This ages-old continent at the end of the earth is full of danger. Hiding in the brush are animals that can and will kill you at the slightest provocation. Of the ten most poisonous snakes in the world, ALL of them are from Australia. Let’s see, there are black snakes, brown snakes, the desert Taipan (the number one most venomous serpent on the planet!), tiger snakes, and coral snakes (they’re even prepared to kill you in the water).
Spiders: The funnel web, whose venom appears to particularly affect primates (like humans), whereas other mammals—such as cats and dogs—are relatively resistant. How lucky for us. They crawl all over the inside of the little laundry room where I play as a kid. The red-back spider, the white-tail … all deadly.
Lizards: Our famous bluetongue. I have one for a pet; actually, I pull him out of his natural habitat and stick him in a chicken-wire cage. I call him Bluey, an Aussie term of endearment, but he still bites me, the ungrateful little shit. Bluey soon succumbs to lack of food (you have to feed these things?!) and the heat of the harsh summer in a wood-and-wire coop.
And then there are the poisonous plants:
Agapanthus orientalis
Agaricus campestris
Aglaonema commutatum
Alocasia macrorhiza
Amanita muscaria
Amanita phalloides
Araujia hortorum
Those are just the A’s, and from southeastern Australia only.
Now let’s take a walk down to the seaside, which is never far from where most Australians live, it being pretty much a coastal country. Sharks! We used to swim behind shark nets when I was a kid, with plane spotters flying overhead and lifeguards watching for the menacing, shadowy monsters. I never learn to surf because of this upbringing, despite living by the ocean most of my life.
White sharks (very, very famous), tiger sharks, northern river sharks, blues, bulls, and gray nurse sharks. Saltwater crocodiles (always good for a sudden death or two during the holiday season). Box jellyfish, irukandji jellyfish, blue-ringed octopi, scorpion and stone fish, Barrier Reef cone shells.
And lest I forget, the worst of all pests: the Australian blowfly, an invasive introduced species. They won’t kill you, but they will drive you totally insane with their constant attention to your mouth and eyes. They are relentless enough to drive grown men to wear dorky little hats with corks dangling from strings attached to the brim to ward off the ceaseless attacks. If the scientist from the sci-fi gem The Fly had fused himself with an Aussie blowfly, he would have been unstoppable.
The list goes on. I spend my early childhood swimming and running barefoot amongst these creatures.
And you think you came from a tough neighborhood.
There actually is a Springthorpe (my true family surname) listed in the convict logs for one of the transport ships that brings the poor hapless bastards from England to the ends of the earth in the late 1700s for stealing a loaf of bread. When I hear this as a kid, I think it’s pretty damn cool. My father, Norman James Springthorpe, is the youngest son of three Depression-era brothers: John, Jeff, and little Normie. Their younger sister, Shirley, is protected mercilessly and mostly against her will from the local young suitors by her three older brothers until she marries Sid, a nice Aussie boy.
My father, a handsome, barefoot young lad (his family can’t even afford to buy him shoes) becomes Dux (valedictorian) of his high school. All three brothers do well in their respective careers, especially considering their tough beginnings growing up during the Great Depression. John, the eldest, rises to the head of the Sydney CIB (Criminal Investigation Bureau), sort of the Aussie version of the FBI. Jeff, the second-born, becomes a very successful architect with a multimillion-dollar home in a private cove overlooking spectacular Sydney Harbor. My dad, Norman, goes on to become a lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army, winning himself an MBE (Member of the British Empire)—the same award the Beatles eventually received, if you want a reference point—for his work in early computer management.
My dad is also a singer, with a rich baritone that wins him competition after competition all over Australia, but he has no real interest in pursuing a music career. He loves the army life and is content to sing for his friends and his church. (I inherit very little of his scholastic abilities, although I do get his love of music.) A few years ago, my mum confided in me that her big dream was to travel to the United States with my father on a singing tour. They say the family gauntlet is thrown down, and it can lie there for generations until someone finally picks it up. I guess I picked it up. (And all the time, as a kid, I thought my old mum hated the fact that I wanted to play music for a living.)
Eileen Louise Evennett, my mum, was born of English parents. She claims that we are actually descended from French aristocracy. (Evennett does sound a bit French, I’ll give her that.) Furthermore, she says, we escaped the guillotine by a wing and a prayer and consequently lost all our wealth when our unlucky forbears’ ship went down in a screaming gale off the stormy coast of England. As a kid, I much prefer the “convict” backstory. Way cooler.
In any case, her parents have just arrived from the dismal damp of London to the sunny climes of Oz when the aforementioned Great Depression takes hold. Not the best timing, admittedly. Eileen grows up on “stations” (huge Australian cattle ranches in the middle of the bush), where her mum works as a cook and her dad drives and maintains the estate’s car. She has a younger sister by seven years named Pat, who is pretty much her only playmate. Her strong spirit is forged of steel, early, by life’s fires. When she is fifteen, both her parents die within months of each other from diseases that would be easily curable today. Eileen Louise is left with a baby sister to raise and no one to fend for them. She leaves school, finds a job, and moves into a boardinghouse with Pat in tow. Abuse and neglect are rampant in the orphanages of the day, and she is determined that she and Pat will not end up in one. In what becomes the path she will always choose in the face of ruthless hardships, young Eileen digs down into her soul and finds the strength she needs to do what must be done. She is made of tough stuff, my mother. Thanks to her unbreakable spirit, she and Pat manage to dodge the fate of many of the other unfortunate Depression-era kids, but theirs is a hardscrabble existence and the specter of an orphanage as a very real potential destination looms over her and drives her through her teen years.
Meanwhile, my dad has had his eye on this young, dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty for some time. And on a rainy night in Sydney, umbrella in hand, he catches up to her and elegantly asks, “May I see you home, Miss Evennett?” But at the intersection of their two streets he bids her good night and bails with the parasol, leaving my mum-to-be to make her own way home in the pouring rain. Lucky for me, Norm soon gets better at courting and these two finally get it together romantically, or you’d be holding someone else’s book right now.
At nineteen years of age, young Eileen is refused permission by the boardinghouse owner to take her little sister out past curfew so they can celebrate Pat’s twelfth birthday. She does it anyway. When the girls arrive home at midnight, all their belongings (not much) are sitting out on the curb beyond the very locked front door of their ex-digs. My mum and dad have recently started dating, and fortunately Norm’s parents take Eileen in (a bit risqué at the time, but desperate times call for desperate measures). Pat goes to the home of Norm’s eldest brother John and his wife Helen. My parents marry on Valentine’s Day.
And I, Richard Lewis Springthorpe, am unceremoniously dumped some eight years later onto the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, the most successful penal colony in the world, at roughly 7:00 p.m. on the 23rd of August, 1949, with a pronounced, though temporary, vacu-formed head, thanks to the “plumber’s helper” used to pry me loose from my mum, who I guess was reluctant to let me go. (Maybe she had a premonition of some of the crap I would put her through later on after I’d grown a bit.) When a nurse brings in a cup of tea for my mum following her hard work of spitting me out into the universe, my dad, the nicest guy, but
very much a 1940s Australian male regardless, takes it from the nurse, thanks her politely, and starts knocking it back. My mum, so the story goes, says firmly, “Norm, that’s for me.”
My dad stands up. “Oh, yes, Eil, so it is,” he reportedly says. He hands the half-drained cup to my mum and then begins cooing over me as though nothing were amiss. Dad has a sense of humor that pretty much allows family matters to roll off his back, while my mum, a product of the British working class, brooks no nonsense. They treat each other with care, and growing up I see they have a warm if somewhat traditional relationship. Their arguments are few and take place in hushed tones.
My mum wants to name me Howard, but my dad sagely points out that Howard could be rhymed with “coward” later on in my school life and decides I should be named Richard instead. (“Dick.” “Rick the Prick.” “Dickhead.” Need I go on? Evidently rhyming was not one of Norm’s strongest suits.) After hearing the Howard story later (Howie Springthorpe?), I wonder for years, “Does my dad think I’m a coward?” By turns I either subscribe to that notion or go out of my way to prove it’s false, depending on the situation.
I’m brought home from hospital (in Australia we don’t add the “the” before “hospital”) in a wicker washing basket that my mum buys for double duty: (A) to bring my new ass home and subsequently (B) to load the wet washing in before hanging it out on the clothesline with little wooden pegs. (Jeez, how old is this guy? Hey, it was Australia in the late, late ’40s, and we were a struggling backwater country in the middle of a very pissed-off Asian world, at the end of a brutal war.) My mum still uses this basket today. Not to bring any more babies home, thank Henry, but to load her freshly washed undies into before hanging them out to dry.
Which brings me to my brother, Mike, who is no doubt seething as he reads this part: me seeming so cavalier about our lovely mother’s undergarments. Mike (older by three years … though you didn’t hear that from me) never sees me as a threat to his status as an only child. (I’m convinced he still sees himself as the only “only child” with an actual brother.) To his credit, he holds me in my washing basket/late-’40s car seat all the way home from hospital and thereafter protects me from all types and sizes of school bullies throughout my blessedly short school career.
I don’t remember my mother’s third pregnancy, but I do remember her going away for a while and returning home seeming much sadder. She’d had a baby girl who died at birth. Nothing much is said in the aftermath of this, but there is a pall over all our lives for a while.
I have a feeling that my sister, had she lived, would have changed my relationship with women dramatically. If I’d grown up loving, living, and fighting with a sister, I might have seen the human side of women much earlier and skipped the whole “madonna/whore complex” completely. Thoughts of my lost sister have never left me; in fact, I think I’m still looking for her spirit.
But “soldiering on” is in our blood. My mum’s parents had done it coming out from England the hard way (though, mercifully, the English who came out to Oz by those times were no longer criminals … at least, not convicted ones). My mum had done it at fifteen, when both her parents died suddenly and she had to leave school, find a job, and raise a baby sister on her own; my dad and his brothers had done it, forging real careers in the aftermath of the Great Depression. So soldier on we do.
We move constantly, as my dad is an army man and prone to being posted here and there. I have only one memory from my babyhood in Sydney: waking up early one misty morning in my grandma’s cozy old clapboard house and hearing the chortling of magpies out in the eucalyptus trees. It is still the most haunting birdcall I’ve ever heard. The magpie—so much that is Australian to me. Unique, wild, beautiful … and meat-eating—snakes, mainly. Our move from Sydney to Bandiana, a tiny army town near Melbourne, is only the first of many painful, tear-stained transplantations. We will live here for three years. I arrive at age three and leave by the time I’m six.
Bandiana is dirt roads, army huts, and miles and miles of parched, brown vegetation. Everywhere, dirt. I don’t think I see asphalt until I hit the school playground, literally, when I turn five. Another kid and I wonder about those weird little white logs all over the ground outside our houses. We finally come up with the excellent idea of tasting one; we find it rather salty. I’m horrified when my brother tells me that it’s old, sun-bleached dog poo. I love animals, but not that much.
The line between animals and humans is still somewhat blurry to me when I offer up my first career choice to my mum. “When I grow up, I want to be a tiger!”
“Uh-huh,” she probably says.
Kindergarten is the only time in my life that I actually ever really enjoy school. The first time I board the school bus, I instantly fall in love. It is a rusty, rackety old junk heap on four bald tires that makes the most amazing noises as it wheezes its way to my future alma mater. With a monstrous steering wheel (at my age it appears to be about four feet across … huge!) and the way the driver smacks at it with his meaty hands every time he turns a corner … it is aaawwwesssooommme! “Now this is more like it!” I say to myself, and I fall asleep that night with dreams of being the biggest, baddest school bus driver Bandiana has ever seen. Tiger as a career choice vanishes.
It is after kindergarten one day, at the age of five, that I watch (along with two other goggle-eyed boys) as one of our fellow classmates, Vicky-something, takes a poop for us under the old wooden bridge down by the creek. I don’t know if she’s trying to shock us, just showing off, or sharing the fact that poop is the first original thing we produce as young humans. Anyway, it is an awe-inspiring performance and, thinking back, definitely sexual. At a fairly early age I am vaguely aware that my penis is for more than just peeing out of, and at this point I am already a confirmed pillow humper. My mum (who may kick my ass for telling this) walks into my room just after I’ve come home from my mind-numbing experience down by the creek with Vicky the poop queen and catches me as I madly give the high hard one to my little pillow, rubbing and grinding furiously. She grabs me by my skinny, five-year-old arm and drags me out to our only telephone (I still see it … black, threatening) and says, “If I ever catch you doing that again, I’m going to call the police!”
To be fair, my mum is, herself, a product of Victorian-era English parents with their staggering sense of shame surrounding anything even remotely connected to the human body and its functions, so I don’t blame her personally for the psychological scars inflicted by her over-the-top reaction to my harmless little humping. But this incident instills in me a great terror of retribution from—whom? God? The police? Neurotic schoolteachers (more on them later)?—every time I wank off. Needless to say, it doesn’t stop me.
My mum may be the product of nineteenth-century Mother England, and perhaps she’s not the most demonstratively loving mother, but she does work hard behind the scenes. When I want a pedal car for Christmas, she gets a job for three months to save up the money to buy me the ride of my dreams. A few days before the car is to be unwrapped beneath our Christmas tree, she finds a pattern for a rag Golliwog doll in the local paper and whips it up one evening while I’m asleep. Christmas morning, the car is completely forgotten once I see Gordon the Golliwog, and he is my new best mate and so loved and carted around everywhere that he has to be patched up the next Christmas, and the next, so he can continue to hang with me. I don’t know if my old mum was more thrilled that I loved her handmade Golliwog so much or pissed that she worked three months for nothing.
Our first dog, Fella, is a scruffy brown weed of a mutt. He’s really more my brother’s than mine, but I like him right away, beginning my lifelong love of dogs (if not their poo). It is a traumatic event when Fella bites someone one day, showing momentary signs of rabies, and my dad (who is, honestly, a sweet guy) is forced to take him out back (again, Australia in the ’50s) and shoot the little fucker. I see the gun in the kitchen afterward … black, threatening … not unlike the telephone.
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nbsp; My brother has a rather obvious reaction to having his dog shot to death by his own father. Soon afterward, he wins a little brass toy dog (one that can’t bite) at a party. He names it Bonzo and proceeds to tie a string around its neck. He takes Bonzo for walks (drags, really), builds him a swimming pool (muddy little hole in the ground), makes up a bed for him to sleep in (matchbox), and talks to him on a regular basis. I often hear him say to Bonzo, “Everything’s going to be okay, little fella, it’s going to be okay.” I think my parents fail to register how deeply the shooting incident affects both my brother and me.
There is a lot that isn’t discussed in my family. We soldier on.
Despite our shot-dead dog.
Speaking of death, my first (and by no means last) brush with it happens in Bandiana. During a game of hide-and-seek in the ruins of the demolished house next door, I squirrel myself away inside the old wood-burning iron stove still sitting in what used to be the kitchen. The door shuts and locks from the outside, and I am stuck in this oven on a 105-degree Aussie summer day while the kids I’m playing with run off to their next adventure. Three hours later my mum, looking for me and wondering why I haven’t shown up for lunch, happens to open the old oven door. I fall out, semiconscious, dehydrated, drenched in sweat, and roughly the color of a boiled lobster. She starts to weep with relief until it dawns on her what a dumbshit I am to have locked myself inside an iron stove on a broiling summer day. Then she is pissed.
Late, Late at Night Page 4