At the end of each booth was a wall-mounted jukebox. We’d flip through the hundreds of songs. ‘Not “Goodbye to Jane”, I’m sick of Slade.’ ‘Fuck Skyhooks, they’re weird. Probly poofs.’ Drop in your coin and press 3H, Gary Glitter. ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me?’ Gary Glitter wasn’t a poof. No way. Not dressed in skin-tight spangle-suits and encased in make-up. We boys vamped along to the song’s lyrics, happy to be given licence to chant lewd suggestions at girls as if we were just singers and not boys who wanted to actually do the things the singers were singing about: ‘Do you wanna touch me there hair … yairhair?’
When the cappuccinos landed Sharon S would pull out the letter, moist from being tucked in her bra for safekeeping from the covetous moles round town who’d make off with it if they could. We’d been waiting for it while sipping our cappuccinos, wrestles breaking out among the boys as we swooped on our neighbours’ choc-dusted froth with our teaspoons.
We’d heard the letter read before. But the thing was like a radio signal from an alien civilisation: its contents weren’t so amazing as the very fact it existed. A higher, more advanced, life form had contacted Sharon S.
She held it close to her face and sniffed it and her eyes fluttered as if at some mind-altering myrrh from the frontier of cool. She would wait, inhaling, eyes fluttering, its magical presence killing off the banter until we were silent.
Slowly she’d open it, looking around at the other booths to see they were watching. They always were. Most of them had come here for the reading of the famous epistle from St Bon.
‘Shazza, howzit, honey?’ Or something like that. We listened hard, trying to glean more meaning from its words than was in them. The letter was flowery, gentle. It read like it was written by a thirteen-year-old C-grade English student who’d just worked her way through a foot-high stack of romance comics. Bon was bewitched by the light in Shazza’s eyes. He was haunted by her fragrance. This was an unsettling communication from the leering frontman of Beelzebub’s house band. I tried to imagine Bon Scott bewitched, haunted. The vision kept dissolving as he humped a microphone stand with his gourd of denim and waggled his tongue at the camera.
Sharon wasn’t much to look at. But then, no girl was much to look at alongside the Italian Job. The Italian Job must have been a tough bestie to have at that skin-deep age. Luckily, miraculously, Sharon was the girl Bon Scott had written to. This gave her a wondrous allure you could neither demean nor deny. The girl was a hall-of-fame groupie, our own Helen of Shepp. And an AC/DC tour was headed our way.
The night of the concert we met to smoke beforehand among the rose bushes of Queen’s Park across the road from the Civic Centre. The Italian Job wasn’t there. Italian girls vanished at sundown and you fed them wild lies of the night next day. I wore beater boots and borrowed a sharpie cardigan. A boy soldier. Sharon was going to get us backstage. Sharon was going to introduce us to Bon. Where the hell was Sharon? Sharon didn’t show. AC/DC were brutal and we didn’t understand what was being attempted, though we said we got it, loved it, wanted more.
Sharon had been laid low by a twenty-four-hour wog. A few days later when we assembled in our cafe she pulled the famous letter from her bra, sniffed it and fluttered her eyelids, waiting for silence. But it didn’t bring silence now. We talked louder, faster, cracked jokes, flirted with the Italian Job, bewitched by the light in her eyes, haunted by her fragrance.
Despite no silence, despite what this meant, Sharon began reading. In a quavering zombie monotone she couldn’t be stopped with a silver bullet or a stake through her heart. If she stopped reading before Bon told her he loved her and they’d catch up soon, then the show was dead. She kept reading until Hearts said to her, ‘Shut up, Shaz. That letter’s from you to you.’ She stopped reading, folded the letter and put it away. She began to cry and jumped up from our booth and went to an empty one down the back, and sat by herself. We all felt bad. The Italian Job followed her, and put her arm around her, and I suppose that was just about the last thing she needed.
I was swimming in Lucky Simson’s pool the day Holt drowned. I remember that because I nearly drowned myself and had to be fished out by Dad, who spilt his beer saving me and made an observation in the form of a joke and sometimes just in the form of an observation that he didn’t know if it was worth it or not. Holt drowned the day I didn’t; that’s all I knew of politics. It was in woodwork class eight years and four PMs later that politics really broke on us.
I wasn’t great at woodwork. If Frank Thring and I had each made a nut bowl and you were asked to choose one to take home for your mother you’d probably have chosen his. Our woodwork teacher, Mr Exeter, was a lanky member of the counterculture. A tottering hair ball conscripted annually to scamper along at the front of the school Easter pageant up a skate-ramp Calvary Hill with a papier-mâché cross over his shoulder while teenage Roman guards whanged away at him with binder-twine whips and he hissed, ‘Guys, you’re not really centurions. I’m not really Jesus. Hey. Hey. Go easy.’
He was a big-hearted hippy. There was constant speculation among us boys as to what variety of gore would be served up if he got his long beard or hair caught in the lathe. A schism developed in our woodwork class over this. One sect (we’ll call them Cameronians) reckoned his flaccid face, still speaking of wood grain and chisels, would fly across the workshop and land in Bruce Stowe’s lap, where it would sniff twice, grimace with incredulity, and die. The other sect believed his head would ping around the workshop like a soccer ball in a bar room of coked Brazilians. Each sect defended their theory as if they were legitimate speculations. Both parties watched him work the lathe, ready to erupt in triumph should he lean too close.
Mr Exeter was so late for class this day I’d started a rumour he’d been arrested for yelling lewd propositions at a war widow while on a marijuana binge. With hair like his virtually any slander got traction. Eventually he staggered in, pale with news, his voice brittle. ‘The Prime Minister’s … been dismissed … by the Governor-General.’ We blinked, chewed our gum, listened to the watery music of our intestines. ‘Gough … sacked by Kerr.’ Again, we didn’t react. He turned away from us and laid his head against the blackboard.
We knew nothing of politics. But we endorsed any constitutional turmoil powerful enough to make a sandal-wearing pinko stain a blackboard with his greasy brow and whimper about what a two-faced bitch Mother England was.
‘That’s why you’re late?’ I put enough amazement in my voice to let him know I thought it a paltry excuse. He turned to us, strained, shaking, a bewildered synthesis of despair and anger. ‘Boys, the Tories have upended our democracy …’
‘We heard you tried to upend some old duck and the fuzz nabbed you,’ Clarky said.
‘What? No. Boys, this is a really black day in our history. Really black.’
He struggled on, determined we see the gravity of this event. Sensing his pain, we naturally enough began to taunt him. ‘Sacked? A poor man’s assassination. Tell it to JFK.’
‘Yeah, tell it to Harold Holt. He’d jump at a nice little sacking and a chance to sit next to Gough smelling old in an old fogies’ home,’ I said.
‘Anyway, the Queen probably knows stuff about Gough we don’t.’
‘I bet she does. Reams of stuff. Eye-popping stuff.’
‘It was an elected government, boys.’
‘Elected by commos and potheads.’
Throughout the lesson teachers came and went at a hustle, their brows furrowed with martyrdom, whispering insurrection. Pretty soon Mr Exeter realised we weren’t going to acknowledge this injury to civilisation. We were too young to care. Or maybe we were sons of rednecks who’d told us Gough was a crazy dreamer that deserved unique political afflictions. He was aghast at finding he didn’t know us at all. ‘We might have seen the best of Australia, boys. The best it will be.’ The fact this thing had happened was bad enough. The fact we didn’t care was worse.
I remember becoming more and more fascinated by his distres
s. According to him great treachery and calamity were afoot. Seeing his anguish was when I first realised politics touched real people. Politics was history in utero. History was politics in aspic.
Our scruffy gang, wearing copper medallions on leather thongs, pants low, shoes gaping, hung round with an equivalent gang of short-skirted Anglo girls wearing copper and leather jewellery. Those girls were being dragged headlong into womanhood by a posse of confusing, and possibly shameful, inclinations. They were by turns astonished, proud and disgusted by their new selves and what their new selves made of us boys.
Our two gangs were overlapping carousels, and as they spun, powered by our chaotic requirements, we each took our turn being private with members of the other gang. Except Hearts and Ros, who were the King and Queen of each gang. They went out together and were a long way further down the road to sex than the rest of us. Hearts’ mother was an usherette at the Capri Cinema and gave him free tickets. He told us that while in a theatre watching a kung fu movie it was easier to finger a girl if she was wearing jeans than if she was wearing a dress. It seemed unlikely. It seemed really unlikely. We were all hoping to test his assertion. But then Bruce Lee died.
For most of us ‘mini-sex’, or ‘fumblings’, or ‘yes, no, fuck off’, was a slow process surrounded by much flattery of the girl on the part of the boy. Our flattery wasn’t poetic. It was experimental and sly. You watched the eyes. If a thing you said raised the lids you said more of that thing, improved on that thing. ‘You get me better than the others do.’ Her eyes opened a little, minimally happier than she was a moment ago and awaiting further hogwash. ‘Somehow you know me … how hard it is to just … be me.’ You would be inside her bra at this stage.
After school one night as the boy and girl gangs mingled on a vacant block waiting for their buses, I backed Anna McKendrick wordlessly up against a grey paling fence and kissed her. Then, because a few boys catcalled dirty things about me being an animal, I caught and kissed Heather Hall, Anna’s best friend, who was loitering too close. The amazement of my mates and the lewdness of their catcalls amplified. Camo had gone mad. I liked being considered mad. Enjoyed the maverick status of the crazy cat. Two girls? That’s nothing, man. Watch this. I continued kissing girls. Any I could catch. And I could catch them all.
No girl, perhaps, wanted to kiss me, but no girl wanted to be left as the sole representative of the unkissed, either. No girl wanted to be passed over. I tongue-kissed nine or ten girls in a kind of delirium. An event was taking place. Performance art. I kissed them all again in sharpening confidence, holding them closer second time around.
My kissing so many girls was a phenomenon. At first each took part in a pantomime where I chased them, grabbed them, held them tight and writhed for their mouth with mine until our lips met, at which point the ritual resistance ended and the girl threw herself into the kiss and we relaxed into passionate smooching in front of twenty or so laughing, barracking onlookers.
Soon I didn’t have to chase the girls to kiss them. They were waiting their turn. The thing had become an audition. Each girl was enjoying being on stage. Each girl, it occurred to me, was trying to out-kiss the other girls I had just kissed. It had become a talent quest. Some snaked the tongue, some sucked mine, some became fey and hollow mouthed, inviting me forward.
Since I was the only boy to kiss this group of girls sequentially, repeatedly, I was the sole earthly judge of their relative ability as kissers. And no one wanted to flunk. Each kiss might last a minute, and after each, like a sommelier, I adopted a reflective expression, waggled my jaw and weighed the worth of the kiss, spat into the long grass, before launching at another girl. Arm around her waist, hand on the back of her head, my stomach pressed flat on hers.
It was a time of our lives when kissing was a new and vital activity. But a mysterious one. No one knew how good you were at it, because no one could fairly compare. I kissed Sandy Taylor last month and she wasn’t as good as Janice Hibbert who I kissed yesterday. But since I kissed Sandy she’s been going with Jim Wilder and Bruce Pickworth. So she’s obviously been schooled and had two new techniques added to the sum of her knowledge and is better now than she was then. People got ahead, slipped behind, high school girls kissed working men and came back with techniques, revelations and herpes to spread among their cohorts. Who could do the rankings? Only a boy who’d turned an idle, post-school hour into an audition. During that wild afternoon of kissing I kissed Gayle Simmons for half a minute. It was like someone had discovered soundtrack in an age of silent movies.
Gayle Simmons was lithe as a vine, with strong shoulders, high breasts, high buttocks and a handsome face of cheekbones and angles. The best-built girl in our year. She and I were not physically matched as the history of ardour suggests partners ought be. We were not champion and siren, choosing each other because our corresponding physical beauty meant each had a value commensurate with the other. No. She would need a full-grown centre-half forward for that contract. I was a cut-rate kid. Too skinny, big-nosed and big-eared to have any chance of cleaving her athletic thighs or getting my hands on her high breasts.
But after the night of the crazy kissing we became entangled in glances. In class we clasped hands while fighting for pencils and rulers neither of us wanted, and grimaced at each other keenly, not daring to smile, while wrestling over notes she had written that I wasn’t allowed to read.
The buttons down the front of her dress were popped open to her bra and her socks pooled at her ankles the day I asked her to go with me. She was blink-thrice beautiful. I can’t ever know why she stooped to say ‘yes’.
So. She was my girlfriend. I was partnered with another person and, as was to become a lifelong pattern, a person who was too good for me. This exotic ownership made us suddenly shy with each other. How did you do this ‘couple’ thing?
We were in the corridor at recess, waiting to go into religious instruction. Seeing we wanted each other but couldn’t quite get to each other my gang pulled a locker out of the row of lockers and thrust us in that space and trapped us there, pressing the displaced locker in on us. They put their shoulders to it and pushed us together, lobbing dirty suggestions over the locker into our space. No possibility of choice, of prevarication, of protocol, the world getting smaller, every part of her body would have to touch every part of mine.
We kissed. And kissing her usurped all existence. Take that, you hidebound days. Die, crawling happenstance, I’m gone to a better place. I’ve been promoted above and beyond whatever guy was the ring-a-ding-ding King of all life till now.
In close-up I watched her nostrils flare as she drew breath, our tongues fast and slow, fierce and tender, everything new. Our bodies were pressed hard on one another, and of all the new curves and sensations, our twinned desire was the newest part of the world. Her enthusiasm was the epiphany for me. Our culture, our provincial, religion-ridden era, hid the true psychology of the female from boys. I’d thought girls intrinsically reluctant. There was nothing in sex for girls. They had to be coerced into it with shiny trinkets and home loans. Sex was a joyous adventure for men that women agreed to participate in for being able to tag along to the bowling alley and, later, the great bounty of a Frigidaire with a double ice tray.
Up against Rev Wilson’s office wall I was astounded to find this truth about the nature of women was, well … demonstrably, nostril-flaringly, untrue. Gayle Simmons needed no promise of white goods. She was driven by the same needs as me.
Through the wall I could hear Rev Wilson’s claque of Christians applauding as he read them psalms. Christians. The point of psalms is to tell you that once, in a time of Holiness, humanity used to be smarter than it is these days. I couldn’t believe that. Watching Gayle’s eyes looking into my eyes I thought we’d about reached the apex of what was ever profound here and now. It was me grinding hard at her and her grinding hard back at me and no fibre or ligament at rest and no part of the mind partisan and the spectacular and revelatory migration of blood
allowing me to hammer a proclamation of omnipotence all across her loins while inside that room, the wall of which I was humping her against, the Rev Wilson shouted hallelujah, and something about revelation and something about a flood.
By my third year at high school I had a reputation among the staff as an insurrectionist. I’d walk into a new class at the start of the year and a new teacher would single me out with a hateful stare, ‘Ahh, the infamous Mr Cameron.’ They’d been prepped. The word was out. I was a known evil mega-clown and they spent time plotting against me in the staff room. Teachers fresh out of college, student teachers, female teachers – these vulnerable types had to be protected from me. The hard, bearded teachers with massive hairy thighs and skintight shorts, the apex predators, began to hunt me down. Lawson, Canning, Engstromme – the big hairy sheriffs formed plans.
The principal himself grabbed me by the back of the neck and threw me down the front steps of the main school building when he saw me drumming my fingers on Mrs Swaby’s blue beehive because I had bet Rob Godden twenty cents that it was so lacquered up with hairspray that it would sound like a kettle drum.
I waited a while on the front steps, unsure if I was free for the day, or forever. Then I snuck around the building and in the back door and into Mrs Swaby’s science class where Rob put his hand out to be paid his twenty cents because, he said, Old Swaby Baby’s hair gave off no special resonance, though, he admitted, it was hard to be sure with the principal ranting serial falsetto threats like he had been.
I apologised to Mrs Swaby for the misunderstanding and told her I was removing a moth and that she might want to get her hairdo fumigated professionally to prevent further intrusions from good Samaritans like myself. This apology caused laughter and Mr Lawson to appear almost simultaneously, the latter red-eyed and vomiting threats at me. His anger was always so pungent he seemed to be geeing himself up for a physical assault of the holistic kind Killer Karl Kox and Mario Milano launched on each other on World Championship Wrestling.
Boyhoodlum Page 26
