Bad Medicine

by Terry Ledgard

  In that instant, tyres screeched on the highway. Impeccable timing.

  The Policía had seen us, slammed their old beat-up Hilux into reverse and stopped on the shoulder of the road. Four armed Mexican Policía swarmed out of the car and shouted at us, violently jabbing their M16 rifles into our chests. We were wrestled to the ground as handcuffs slapped closed against our wrists, then picked up by the handcuffs and thrown into the back of the Hilux, face-down.

  We looked at each other, giggling. ‘You’re the pretty one. Big Julio is going to feed you a burrito in prison, son,’ I joked.

  ‘Fuck that, you’re my chica. I’m gonna pimp your ass out to pay for my freedom,’ Wayno replied.

  The Policía gently kicked us in the guts, I guess to remind us that they were the boss, but we couldn’t stop laughing.

  The Hilux took off at breakneck speed, slammed around corners and mashed our faces into the side of the tray. But I still giggled at the absurdity of the situation. Before long, we were way, way off the beaten track. The Policía had driven us to the Cancún ghetto. They bundled us out the back of the Hilux and dragged us onto the pavement.

  Shit, we’re going to get filled in here.

  I clenched my teeth, expecting the worst.

  ‘You boys don’t want to go to jail, do you?’ the Policía Big Nuts asked.

  ‘I’ve had worse Saturday nights,’ I joked.

  Big Nuts kicked me in the thigh.

  ‘Give us your money and you gringos can go free,’ he said.

  Why is it that, in non-Caucasian countries, people automatically assume I’m American?

  We finally understood the game. This was extortion. We’d both just been to the ATM at the Hard Rock, so we ponied up $400 between us. The most expensive piss in history. The fuckers didn’t even give us a lift to the main street, or offer us some weed and blow as they sped off around the corner. How rude!

  Wayno and I jogged through the ghetto, trying to find a familiar landmark. Before long, we were back on the main drag and found our destination: Señor Frog’s. This nightclub was amazing, overflowing with alcohol and fun – the adult version of Disneyland. We stood in the cheering crowd as the Señor Frog staff organised a drinking game up on stage. I was plucked from amid the drunken mayhem.

  I stood on stage and ripped my shirt off, as instructed. The club owner patrolled the stage, asking each of the game participants where we were from.

  ‘I’m from Straya, mate,’ I said into the microphone, doing my most convincing bogan impression – which wasn’t a stretch.

  The crowd cheered.

  Four blokes, including myself, knelt down over a yard glass of beer. Then, the club owner picked four girls from the crowd and lined them up behind us.

  The game began.

  My girl slapped my ass like it was her paid occupation, spurring me on to drink the litre of beer, through a straw. I’d just had a gutful of bourbon, so wasn’t entirely keen to scull the drink. I stopped to breathe between mouthfuls, but my girl wasn’t happy. She ripped her thong off and whipped my ass like a sadistic dominatrix jockey whipping Phar Lap to the finish line. By game’s end, I’d only just been pipped at the post by a German opponent; the bloke had some mad beer-guzzling skills. He looked like a lumberjack, and only needed the lederhosen to complete the kraut stereotype. I came a close second, but was relegated to the loser circle, where we had another challenge awaiting us.

  The club’s owner described the game. We needed to race each other across a single horizontal rope suspended above a swimming pool as punishment for our bantamweight drinking antics. One of the losers didn’t like the sound of this game, so he piked out. I stripped off to my boxer shorts – I didn’t want my wallet to get wet.

  The starting whistle blew, and I held back from the other bloke moving across his rope, laughing at his feeble display of athleticism.

  ‘Oh shit, Aussie boy is confident!’ the owner exclaimed through a microphone.

  The horizontal rope was my forte. I raced across mine, overtaking the other opponent on the way over the pool, and then again on the way back.

  ‘Dang, these Aussies know how to do this shit, yo!’ the club owner exclaimed.

  The Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi chant reverberated around the club as I threw my hands in the air and soaked up the fifteen minutes of fame. Best night ever!

  From Cancún, we flew to Miami for round three of drunken tomfoolery. But we stayed on the South Beach strip, which would’ve been cool if we were millionaires and drove Lamborghinis.

  Pretentious Prick Paradise.

  Unfortunately, we looked exactly like a duo of drunken Australian degenerates, so we had the social status of a homeless bum or a parking inspector, and couldn’t break into the clubs where the real fun was happening.

  After a few days of the Beautiful People looking down their noses at us and throwing pity change at our feet in the Miami streets, Wayno and I were back in Australia. We smelt like waterlogged mangy mutts, souls stained with sin.

  The hard hitter himself, my late Great-great Uncle Jim Ledgard, Coober Pedy, 1970s.

  The cheeky little shits, Baby Bro (left) and Big Bro (right), Coober Pedy circa 1988.

  My very first mass-casualty patient at the American Forward Surgical Base, 2007.

  Dusted up and looking like a Team America character, Tarin Kot base, 2007.

  The Kilos, kitted up and posing for our first hit, 2007.

  An epileptic kid fighting it out while his old man keeps the faith, 2007.

  Myself and another Kilo sitting in the ‘field of dreams’ – a giant marijuana crop, 2007.

  Treating a kid with facial injuries at Forward Operating Base Anaconda, 2007.

  The Kilos: Commando and SAS medical team, 2007.

  Minor surgery on a suspected Taliban fighter with a frag wound to his knee, 2007.

  A normal day at the American Forward Surgical Base – a British soldier suffering massive shrapnel and bullet wounds being treated by the resus team, 2007.

  Fallout from the big contact: my blistered dick skinner (top left), shot-up mortar packaging tubes (top right), a bullet hole in a fuel tank (bottom left), and a shot-up compartment on my Bushmaster vehicle (bottom right), 2007.

  Wayno the male model, movie star Neal McDonough and me at a Los Angeles pub, 2008.

  Drunken debauchery: on the receiving end of a drinking game at a Cancún nightclub, 2008.

  Big Bro and me taking a rest break along the Kokoda Track, Papua New Guinea, 2013.

  The famous Kokoda arches. Big Bro and me at the finish line of the Kokoda Trail, 2013.

  14

  DON’T TELL MUM I WORK ON THE RIGS . . .

  The final few months of army service were spent at an experimental weapons range near Port Wakefield, South Australia, in early 2008. My last day in the Green Machine involved shooting trial automatic grenade-launchers into the desert, which was an incredibly cool send-off from army service.

  I unconditionally loved my time in the army – the people and experiences were second to none. As I reflected on the army period of my life, I was content with my accomplishments, kind of. I’d achieved everything I set out to – with one exception. I never pulled the trigger on SAS selection. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but this is my one and only regret. I let the fear of failure defeat me before I even got to the starting line. Given that I passed on the opportunity to attempt selection, twice, I doubt I would’ve made it. My regret is that I’ll never know now.

  It might seem strange to some (given my allergy to boredom) to look back on my army days as a positive experience, but on the whole: it rocked. The boring parts seemed to melt away when I remembered the morbid sense of humour that we soldiers tended to develop while sitting around for hours in the most dangerous country in the world with nothing to do. It was undoubtedly crass and inappropriate, but it had a very important purpose: it was a coping mechanism. When you’re in an environment where you need to be alert for that long without a
break, while you’re dealing with daily life and death situations, lame dad jokes just don’t make the grade. You need a belly-laughing, dark-and-stormy, fuck-me-I-just-pissed-my-pants humour to blow off steam. This brand of humour would stay with me long after my army days and become my most valuable life skill.

  With army life now in the rear-view mirror, I looked forward to my new future. My military skills and experience landed me an opportunity to work on the offshore oil rigs. I had dollar signs in my eyes. The allure of the exorbitant wages and generous rosters on the oil rigs was irresistible – so I sold out.

  OIL RIGS

  Mobile offshore drilling units (MODUs), or oil rigs for short, are intensely awesome feats of modern engineering, employing sophisticated marine stabilisation and drilling technology to extract black gold from the depths of the sea floor.

  The rigs boast wages almost triple what the military can offer, coupled with an enticing twenty-eight days on, twenty-eight days off roster.

  Oil rigs are home to the most disgusting and depraved pornography known to man.

  In May 2008, I made my maiden voyage into the War on Oil, in the Timor Sea. I was already familiar with the maritime lingo through my experience with the navy on the UM course, but my vocabulary once again transformed on the oil rigs. I was immersed in a sea of roughnecks, roustabouts, tool-pushers, blow-out preventers and man-riders. If you were unlucky enough to be fired from the rigs, it was said that you’d been ‘run off’. Being sacked was a fate worse than Davy Jones’s Locker for the unlucky unemployed, who had to walk the plank.

  But the most commonly used word in the rig pig slang was cunt – all manner of cunts inhabited the rigs. The title of sick cunt, mad cunt or good cunt meant that you were a good bloke. Whereas the shit cunts and garden-variety cunts were ever at risk of being run off. Surprisingly, the word cunt was never used to describe a vagina – too offensive.

  I was a medic on the rigs, which necessitated enduring a daily twelve-hour onslaught of boredom. I had a legitimate hour of work during my shift, so the remaining eleven were spent going to the gym, reading books and watching movies. I was paid like a prince for doing this, day after day, twenty-eight days in a row, six months of the year.

  All work and no play makes Terry a dull boy.

  All work and no play makes Terry a dull boy.

  All work and no play makes Terry a dull boy.

  Despite the groundhog day tedium, I thoroughly enjoyed shooting the breeze with the legendary rig workers. The stereotypical rig pig raked in a massive wage by Australian standards, but they’d discovered that when residing in an undeveloped Asia-Pacific country it was even more disproportionate. It practically meant living like royalty. Tales of luxury floated around the rigs, taking the edge off the boredom.

  Pranks were rife. Shaving cream in the coffee. Hair-removal gel in the shampoo. Itching powder between the bedsheets. Embarrassing photos sneakily inserted into the weekly safety slideshow presentation. The shenanigans really lifted morale and helped with the boredom and isolation. But, as they have a tendency to do, they escalated. The prank wars would usually heighten until they touched someone’s raw nerve, only narrowly avoiding fisticuffs through peer mediation.

  Steroids were the poison of choice on the rigs. And on American rigs, roids aren’t illegal, just immoral. Gym junkies habitually knocked on my door, asking for syringes and needles. These guys were going to incubate back acne, get angry and shrink their nuts without my consent anyway, so I decided that the lesser evil was to give them what they wanted lest they share dirty needles.

  Popular portrayal of the rigs is of an exciting way of life, but in reality nothing exciting ever really happens. In my eighteen months spent on the rigs, I treated one bloke with a broken knee joint, and another one with a heart problem. The rest of my time was spent ‘fucking the dog’ (rig pig slang for wasting time). My most exciting time on the rigs was being made redundant in 2009; I spent a week on our rig while it was being towed by tugboat to its final resting place – Kuantan, Malaysia. This was where I’d been for my army training exercise a few years earlier – it really is a small world. The poor old rig would float about in the Kuantan seaport, slowly withering away as it accumulated salty sea-spray and barnacles, unless an oil drilling company decided to revive it. I never found out if anyone gave her the ‘kiss of life’.

  I looked into the mirror, preparing for a new kind of war.

  My hair was a shoulder-length mess of blondish locks. It had taken four minutes of applying hair wax to make it look like I’d just woken up. In reality, I had just woken up, so four minutes was a ridiculous amount of time to try to make my messy hair look like it already did.

  I had a natural-looking coral necklace around my neck. It cost $12.99 and was entirely synthetic, made in Thailand.

  Scanning down, I wore a tight, surf-brand T-shirt to show off my guns. Gym work and drinking piss: conflicting lifestyles if ever I’ve seen them.

  My jeans cost $120 and were a surf brand, of course. I’d only been surfing once, and almost stood up on the board before spectacularly wiping out and using my face as a handbrake.

  My vintage ’70s American Converse shoes seemed very cool, especially considering that I’m not American and wasn’t even born back then.

  So there I stood, dressed in the seven shades of irony of my Party Dude Douchebag uniform, ready to fight the War on Sobriety.

  FASHION

  Fashion is a global, multi-trillion-dollar industry, constantly manipulated from season to season to ensure that consumers buy the latest and greatest clobber that they really don’t need. Fashion advertisements are designed to create a brand image that suggests that dressing in a certain way and living a certain lifestyle are values to which we should aspire, to promote the warm and fuzzies in the consumer’s sense of self-worth and imply that they belong to a certain subculture.

  This is why yuppies wear suits, emos wear black and bogans wear Bintang singlets.

  This is why new-age, environmental warriors wear brand-name ‘all natural’ hemp clothing, post ‘peace and love’ messages on social media and espouse environmental conservatism, while their own personal purchasing decisions leave a larger carbon footprint on the planet than a yeti in a kids’ sandpit.

  The years from 2008 to 2010 were a blur of drunken rebellion.

  Which machine was I raging against? No clue.

  I had no direction in my life, no real point to my existence. In the army, I was part of something bigger than myself, something meaningful. But in the civilian world, I was just going through the motions. I couldn’t find a cause that was worth putting my all into. So instead, I focused on being the village idiot. My sense of identity relied on being the drunkest, for the longest, at whatever Whyalla party was raging at any point in time. It’s good to have goals.

  My nights were filled with loud music, large crowds and an endless supply of Dutch courage. But before long, even shameless partying became tiresome, and I needed to spice the game up. One Saturday night, I’d fed a pineapple into the pokies and pulled out $600, so I was swimming with cash and bravado. I decided that the occasion called for a social experiment. I licked the back of $50 notes and stuck $300 worth on the glass window that separated the dance floor of a Whyalla nightclub from the beer garden. I wanted to observe the behaviour of my fellow patrons. The money was free for anyone who reached out and took it. I stood back, enjoying a beer and a laugh with my mates, and almost forgot about the experiment.

  Twenty minutes later, I was startled to find that no one had taken any money! Hundreds of people had seen it, laughed about it and walked by.

  I tried to explain to passers-by that this money was free, with no strings attached if they would just grab it. But no one did.

  I can’t believe it! I need aggressive sales tactics to give money away.

  I wracked my inebriated brain to figure out how to give this cash away, drawing nothing but blanks.

  Hang on a minute, sex sells!


  I crammed the $50 notes into my jeans zipper and paraded onto the dance floor. At first, there were no takers. So, I stepped up my game. I gyrated my hips, full slinky style, dancing uncomfortably close to groups of girls who were grooving to Pink songs. As I thrust my pelvis into the girl groups, they plucked the money from my fly like it was the last drop of water in the Sahara! I couldn’t believe it!

  SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

  Like all the best social experiments in history, this one didn’t really have a point. But the two conclusions were both miraculous and startling:

  Affluent people don’t accept freebies in front of other people, because they don’t want to look like scabs.

  Doesn’t matter if you look like a seedy fucker: girls stick their hands down your pants if you’re rich.

  My partying knew no bounds.

  I was making up for all the fun I’d missed during the hundreds of army training exercises and overseas operations in the years previous. The debauchery reached a crescendo in 2009, at my mate’s Gold Coast wedding. Dan, my Baby Medic mate, invited me along to his nuptials. I felt like a bogan at a black-tie ball, but luckily I wasn’t alone – Dan had invited some other military mates. We riff-raff were sat together at the back of the wedding reception, where our boisterous behaviour could go relatively unnoticed.

  I managed to attract the attention of a gorgeous bridesmaid. She was an incredibly upstanding citizen, studying law or accounting or something equally impressive at some prestigious Brisbane university or another. I was batting well above my average with this stunner. We left the wedding reception and continued with the flirting game, fostering one of those drunkenly genuine one-night-stand connections that, oddly, seem more fulfilling than a failed long-term marriage.