As a fifteen-year-old, sneaking out from the Hot Trax blue-light disco in Moonee Ponds for a cheeky Peter Jackson extra-mild cigarette should have been an exhilarating moment. Instead it was ruined by flashing high beams and a tooting horn from across the road. Dad whistled, summoning me across the street to ask why I was outside the venue so early. It was a question I could have put to him, considering it was an hour and a half before the scheduled closing time, but after half a hip flask of Southern Comfort I decided silence was the better part of slightly tipsy valour. I mumbled something about ‘getting fresh air’, then skulked past my friends’ laughter straight back into the venue.
His earliness set me on a path of urgency for everything I did in adulthood, an unnecessary anxiety entirely created by him. Don’t get me wrong, people who are constantly late are worse than incessant sniffers, but I’m so far the other way I panic if it looks like I’m only going to be nine minutes early. I have to constantly remind myself to take things in, slow down, be patient. All because the words ‘HURRY UP! COME ON!’ have been ringing in my ears since childhood.
Watching (and listening) to Dad struggle to walk down city streets was the first time I’d seen him as old. Not being around him all the time meant it crept up on me, like looking at an old photo of myself and suddenly realising how much closer my hairline used to be to my eyebrows.
I was in a quandary; on one hand, the way I’d been taught would have been for Dad to suck it up. If the situation had been reversed, when I was growing up Dad would have let me suffer for not listening to his advice, teaching me a lesson. Like when you’re a kid and your parents tell you not to touch something hot, and you touch it anyway and holy mother of fucking god you may as well have reached into a volcano. But even if you had third-degree burns you get no sympathy. ‘Told you not to touch it,’ would generally be the follow-up.
I was caught in the middle. I didn’t want to punish him for not walking before leaving for our trip like I’d recommended (even though it would have been nice to get a little payback), but if I openly asked him how he was going, he would lie anyway. I decided to split the difference and over the coming days I would walk just far enough that I could see he was starting to hurt, then pretend I was lost or doing up a shoelace. Which left Dad thinking either I was an idiot who couldn’t read a map or tie his shoes properly, or knowing exactly what I was doing and going along with it anyway. I prayed it was the latter.
We picked up the hire car, a white C-Class Mercedes station wagon. It’s a run-of-the-mill car in Germany, but better than anything Dad had ever owned. He was impressed by some of the luxuries, ostentatious extras he’d never had, like power windows and air conditioning. When I informed him the car also had satnav and heated seats, he almost blacked out. Thankfully the leather bucket seats would have made the experience an extremely comfortable one.
Dad never spent big on cars, as he considered them ‘a waste of money’. My childhood memories are of our 1974 Holden HQ Kingswood with vinyl seats that stuck to your skin in summer like industrial velcro. Any sudden movement would result in the removal of all skin from the hamstring and rear-of-knee region. Its belt buckles became so hot that if you didn’t pay attention your leg would be branded with a mirrored Holden logo.
Summer wasn’t the only season that provided dangers. Come winter the car leaked every time it rained and, alongside the temperature of the five bodies inside, created a fogged-up interior that only a rag or sleeve on the windscreen could rectify. The water also added to an overall damp odour that regularly made me car sick.
As was the custom of the day, both Mum and Dad smoked, their addiction to nicotine clearly overriding any concern for their son’s asthma. Our car was a constant cloud of cigarette smoke, which, combined with the dampness, made any winter drive like travelling inside a mobile bong. Second-hand smoke wasn’t seen as a health issue back then, so Mum and Dad didn’t think they were doing anything wrong; though it should’ve become obvious when I was the only child in grade three with a nicotine patch.
Between my asthma, my parents’ smoking and Dad’s talc use, it must’ve been a race to see what killed me first, a thought that used to keep me awake at night as I lay under my asbestos blanket. Thankfully Mum smoked Alpines, a menthol cigarette, which meant the coroner would at least be in for a minty-fresh surprise when he got to my lungs during the autopsy.
Through my entire childhood, we never had air conditioning in a car. Ever. I understood not having it when I was younger, because in the seventies it was a luxury. By the mid-eighties, however, it had become standard across most models. Dad just never chose those. It wasn’t required, not when you could ‘wind your bloody window down’. If I followed this instruction in summer it would result not only in a constant blast of furnace-temperature air to the face, but allowed the ash from the cigarettes Mum and Dad held out their open windows to blow right back into my face.
After the Kingswood we ‘upgraded’ to a roomier but older 1971 Ford Fairlane. It had air conditioning, a bonus of getting the high-end model, but unfortunately for four-fifths of the family, the refrigerant gas had long since run out, rendering it useless. Despite our pleas, there was not a hope in the world the gas was getting replaced.
We begged for a newer car but it always fell on deaf ears, Dad’s argument being, ‘It sits in the driveway most of the time.’ I understood this to a certain extent, but countered that when it wasn’t in the driveway, we sat in it. It would have been nice to arrive at a family event and not be the only ones soaked in sweat, having spent the whole trip praying to arrive so that we could get out of the car and finally cool down in the 40-degree sun.
Dad and I emerged from the rental place, ready for our drive to Bamberg. I drove a few minutes down the street, searching for somewhere to pull over so I could set up our satnav. Stopped at the roadside, I realised within a few alarming seconds I didn’t know how to access it. My car didn’t have satnav, and there was no chance Dad’s did – he still used the physical Melways road atlas, cheerily choosing that moment to inform me, ‘It’s never let me down.’ He’d buy a new Melways every year to allow for construction of new roads, housing estates and suburbs I’d never heard of. At least his completely outdated analog technology was up to date. I liked to imagine he camped outside the newsagency overnight, waiting for the latest edition to be released.
Getting assistance from the hire place wasn’t an option, as I’d driven a few kilometres down the road before finding somewhere to pull over. Returning would have involved backtracking for quite a few blocks and if a one-way street or some other obstacle appeared that forced us to turn off, then we’d be completely lost. My stubbornness was also a huge factor, as there was no way I wanted to admit to Dad that I couldn’t work out this technology. I’d drive us into the Mediterranean before I conceded I was lost.
The satnav screen sat on the dashboard. I tried pushing on it with my finger, but could tell immediately it wasn’t a touch screen. Dad did the same and I told him, ‘I don’t think it’s touch screen.’ I knew for sure it wasn’t, but I figured if I began with ‘I don’t think . . .’ it would soften my message.
I was looking around the car desperately, knowing we needed a map of one sort or another or it was going to be a nightmare of a trip simply getting out of Munich, let alone to another city three hours away. While I scanned the car, Dad attempted touching the screen again, as though perhaps he hadn’t pressed it hard enough earlier. I reiterated strongly that it still wasn’t a touch screen.
The stress building inside me, I searched for a button that said ‘GPS system all located here’. This was when Dad gave it one last attempt, almost pushing his finger through the screen and into the engine bay. ‘Dad! It’s not touch screen! You’re going to break it!’
I didn’t understand what was wrong with him. Why was he going back repeatedly, as though pressing harder would solve our problems? ‘Sorry Mr Rozenbachs, the screen in this model of Mercedes was designed to be pressed to the p
oint of almost breaking before activating. Lucky you had your dad with you or you’d have been stuck in Munich.’
I was frustrated that I couldn’t work out something as simple as a satnav, but mainly because I’d snapped at Dad even though he was only trying to help.
‘Sorry Dad, I don’t know what’s going on. Why can’t I fucking find it?’ The tone in my voice conveyed my defeat. I tried to regain my composure, but the longer we sat there the more I felt like I’d let him down. I was suddenly back to being the kid who couldn’t be put in charge of anything. The difference from the trailer chain incident was Dad’s reaction: he was surprisingly calm.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
It did matter to me; it was the most important thing in the world. I knew it shouldn’t have been, but then I wasn’t brought up under a regime of calmness and tranquillity. It’s not like I lived on a knife edge, and I’m sure my parents knew when to soothe a worried child, but this ‘she’ll be right’ attitude didn’t exist when I was growing up. It was more ‘do it properly!’ or ‘what did you do that for?’
When I was nine years old and put a nectarine from our tree through Mrs Smith’s window next door, Dad didn’t shrug his shoulders and say, ‘Doesn’t matter, these things happen.’ As I recall, his reaction was quite the opposite. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said a bird flew into the window, then hastily changed the story to a cricket ball being struck from the other neighbour’s backyard (which would have been quite the shot, to clear our backyard and into Mrs Smith’s). The changing story didn’t help my case, nor did the number of nectarines sitting under the smashed window. The smack on the legs and a week without television let me know we weren’t cool with such acts of wanton vandalism.
Sitting in the car, desperate for a way to make the satnav work, I wondered where Señor Chilled beside me came from. Perhaps Dad’s demeanour was the result of no longer having to worry about me all the time, allowing him to be the person he was before he had kids. Before he got put in charge of someone who thought throwing nectarines at a window was going to have anything but a negative outcome.
It’s why I think kids should be shown videos of their parents before they had children, when they were young and carefree. That way they would get to understand that it’s their fault their parents are short-tempered and frustrated all the time.
Fortunately we were saved when, like a bolt from the blue, I remembered how to operate the satnav from something I’d seen on Top Gear. No, not casual racism – I recalled an episode where the satnav on this type of car was operated via a big dial on the console, next to the gearstick, which controlled all the car’s functions, including the life-saving maps. Relieved and proud I’d finally worked it out, I dialled in our destination, stopped Dad from again attempting to crush the screen with his finger, and set off.
I didn’t have to worry about Dad smoking on this drive, as he’d given up cold turkey about ten years earlier, in his mid-fifties. For forty years he’d smoke two packs a day of lung-busting Winfield Reds and then Winfield Blues, dropping from 16mg of tar to 12mg for ‘health’ reasons. Then one day he thought ‘that’s enough’ and never smoked again. One day a heavy smoker, the next day not at all. Like some kind of superhuman freak. There are Buddhist monks who don’t have that level of discipline. People spend years fighting their nicotine addictions with patches, hypnotherapy, tears. Ol’ Ice Veins just thinks: I’m done. Decision made. End of story. Let’s move on to the non-smoking chapter of my life.
Being a non-smoker – and apparently now the most chill person in the world – didn’t mean Dad was suddenly a fun companion in a car. It just meant the trip was now less lung-cancery and shouty.
When I was a learner driver, Dad was deliberately the most annoying passenger possible. He tried to distract me at every opportunity. His rationale – like a fitness-obsessed coach taking his football team to high altitude – was that when I finally got into real conditions alone, I’d be more than prepared. Every lesson was a combination of him whistling, drumming, windows down, smoking, windows up, humming, opening and closing the glove box and constant radio station changes. I still can’t believe we weren’t involved in a fatality every time I was under his tutelage.
Not only was this an odd method, it was the complete opposite of what I’d observed as a backseat passenger when he was driving, when silence was a must for any long trip. Fights rarely kicked off in the back, and usually only happened when my sister was given a window seat. This is a privilege the youngest should never be granted, as everyone knows the last out of the womb gets the middle seat. Despite this breakdown of the social order, my sister would sit there, refusing to wind down her window. It was bad enough given the lack of air conditioning, but was made worse when it caused that weird painful thudding sensation in our ears, created by a change in air pressure only rear windows generate. That would set my brother and me into full over-the-top whinge mode, causing my sister to dig her heels in, which in turn set Dad off, who started yelling, ‘If you kids don’t stop mucking around I’ll pull over! I’ll pull over!’
We all knew it was an empty threat. No one was pulling over; no one was getting out. It’s way too much effort. Though I like to think it did happen once and that’s how Adelaide got started.
When I was a learner, Dad’s approach wasn’t necessary. I was already more than nervous enough about being in control of a two-tonne V8 weapon with balding tyres that handled like a yacht. The car was even more dangerous when it was raining – if you even slightly over-revved it on a wet surface, the back end would flick out and send you sideways across the road.
Whistling to distract the teenager in command of that death trap wasn’t Dad’s greatest idea. When we’d arrive home, Mum must’ve thought my through-the-roof excitement was at being allowed to drive, but it was actually a deep appreciation that I would live to see the next day.
As we drove out of Munich I was in control, but adamant Dad stay quiet. Perhaps I put it more bluntly, but it was as much for our safety as my sanity. Driving on the opposite side of the road might sound easy, but it requires constant concentration. It’s as dangerous as trying to cut your own hair in the mirror.
All those years of Australian driving experiences were turned against me, habit making me look at the wrong side of the car, mirrors and road. As much as I tried to remind myself everything was opposite, split-second instinct took over, terrifyingly making me perform the exact opposite of what I intended. If you’ve ever driven a European car and indicated you were about to change lanes by switching on the windscreen wipers, you’ll know what I mean. Once we’d settled onto the Autobahn, Dad couldn’t help himself, whistling, drumming and fumbling around on the radio looking for the German equivalent of Gold FM (das Gold FM). He was a constant distraction, but this time I knew it wasn’t calculated; he was relaxed and enjoying himself.
He thought the car was amazing. And he loved the smooth, flat surface we were allowed to do any speed on. Every time we drove by signs that warned motorists to slow down to 130km/h during inclement weather, his excitement rose. ‘One-hundred-thirty kilometres an hour during a storm! Unbelievable!’
When I decided to wind us out to 180km/h and take a photo of the speedo, he surprisingly didn’t have an issue with it. I expected to be told off for doing something so reckless, but not only did he not mind, he handed me the camera. This wasn’t the man I had grown up with.
Except he definitely still was. He was the man who, every time the GPS gave a direction, pointed in that direction. Even after I told him to stop, he kept subtly doing it in his lap.
He was the man who, every time the GPS gave an instruction, would lean in to listen to her. He was nothing if not polite.
He was the man who, every five minutes, gave me a weather update, the temperature gauge in the car a new technology that had to be exploited.
Travelling at a speed of ‘choose your own’, we reached Bamberg, the town where he’d been born, in no time. I imagined for Dad i
t would be an odd feeling, returning to his place of birth some sixty-odd years after leaving. He didn’t have any actual memories, but perhaps he would feel that deep connection I guess we all have with our hometown.
As we drove in through the outskirts of Bamberg, with all that weight of history and emotion, Dad had four words: ‘Doesn’t look very nice.’
BAMBERG
Dad’s negativity at his first sight of Bamberg wasn’t unexpected, but I was disappointed nonetheless. What I hated most was that being negative was a trait I’d picked up from him and had found hard to shake.
Though he wasn’t like that in every situation. There would be times when he was really positive, particularly about me and the goings on in my life. The way he talked about my comedy career and what I should be doing felt like being at an Anthony Robbins seminar. But one where as well as building you up, the person running the seminar also pointed out the people currently on TV who he doesn’t think are talented.
It was always a lottery which Dad I was going to get. If only to counter him, I needed to be positive, so I said, ‘Give it a chance! What city looks good from the outskirts?’
I mean, that’s why they’re the outskirts. People don’t care about the fringes. No one is painting up a factory in an industrial area in the hope of drawing tourists to it. Evaluating a town by its edges would be like getting judged when you first got up in the morning, wearing slightly soiled tracksuit pants tucked into your ugg boots. That’s the outskirts. We were still a good distance from the heart of town, the bit that’s had a shower and done its make-up.
Perhaps one day when another layer was added to the outside of the city and the outskirts became gentrified and easier on the eye, he might appreciate them. But by that time they’d be the innerskirts, and we’d be back home in Australia.
His reaction also confirmed that he’d done no research, and had no idea what to expect of Bamberg. I knew that it was a beautiful, world-heritage-listed town, and sure enough it lived up to the billing. It has a river running through its heart and is often referred to as Little Venice. That’s because it’s picturesque, not because it stinks and you’re being ripped off at every turn by lame, overpriced gondola rides.
Paris and Other Disappointments Page 8