by Tim Rogers
Thanks to Scooter, Dad and I do a radio interview from the stands, talking about Dad’s history with the region and the footy leagues. He’s a natural in this situation. Not loquacious but gently assured, he gives a rundown of the weeks leading up to an infamous stand-off in 1974 among the League directorship, then still based in Perth, that insisted that umpires from Perth look after the Finals series. ‘If local blokes were good enough to umpire the rest of the bloody season,’ Dad opines, ‘why couldn’t they look after the big games, with their awareness of the ploys and peccadillos of the players?’
He offers no umm-ing or ahh-ing, and is generous about the present-day game, though observes how it is ‘over-umpired’ and should be left to the players until chaos or grievous bodily harm looms. It’s all in good, steady humour, as is the shout-out to Donnie, Dad’s favourite compatriot. Scooter is aware of Donnie’s story and joins in, and tales of trips away to the big smoke of Perth with all the attendant mischief and mirth have us all interrupting each other to reveal yet more transgressions. The two-minute chat goes for twenty. As we wrap, Dad looks at something stirring in the crowd to his left, then mutters, ‘Well, fuck me, it’s Donnie.’
On his approach, Donnie stops every few steps to shake hands and swap lightning-quick reminiscences with anyone, it seems, over forty years old. Dad and he exchange hearty handshakes and wry smiles, then start trading opinions on modern umpiring – ‘They should stay outta the bloody way, Adrian’ – and shared histories. But it’s when Donnie tells us he is the ‘administrator’ at a two-up game held bi-weekly ten kilometres out of town that the real spark ignites in his eyes.
Now it is true that Adrian has ineffable charm, but Donnie, at eighty-four and as sprightly as a pup, is his equal in every way. Dark sunglasses remain affixed, but when a point needs to be made or a savoury story shared, his eyes search yours out over the rim, although for extra emphasis not authority. His hair is slicked back with Brylcreem; his arms are still taut and muscular, a possible warning to anyone getting too loose at two-up. He looks great. Fit and ready to go, with a little bit of the spiv about him to keep it all interesting. I’d love to ask him about some of the shadier aspects of the past, but he fixes me eye to eye with a gentle nod of the head and, before I even broach the subject, says, ‘I got a bit lost there for a while.’ It’s a polite but firm last word on the subject. He leaves after ten minutes, with broad smiles and vice-grip handshakes. Though I leave Dad with his thoughts for a few minutes, I can feel him smiling beside me.
The Reserves Grand Final has been played, the Boulder Tigers getting up by nine points over the Kalgoorlie City Kangaroos. I’m informed by a coaching staff member beside me that the best-on-ground recipient, a long-haired no-nonsense half-back who deserved all the kudos, was found sleeping on the serving area of his local pub this morning. The Boulder captain’s victory speech concludes with a hearty ‘Let’s get on it!’
The national anthem is introduced over the PA but then there’s an embarrassed pause and a chuckle from the announcer as he admits the singer hasn’t shown up. While laughter ripples through the crowd, a young girl of maybe fifteen, perhaps spurred on by mates or buoyed by the rags-to-riches stories of televisual talent contests, sprints to the microphone and, with some visual encouragement to the playback operator, gives a spirited stab at the tune. The warm applause that follows is as much for her chutzpah as for her performance. I hope she just wanted to impress her mates.
The game is hugely enjoyable, with both the Mines Rovers and the Railways teams having a great balance of hard-headed back-men, pot-bellied yet strong marking forwards, and skilled, gymnastically agile mid-fielders that keep the game free-flowing and full of flashes of brilliance. Although the grandstand is not at capacity, it serves as a great vantage point, and has the same energy as out on the bitumen. The contrasts between the stern elder gentlemen in blazers to our left, the half-dozen excited teenage girls in basketball uniforms to our right, and the winning Reserves team behind us, only half-appreciating the play on the field as they anticipate the night’s forthcoming debauchery, make these the best seats in the house.
The fierce start to the game, with play zipping from end to end, cannot be maintained once skill trumps enthusiasm. The Mines wrestle the ascendancy with an eight goal second quarter, and the rest of the game is slightly anti-climactic as they pull away to win by sixty-four points. Dad and I nominate our favourite player on the day to be number seventy-six for Railways. A big, burly full forward who plays as enigmatically as his jumper number – digits as lofty as these are rare domain, seen usually on a player not embroidered in the main thrust of the day’s action, such as a skinny kid brought in from the sticks to make up the numbers. But our favourite doesn’t so much move as ‘announce’. Every celebration for a goal is a simple head nod, as his comparably diminutive team-mates clamber on his huge frame like excitable minions to worship a battle-winning Ogre-King. As the end-of-season celebrations begin, we bid a slow retreat and head back to Kalgoorlie.
My AFL team, North Melbourne, are playing the Swans in a semi-final in Sydney, and to watch the game on TV with Dad, here, feels like the perfect end to a full day.
We enter a pub where the bar staff are mostly ‘skimpies’, essentially young women serving drinks dressed only in lingerie. After a few minutes Dad and I give each other a look, letting our thoughts meet and agree. I know he’s a first-class flirt and loves female company, but young women, barely dressed, serving ogling, leery blokes is not a comfortable atmosphere for anyone. We skol up and relocate to the York Hotel, a little pub full of sporting and other local ephemera, with cheery bar staff and a TV primed for the game. Perfect.
Even though Dad grew up barracking for Essendon, and still does, he has a lot of affection for North, due mainly to the heavy Western Australian presence in the team throughout the seventies. North pull away to a win and a spot in the following week’s preliminary against West Coast. I usually try to keep my mouth and emotions in check in public for fear of scaring kids, but the joy of the win, and the day, takes over, and I exuberantly offer a shout to the entire bar and staff.
Over a late-night schnitzel back at Judd’s Pub where we’d started the day, our talk is loose and florid: about our relationships with our partners, about my brother and whether he will move his family home from northern England, and about my sister and her increasingly successful career as a voice coach for film and theatre. And then there’s the almost magnetic pull in talking about Dad’s family history, though tonight it’s clear-eyed and unsentimental, with no new revelations, and I’m thankful. We can just be a father and son, throwing little stories around like we’re chucking chips to seagulls.
We finally pull up stumps and walk slowly arm-in-arm down Hannan Street, this tranquil and placid Saturday evening soon to be shattered by the return of victorious footballers. I’m heading home tomorrow but I suggest to Dad he stays another day on my credit card to do a bit of driving around. I’m so glad he takes me up on it. Sometimes you don’t need your over-excitable middle-aged son by your side as you sift through your yesterdays. With light heads, we walk to the hotel, to spite his failing legs, and enjoy the silence of our old town. It’s a twenty-minute amble.
‘Don’t tell the missus, son,’ Dad says. ‘She’ll kill ya. Then me.’
The next morning as I fly over the Great Australian Bight, with a persistent little smirk on my lips, I do some maths. I turn forty-six today: the age my dad was when I left home at seventeen to make a little history of my own.
Last Night When We Were Young
I grab a stool in the back bar and straddle it like a wrangler mounting his horse. Jim, Andy and JVG are here for the twenty-buck bolognaise-and-wine-deal night which is a regular for them, and I possibly don’t realise that they’re knee-deep in a necessary conversation. Their furrowed brows serve as a meagre defence to the bravura I emanate after relinquishing the wheel after a nine-hour drive.
‘Gentlemen!’ I interject.
‘Timpofi!’
Before the question is even asked, I launch into the story of my long weekend like a kid who retraces each minute of a sci-fi blockbuster to his obliging parents. Nine hours in the car driving alone has vaporised any sense of decorum and tact. A Coopers Pale and a Jameson’s neat are placed in front of me with nary a word between myself and Patrick, barkeep magna cum laude.
Four nights earlier, I was onstage at the Playhouse at Melbourne’s Arts Centre with two blisteringly talented young women, Clio and Xani, waiting to play twenty-two ‘torch songs’ to a seated audience of eight hundred. The thick, pleated red curtain was yet to be raised. Xani on violin and Clio on piano were as measured and composed as the perfect balance of vowels and consonants in their names would suggest. Sitting on a stool between them, older than both by a couple of decades and with my name and image dominating the posters advertising the event, any composure and balance on my part was absent. Sweat was inching around my collar like cold bony fingers. The stool started to topple – or did it? My heart was a caged hyena. Laughing maniacally. My eyes darted left and there was Kenny, the producer, standing in the wings. The whole evening was his idea. His broad, beaming, sincere smile was temporarily blocked by his hand giving the ‘five more minutes’ symbol followed by a rousing thumbs-up.
‘Fuck you fuck you fuck you,’ I sincerely replied in a serpentine hiss. Fuck your generosity, your grand schemes, your beautiful wife and kids, fuck this theatre, and most of all fuck me for saying yes all the fucking time.
I’d made a promise to myself not to drink before curtains. Fuck me.
We hadn’t come to a satisfying definition of what a ‘torch song’ really was, but it suggests melodrama, which I can access, and also a strong singing voice and performance aesthetic, which I cannot. However, my typically Pavlovian response to being asked to perform had taken over any apprehension, and Kenny and I had made a long list of songs we thought appropriate. Songs by Peggy Lee, Randy Newman, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra and my beloved Mary Margaret O’Hara made the cut, along with some of my own. And then some more outré choices for comic relief: ‘I Don’t Think Your Wife Likes Me’ by Loudon Wainwright, and ‘The Lodger’ by English balladeer Jake Thackray, a tune about a young man who, over the course of one steamy night, is seduced by his landlady and her three daughters, one after the other; the final line is his demand that Grandma leaves him alone. The meticulous rhymes and pace of the song make it as intimidating as it is masterful. I couldn’t resist attempting it for the show, then deeply regretted it as I lurched on my stool behind the curtain, which was beginning to undulate as if it were a river of blood. A performer’s unctuous, egoistic blood.
Clio, sitting at the grand piano to my right, was as poised as a portrait – black evening dress and bobbed ebony hair punctuated by long hooped earrings. What a wonderful presence she was. Astute but witty, musically dextrous and passionate. I wanted to rip those bloody earrings out. Their balance and symmetry was mocking me. She smiled at me in solidarity. I smiled weakly back. ‘Damn you and your fucking balance,’ I whispered under my breath.
Xani was wearing a red cocktail dress, heels and a dazzling smile for hemispheres. Underneath her bobbed copper hair, her violin was cradled by her chin. She was born for the stage, an astonishing performer, and a true, dear friend with whom I’ve worked for years. She gave me a cheese-ball open-mouthed grin of comic encouragement. Oh, Xani . . . fuck you for letting me go ahead with this. I blew her an unconvincing kiss.
Kenny gestured for my attention and signalled okay. I reminded myself to make the quip excusing the music stand in front of me, perched with cheat notes and lyrics, by denying that they were such – ‘It’s just a PDF copy of the new Margaret Atwood novel that I simply cannot put down’ – adjusted my psychedelical Pucci tie and reached inside the pocket of my new suit tailored by Antons of Melbourne for my hip flask that, damn-fuck-tug-knuckle, wasn’t there.
The curtain began to lift and I kept my eyes to the horizon as it lifted above our three heads. Don’t look ’em in the eye, kid. Take a breath. It’s all . . . just . . . somewhere inside you. Clio hit the first chord and it was like ice cubes being tumbled into a highball glass. I opened my mouth and leaned into the microphone, ‘Last night, when we were young . . .’, and every nerve in my body settled back into place as if iron filings had been released from a magnet’s spell.
The following night I was playing guitar in a grimy rock band called the Draught Dodgers to forty folks in a little pub in Ballarat, western Victoria. And the night after that we were to play at midnight in a shoebox pub in Adelaide. The chasm of difference between singing delicate songs of love and heartache in a theatre and bashing out teeth-rattlingly loud rock’n’roll in a pub is kind of bewildering but also invigorating. Waking up on Friday dusty and with sticky eyelids, it took a few moments to join the dots. Who was I supposed to be today? Stirring from the dusty canyons of my imagination comes a conspiratorial prod, smoky and aged, in the tone of American actor Sam Elliott, ‘The same one as last night, son, but things gonna get a whole lot rowdier.’
‘Fuckin grouse, Sam! Thanks, my man!’ and I heaved outta bed. The room spun a bit but then the spirit level regained its composure and the next adventure began.
Thursday’s character was a hot mess of nightclub singer, failed Lothario and dedicated romantic. The weekend demanded a shadowy troubadour on the road, again. I knew this one well. Thrown into the car was my Vox amplifier, two electric guitars, a spare shirt, my footy gear and a slab of Carlton Draught. Travelling light to make a quick exit if required.
Once I cleared the city traffic I eased back and let the road pick me up and hurl me through distance like I was surfing a wave. I prefer to drive alone out of habit and ritual. More than that, though, my Dodgers bandmates have become treasured friends and I fear that exposing them to my ponderous silences will diminish whatever appeal I have for them.
Thursday night’s show was a success but it drained me despite my best efforts to remain in character and a little aloof. I was doing fine until a few Randy Newman songs caught me out – their gentle sadness touched me as I remembered Dad was in the crowd. The memory of choking up caused me to wince. I reckoned that at some stage on the drive to Ballarat I’d need a cry. I knew it was part of a process and not a dilemma, so no need to share it.
The Dodgers meet at Mick’s house to construct a loose plan for the weekend. Bass-player Mick and I started the band, I believe, as an excuse to drink beer and listen to records. We met playing footy ten years ago and the ease with which we bonded is a testament to how wearing the right T-shirt can be a great start to strong friendships. The cotton in question was my The Thirteenth Floor Elevators shirt, Texan psychedelic maestros who made four exquisitely thrilling records in the mid to late sixties before crumbling apart in a maelstrom of police harassment and mental disintegration. Mick also happens to look great – in the right light he looks like a 1973-era Glenn Frey – and has a heaving record collection, so when he revealed a little bass-playing history my thoughts leapfrogged. To form a band to hang around people you like a lot? A more honourable reason I’m yet to discover.
True to the historical model we talked about it for a year before picking up an instrument, in which time I made contact with Evan, who is a drummer, sometime guitarist and sound engineer and also the Zelig of St Kilda music – a presence in any snapshot taken in any venue for the past twenty-five years – and Jack, a singer I adored after witnessing his performance hanging upside down from a lighting rig several metres above the stage. Jack’s sixteen years younger than the rest of us but shares an appropriately absurd sense of humour; onstage he lurches like a shickered waiter on a cruise ship in violent waters, but offstage is still, calm and watchful. Evan draws deep on his Stuyvesant, only engaging in eye contact to impart a sage-like phrase or to laugh, which is when his eyes erupt with brilliance like blue cocktail umbrellas from behind dark drapes of hair.
Whenever I reveal that the r
ock’n’roll band I’ve been in for over two decades, the one with the non sequitur for a name, still congregates in a designated hotel room after each show to drink, laugh and listen to records – or, on rare nights that we have a stinker, to sulk and stare at the corners of the room before broaching an uncomfortable subject (more likely to be a misread facial expression during the intro to a song or knocking over someone’s bottle onstage rather than musical malfeasance) – the company I’m in will often stare quizzically as if to say, ‘Surely you’re not still like that after all this time?’, as if the spirit of brotherhood is something you grow out of.
Dodging success or tragedy in any redefining way has afforded the four of us and a small coterie of friends the space to appreciate each other’s temperaments under trying circumstances, drug comedowns, relationship traumas or bad shows, so even if every night isn’t like a teenage slumber party or a Caligula-hosted orgy, we can at least still resemble a dusty possé of bandits around a campfire in the desert after a successful hold-up. The knots in our brows can be massaged out with a well-curated drink, a time-honoured anecdote or a recital of a comedy sketch beloved by the four of us, from antique Goon Show silliness to much-loved and well-plundered Tim and Eric derangement.