by Tim Rogers
Dedication
For Ruby
For Rosemary
Contents
Dedication
Lookalikes
Kalgoorlie
Last Night When We Were Young
The Hurricane
Stardust
Earworms
Feardom
Bagatelles I
Punctuation
Yusuf Am I
Windows
Bohemians
A Solid Afternoon’s Therapy
To Cry About
Invisible
Port Hedland
The Dripping Tap
Bagatelles II
My Man
Primrose Hill
Conversations with Maureen
The Dread of the Boards
The Man at the Door
Bagatelles III
Hopeful
A Spill in Aisle Two
This Must Be the Place
Thank You
About the Author
Copyright
And it’s an age-old tune
You never know where you are ’til you move
So pack up yer daks, yer hat, we’re leaving today
We’re checking out to check out what’s up-a-ways.
Lookalikes
Some would compose winsome odes while conferring with the clouds and the gulls
Sure I was raised a gentleman but I was also born with a pulse
So while this four-four rhythm has sure brought out the very worst in me
What can a middle-brow boy do but call it just the way that he sees
Handsome Dick Manitoba dictated it, now listen to the words
Ain’t nothin’ better in the whole wide world but singin’ ’bout cars and girls.
The driver was chatty enough but he was working his shoulders back and forth underneath his seatbelt like he wanted to spar. ‘Geez, mate, the bloody West End’s changed. All hipster shit around here now. You’d have to have a reason, eh?’
It was then that I lost most of my enthusiasm for the ride, sensing the swell of another cultural tirade. ‘Ah, well, I see your point, but—’
‘You know who you look like, mate? Rod Stewart.’
‘Do you mind if we just stop at the next bottle shop, please?’
‘You know who Rockin’ Rod is, doncha?’
The bottle shop was already part of the plan. I was attending a rehearsal with a mob of musicians in Brisbane to play Stones songs – two shows – as much for the chance to play with some wonderful musicians and friends as to lose myself again in the first songs that really moved me. Turning up empty-handed wasn’t an option. I wanted to enter the room at full speed. But the lazy, culturally colour-blind opinions of the driver had buckled my wheels. I thought about telling him that he looked like a bowl of porridge with a moustache dropped on it, but decided against it. My reply instead, as a bottle shop mercifully came into view, was, ‘Y’know I really think his first four solo LPs are the perfect confluence of swagger and tenderness. Beautiful records. And the Faces? Love ’em . . . LOVE ’em.’
Silence.
And then, ‘Er, want me to wait for ya, mate?’
As I walked into the unforgiving LED glow of the Thirsty Camel bottle shop of Brisbane’s West End, I took a cursory glance at the mounted shoplifting mirror on my right. Despite my wearing a little plaid that could be mistaken for tartan by the untrained eye, and that, yes, I do have a prominent nose, I looked nothing like Rod Stewart. I looked much more like a masculine version of the actress Glenn Close. The slab of beer joined me in the back seat of the cab, and the porridge and I continued our journey in silence.
If I recall correctly, it was in Dusseldorf a decade earlier, after a show I’d done with my dear friend Tex, that I had been approached by a woman who had asked me if I wanted to go home with her. I said no – but being asked home by an attractive German woman was a new and surprising experience, so I had to ask her: ‘Why me?’
‘Because you look like Sean Penn,’ she replied.
I was intrigued. Did she mean The Falcon and the Snowman Sean Penn, or Fast Times at Ridgemont High Sean Penn or – remembering my recent haircut and greased quiff – Dead Man Walking Sean Penn?
The post-show music took over in the room and her answer was lost to me. Then Tex grabbed me by the elbow and we spent the night doing Jim Morrison impressions to a bemused group of stragglers. We chose the ‘fat poet days’ Jim. He’s far, far funnier.
Then in Dublin, a few years later, I was doing an interview for a small radio station on the afternoon of a solo show. The DJ knew a bit about my stuff and was generous, but once the tape stopped recording he said, ‘You know, Tim, I was going to come to the show tonight, but my wife thinks you look like Daniel Day-Lewis and I know how much of a crush she has on him so it’s a no-show for us, I’m afraid.’
My Left Foot Daniel? There Will Be Blood Daniel or The Last of the Mohicans Daniel?
That very night I told the DJ’s story to the little mob in Dublin, and included previous comparisons to Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, at least two members of Jet, footy player John ‘Mopsy’ Rantall and a giraffe. Some I got, most I didn’t, but I concluded with my story of the German Pennophile. From the very back of the room, after an excited squeal, a woman’s voice with a German accent bellowed: ‘That was me!’ We spoke very briefly afterwards through wry grins, but no further invitation was even hinted. Which figures. Not having the patience to brood enigmatically, my countenance was arch but inquisitive. More like Penn Jillette.
For what it’s worth, my brother has been told he resembles John Goodman; my dad has been told he can look like Kevin Sheedy; and my beloved bandmate Rusty’s wife reckons he looks like Mark Waugh in the right light. There are talent agencies for this sorta thing, aren’t there?
Truth be told I would like to resemble Alain Delon from the hours of 10 am until midday, Peter O’Toole come cocktail hour, and Katharine Hepburn in dim light. Unfortunately occasional public opinion deems me more prosaically ‘rough’ in the morning, ‘that guy from the footy ads’ in milk bars out in the country, and ‘are you in a rock band’ on domestic flights. It’s not tricks of the light, I’ve got the face and body I deserve. Containing multitudes. A distant dad, a delusional footballer, a singer in a rock’n’roll band, a long-distance walker and a very light sleeper. Of late, my visage has attained a new feature – a wonky eye, a ‘possum spotter’. It’s not quite the spreadeagled dimensions of Sartre, but I have been told that one of my pupils will, at any time, wander askew like the bubble in a spirit level, held against its will to give an impression of balance and order but straining against both, searching out another detour. To wander and discover, or to hide.
Kalgoorlie
The Umpire’s Son knows all about language Thrown so loosely from every vantage
He knows you bastard and yer blind and ya little white maggot
As he’s runnin’ off at half-time hidin’ ’neath yer jacket The Umpire’s Boy.
I slouch into the Perth Airport lounge with a gait that has been described as a ‘swagger’ yet is less attributable to nonchalance or confidence and more to two knee reconstructions after twenty-five years of stage moves and forty years of irregular football training. I take a seat between the children’s play section and the bar, which to me seems perfectly apt: my approach to both work and leisure is ruled by the opposing forces of childishness and sentimentality.
I’m flying home. To Kalgoorlie, from my current digs in St Kilda. Despite dressing demurely for a middle-aged, middle-brow musician and bon vivant, I have only just shrugged off my saddlebag and begun the brief internal debate whether to begin plundering the gratis beer selection when I’m approached by a gentleman with considerably more ‘swagger’, due perhaps to thi
rty years’ solid hard work in mining.
‘Are you that guy from that band?’ he asks.
My reply, with a reflexive smile, can only be: ‘Well, some of the time.’
A brief silence descends, then, ‘Yeah. Looks like it.’
As great reveals go it’s minor, but my flimsy cover is blown, and I am ‘that’ guy when this weekend I was wanting to be some ‘other’ guy. One who’s not dragging his arse to another show in a town he can barely spell, but one who’s being cheerfully escorted by the winds with intent and expectation. The look on my recent interlocutor’s face confirms that he wanted me to be a member of a band worthy of at least a photograph, so our burgeoning relationship turns on its own heel as he turns back to familiar company. Me? I’m heading home, to meet up with my dad, watch some footy, and rediscover something shared between us.
The busy lounge has me surrounded by boozy, cheery, red-faced blokes who would have once been heroes to me – men with harsh opinions or profane stories, who stretch their vowels and punch consonants. As a kid, I used to giggle incessantly as they bantered, their shoulders pushed back like roosters, pontificating and posturing, keeping any confrontation sarcastic and playful, with lapses slapped down as quickly as a rolled newspaper on a blowfly. Perhaps my mild intolerance these days is due to a few thousand unsolicited opinions from thunderously drunk audience members. Perhaps I’m just a grump. Airports are second only to high altitude as locations that starve my reserves of bonhomie. The only antidote is twenty minutes with a good book or a good drink. I have a novel in my saddlebag and a free bar ten steps away. It’s time to recalibrate.
On the humble aeroplane to Kalgoorlie from Perth the majority of passengers are men wearing polo shirts with mining logos on the left breast pocket. It’s Grand Final weekend so I was hoping to see one or two T-shirts with the local Goldfields footy teams – Railways, Kangas, Mines-Rovers, Boulder and Kambalda – and for the person wearing it to park themselves in a seat near me so we could talk footy, The Great Equaliser.
I’m eager to reconnect with people from the area where I was born. That they are hugely transient owing to the nature of mining isn’t foremost on my mind. Connection is. However, lanky, shaggy D-List celebrities, like me, and hard-graft men and women staring down the beginning of a long day underground aren’t natural fits for badinage.
Across the aisle from me a young boy is tucking into a party pie. I smile gormlessly at the kid, imagining myself in his place, at his age, nagging for a miniature can of Solo so I could promptly imitate the Solo Man gulping greedily with it pouring down his chin. The style with which the boy attacks his pie is very familiar.
All this makes me think about my father. He was the one of the two who instigated my creation, of course, and the reason I’m coming home.
From 1970 until 1975, Adrian Rogers was an Australian Rules football umpire, and umpires administrator, for the Goldfields League centred around the WA town of Kalgoorlie. Footy has run through my relationship with Dad, like whiskey through a cold body, ever since I was a four-year-old clutching the back of his shorts post-match, weathering torrents of abuse as we hurtled towards the Holden. He was a wonderfully skilful and successful player until his early twenties. And then us lot came along.
As administrator, he was given the task in 1974 of choosing the main field umpire for a grand final. The one chosen would have to be the finest, fittest and fairest of the entire season. He made his choice and called Donnie, who ran a fruit and veg stand during the day, to deliver the good news. Mrs Donnie answered, informing Dad that her husband was having a short holiday at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Donnie, possibly refreshed, had strolled into the local TAB, leaving his son on the lookout, and demanded loot. No recidivist, Donnie was very well known in the community and had walked in unmasked. The teller’s reply to his forceful request was, by some accounts, ‘What the hell are you doin’, Donnie?’
He served a few months and was back umpiring soon after.
This is the Kalgoorlie I cling to for dear life and folly. The ‘wild west’, where names regularly change, where men and women come to disappear from the rest of the country, and where the region’s best umpire lolls into the local TAB and sizes up the possibilities. For years, I have been promising myself to get back to Kal to see the Goldfields League Grand Final and I’ve asked Dad to come and join me. Dad hasn’t been back in twenty years. We’re not flying together for no greater reason than I want a night out there by myself first for some reconnaissance. Dad is seventy-four and, if not frail, then challenged, and being rushed wouldn’t be a joy. His legs have an infrequent but malevolent habit these days of forgetting to move in co-ordination with his big frame, so I’ll check where there are stairs and where there are not. But I also feel the need to have a night’s rambling on my own. We share no fear in being alone, Dad and I. I believe we both crave it at times.
When I asked him to join me here, his reply was, ‘Well, if I kick the bucket out there, I can do it happily.’
Adrian Rogers grew up in the foothills of eastern Melbourne, but in 1969 he took my mother, pregnant with me, and two-year-old brother out west to make his name. I was born in Kalgoorlie that September, the only West Australian in my family after generations of Victorians. I was either the blemish on the scorecard, the missed shot on goal, or the diamond in the rough. Either way I throw my birthplace into conversations like mayonnaise on a sandwich, to tart up my origins.
I have often imagined that Mum and Dad took us out to Kalgoorlie for some covert reason. It took thirty-eight years to find out how bog ordinary the story of my beginning was, compared with that of my father.
Dad was a good-lookin’ rooster as a kid; tall and athletic, he worked hard, and in my memories he’s always been quiet and thoughtful. Even as he progressed up the totem pole among colleagues in the mining, then road-paving industries, with the pub knock-offs and late-night drinking sessions that I’d occasionally be privy to as a bed-wetting kid, he was never the sarcastic braggart. And I’d taken that as a sign that he wasn’t entirely sure of his place in the world. His kindness and patience was gilded by a lonely stoicism that even now I can only understand a little of.
A decade or so ago, after a long night in cups with a family member, I discovered Dad had been adopted. I was surprised, both by the fact itself and that he’d not shared it with me. After living with this new information for a year, I flew back from Spain (where I was living at the time) to meet up with him in Melbourne, and with the fortitude that only jetlag and a night at the pub with Dad can provide, I asked him about it. My father is not one for throwing personal stories around, except when in close quarters; nor does he gesticulate, aggrandise or seek attention. The more attention-seeking idiosyncrasies are shared among the rest of our family. But if there’s any hint of grandstanding, that person is jumped on by the other four of us, creating many an evening that could have been scripted by Tennessee Williams, or the Goons. So when I pressed him further on why he hadn’t offered the story of his adoption to me, it was met with the classic response: ‘Well, you didn’t ask before.’
How very Dad. How very droll. Yet once the garden gate was pushed open, he let me fossick around the weeds. His birth mother had been very young and, it being 1941, he was adopted out. Had he subsequently contacted her? Yes, but she requested that no further contact be made.
As he talked, a flood of memories about my grandmother Nana Nonie had rushed in. When I was nine, she once locked me in a room, banning me from watching a grand final because I’d run home from the supermarket – baffling and infuriating me because I thought enthusiasm to be a commendable trait, particularly as a kid – but she did great stuff too. She cooked us treats like custard and dumplings with treacle, and let me run havoc in the backyard with some kind of sports ball. The woodpecker drill of a tennis ball thrown against a wall for catching practice was not as tolerable as the muted ecstasies of the self-commentary accompanying my high marks and reptilian evasion of imagined defenders, b
ut I was not seen and barely heard.
The memories are always of winter; the warmth of her Rosebud house on the Nepean Highway I can conjure up at the snap of a finger, or the stirring of a pot. And she adored Dad. My brother, Jaimme, who as a boy resembled Dad physically, was her favourite, and I, the poncey theatrical flake, accepted that as natural.
Dad and I talked of such stuff that night. We cried a lot and, even among the bar patrons of a forgotten locale, hugged each other as if trying to squeeze out the pain. This was then followed by a few years of silence on any matters to do with his past, which was not at all strange to me. We had our weekly phone chats and emails, went to the odd footy game, and all the while I noticed a heaviness in my dad’s gaze that seemed more than the weight of time passing. He’d spark up at the presence of a pretty woman, and could still hold a table’s rapt attention on the slow wind-up of a perfectly executed joke, but I feared that being shunned by his birth mother might have been gnawing at his capacity for joy. I felt I’d opened a door to a room I had no greeting for, and had left him alone there, locked inside. It was a surprise and a joy, then, to hear he had received an email, quite out of the blue, from three brothers and their sister, announcing that they wanted to make contact with the half-brother they had only heard about as a rumour.
Since the initial contact two years ago there have been lunches, dinners, barbecues, cups of tea, boozy weekends, late-night phone calls – all types of occasions to include Dad’s expanded, much-loved family. After seventy-three years of being an only child, he now has his brothers and sister. Many a 3 am talk between the ‘kids’ has been about whether the phrase ‘time lost’ should ever be uttered, as they enjoy the time they all have left together.
I suppose I will always wonder who my dad’s birth father was – an American GI from Kansas City who blew a trumpet in a local combo when home? a local cad who could twist girls around his finger like he could twist a cricket ball into a bewildering leg spin? a loved boyfriend not welcomed by the family? – but a twinkle is back in Dad’s eye with his new family (who all have a familiar, supernal blue in their eyes), which causes mystery to melt away to a soft wonder.