘Did somebody buy the Steinway?’
Later, when the assistant manager was telling his story to the police, they would ask if he got a good look at the men who stole the piano. He would have to reply that yes, he did get a good look at them, particularly when he signed their form and helped them load the piano into the truck. My grandma would finish by explaining the moral of the story.
‘So you see, if they’d broken in at night, they would have looked suspicious, never have gotten the piano out and probably have been caught. But because they were smart, did it during the day and looked like they knew what they were doing, nobody suspected a thing.’
Impractical Jokes Page 12