The first and one of the only times I remember seeing my dad’s anger involves a cardboard aircraft carrier my brother and I see advertised on the back of a cereal box and send away for. When it arrives, as a kit, in a thousand pieces you had to put together yourself (we’d both missed that little pertinent bit of info in the ad), our dad spends a long weekend spitting and swearing and gluing it all together. He is very proud when he’s finally done and the three-foot-long aircraft carrier is revealed in all its pasteboard glory. Mike and I both look at it, instantly recognize it will never float in the bathtub (cardboard not being the construction material of choice amongst the world’s boatmakers), run outside to play, and never bother with it again. My father is so mad that I imagine my brother and me narrowly missing Fella’s fate by the grace of our mum’s intervention: “Norm, you can’t just shoot them.”
I hear traveling music
That’s the sound of my family and me moving again. This time it’s to an equally barren army encampment, appropriately but uninspiringly named Broadmeadows. At the age of seven I say good-bye forever to potential lifelong friends, my future career as Bandiana’s brilliant school bus driver, and the crappy little clapboard house I love and call home—not to mention Vicky, the erotic poop queen.
We move into the old farmhouse of what was once a dairy farm. Due to the poor quality of Australia’s topsoil, the farm idea didn’t really work out, so Broadmeadows has been reinvented as a backwater army camp. Our house itself is a beautiful old Victorian that sits perched between the prongs of the Y where one railway line divides into two. The rest of the housing camp runs up a small hill and consists of bare wooden barracks-type houses. They are really butt-ugly, hot in the summer and brass-monkey-balls-freezing in the winter. My dad is the senior officer of the little enclave, so our house is comparatively grand, while these more Spartan “homes” are populated by enlisted men and their families.
The township of Broadmeadows is inhabited by hundreds of kids like me. Army brats and the like. But there is a unique contingent—the immigrants. Mostly English and Irish families who have been tricked into populating Australia by our government waving a ten-quid note (about $20) in their faces and saying, “All this can be yours if you come on down to our side of the planet and help us bump up our numbers so we can become a world power one day … possibly.” They are now stuck in horrible corrugated-tin sheds without plumbing or any form of cooling whatsoever, which in the Aussie summers can be a death sentence.
A big, beautiful, black (not threatening this time; thank the gods of little boys) steam train puffs and boils into the army supply stores by way of our house every Thursday. It is freaking spectacular. I still see its dark iron wheels (taller than I was back then) and the white billows of hissing steam escaping through their spokes. The friendly engineer always waves to me, the little kid on the side of the country road waiting for him to pass by.
“Gee, this place is supercool,” thinks my seven-year-old brain, so it’s a bit of a surprise when this truly golden part of my childhood begins with a severe whipping. My first day as the new kid on the block, I walk up the little hill with a big smile and an open seven-year-old heart to meet my new best friends—the rest of the kids on the street. They are waiting for me at the top, a group of ten, as I remember it. I’m sure I say something along the lines of “G’day, moy nime’s Reechud” (heavy Aussie accent).
My new friends proceed to yank off my T-shirt and give me several sharp whacks across my skinny white back with a brown leather belt. Welcome to the neighborhood, dickface! This may have something to do with me being the son of the officer on the block, or maybe they just think I need a good thrashing; whatever the case, I take the hint, turn around, and head back to our new digs. (Today they probably would have just shot me in the knees.) I don’t mention the incident to my parents; I don’t know why. Maybe I think my dad has enough on his hands moving to a new army base, getting over the merciless slaying of our dog, and lugging in the really heavy shit from the moving van.
I soldier on, keeping the ringleader of the “gang” and his pleasant initial greeting very much in my thoughts until six months later, after they’ve all become my friends. I’m hiding by our side fence one day, waiting for this kid to pedal by on his bike. Unaware that it’s “payback time, bitch,” he zips by and I take him down and beat him senseless. Proof, I think, that my dad was wrong in his “Howard the Coward” assessment. Okay, the truth is I had the help and encouragement of my biggest, toughest friend, Eric Kelly (from a good Irish family who had the ill luck to think Australia would be kinder to them than their native land). He actually stops the kid’s bike for me, then I jump out to do the pummeling … Dammit, maybe my dad was right.
It is around this time that I come home from school one afternoon and see my dad crying by the fire. I am told that my Nana (Dad’s mother, she of the chortling morning magpies) has died, which upsets me, but it hurts me much more to see my strong, manly dad in so much pain. He is crying just like I cry. Silent tears and a few sniffles. I feel weird at first. Seeing this takes him down a peg from Superdad status, but at the same time it is incredibly endearing and makes me see him as more human. I love him even more, and I’ve never backed down from a good, righteous cry since then.
Or, occasionally, a good, righteous fight, as my dad has had his share of those as well. Whether I get myself damaged from the odd punch-up or just plain sick from one of the myriad viruses running through the state school system, the cure is always the same as far as my mother is concerned: Vicks butterballs. And what is the recipe for this wonder treatment? Take a big glob of Vicks—yes, the Vicks that you rub on your chest. Mix it up with an equal-sized glob of butter, make a one-inch ball out of the concoction, then roll it all in white sugar and insist that I swallow it.
Now, correct me if I’m wrong here, but doesn’t it say, really plainly, on any jar of Vicks VapoRub, FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY. IF SWALLOWED, SEEK MEDICAL HELP? Okay, maybe the warning wasn’t quite as plain in the 1950s, but it was clearly indicated for use on the outside of the body, yes? Plus butter, plus sugar … was this folk remedy thought to be the cure-all for everything from the common cold to a bloody nose? I don’t have an answer for that, but I have to say that it always made me feel better. Placebo medication at its finest!
The miles and miles of empty land around our little neighborhood stretch to the horizon in all directions—covered with a very pointy, painfully invasive weed called Scotch thistle. My best friend back then, Billy Groves, looks a lot like Alfred E. Neuman, the bat-eared kid from the Mad magazine covers. Of course, I can’t really talk—I haven’t grown into my own ears yet, and a stiff breeze could get me airborne. Billy and I run around all day long, barefoot, in perceived safety, without a care or thought of injury, abduction, child molestation, or murder. I’m having a fabulous time.
A dog and his boy
For whatever reason—my parents seem to take pity on me or are overcome with guilt; maybe a bit of both—they eventually get me a dog of my own. My very first dog. He is a black-and-white Heinz 57, and I call him Elvis. He is happy and playful and not at all rabid, all of which I take as a sign that my luck is changing vis-à-vis dogs.
I wake up and leave the house at daybreak, before anyone else on the street is stirring. My best friend/dog, Elvis, is always by my side. We run to greet the milkman, who still uses a horse and cart on his rounds through the mists of the early bush mornings. I become his Junior Milk Buddy and help him deliver clinking glass bottles on doorsteps throughout the modest neighborhood. I am given a free half-pint bottle as payment, which I slug back. Then Elvis and I round up all the local dogs for our daily adventure: a run down to the abandoned quarry behind our house while everyone sleeps.
At this young age I am already sold on the idea of the dog. One of God’s absolutely greatest inventions and one that needs no more tinkering. The dog is the perfect beast, companion, friend, shoulder to lean on, and scapegoat when too many cookies are missing
. And a dog won’t hold that against you, either. I am at peace sitting in silence with a dog. Trying to do that with a human being is uncomfortable and a little creepy—“What is this guy really thinking?” You know what a dog is thinking: “This is so great. You’re great. Could you pet me or rub my ear or … okay, there ya go. You’re so great. This is just great. Really, really great.”
And the whole welcome-home thing? “Wow, you’re BACK!!!”—y’know? They are the best. And they are fuzzy and I have always loved the smell of a dog’s paws. There are people I’ve met who agree wholeheartedly on this matter. It’s a kind of Fritos corn chips, grassy, unwashed, animal stink kind of thing that’s always the same from dog to dog. Unlike people, who have a variety of mostly noxious aromas.
So Elvis, with the good stinky feet, and I gather up the neighborhood canines for a wild-boy romp through the smoky Australian bush as the day breaks. Every morning and all summer long. Truly, there must be twenty different neighborhood mutts who anxiously await my arrival each morning, tails wagging, ready to go. The fast-rising heat of the new morning, the dry, stringy-bark gum trees full of kookaburras looking for breakfast, the forever view of the bright blue sky, and the knowledge that it’s just me and all these slavering hounds: I feel connected to my life, the earth, and my existence in a way that I have very rarely known since.
Though I am literally the Pied Piper of the canine world, there is one chihuahua that I can never get to join us. He’s a timid little freak, shaky and bug-eyed, but I’m determined to bring him into the fold. The fact that he belongs to the hottest girl on the block (Josephine, my first real crush) doesn’t have much to do with it, I tell myself. Toward the end of summer vacation I finally win him over (though I’m not so lucky with Josephine), and he joins us all on our mighty quest to the great red quarry every morning where I am sold on the idea that dogs do indeed rule.
Since Oz is in the Southern Hemisphere, Christmas falls in the middle of the summer. One year I get a pogo stick for Christmas. It becomes my pseudo-bike (which I think we couldn’t afford then). I hold onto the wooden picket fence in front of our house and hop up and down the dirt road ’til I fall off. Then I get up and do it again. And again. And I get really good on that thing. All day long as Elvis runs beside me, barking like a maniac. The idea of that little kid hopping around a tiny Aussie country town on his pogo stick versus the guy I see in the mirror today is one of the biggest mind-fucks of my life. I used to wonder where that kid went, but I eventually realized that he’s still in here.
It’s 1985. I’m standing on a stage at the Nürburgring Speedway in Germany at an outdoor music festival in front of a crowd of 250,000. I’ve never seen so many people all looking in the same direction at once. It’s mind-numbing. A sea of faces, stretching to the horizon. The energy from the crowd is so powerful that I actually feel physically lighter. It almost lifts me off the stage. I play and sing and leap around and feel like I’m flying, and I realize that this is where that little kid went. Onstage. It’s the only time I feel that connection I had when I was running with dogs in the morning sun to the quarry and back. It feels so long ago.
First stab at fame
Let’s be honest: No performer ever lacks the innate and insatiable desire to be noticed. So it’s no surprise that early on I come up with this little scheme: I will grab the nation’s headlines as the eight-year-old kid who is … GorillaMan.
I take one of my mum’s old sheets (construction materials being somewhat hard to come by) and make a little shirt and mask for my alter ego. Really just two pieces of the sheet tied around my chest and face, and in pencil—pencil, mind you—I write “GorillaMan” on the chest. I find a stick, attach a small stone to it with string, and stand outside our house for a couple of nights in a row with my cheesy homemade mask and costume, swaying from side to side, waving the stick/ stone combo and making grunting noises any time a car passes by (and they’re few and far between, let me tell you, when you live way out where we do).
I wake up every morning and check the newspaper my dad has discarded. Damn. No mention of my nighttime alter ego nor of the fear this frightening figure must instill in the passing motorists. I sometimes wonder if GorillaMan morphed into Rick Springfield eventually. Probably, huh?
Pop tunes
Around this time, my brother Mike brings home the first pop record I have ever seen, a 78 rpm copy of Paul Anka’s “Diana.” Even though it’s state-of-the-art for the times, it looks like an ancient and fragile relic to me, that 78. Huge, heavy, magical, and still with the word “Edison” printed on the label. I’m sure that my small obsession later, writing songs with female names in the title (“Kristina,” “Allyson,” “In Veronica’s Head,” “What’s Victoria’s Secret?”) stems from that first encounter with “Diana.” My brother proceeds to play the fucking thing fifty times a day for the next three weeks until we all want to shoot ourselves—or him.
The first pop song I remember hearing on the radio is “Dream Lover” by Bobby Darin. I hear it on the bus on the way to school one morning and can’t get it out of my head. It’s cool and catchy and nothing like the music my parents play around the house. I don’t know them by name yet, but those four glorious chords—D, B minor, G, and A—are the same four chords I will use twenty years later to write my own first hit song of the ’80s, “Jessie’s Girl.”
School
It’s still okay at this point. I’m now attending Faulkner State School a few miles from our Victorian farmhouse. At Faulkner State, many of my immigrant classmates are fairly poor kids. Some of them ask me for my apple core and sandwich crusts after I finish eating lunch each day. I don’t think anything of that, but my friends and I give them a lot of shit just because they’re different. “Pommie bastards,” they are known to us boys of the Great Southern Land, “Pom” and “Pommie” being derogatory terms reserved specifically for the British by the Aussies. The derivation is obscure, but the most popular theory is that the reference is to the red “pom-pom” atop the hats of British sailors who supervised the transfer of prisoners to the Colonies. Another is that “Pom” was an acronym for “Prisoner of Millbank” after the area of London where prisoners were held prior to their transportation. The best one, and the one I subscribe to as a kid because it’s so damn funny, is that it comes from the French word for “apple” (pomme) because the unsuspecting English skin turns bright red, like an apple, under the fierce Australian sun. (I guess it eludes me that I am actually a half-Pommie bastard myself.)
Teacher’s pet
Miss Hamilton is my fourth-grade teacher and I know I’m her favorite. Everyone in the class does, too. One day she asks me if I’ll stay behind and help her with something after class. After all the other kids have gone, she leads me into her “teacher’s room” at the front of the class and pulls out a thick brown leather belt. “Uh-oh,” I think, panicking. “Am I in for another whipping?” At this point in history, teachers clobber us kids on a regular basis, for the slightest infraction, without fear of lawsuits or any retaliation whatsoever. But Miss Hamilton hands the belt to me. She tells me it’s a new one she just bought and wants to know how it feels before she whales on any of the kids in her class. Would I please hit her with it? Wait, what?! She repeats her request.
So I do. She says harder, so I do. I must be there for ten minutes whacking her into a lather and beginning to feel a wee bit uncomfortable in the process. I eventually tell her I can’t miss my bus and bail. I’m not sure what she does after that—probably best I don’t know.
Clag
Glue that is very Australian and always a part of every new school year’s purchases, along with books and pencils. It is a thick, stinky, grayish-white gel, in a glass bottle with a wood-and-bristle brush, that doesn’t glue anything but paper to paper. Who makes glue that doesn’t glue anything? Spit holds paper to paper. And what a catchy name, Clag.
I was about thirteen when I surprised myself by actually producing some real “manly” semen after a furious
little wank. Once the wonderful shivers had subsided I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, this looks just like Clag!” And speaking of Clag …
Girls
On the monkey bars in the playground, the girls at school tuck their dresses into the bottom of their underwear, so when they hang upside down us boys can’t see their panties. But the whole implication of this act, and the fact that we can see the panty line, just fuels our innocent white-hot passions further. Charlotte has twin braids hanging down her back and apple-red cheeks. My friends dare me to kiss her behind the bike shed, so I do.
Television
We are the first family in our neighborhood to get a television set. Considering our dad is the commanding officer of the area, it seems only fitting. I’ve never seen a television before. Our previous evening entertainments have been listening to the radio (wow, I feel old) and gathering around the player piano (no one in our family could actually play an instrument yet) and singing my parents’ favorite songs like “Hot Diggity Dog,” “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” and “Abba-dabba-dabba-dabba-dabba-dabba-dabba Said the Monkey to the Chimp.” Swear to God—that’s a real song.
So it’s big news when we get the first TV within a hundred miles. Our dad plugs it in, and my brother and I race into the living room and park ourselves about three inches from the screen. What is this? It looks like a bunch of fuzzy black and white dots! This is TV?! Our dad suggests we move back about ten feet. We do and suddenly a football game comes into focus. It is unreal, like something from a futuristic movie, in glorious black-and-white. The whole neighborhood comes down to our place to watch whatever is on our set some evenings. It becomes a communal thing, like having our own drive-in movie theater.
Late, Late at Night Page 5
