Detours

by Tim Rogers

  I mouth, with a shrug, ‘I’ve been home all the time.’

  Bohemians

  You should have met the guy

  Been saying it so often it’s like there’s a swingin’ party and I’m the only one not invited

  Where those dilettantes wave their wits like wands

  And curse the living for not snatching days like prizes

  There’s a tarp hoist at the waterfront

  Gas bottle heaters and bins filled with ice

  I’m overdressed and miss the point

  But when I wake up from a tropical slumber

  So far away from even making up the numbers

  I could never see you in the light

  What chance have I got finding you in the shadows?

  I only see Boris when I go for a coffee at the Italian joint around the corner, although he has twice shouted to me from his apartment window on the fourth floor. He’s a little older than me and walks like he talks, kinda crooked and sporadic. Gusts of movement or speech interrupted by pauses as he negotiates his next move. I suspect he smokes a bit of weed, but only from the glassy film I’ve noticed, on the rare occasions I get close enough to him, that seems to cover the whites of his eyes. He’s been saying for a while that he’s written a play that involves stories from the suburb’s history. He’s going to stick it in my letterbox soon. I’ve given him my address despite not knowing him at all well. I trust him. I like him. He’s batty and erratic but he’s kind, and if I could sit with him one day – if I had the patience and the wherewithal – I bet he could tell me great stories from his decades of living here. But the other morning as I was moping outside the café in shock because I had noticed a menu item called, I shit you not, Deconstructed Muesli (which I thought could make a great band name only if that band played Death Metal exclusively), I heard him say, ‘Geez, son, it’s good to see one of the last bohemians still around the suburb.’

  He was talking about me. It was then I knew we were all in trouble, and that the suburb of St Kilda had truly lost its heart and soul. Suspecting that fifty percent of what I do, notably the habits and rituals, mantras and counting obsessions, are to keep sadness and anxiety at a distance, I replied to Boris that although I had a certain ‘raffish affectation’, I was not possessed of the ‘schismatic spirit’, and that if I were regarded as a ‘bohemian’ then we were all going to pot. He threw his arms up and laughed as he hurried away, shouting something about a thesaurus, and before I had the chance to ask him about his play he had turned the corner and was gone.

  The exchange bothered me a little. Even more than deconstructed muesli.

  For the next week I wandered my usual streets noticing everything – behaviours, snatched bits of conversations, personal styles – more acutely than ever. But I also smiled more at strangers, and took greater care of the sartorial messages I was transmitting in public. I was representing something I barely felt entitled to be a part of. As always, appearance took precedence over substance and the dress code took up all available time. I no longer stepped out as if I had just been to a garage sale curated by Status Quo – denim was given over to velvet, and no neck of mine would be exposed without being adorned with a kerchief. With fedoras worn at rakish angles and jewellery a must, I looked like an oafish Quentin Crisp.

  After a week of this, I was sitting in the outdoor section of a local restaurant and bar with my dear friend Mick and his family. They are gorgeous company and we were in high spirits, it being a Sunday, and footy practice in the morning having created in me a deep thirst and an avuncular camaraderie with his two boys, one of whom I have an eye on to be my future son-in-law.

  Lurching towards us as if fresh from a cudgel attack, a tall, broad young gentleman, in a Fred Perry short-sleeved shirt and a haircut that must have been administered as a punishment for some felony, announced himself with a thick Dublin accent and reminded himself to Mick’s wife, whom he’d chatted to at the bar three rounds afore. Mick’s wife likewise reminded the gentleman that she was with her family and, no, she was not keen to join him, and then Mick, always quick to surmise a situation as a good lawyer should, introduced us all – his family and me, a family friend, enjoying a day out.

  Circumnavigating the table with eyes as steady as balloons on the ocean, our Irish friend stopped at me and with no small amount of invective announced that he couldn’t talk to me as I looked ‘like a feckin aristocrat’.

  An aristocrat? Apart from my deep hatred for birthright and primogeniture, I was aghast at my grooming misfire. But before I could elucidate about the ‘1973 Italian film director’ look that I was going for, I blurted out: ‘I can’t be a fuckin aristocrat, I’m from bloody Kalgoorlie!’

  I was doubly bothered. Both at my lack of self-assuredness and an itchy sensation indicating I was becoming a curmudgeon, bemoaning current mores and yearning for a time past.

  When I first moved here, the suburb throbbed with contrary energy. Now, walking down Jacka Boulevard along the beachfront, feeling decidedly overdressed, I stop at a monument that speaks a little of St Kilda’s history as a playground for the elite, as evidenced by the huge rooming houses to my left, ornate and stoic above swathes of tanned flesh that congregate and disperse underneath them in explosions of coarse accents and towelling, that appear like angry bull ants ricocheting at the base of grand, immortal trees.

  I glide away from the Lilliputian scene in haste and chastise myself. For doesn’t bohemianism suggest freedom and enthusiasm? This is why I currently dress like a peacock, yes? For my own amusement and for others’ entertainment? As for the aristocrat sledge, why the hell should that even bother me? That I have $78 in the bank and debts a-mounting yet can look like landed gentry should be a velvet badge of honour.

  On arriving home I write a little message to myself to pin to the inside of the door, something about acceptance and enthusiasm. There is only a can of peas in the pantry but I have hot sauce, olive oil and half a dozen dry biscuits. Mushing up the peas and garnishing them with sauce and oil, I pour a large whiskey and look out the window at the bruising dusk. Trees rustle like a thousand conversations on the other side of the glass and, not for the first time, I think of Blaise Pascal.

  For now, I’ll remain this loose network of habits, rituals and labels, but the dress sense shall henceforth be labelled simply ‘optimistic’. Looking around the room, at shelves groaning with books and records of iconoclasts and rebels, apostates and true bohemians among photos of a young girl who has grown into a teenager, I put down my can of peas and stare again at the cover of a record by a young Kris Kristofferson, handsome with small eyes that could cut diamonds and the tanned, bearded face of a devoted apostle, who once wrote something about freedom being another word for nothing left to lose.

  A Solid Afternoon’s Therapy

  Been living underwater, and I sure dug the scene

  But no-one could hear me out, when I leant back to scream

  Combing through the shells to live in the dirt

  To keep from the sun, to keep from gettin’ hurt. Gettin’ gone.

  We have to get better at dishing out nicknames. Is it an Australian thing or is it just sporting clubs that think attaching a ‘y’ or ‘o’ at the end of a name is a good idea? Decades ago a newspaper poll compiled votes for some suggested nicknames for the Essendon Football Club full-forward Paul Salmon. He was about six foot eight and had a kicking style so courtly and mannerly that I imagined King Louis XIV would have lined up for goal in a similar manner. There was, of course, the reductive suggestion of ‘Fish’, but I was rooting for ‘Sockeye’. It would have been met with a few seconds of face-screwing ponder before recognition hit, like all great nicknames should. It also had the perfect balance of syllables and noun–consonant ratio joyous to shout out as he took a grab or slotted one from forty metres out, whether you were an Essendon supporter or not; it was almost onomatopoeic in its echo of action and reaction. It resembled the thud of ball on boot and then the trail of expectation as yo
u’re left to wonder where the ball would go. I am not an Essendon supporter. But, geez, it was a good nickname. The public chose ‘Fish’.

  Over the past three years I’ve attained a nickname on the footy field that I’ve never quite understood. I’m called ‘The Specimen’. Being the self-flagellating type I immediately thought it was referring to a specimen jar for urine. I’ve been assured, however, that the name refers to my unique physicality at the age of forty-seven. Being rangy, grey, tall and manically enthusiastic when I grab the ball and go for a sprint before delivering it by hand or foot to a team-mate, I apparently look like a bit of a specimen. It’s no ‘Sockeye’ but I’ll take it. It sure beats ‘Rodgo’.

  Our footy club has a couple of Tonys and some Johns, and a disproportionate number of Brians which has necessitated using B1, B2 and B3 in a straight-faced nod to Bananas in Pyjamas. And there are far too many Micks. This led to some confusion at our 2013 Best and Fairest awards when it was revealed, post-count, that votes given to one Mick were for another Mick, and therefore Mick, who was most definitely in line to win the medal, lost out to another Mick, when really Mick had a stellar year and should’ve won instead of Mick. So my mate Mick changed his name for footy. Now he’s Daryl. I think it’s gonna stick.

  I’d played a lot of footy as a kid, until my parents moved us to the north-western suburbs of Sydney when I was fourteen and any progression as a player was pulled to a halt: the region was bereft of any love of the game in those years. This realisation had come sharply. My schoolbag tag, a laminated chewing-gum gift card of North Melbourne legend Malcolm Blight, was routinely ridiculed and vandalised. Over the next decades, I’d snuck in a kick with other expatriates and bandmates, but I hungered to be among two dozen other devotees at ease with the vernacular, extolling the virtues and follies of past players as we grunted and grinned within the vicissitudes of a game played by superheroes, under rules made up by kids.

  One wet, cold Wednesday nine years ago I was asked by a fellow songwriter to come down and have a kick at his club. In typically dramatic remembrance, I’ve imagined I was asked because my friend could see that I was wallowing in post-separation crapulence, and that a run around a park with a footy would sweat out some of the drink and recreational powders I was existing on. The more prosaic reality was that we’d kicked together before, in car parks of venues where we’d shared gigs, so he knew I was, in footy parlance, ‘handy’. I had a half-hour to dig out some shorts, a pair of boots I’d bought and mostly ignored for fifteen years and a trusty old woollen short-sleeved guernsey of a team I’d never played for, then stretch my taut hamstrings gingerly and pace expectantly as I waited to be picked up.

  With any new undertaking I’m still as nervous as I was when taken to Sea Scouts at the age of eight. It might be a first-morning rehearsal for theatre, or a meeting with family I haven’t known before or a new psychiatrist – whatever it is, the anticipation is the same: my body interprets it as pure dread. And that short drive to the designated oval that afternoon nine years ago, to participate in a new sporting endeavour at the age of thirty-seven, exposed new worries to do with hand–eye coordination, a dwindling lung capacity and a lack of knowledge about the level of skill expected – all fears which my companion attempted to allay. If I didn’t possess a wildly capricious competitive streak, mostly directed towards myself, perhaps I could’ve relaxed in the generally upheld dictum that sport, particularly at a non-competitive level, was supposed to be fun, for fuck’s sake.

  And fun it was. Sprained finger, mildly torn calf, misdirected kicks, occasional solid marks, a quick vomit in the flora behind the forward pocket – most of the afternoon had a familiar smell and taste. There were some fellas that didn’t strike me as being especially convivial, but to share a middling level of skill would have to be enough. I’d found my team.

  The group has always been referred to as The Kick, and any suggestion to formalise the unit is always shut down. Even with the absence of an opposing team, it’s appropriate to think of the other twenty men running the rim of the park as team-mates – for all participants, the afternoon’s satisfaction demands both fluid movement and commitment to elevate the afternoon activity above what it ostensibly is. Which is, for two afternoons a week, nine months of the year, anywhere between ten and forty middle-aged men running around an oval, kicking or handballing a football to each other. There is no game.

  Competitive stuff is confined to spot-fires – the odd tackle attempted more with humour than aggression, a healthy amount of sledging, again with the emphasis on amusement. Even at the most rudimentary level, footy means injuries, and they will come without any provocation. For bodies not drilled for high-intensity contact, a badly executed tackle or bump can bugger up your collarbone or crack a rib, and no-one is in a position to miss work.

  The times for a kick are Wednesday afternoons around four and Sunday mornings around eleven. The numbers on the park vary from a low of eight for a windy, rain-pelted winter Wednesday, to thirty-plus on a dry Sunday. It’s a lucky dip. We run around for an hour and a half usually, or until the numbers dwindle, or until the light disappears, or it looks like the beers are running out near the bunch of trees on the wing. Yep, you got it. They’re the clubrooms.

  There is the weekly problem of securing an oval that isn’t taken over by schools or sporting groups who can flex their formality and render us, often, nomads. Calls and text messages are frequently thrown around whenever one of the five ovals we routinely use are hosting amateur matches or college training sessions. These ovals attract nicknames, naturally. There is ‘The Tramp’: a reference to its pristine, flat green turf, which gives an even bounce to balls and players, like a trampoline. ‘Caroline Springs’ is surrounded by manicured parkland, with a small lake and children’s play area, akin to one of the satellite suburbs lately constructed in Melbourne’s north.

  There is also ‘Wattie’ – The Kick’s ‘spiritual home’ – a properly maintained footy and cricket oval only a torpedo punt away from the beach. Its mention is always accompanied by a sigh and a wistful smile: a summer dip after training is as indulgent and satisfying a thing as a middle-aged footy player could dream of. One such afternoon, as six of us were waist-deep in Port Phillip Bay, arms folded across chests puffing out in desperate vanity, I caught myself musing that each of us was imagining ourselves as young AFL players being filmed by news cameras, the boyish voiceover declaring us to be the team to watch for the season. Even if asked about my dreamy silence by one of my mates there I wouldn’t have revealed its fodder. Let each of us have our humble fantasies.

  There are no formal rules for these gatherings; however, the list of minor transgressions that could banish a bloke from an invite to a post-practice social gathering is long, and possibly bewildering to a newcomer. But as an acquaintance of mine from Europe once said after watching their first game: ‘Australian Rules Football is a game to be played by supermen and women, yet the rules were made by children! I mean, look at the ball? Oval? Who but an excitable kid would introduce a ball that could bounce in a hundred different directions at any time? And, hey, let’s not throw the ball, let’s PUNCH it! Who COULD understand this game?’

  I agreed with him, but I also agree with the empirical jumble of as yet unscripted by-laws and breaches that govern our afternoons. If a player takes a clean mark while stationary, for example, and chooses not to handball to a team-mate running past but returns to a forward kicking position by running an arc then kicking, thereby slowing a potentially quick stretch of play, he is branded, under muttered breath, ‘hungry’ and not a team-man. But having a whinge about not getting kicked to is a transgression of the highest order. Someone new to the club may have to be taken aside and given a quiet talk about ebbs-and-flows positioning. And being a fuckin whinger. Although no penalties are forthcoming, memories last a long stretch at The Kick, and nothing shows up potential flaws in a guy’s character than ignoring a hard running team-mate. In the sage words of one of our club’
s founding fathers: ‘Geez . . . that’ll kill a club.’

  Not for the first time lately did a vague acquaintance comment that our Kick was a vain attempt to reclaim our lost youth. I couldn’t argue the point, but resented their scoffing tone. As with playing in a rock’n’roll band, for myself, I honestly believe having a kick is far more fun at forty-seven than it was at sixteen. It’s true that legs don’t run as fast, backs won’t allow the flexibility to scoop the ball one-handed off the deck while in motion, and any simple movement the day after rigorous training will be accompanied by, at least, a wince. But such mild frustrations pale against the pleasure of participating in something after a long absence and is a reward unto itself.

  My memories of playing, and training, as a boy never included laughter. There was a joy, I guess, but more often just relief. To get through a game without a busted nose, or a torn knee ligament, to slot a goal from close range and not spray it out of bounds, to get the victory which would be rewarded by a lunch at Pizza Hut. As a kid there were also trips away to play country teams, or interstate sides, which offered great bus trips, pranks and comradeship, but also the uncomfortable possibilities of being billeted out, to stay with a family who were inhospitable, or creeps. So although each kick these days is followed by a host of physical grievances, there is no intimidation or dread which sullied the game for me as a kid. Youth is not wasted on the young, but it’s wasted on me.