by Paul Carter
Some years later I was living with three mates in a nice house not far from town. Pete, Phil, Iain and I got along perfectly well. There was never an argument or any of the standard scuffles you get with shared accommodation. The house was old but by no means run-down; we had a pool and a massive yard to grow drugs in. The back porch was huge, coming out of the house from two sliding doors then dropping down five feet to a surrounding rose bed that not only provided a natural balustrade of rose bushes but cover for our dope. Looking back now, it stands out clearly as the easiest time in my life.
Friday night was a ritual; it was my turn to fill the beer fridge out the back and provide dinner. We would sit around on the back porch in our underwear, everyone also wearing an obligatory funny hat, smoking joints and drinking beer, recalling the day’s activities and planning the weekend.
One typically hot still Perth summer night when it was my turn to cook, I waited until everyone was sufficiently stoned and then called ‘The Winged Wok’. Our Chinese takeaway food arrived and as we started peeling the cardboard lids off the steaming hot aluminium containers, someone farted. That may not seem overly funny, but when you’ve been smoking Pete’s special Denmark Death blend it’s bloody hilarious.
Iain roared, throwing himself backwards on the back legs of his plastic IKEA chair. But the legs snapped off, leaving him rocking precariously on the edge of the porch, so then he lunged forwards grabbing at the tablecloth, which dumped thirty dollars of piping-hot Chinese and a fruit bowl full of grass into his crotch. The high-pitched scream made us all grit our teeth as we watched him disappear over the side.
We peered down over the edge of the porch at him, sitting in amongst the roses which Pete’s mother had pruned the previous weekend, covered in sweet-n-sour and dope. Iain didn’t look up. We stopped laughing and jumped down to help him up, but he was frozen still, with his arm grasping his right thigh where the pruned stump of a rose bush was protruding through it.
‘Oh fuck . . . call an ambulance.’ I tried to scrape off the Chinese food and dope covering Iain’s leg.
Phil grabbed the phone.
‘Yes . . . he’s in shock, I think,’ Phil said, trying to sound normal. ‘You better bring a hacksaw or something, okay, okay.’
‘Where the fuck is Pete?’ I yelled.
Pete came running up with his camera.‘Okay . . . put his hat back on.’
‘You fuckhead!’
‘I’m okay boys,’ said Iain quite calmly. ‘There’s no pain.’
‘That’s ’cause you’ve been smoking this shit all night,’ said Phil, scooping up a handful of greeny-orangey goop.
The camera flashed, making Iain blink.
‘Someone’s pulling into the drive.’ Pete panicked. ‘Hide the dope!’ But his paranoid attempts at hiding the dope only had him smeared in it from head to toe.
The paramedics took one look at us and asked, ‘Has the patient taken any drugs or alcohol . . . other than what he’s lying in, gentlemen?’
In what seemed like seconds they had Iain on a gurney with the rose branch still through his thigh, sticking up under the sheet.
‘He looks like he’s got a boner,’ said Pete.
‘Can we come too?’ asked Phil, but they slammed the ambulance doors and were gone, sirens blazing.
I suggested we follow them and so we all piled into my Holden, still in our underwear, liberally covered in Chinese food and marijuana.
‘I’m still hungry,’ Pete was eyeballing a McDonald’s drive-through. So then we stocked up on burgers and munched our way to Fremantle Hospital, Pete dipping his chips in the greeny-orangey goop.
Not surprisingly the hospital staff wouldn’t let us in but they did accept a burger, which Phil insisted they pass on to Iain as soon as he felt up to it.
AFTER WRITING COUNTLESS LETTERS to drilling contractors I finally landed a job, as a roughneck (labourer) on a land rig drilling core samples for Western Mining. The job meant moving to a tiny town north-east of Perth, about twelve hours by car, but I was happy because I got what I wanted. So I packed up my old Holden, the boys wished me good luck, and with just enough money for petrol, I made for the rig.
Leinster is the middle of nowhere. A mining community of about ten thousand, it is 376 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie, the nearest large town and centre of Western Australia’s mining industry. I was assigned a staff house on the edge of town, sharing with Craig, a geologist from Brisbane. Craig and I got on very well. He too had recently arrived and we found a lot of common ground to occupy our leisure time.
We decided to throw a party for my birthday, only about ten people showed up, but we had a good time. I drank too much scotch and tried to spot some hash with a hot knife over the stove, but ended up passing out on the kitchen floor. That’s when two of the guys who were electricians decided to go out to their trucks and get as much gaffa tape as they could carry then tape me naked to the kitchen floor. I came to thinking I was a paraplegic. Everyone spent the next hour laughing at my attempts to pull the tape off my body. We’re not talking about a small piece of plaster here—by the time I was tape-free I didn’t have any body hair left either.
Craig gave me a big joint ‘for the pain’, so I did manage to calm down, then half an hour later, I had the munchies like never before. But as usual we had no food. Luckily, the camp chef had made me a birthday cake earlier and had even saved me a slice during the feeding frenzy that occurred while I was taped to the floor. Of course, it was the best cake I had ever tasted but I was still starving. Looking into the fridge the way you do when you’re stoned at two in the morning, hoping that by some miracle you’re going to find a whole barbecued chicken hidden in the back, I saw nothing but beer and mouldy half-eaten TV dinners.
Then the camp chef told me that when he was making the cake, he had cracked some eggs into a tea cup, and suggested I fry them up for a sandwich. Like a man possessed I grabbed the tea cup from the fridge, threw the eggs into the big frying pan, lit the gas plate and started frying. But nothing was happening. The eggs wouldn’t cook. I checked the gas, it was on; I turned it up. Still the eggs just sat there, refusing to cook. Hungry, half-naked and still sore from pulling every last hair from my body, I ran into the living room and complained, ‘My eggs won’t cook.’
By this time the party had reached stupor stage and no-one felt inclined to help me. Craig, however, managed to haul himself off the couch and make the long trip to the kitchen. But when he got to the stove he started laughing. Craig had discovered why my eggs wouldn’t cook.‘You’re trying to fry apricot halves Pauli.’
One of the guys at the party was called ‘Riff ’. Riff tried to play an electric guitar solo while standing on the coffee table, but it broke, sending him into the lap of our large neighbour who became disturbed and began punching him. Riff used his guitar as a shield and ran outside. I followed to calm him down and we talked in the driveway for a while. Riff was the town garbage man and needed an offsider to help him with his Saturday run. I needed the money so I applied and he agreed.
The next day Riff arrived with his flatbed truck. Walking up to the passenger door, I thought that my massive hangover was affecting my vision because I couldn’t see him inside, but then I realised the whole cab was thick with smoke from the bongs he had chain-pulled on the way over. I got in, holding my breath, and wound down the window.
‘Keep it up mate,’ said Riff. ‘Unless you want two million flies inside after the first stop.’ He shoved the bong back in his mouth and flicked his lighter.
We drove to the first camp, where bulging, black plastic bin liners that had been sitting in the desert heat for days were lined up outside the camp kitchen port-a-cabin. I pulled at the first of a dozen bags, but the knot at the top came off in my hand like melted cheese. Rancid garbage and thousands of blowfly maggots spilled down the sides.
‘You’re gonna have to shovel those into the truck mate,’ yelled Riff from the cloud inside the cab.
So I tied my shirt around m
y head, leaving just a tiny slit to see through, and shovelled for the next forty minutes. Billions of flies followed my every move, determined to get into my ears, nose, eyes, mouth—it was infuriating, not to mention disgusting. Riff did the next one, his long hair and stoned bliss making him oblivious to the marauding flies. And so the day went on, driving from camp to camp, one of us shovelling garbage while the other smoked bongs.
After the last camp we drove out to a remote site where a deep trench had been dug for the garbage to be dumped into, burned and covered up. By now I was quite stoned too and finding everything quite funny. Riff backed up the truck to the edge of the trench, and I staggered out, climbed into the back and shovelled out the revolting mass. When I’d finished Riff hooked up the forty-four gallon drum of petrol and hand pump which he had tied to the back of the truck then handed me the pump and climbed back into the cloudy cab. The pump wasn’t working. I cranked the handle but no fuel came out, so I kicked the drum over on its side, letting all the petrol pour into the trench, then rolled the empty drum into the trench thinking,‘Job well done’.
Riff grinned at me through his dirty hair as I climbed back in the cab.
‘I need a lighter,’ I told him.
‘I’ll drive over there,’ he said, raising a finger off the steering wheel pointing nowhere in particular. ‘And you light the rag on this stick and chuck it in the trench, from a safe distance mind.’ His eyes were so red he looked demonically possessed. He pulled another cone and handed me his lighter.
I jumped out with the stick and walked back to the trench, a black cloud of flies swarming around my head. Then following Riff ’s instructions, I lit the rag and threw the stick, but it fell short of the trench, teetering on the edge. So I wandered up and kicked it over.
All I remember is the sound, and getting punched in the whole body. The trench exploded in a fireball that people saw from the town miles away and the drum went into a low orbit. My shirt was on fire, and I started rolling around in the dirt screaming. Riff came running and helped put me out. My fringe was gone, so were my eyebrows, but I was okay. Then Riff was laughing. ‘The whole fuckin’ drum,’ he kept saying, over and over again. We drove back to town, not a fly in sight.
The work was hard at Leinster but I enjoyed the vast open country. Time passed quickly. The rig was mounted on the back of a huge truck and I learnt the do’s and don’ts fast. Des, the man in charge, treated his crew well and we respected him. But while work was hard, life’s lessons were sometimes even harder.
On one occasion, I had a few days off during a blisteringly hot summer and Craig and I were driving down the main street when he suggested a beer in the Wet Mess, one of the two bars in town. Except this was the bar for the wild men.
‘No way . . . I’ll get raped,’ I protested, but Craig was already getting out of the car and heading towards the bar, chuckling at me.
It was early afternoon so there were only four hall-pack truck drivers shooting pool inside. They were all Maori, two of them had tribal tattoos covering one side of their faces. All stood over six feet and looked like they’d been genetically engineered to crush small buildings. They nodded hello as we walked in. Everything was concrete—the bar, the stools—beer was served in plastic cups, and the windows had heavy bars instead of glass. We decided to play pool on the other table, and Craig paid the deposit for two cues and a tray of balls. (This was normal practice because every weekend they got demolished in a brawl.)
An hour rolled by and soon the four truck drivers started getting rowdy. They suddenly broke out in a vicious fist-fight, all four trading blisteringly hard punches. We panicked . . . but there was only one way out of the room, past them.
The fight spilled over on top of us, I made for the door but ran straight into one of the fighters, then his elbow ran into me. It was painless, really. I’d never been hit hard before, not hard like that. My brain went numb, lights out. I was on the floor, my nose wasn’t working, tears were streaming down my cheeks. I could vaguely see the back of one giant bent over the pool table, his right arm swinging up and down, delivering his fist into the tabletop. I could feel the vibrations in the floor as he pounded on the felt. Then as quickly as it had started it was over, and they were gone. The barman was also gone, having locked the bar door and the steel grille between the roof and the bar counter behind him. My nose was smashed; blood flowed into my mouth and down the front of my shirt like two GT racing stripes. I got up slowly, and that’s when I saw Craig. He looked dead.
Flat on his back in the middle of the pool table, he was covered in dark red blood, bubbles formed in the middle of his face. I didn’t recognise him. The big trucker had shoved a ball in Craig’s mouth, balled up another one in his fist and beaten Craig’s face into a pulp. He had lost all his teeth, his jaw looked broken, as did his nose.
I carried him out to the car and struggled to get him inside. His blood spilled down my back as I positioned him. My head was spinning. I caught my reflection in the window—I looked like I’d just murdered someone.
The tyres shrieked to a stop in the doctor’s driveway. Craig was unconscious, slumped forwards against the seatbelt, his head hanging down with a series of bloody saliva strings connecting his face to his crotch. A young woman was at the door, telling me that her father the doctor was in Perth for a wedding and she was unable to help me. The nearest medical help was a two-hour drive to Leonora. I ran back to the car.
Craig had a pulse, and was making a rhythmical gurgling sound so I knew he was sort of breathing. I floored the car as much as I could, regularly checking his pulse and trying to light bloody cigarettes with the car lighter. Finally I began passing signs to Leonora and felt triumphant just getting him there alive. The doctor lived in a modest whitewashed house and he had the flying doctors on final approach for the main street within an hour.
The plane’s large rear doors swallowed up my friend in superfast time, its departure sandblasting everyone in red prop wash as it vaporised down the main street and into the afternoon’s dust-bowl sky. The doctor explained that Craig was stable but would need facial surgery and new teeth and his jaw was going to take more than a month to reset. He gave me a shot of anaesthetic, then he straightened my nose: shoving a wooden tongue depressor between my teeth and bracing my head between his knees, he quietly said, ‘Now this is going to hurt’. It did.
During my drive to town, I had managed to cook the head gasket on the car, but luckily the doctor lived next door to a used-car yard so I just traded it for a Ford ute that had ‘Killer Deal’ painted across the top half of the cracked windscreen. I drove back to Leinster slowly, with my face a mess, bruised and swollen, squinting into the sunset on the straight desert highway through the ‘Killer Deal’ windscreen.
Six weeks later the four men had been fired over the incident and charged with grievous bodily harm, and all four were in Perth waiting for their day in court. Des asked me to drive to Kalgoorlie and pick up Craig at the hospital. He’d organised a new company truck and suggested that we go from the hospital to the car dealer, and from there Craig would drive the new truck back to Leinster. I decided to drive Craig’s Toyota Hilux to get him; it was old and slow but more reliable than my ‘Killer Deal’ ute.
I left at daybreak and by early afternoon I was sitting in the hospital waiting for Craig. The doctor walked him into the room, one arm around his shoulder. Craig had lost a lot of weight but that was insignificant compared to his face. Four bolts protruded through the skin, all joined with tensioning wire that formed a square around his mouth. Anything he ate had to go through a blender first. I felt so sorry for him. He had to return in a month to have the bolts removed but at least he could go back to work in the meantime.
I told him the plan, but he just wanted to have a beer. So we picked up the new truck and agreed to stop at the last pub on the way out of town. Craig didn’t say much but he did have his jaw wired up, with a straw jammed in one side of his mouth, and a cigarette in the other, so there wasn
’t much room for conversation. We stuck to two beers each—Craig sucked his—and as we walked out to the cars he unexpectedly turned and hugged me.
‘Thanks mate,’ he said and smiled with his eyes.
We had a convoy plan but minutes later I was crawling along in his crappy old Hilux and he was disappearing fast into the distance in the brand new Landcruiser. At least it was dusk, my favourite time in the bush.
It was easy to drift off in your mind on the long straight road, with ten minutes to the next corner and no radio, just the wind blowing hot against your skin. The desert stretched into the burning orange horizon in all directions. I felt lucky, I didn’t miss the city at all. I paid more attention to the road as I took the solitary corner, but was still driving in a state of boredom. Heat haze distorted the road ahead, but I knew instantly that something didn’t look right.
It was the new truck, lying on its side . . . I was looking at its black chassis. My heart jumped, I floored it but the Toyota just blew smoke and grumbled at me. My mouth went bone dry as I pulled up next to the truck; I prepared myself for the worst.
There was a thumping sound coming from inside the cab. Then I saw a massive tail. It belonged to a wounded kangaroo, a huge red wounded kangaroo. Craig had hit him mid-hop and sent the beast through the windscreen into the cab. Somewhere underneath its bulk was my friend. It was kicking against the dashboard fighting for breath, and I had no chance of moving it. I didn’t know if Craig was dead or alive—Do I go back to town? Get help? Do I try to move the roo?