So, what happened to the old scooter once Steve had outgrown it?
His younger sister rode it.
Do-it-yourself fun was second nature to my brother and the McGinty Boys. Ball-shooters were a classic element of any Crackernight up until that time, the multicoloured balls they shot out going quite a way. You weren’t supposed to hold them in your hand, but we soon graduated to doing so – the feeling of the powerful, repeated recoil effect was awesome! Thoomp-thoomp-thoomp-thoomp … ! Though the McGinty gang had ceased regular operations after their run-in with the police, they did like to keep their hand in. Just minor ops. Like firing ball-shooters at speeding cars on the highway in broad daylight. Genius. They’d thought of everything. The bush next to the bridge over the creek on Epping Road provided the ideal emergency escape route, bikes at the ready. Crackernight, move over. This was Crackerday! I’m not exactly certain if they caused any major car pile-ups, but I suspect their fun game may have contributed to ball-shooters being discontinued. All I know is they were conspicuously absent from milk bar shelves the following Crackernight – in Epping, anyway.
Ball-shooters were gone.
Chapter Ten
Dress-ups
I used to love fancy dress and guarantee you I used to dress up as male characters exclusively. It was my brother with the penchant for drag. At about the age of fourteen, it beats me what the occasion was, but he borrowed a bad auburn wig from Mrs White and left our front door as ‘Miss Patrick’, complete with dark-green beauty contest sash over powder-green nylon cocktail gown. Personally, I didn’t think he had the legs for it. Luckily the dress was ankle-length. He even posed for a photo, which he kept. God, I dunno, ask him what he was doing! He’s currently married with two children. It was just a phase he was going through … I expect.
Every year at St Mary’s there was a Friday night fancy dress competition. I won it in Third Class, dressed as a Roman soldier, the film Ben Hur having recently made a big impression on me. This film has since been acknowledged as full of gay iconography, along with a host of certain so-called gladiator flicks. All I can say is there was nothing ‘gladiatorial’ about my effort.
As she did every year, Mum put her whole heart and soul into making my costume, but more importantly, she taught me one of the most important lessons I’d ever had up to that time. At the moment she’d finished the outfit to my exacting specifications, I turned to her and said, ‘Oh, Mum, it’s perfect – I love you.’
At this, she stopped, surveyed me very intensely and said, ‘Would you still love me if it hadn’t been?’ In the pause that followed, I grew up a little further and in the blink of an eye.
My Heroes
When my brother wasn’t parading around the cul-de-sac in drag or engaged in rampaging destruction with the McGinty Boys, he was to be found engaging in slightly lower-intensity acts of destruction with his friend John Vandermark.
John’s house down the lane was a paradise to enter. It had a basement rumpus room with a pool table and, most magical to me of all for some reason, a cocktail bar. Once John set up his train set on the pool table with his pet mice for passengers! The issue of animal cruelty here might have occurred to me if the sight of the white mice literally shitting themselves around the track hadn’t had me and Pat in such uncontrollable hysterics. Not John, though. He was too busy making it all happen for us, his eyes full of evil focus beneath sandy locks.
Then there was the time we went smashing light bulbs. And not just the little bulb-shaped ones; I’m talking great, long fluorescent tubes. We speared them off a shallow cliff into bushland behind John’s house and they’d explode on impact with the rocks below. Bang! Bang! Bang! When we ran out of them, ‘Hang on a sec,’ said John, racing back up into the house to reappear a minute later with a fresh supply of tubes and his usual wicked smile. A smile that said, ‘Fun is my birthright. And there is no fun I cannot or will not engineer’. What his electrician father would have to say about it just didn’t seem to matter at the time.
John’s father was a Dutch man, and one of the sternest men I have ever known. Sterner even than my own father. Stern in a way that only the Dutch can be. Look up ‘stern’ in the dictionary, it’s got a picture of Mr Vandermark. And when I suggest what a hard man he was, I mean hard. As a teenager he’d been an active member of the Dutch Resistance against the Nazis in Holland. I’d been told the story how he’d witnessed dead German soldiers whipped away in a meat truck on meat hooks. So I’m talking ‘hard’, yet to John, smashing the tubes was clearly just so much fun that it was worth the inevitable punishment. I never heard of Mr Vandermark thrashing John. What’d he use? A rack? Some manner of survivable electric chair? Given his trade, it certainly would have been within the grounds of possibility. Nothing fatal, just ‘correctional’ …
When we’d completely exhausted Mr Vandermark’s stock of fluoro bulbs, to round off the fun we all took a piss off the edge of the cliff, steam rising from all the broken glass as it was a foggy winter morning. There was me at nine, my brother at fourteen, John at fifteen and me pissing twice as high as either of them. John’s expression down at me was priceless, a mixture of hilarity and disbelief as he blurted straight out with it.
‘Jesus, Justin, you’ve got a strong cock!’
John was a superb kid, kind as well as wicked. I was in awe of him. But best of all, he had a drum kit in the rumpus room! And not only could he play these great, long drum solos but really loudly! John did it all, had it all.
The Remarkable Joe
My school’s pioneering immigrant was Joe Bashir. He had something called ‘Lebanese bread’ in his lunch-box. I became instant best friends with him.
With tightly curly black hair, olive skin, watery brown eyes and great big white teeth always visible as he was constantly smiling, Joe was such a vibrantly friendly kid. Maybe I was his first friend in Australia and he was responding to that. Everything about him exuded energy, enthusiasm.
‘You like UFOs? I love UFOs! They saw one flying over Beirut. I told Damon McKellar, but he didn’t believe me, but I knew you’d believe me. Wanna see the picture we brought with us from Lebanon?’
He asked his mother, who produced a newspaper clipping and handed it to me. I couldn’t read the caption or story as it was in Lebanese, but indeed it showed a fuzzy picture of a flying saucer. It was beyond me how such a momentous event hadn’t been reported in Australian newspapers as well.
‘They said it came from outer space,’ gushed Joe, ‘an’ it wasn’t a trick or nothing! An’ you believed me before seeing the picture, even!’
Additionally exciting to me was Joe’s ‘difference’. His family had fled a war zone and he still remembered what it was like, telling me stories of jets flying low overhead and about his big brother being stung on the foot by a piece of a bullet.
Joe’s constitution seemed influenced by his early experiences. Whenever I fell over in the convent’s all-asphalt playground and grazed my knee badly, I would cry for a few minutes. With an identical injury, Joe would stop, grip his knee, bite his lip and hold the pain in. Who needed the Six Million Dollar Man? To me, Joe was quite simply ‘better … stronger … faster’.
His war zone upbringing may account for the fact that he was never allowed to leave his home and go to the nearby park with me. One bright, sunny Sunday afternoon with only fluffy white clouds in the sky, his father simply countered, ‘No, Joe. It might rain.’ Consequently, he never came over to play at Howard Place or muck around with me down the bush. Somehow it just didn’t matter; he lived above the corner shop which his parents ran and we played there, or in their tiny backyard. There we had complicated war games with miniature plastic soldiers, toy tanks and artillery, though the game was up whenever his brother started throwing things at us from the upper window. That was an ‘air strike’, Joe informed me.
Despite their protective ways, I seemed to connect with Joe’s parents too. Whatever time I arrived there on a weekend, Mrs Bashir would always insist I s
it down and have something to eat first. At any Anglo friend’s home, there was generally only one serving of lunch. Not so with Mrs Bashir. On my first ever visit there, she served me up a big plate of toasted sandwiches – not Lebanese food. She was serving me what she served her Anglo customers. When I’d finished them, I thanked her, only to be amazed …
‘You like? You like some more? I make you some more.’
Which she did, and which I finished, half out of politeness, half out of being a growing boy. Pushing my plate forward, I thanked her again.
‘Come, I make you some more. You have some more, yes? Is good. You very good boy.’
I suspect, if I hadn’t said ‘please stop’, she would have gone on making me toasted sandwiches all afternoon. Aware that I was onto a good thing, though, I promised myself that next time I would request Lebanese food. Yesss!
Teachers
We’d had some superb teachers at St Mary’s; benevolent, no-nonsense experts at getting the important stuff between your ears, all excellent women. All except for one …
One Mrs Storch.
This bitch was legendary. My older sisters and brother hated her, long after they’d had to endure her. Older brothers and sisters of my friends hated her. Anybody I ever heard of who was taught by her hated her.
Frances was nineteen and studying Social Work at university. When I told her about this awful Mrs Storch, Frances looked down at me and let fly.
‘Mrs Storch is a hag,’ she pronounced through tears of laughter. ‘You have my full permission to march up to her and tell her I said so!’
And she was a hag. She even looked like a witch: badly dyed black hair; black, manic eyes; black vinyl jackets … okay, more like a Nazi, now I think of it, except in vinyl instead of leather. She exuded this presence, even in passing, as if her every little movement, look and gesture was aimed at you. Think of some shrunken, poisoned, vinyl vulture. Well, that was her.
God clearly hated Fourth Class of 1978; we were subjected to her for almost the whole year, a situation doubly appalling as we were supposed to be having Mrs Grace, whom we’d looked forward to since kindergarten as had all our older brothers and sisters. Mrs Grace was undergoing some kind of medical treatment for the majority of the year, so instead of the very best, we had to suffer the very worst.
In maths class, or ‘sums’ as it was then called, Mrs Storch warned us to space our work out on the paper so that it could be easily read; however, to be able to get more onto the page and conserve paper, I thought it most prudent to compress my figures, only to be dragged out of the room by my ear. Clearly, I hadn’t assumed saving paper would induce her rapid-fire wrath of which I got a solid, hellish minute. Her words were a blur to me; her eyes were so scary. Even in the moment, though, I was quite conscious that I was taking neither her nor her tirade seriously. I knew she deserved no respect. This was the first adult I’d ever experienced whom it was right to be rude to. Frances had said so. For a second I even considered yelling back at her but buttoned my lip and just waited for her to finish her disgraceful performance.
Mrs Grace was legendary for exactly the opposite reasons to Mrs Storch. I only remember Mrs Grace for a handful of classes, yet just about everything she said, I remember. In elementary Fourth Class history projects, the ones more about colouring-in than anything else, she actually introduced us to the idea of logical, academic thought. One of these projects was on the Vikings.
‘A few years ago now, children, one of my students in this very classroom showed us something rather interesting. When I saw her pencil colouring of the Viking ship, I noticed something unusual. Instead of using many different colours on all the Viking shields lining the ship, she had used only one: light green. Now, some of her friends said she’d been silly, that she should have used all the different colours she had in her pencil tin – red, blue, crimson, purple – instead of just one. But then I realised what a very clever girl she’d been. She explained to us that Viking shields were made of copper. And as they were made of copper, after a long time at sea, they would all have turned light green as that’s what copper does. You see, children, when you’re studying history, it’s very useful to get in the habit of thinking like that.’ Yes, asking ‘why’ was okay by Mrs Grace. It was, in fact, the key.
Because of the way she was, Mrs Grace never had the slightest disciplinary problem with any child – at least, none that I ever saw. Even at the age of ten, we were just so grateful for this queen amongst women, a woman who inspired nothing but love and respect. (I suspect even Juliette might have behaved.)
On our last day before changing schools, on our way out of the classroom door we filed past Mrs Grace as she gave each child a parting comment. Her comment to me? I even remember the look in her eye as she said it, possibly the nicest single thing anyone has ever said to me: ‘I’m expecting great things from you.’ Though she was merely trying to instill confidence in me by telling me that, Mrs Grace was certainly was my first experience of a born educator.
Mrs Storch was my first experience of a vinyl vulture. What epitaph she was ever gunning for buggers me. ‘An alleged teacher whose life achievement was the inspiration of fear and resentment in generations of little children’.
Payback Time
If I could be a bossy boots at times, to be fair, I was also the bossy boots who invented games for others. Having started out as ‘spaceman-fascist-style arbiter’ back in preschool, it seems I’d brought the games-inventor portfolio with me to primary school. This was evidenced, to my immense surprise, by an end of Fourth Class summary of me, specifically, by one Carl Schulz.
Just a few days prior to Mrs Grace’s parting comments to me, she’d sat us down and asked the girls, then the boys, who were the ‘leaders’ of any ‘groups’ that might exist in the class. My arch-nemesis, Damon McKellar, was identified as one. Then Carl Schulz put his hand up and said, ‘Justin. He just always makes things so fun.’ He went on a bit and half the boys in the room agreed with him, Mrs Grace taking notes. I was really shocked – I wasn’t even close to Carl. I certainly didn’t remember him being in any of my commando games … Perhaps he meant I invented games for other kids and he was simply ‘aware’ of it? I couldn’t understand it.
Then I reflected that I’d been the only one who’d defended him once when he was nailed to the wall by the rest of the boys. Yes, that little lunch back in Second Class. Whatever the truth may be, just before we left St Mary’s to start the next year at Marist Brothers, this kid who I didn’t remember ever playing with in the previous five years gave me my first ever ‘reference’.
Higher Education
We graduated to Get Smart, Lost In Space, Hogan’s Heroes, The Munsters and The Addams Family, and they all seemed to come on one after the other. Man, what a syllabus!
Of course, it wasn’t as if we appreciated the sophistication of these TV shows immediately; I’d been thrown, at the age of four, to read in my TV guide: ‘4.30 – Batman – comedy’. Wha’? Though I’m certain the Sesame Street Effect was working on us sooner rather than later. Yes, as kids we loved Batman for the high adventure of it, but then, as our brains started to grow, that wonderful penny started to drop for us and we realised why our teenage siblings were watching it with us. This wasn’t just exciting, it was hilarious too, and it was talking to us. Plus, Julie Newmar as Catwoman was talking to my big brother’s hormones.
Not only did this show increase our vocabulary with words like ‘ZLORP!’ superimposed over its fight sequences, it introduced us to the tongue-in-cheek, to camp comedy and to alternative thought. This was anarchic satire where bad was good, good was a drag, the baddies pitying Batman and Robin as pathetic ‘squares’. It’s no wonder Frank Gorshin won the 1966 Emmy for Best Actor – his performances as The Riddler were nothing short of inspired, our first archetype for the Manic Evil Genius.
My other favourite character from the show was and still is the brilliant Victor Buono as King Tut, which he plays as a cross somewhere between Ne
ro and WC Fields. This Harvard professor-turned-Egyptian Ultra-Baddie gave us our first notion of the ‘split personality’, though the full comedy of his evil transformation only struck us years later: He’d been ‘hit on the head by a brick during a love-in’. Through comic gems such as this, we would leave childhood already reading between the lines a little bit. Indeed, the venerable Tut armed us with an inkling of one of life’s key wisdoms; namely, that Good and Bad could be a matter of opinion …
Tut to Barbara Gordon: ‘What in the name of Osiris could you find attractive about Batman? He’s so deadly dull.’
These TV shows were educating me more profoundly than any teacher. Sister Stigmata never took me aside and told me, ‘Look, intelligence is the ability to observe things critically.’ No, it was from Get Smart that my first notion of American Military/Corporate Paranoia came; also my first notion of human ridiculousness, and of a joke being so sublimely funny that it could make you laugh every time you heard it …
The Chief: ‘Max, at all times during this mission you will be facing deadly danger, torture and peril of the direst kind.’
Max: ‘And … loving it.’
Hogan’s Heroes and Lost In Space introduced me to the comedy of human frailty, via the characters of Colonel Klink and Doctor Smith respectively. Jonathan Harris’s brilliant creation of Doctor Smith said superior intelligence is primarily self-preservational; a coward is a man too smart to be a hero. I think also Harris’s singular genius for the English language offered me my first real concept of the power of words, a power achieved through mastery of them. Smith’s elaborate verbal put-downs for the Robot were an English lesson in themselves, many of which were devised by Jonathan Harris himself the night before filming them. From ‘Bubble-headed booby’ to ‘Pusillanimous pipsqueak’ to ‘Tin-plated tintinnabulator’, I discovered that language was something you could play with, just like you did with your toys. And tell me this is a line from a kids’ show: Dr Smith (salivating before giant space-egg) …
Goodbye Crackernight Page 12