Late, Late at Night

by Springfield, Rick

  From this point on, my twin obsessions are established and fueled: music and girls. The two have always been inextricably entwined for me, much as I hoped to be with them. And my fast-approaching pubescence is stoking them both.

  My New Year’s resolution for 1962, as written in my red diary, is: “Not to eat any sweets. To brush my teeth every time I do eat sweets.” I am already giving myself an out, which doesn’t say much for either my self-control or my sense of self-honesty. Speaking of being honest with myself, whenever someone asks me about acting versus music, which came first (and they do this a lot), I always answer music, of course. But I now realize that the truth is I started with acting, at age eleven. Scuttleboom’s Treasure, you remember it? Neither does anyone else.

  Miss Inman, our fetching English teacher, is rumored to be partial to the tender young flesh of us schoolboys, or so all the older boys smirk and whisper. She gets me alone after school one day and I panic, thinking, “Uh-oh, not another deviant request for a whipping or God knows what else.” All she wants to do is talk me into playing the lead role in the school play—Captain Scuttleboom, he of the famous treasure. The idea of doing anything public like “acting” scares me to death—I’d be happier if she had, in fact, pulled out a velvet cat-o’-nine-tails and begged me to lash her quivering buttocks while Mr. Hales, our red-faced, bug-eyed, heart-attack-waiting-to-happen of a math teacher, watched and whacked off.

  But no, I am lumbered with the part of the pirate captain. On the night of our first and only performance, in the same school hall where I had touched my first guitar and fallen in love with what’s-her-name, I jump up on a box to rally my sea-mates and fall ass-over-teakettle in front of all the parents. I struggle to right myself and carry on with as much dignity as I can muster amidst the howls of laughter. It makes an impact on me that I have survived my first encounter with the guitar and the older woman but made myself a laughingstock in the acting department. No wonder I don’t touch acting again for another fifteen years. Screw that, I think, and—realizing that girls are still out of reach—I take a second look at the guitar.

  Enter the very first Fiesta-red Fender Stratocaster guitar ever to see the light of a soggy, sodium, English dawn, circa 1961. The band’s name is the Shadows, and they are led by a Buddy Holly look-alike Englishman named Hank B. Marvin. They’re an instrumental band that most Americans would consider a surf band, but, truly, they are way beyond that to us kids living in Europe in the early ’60s. Hank is the inspiration for all those young boys in England picking up their first guitars and looking for guidance. Jeff Beck, Ritchie Blackmore, Eric Clapton, Brian May. Hank is IT!

  So, at age eleven, I zero in on that red Fender Strat, pictured in all its teen-dream glory on the cover of the second record I ever buy, The Shadows to the Fore. Music is my way out of life’s noise and confusion. That red guitar is exactly what I need. The bad news is that there’s only one of them in all of England at the time and Hank B. Marvin owns it. If I’d wanted to acquire one back then, it would have cost my dad a year’s worth of paychecks, had we even been able to contact a U.S. dealer in what was then an impossibly huge world. And the Americans! Well, they have brighter teeth, prettier women, stronger men, better cars, and cleaner kitchens, and they have the world under their collective thumb. We didn’t even dare.

  I do what I’ve always done when I can’t get something I want: I make one for myself. This is true of the Roman gladiator’s outfit I beg and beg for (but which has yet to make an appearance at a birthday or Christmas) and eventually construct out of cardboard (the building material of the gods). I cut and glue/tape together a helmet, breastplate, and shin guards, all covered in silver foil. This is also my plan for the REDFENDERSTRAT, as the guitar becomes known in my mind.

  Cardboard again, which to my young mind is possibly not the preeminent building material for an electric guitar. Anyway, it’s all I have available to me at the time. I draw, paint, and cut out a full-scale, really sucky version of the guitar, tape a piece of bamboo to the neck to support it, throw a line of cotton thread around it as a strap, and proceed to pantomime all the Shadows records I own (three), in the reflection of the small living room window at Randene. I manage to rope some of the kids who used to beat me up into playing the other members of the band. They use inverted tennis rackets. I am the only one who plays the REDFENDERSTRAT. Check me out!! I am swingin’ cool!

  At this point, Europe is gung-ho for instrumental bands like the Shadows and crooners like Cliff Richard and Frank Ifield (a good Aussie boy), but a new noise is being born up north a ways. I have a vague memory of a kid at school, in late 1961, telling us all about a really “smashing” (’60s Englishese for “outstanding”) rock-and-roll band he’s seen at the next-door town of Guildford the night before. He didn’t like their name, though: the Beatles.

  Along with every other eleven-year-old boy in England at the time I fall in love with Hayley Mills. She is an English child actress and the youngest daughter of British film star John Mills. I’ve just seen The Parent Trap at our local theater, and her spunky attitude and pouting mouth win me over instantly. I write away to the Official Hayley Mills Fan Club, at an address I’ve managed to get somehow, and ask for an autographed photo, which dutifully comes back signed “To Richard from Hayley.” I put it by my bed and kiss it good night every single night. I still have it and I can see the smooch marks I left, as a besotted eleven-year-old, all over her face.

  So, encouraged by this first photo, I send away for another, possibly more revealing one. It arrives a few weeks later and I am ecstatic, until I compare the new signature to the original one and see that the handwriting is completely different. I know that flunkies have signed them, not my fantasy-inducing Hayley. I go from ecstatic to crushed in a heartbeat. So to all those folks for whom I later had someone else sign a photo or an album cover: forgive me. Blame Hayley Mills.

  My dad works hard. He is away a lot and is always studying, studying, and studying. He is pretty sressed out about all the work he’s involved in, so when summer vacation, circa 1962, rolls around, he’s looking forward to a quiet, relaxing few weeks at Randene, “the smallest bloody house in the county of Surrey,” as he calls it. My mum has other plans.

  She, conversely, has been cooped up in the smallest bloody house in the county of Surrey throughout the long school months while Dad has been traveling, and she’s now looking to get “away.” Hence her idea of a summer vacation: a camping trip around Europe. My dad is dead-set against it. So off to Europe we go. And by the end of the trip, we’ve all had such a blast that our vacation becomes known as “Dad’s brilliant idea to take his family to Europe over the holidays.”

  Again, we are dragged by our mother to more amazing, staggeringly beautiful, centuries-old churches and abbeys, palaces and castles, built by the blood and sweat of our wretched forefathers. We see so many landmarks that I get to the point where if I see one more I really am going to OD. And then one morning in a little burg in France called Amiens, we’re taking a town walk before we pack up the tent and head to Belgium when, in the window of a toy shop, I see it: the perfect, kid-sized Roman gladiator’s outfit, rendered in plastic and Saran-wrapped to a cardboard shield. It looks exactly like I have always pictured it in my child-mind.

  Of course the shop is closed. And of course we have to leave Amiens at 8:00 a.m. and the damn shop doesn’t open until 10:00 a.m., and of course we can’t wait, we have a schedule to keep. Of course I kick and scream and of course we leave at 8:00 on the frigging dot and of course I soldier on, sod it.

  I am a headstrong little dude in my early youth, even though I never seem to get my way. Or maybe because I never do. When we finally arrive at the campsite outside Brussels, the capital of Belgium, I am still fuming about my gladiator outfit that some French kid is probably wearing at this very moment, poncing about like he’s Marcus friggin’ Aurelius. We pull into the campsite and unload our dark-blue canvas tent and a thousand million tent pegs. I immediately bail
to go scouting for the bathrooms or anything else that will get me out of the atrocious task of erecting the tent. I find a charming swimming pool on the far side of the campground, with tin cans and dead animals floating in the nearly black water, and although the weather is a little on the rainy, chilly, and foggy side, I am going for a fucking swim.

  “Absolutely not,” my mother says. “It looks as if it hasn’t been cleaned in years.” “No, son, you’ll get sick,” my dad says, backing her up. “Bye!” I yell and run off in my shorts before either of them can grab me by a lily-white arm or leg. I thought I’d thrown up a lot on the ship coming over here, but after a fifteen-minute dip in the Black Lagoon of Belgium, I am already hurling as I stumble my way back to our campsite. My mother is furious, as she’s the one who has to carry each bucket of my tossed cookies through the foggy night, past tents full of snoring travelers, to the bathroom I had so conveniently located earlier (all right, a point for me).

  Apart from that episode and the rough, canvas, three-feet-in-diameter folding bath we are forced to use to cold-water wash our shivering bodies whenever Mum catches a whiff of boy stinkiness, the trip is spectacular. I know why I love to travel now. It’s because I’ve never really stopped and I’ve seen the most amazing things. I’ve been moving almost from the moment I was born.

  We carve a swath through Germany, Luxembourg, France, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, and Austria, stopping only when we reach the Eastern Bloc. We also go to Scotland, where we camp by Loch Ness and my brother goes fishing and actually hooks the famous Loch Ness monster. I can’t believe all the centuries of fuss over a three-inch fish. Mike is thrilled. We go to Wales—not really part of Europe. Not part of anywhere, really. I experience it as a kind of Alice-in-Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwillllantysiliogogogoch type of place. (That’s the name of a Welsh town. Honest to God.) Did I pass through a looking glass to get here? It seems otherworldly. I find Edmund the Eel (cast on the rocks by some careless angler) and bring him home curled up in an old corn tin. We live together (my only English pet) for six months and then he buys the farm. Chokes on a pebble or something. My luck with pets is holding steady. He was really hard to cuddle with anyway. Wouldn’t lie still, squirming and slippery. Making the bed all wet.

  And everywhere there are music, guitars, and girls. Though I have not a whole heck of a lot to do with them yet, I am very aware of their omnipresence all the same.

  The seasons begin to roll by faster, in all their English grace; I am forging friendships that could last lifetimes; I feel alive and hip and at the center of the modern world … and I know the end is coming. The feeling is all too familiar. It’s like a Sunday night when I lie in bed, struggling to stay awake because I know when I wake up it will be Monday morning and time for school again. As it always does, Monday comes.

  I know our time in England is getting short: Even before we arrived here we knew that we’d be sent back to Australia once my father had learned what he came here to learn. I begin to brace myself, like so many eighteenth-century kids did before me, for the dreaded transport ship. I start assembling an odd assortment of toy figures that I imaginatively name “The Gang,” possibly to take the place of my real-life friends when it is time to hit the open seas and head back to Oz. I don’t really know. My new facsimile pals begin with a pair of red plastic lips I find on the street one day. I instantly recognize the beginnings of a new friend—a ventriloquist’s dummy, which I will construct and name Pierre! I look around for suitable building materials. Again, cardboard leaps out at me as the construction material of choice. An old shirt box for his torso, a smaller box as his head. I attach a spring-and-pulley-type gizmo so I can open and close his mouth. I sew some clothes on him, draw a face, and voilà: Pierre, my new best friend. I have a small bear as well, named Cheyenne, who I also make a suit of clothes for.

  I entertain myself for hours with all the crappy stuff I make. I think this is part of the reason I’m such a toy freak today: because I never had any real toys as a kid. As an adult, I have a better collection of toys than either of my sons ever had. And they aren’t allowed to touch ’em, either. Especially my supercool-neato Star Wars toys, of which I have some of the rarest in the world and … Hey, did your eyes start to glaze over just then? They did, man. I saw your eyes begin to roll back in your head. Let me tell you, there are people out there who love this nerdy toy stuff. Like that guy in the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Some of the figures I have are worth thousands of dollars and I … You just checked out again! Goddammit! Doesn’t anybody find this shit interesting? All I’m going to say is … Boba Fett. Okay? The only Italian-carded version in the universe. And I own it … All right, that’s it. I saw that look. I’m moving on.

  It’s mid-1962 and after two and a half “smashing” years, the time to leave my sweet England draws near. More tears, more begging, and vows of “I’m never doing this to my kids when I grow up.” I’m almost thirteen, desperate not to leave my really cool friends and sure that I want to live in Horsell for the rest of my life. No matter that visiting strangers have to be told that Horsell is near Woking, or they’ll miss it. As a parting gift for a “job well done” in England, our mum inflicts another brace of unlovely Hawaiian-style shirts on my brother and me, made out of what looks like curtain material, and an additional round of atrocious crew cuts. In almost every photo from the trip home, we are wearing these extremely hideous garments. We catch the train to Southampton, not unlike all those unlucky travelers who headed for the Titanic, so many years before, and three of my best friends, who were probably some of my nemeses when I first arrived in England, are standing on the side of the railway tracks, crying and waving, as we separate for all time.

  Another alternative future blown to hell.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE UGLIEST KID IN THE WORLD

  AUSTRALIA

  1962–1965

  I’m quite the seasoned world traveler by now, so our voyage home on the Wilhelm Rhys (a liner out of Holland) in June 1962 isn’t all gosh-golly-wow. It is pretty spectacular just the same. Apart from almost rolling over in a heavy storm as we cross the Bay of Biscayne, the trip back to Australia is pretty much like the trip over—minus the first three days of me tossing up my breakfast, of course. This time violent rocking and rolling doesn’t faze me a bit.

  The ship isn’t very crowded up in the swanky first-class section, so I’m stuck with a fat little Dutch kid who can’t speak any English and a bizarre older girl who keeps hinting that we should go somewhere our parents can’t see us. I get her drift, but she also scares me, so I resist. Her name is Anne and she gets the strangest look in her eyes sometimes. I think I see that same look years later in photos of Charlie Manson. Hey, wait a second, maybe I didn’t completely get her drift after all. Together we cross the vast Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans.

  On the day of our arrival at the Port of Melbourne, Australia, I dress my twelve-year-old self in my coolest clothes for our homecoming. I put on my Cuban-heeled boots, the same style the Beatles will soon make famous. I fought tooth and nail to get them—my mum thinks they’re too “thuggish-looking” and that people might mistake my skinny butt for a hooligan who wants to eat their children. I look in the mirror at the guileless Leave It to Beaver freckled face staring back at me and beg to differ. To the boots I add my only pair of big-boy pants (long trousers) and a supercool purple mohair sweater that my old mum has knitted for me. I comb my longish hair and check my look. Yeah, totally swing- ing, pal!

  I run up the gangway to the top deck and stand with my parents and brother on our auspicious homecoming to Australia. I look out to see my homeland and am shocked. What is this? The whole pier is lined with fucking losers! All of the guys have buzzed ’50s haircuts, white golf shirts, baggy gray flannel pants, and flat, square, brown shoes, and the girls are all dressed like my mum. It will change soon, but in 1962 Australia is woefully behind the times. To me, highly impressionable and desperate to be cool, it seems like I’ve taken
a big leap backward.

  From the moment I step ashore I begin suffering from cultural memory loss. As far as I’m concerned, I am now a Pommie bastard, and if these Aussies have a problem with that, they can kiss my pasty white English ass. Every move so far, despite my initial misgivings, has seemed like a move to somewhere better, but this time I feel like I’ve been sent back to the farm after I’ve seen Paree (as the old song goes).

  One of the first things we do as a family is attend an Aussie-rules football game, the fastest ball game in the world—a mixture of the wild-ass pummeling of ice hockey, the finesse of soccer, and a bit of the thuggish rugby mentality thrown in for good measure. I buy a three-foot-long wooden souvenir stick with a walnut stuck on the top, painted in my team’s colors. I wave it around wildly and unwittingly whack some guy behind me in the head. He tells me I’d better quit it or he’ll knock my head right off my scrawny little shoulders. The good news is my brother and my dad are right there beside me, and after a few angry words are exchanged and our neighbor doesn’t take the hint, they beat the crap out of him and his friend. It’s a righteous fight and I am mightily impressed. My dad can cry and clean someone’s clock.

  We settle into a hideous bright-pink house with black trim on Frederick Street into the Melbourne suburb of Ormond. My brother and I are enrolled in McKinnon High. How many times have I done this now? The process has lost any and all of the excitement and new-beginning promise it might once have held for me. My least favorite part of the prep is buying the school uniform, which all Aussie and English kids had to wear in those days. It always seems that I’m wearing the jacket of a club I know I’ll never truly belong to, although I try to get into the whole “school spirit” thing. The unreadable, arcane Latin motto on the pocket of everyone’s blazer translates to sayings like “Work First, Then Play,” “Forever My Best,” and “Pummel the Shit Out of the New Kid.”