By this time I am completely burnt out on the whole process. I so know the drill. The class nut job no one wants to hang with is always the first to make any overtures, of course. This is followed by the usual baiting and testing of the new guy by the class cool clique. But this time, the girls are casting sidelong looks and making snide comments, too! The teachers are cruel and psychotic. The only positive aspect is that these kids all think, much to my secret satisfaction, that I am English. McKinnon marks the beginning of the end for school and me, and also my first real introduction to a most unwanted and uninvited guest: a Darkness inside me that I just can’t seem to shake. This new voice in my head tells me softly and consistently: You are no good.
There are a couple of bright spots while we live in the appallingly pink house. As soon as we’re settled, however briefly, we get a dog. Cleo is a tiny black/brown mutt we all shower with affection after three long years of pet deprivation. Unless you count Edmund the Eel, which to be perfectly honest, we don’t, Cleo (my mum always chooses names from another century) will be the only animal, thus far, to live out her allotted life span in our keeping. My dad is a loon with nicknames and comes up with some doozies for Cleo. Clee, Cleenzie, Tombalina-Jackson 459, Tombee. It goes on. I inherit this trait, unfortunately, later giving my own dogs (and even my sons) thousands of free-associated nicknames. It is obviously genetic.
I am about to turn thirteen and my mother asks me if I still want the guitar I’d previously asked for as a birthday present. I tell her that I’ve changed my mind and would prefer this really cool-looking robot I’ve just seen at a local toy store. “Oh …” says Mum. She’s as transparent as a politician’s pre-election promises. I realize she’s already bought me the damn guitar, so I say, “No, hang on. Maybe I want the guitar,” and in my mind, this totally awesome robot waves bye-bye as he heads to France to hang with the kid who’s still wearing my fucking gladiator outfit. So a guitar it is!
Well, of course, it’s a Woolworth’s special that cost five quid—about $15—and is completely unplayable. I immediately take a saw and cut it in half lengthwise, paint it bright red (where am I going with this?), chop off its head and nail on a Fender-style one of my own manufacture, add some papier-mâché, then put it all back together with Tarzan’s Grip glue. My first REDFENDERSTRAT! Just like Hank B. Marvin’s. I’m elated—until I try to play the thing and realize I have completely trashed it in the process. So I tie a string to it, put it around my neck, and lip-synch Shadows records, just as I did in back in England with my cardboard guitar. The bloody steel strings had hurt my fingers anyway. Fuck ’em.
Oh no, I hear traveling music again. Yes, folks, we’re on our way once more. This time to a town called Syndal. Syndal? Did they make that up? It isn’t even a real word. I’ve just turned fourteen, and our moves are happening more frequently now. There’s almost no time to make real friends and consequently have soul-destroying farewells, but this endless relocation troubles me more and more. I suggest to my parents that we should just buy a gypsy caravan so our stuff can stay pretty much packed up all the time. I recently read that moving is right up there in stress level and freak-out factor with public speaking and being on a crashing airplane. No wonder my anxiety bucket is approaching capacity.
We move to 13 Subiaco Court (really, are they running out of real words for streets now too?), Syndal (near Melbourne), Victoria, Australia. I peer nervously out of our new cream-brick abode on Subiaco Court. Every house in Australia at this point is either cream brick, red brick, or clapboard painted pink or some other heinous color. It is a devastating anonymity for a young, hip “English” lad still fresh from London, the most with-it place on earth in the ’60s.
I look for welcoming neighborhood gangs with leather straps. Nope. A big kid who doesn’t know I have an older brother. Nope. Anne, the scary chick from the ship (Charlie Manson’s sister). Nope. It’s looking pretty safe out there. Birds singing, sun shining, breeze blowing, laughing kids in the street playing cricket (world’s worst game). Yep, I think I’m good.
My first friend in Syndal is a neighbor, Rob Newton. Rob is a twisted young private-schooled lad my own age, whom I’d actually met once in England and had assumed was English. In fact, his dad is a transplant Aussie Army officer just like mine. Rob has a heavy British accent and dislikes Australia immensely and for the same reasons that are making it so hard for me to fit in. We both feel like we climbed aboard a time machine headed in the wrong direction. At this point the world sees Australia as a backwater burg of indeterminate geographic location, full of hapless rubes. Rob and I, as young, hip, wannabe Europeans, want none of this. We know there’s something bigger out there in the brave new world. We’ve seen it! Close up. We bond quickly over our shared disdain for our location and our situation. He plays the guitar, too, which interests me.
Then somebody shoots John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States, in the head. To all of us outside of America, it seems that suddenly the land of perfect people has a big dark secret it’s been hiding. Not just that they managed to get their president killed, although that is incredibly disturbing, but that the good guys don’t necessarily always win, like we’ve always believed they would. I start to feel that maybe all the school bullies and beatings are just the tip of the iceberg. The world is actually a bad, scary, and dangerous place to be. The constant underpinning of anxiety that I’ve lived with for years deepens into a grimmer, low-level depression. The fact that teenage hormones are kicking in and wreaking havoc on a cellular level no doubt has something to do with my gradually ever-darkening mood.
I become preoccupied with torture, dismemberment, and death. Rob and I share a growing urge to torture and ritually execute all the idiots in our lives—at least in effigy. I start building working guillotines in the backyard—one is actually twelve feet high—much to my old mum’s dismay. Now, every time we have a bad argument she runs out, grabs an axe, and chops these guillotines down. I guess it’s her version of hanging out the window and screaming, “Help, they’re killin’ me!” I finally get wise and construct a portable, five-foot-tall version that lives in my bedroom alongside a small gallows with a spring trapdoor for the “long drop.” At fourteen, Rob and I spend hours “executing” all the jerks we know, including schoolteachers, bullies, and shopkeepers who’ve caught us shoplifting from their stores. It’s all good, clean, dark fun. We have connected on a very bizarre level and encourage each other’s alienation and unhappiness. I’m surprised, later, that I never see him staring out of the local newspaper in a mug shot, having been arrested for eating the people next door. I suspect that in the years since, he’s looked for my mug shot.
Another new school, this one my last, though I don’t realize it going in. Ashwood High is the same game all over again. The dork, the bullying, the girls smiling or sneering depending on their coterie affiliation. It’s so drearily and stressfully familiar. And as usual, lots of insane, sadistic teachers who hate children and have disgusting bronchial habits plus a desire to punish younger people for their own lives’ shortcomings. I’ve been the new kid a few too many times. For the first time, there doesn’t seem to be any upside. Just more alienation and despondency.
The only bright spot in my unhappy existence is that I’m falling in love again, and this time I’m pretty sure she isn’t going to break my heart. She is sexy-hot and curvy, has a long beautiful neck and a rather small, pretty head with three tuning pegs sticking out of either side. Yes, the guitar is back in my life, this time to stay. With my parents’ help, I buy myself an acoustic with an electric pickup. (Hey hey hey!) If I had a guitar amplifier, which I most certainly do not, I could plug it in and play really loud, which I most certainly cannot because of the added financial strain. I now begin to choose friends based strictly on whether they can (a) play the guitar and (b) teach me anything new. I’ll take the train for an hour and a half to go to some spotty, weirdo kid’s house just so he can teach me the latest George Harrison solo.
&nbs
p; Speaking of which, some smart Aussie promoter, early on, books an unknown band from the north of England, and when they hit it big he has them already signed up to perform way down here at the bottom of the world. So like many of their sorry countrymen and women aboard the convict ships of the 1800s, the Beatles have to drag their now- very-famous asses to the ends of the earth. I go to this show with my brother because we still haven’t formed any strong friendships in this new place yet.
I’m just another teenager in the audience when the Beatles take the stage in Melbourne, 1964. Everyone starts screaming when they appear and, so help me, completely against my will and much to my own chagrin, my mouth opens up and out comes this high-pitched girly scream that doesn’t stop until the band has left the stage a short thirty minutes later.
Maybe it’s just my age, or the adjustment to high school, but I’m not really connecting with the kids at this new place. The guy at Ashwood High who gives me the most grief is a handsome blond kid named John Kennedy (no relation to the recently departed president of the United States). One day I’m at my locker with this future juvenile delinquent standing over my shoulder, giving me shit, when he notices a photo of the Shadows featuring the great Hank B. Marvin, taped to the inside of my locker door. This is how cool being a kid is: everything changes in an instant. “You like the Shads?” he asks incredulously. And we become best friends for life, just like that. The power of music at age fourteen. This friendship becomes a saving force at this point. (I keep in touch with John to this day—the song “Me and Johnny” is about our early relationship—and neither of us has really changed much. Okay, maybe we’re a little older.)
The British Invasion is in full swing and music is changing so fast and furiously that it’s mind-warping. Every day I hear new and more amazing songs on the radio. John and I hang out at school and at each other’s houses on the weekends. All we do is talk about music, play our guitars, and write hopelessly banal songs. It’s all we want to do. Out of our mutual inferiority complexes, we also start a rather destructive habit: we spend a lot of time staring at our changing faces and bodies in the bathroom mirror and belittling and berating ourselves to each other for our perceived faults and staggeringly misshapen appearance. His nose is too big, mine is too fat. His ears are too small, mine are the breadth of Batman’s cape. His chest is concave, mine is too. Neither of us has any real pubic hair and we are sure girls are utterly repelled by the sight of us. We are cut from the same cloth, John and I—probably why we’ve stayed such good friends. We start “rehearsing” with the idea of putting a band together and begin to look for a drummer. Back then, no one wants to play bass guitar. That position is left to the worst guitar player in the group, and neither of us wants to be lumbered with that. We also start smoking (Kools) and drinking (cherry brandy) but still remain, much against our wishes, luckless virgins.
John and I find our drummer and we name the band the Icy Blues. We also find a gullible kid whose first name is Breckstin (you can’t be a rock star with a name like Breckstin). His parents are obviously feeling guilty about saddling their kid with a name like that, so they’ve bought him a really expensive guitar amplifier that John and I plug our guitars into and then unplug him because he sucks. We actually get our first gig playing at a school friend’s birthday party. We are paid three Australian pounds (about $15) and are completely blown away that we have actually made money doing something we would gladly have done for free. This is the most money I have ever made, including what I earned from mowing neighbors’ lawns and running a paper route. It’s a very revealing moment for little Ricky, who, as a boy in Broadmeadows, carried “cash” (newspaper cut to size) around in a sack because he liked the feel of “having money.” But more important, we get attention from girls—and the open invitation for the odd (still chaste) date now and then.
Invitations from girls are big news, because the teenage dating ritual back then is set in stone and never varies. Certainly not for me, anyway. I don’t know if it was true for all guys, but every encounter with a girl invariably ends the same way when I am in my early teens. I go to a local party, hook up with a girl from my school, go off into a dark corner, and start kissing. My hand, beginning under her dress at the knee, s-l-o-w-l-y creeps its eager little way up, up, up as though, if I go slowly enough, she won’t notice. When I get to mid-thigh—thwack! her hand comes down on top of mine and I hear the dreaded words, “I can’t.” I swear, I try it twenty times a night with the same girl and every time I think, “Yes, yes, this is it. This time …” Then, like a cat toying with a half-dead mouse, she lets me get just so far and … thwack!
I start to think the problem may be familiarity, so I take a different tack. At the next party I spy a girl I don’t know. I ask her if she wants to dance and soon enough we are in a dark corner. I start with the slowly creeping hand—only this time she doesn’t stop me. I am flabbergasted. Hang on, this is not how it’s supposed to go! Doesn’t she know the rules, for God’s sake? I reach the top of her stocking (very sexy, the top of the stocking in the days before pantyhose) and I have no idea what to do next. I am mortified. The hunter, balking at the moment of the kill. I stay there all evening while my clueless fingers toy with the lower edges of her underwear but dare to go no further. The next day at school I consult the “mature” kid in our class—you know, the one who starts shaving before anyone else does, and who, kids say, has “done it” lots of times—to get some advice. He laughs at me. He knows the girl and says she is a “go-er” (Aussie slang for a girl who puts out). Damn it! Had I blown my best shot at losing my virginity?
I grow into a fifteen-year-old virgin that year. What is God saving me for? Why can’t I, as all the other kids in my school swear they have done, get lucky? My hormones are breathing down the back of my neck, and to add injury to insult, John is suddenly transferred from Ashwood to a private school because his dad doesn’t like the influences at the public one. Our relationship suffers a serious blow. As I’ve invested all my time in him and no one else, I’m left with no real friends at school. This also spells the doom of the second-best cover band in Syndal, the mighty Icy Blues, just as I feel we are on the cusp of megastardom.
Other than my guitar, the love of my life at this point (though she has no idea) is a girl named Tania Hunt. She looks like a young Elizabeth Taylor, with violet eyes and thick, dark hair (actually, not unlike early photos of my old mum I’ve seen … wow, that’s weird). I love her and I am terrified of her. I worship her from a safe distance. All the kids in my tenth-grade class know I am insane for this girl, and when she breaks up with her boyfriend at a weekend party that I’m attending, these same bastards from school chase me up the dark street, pick me up, drag me kicking and yelling back to the party house, bodily throw me into a bedroom where she is alone crying, and slam the door shut.
Tania sits, moist-eyed and beautiful, on edge of the bed; it is the most romantic and yet humiliating thing that’s ever happened to me in my young life. “Hi,” I say from the floor, sweating and breathing heavily and trying to ignore the fact that I’m obviously socially inept. “You’re shy?” she asks. And I am in like Flynn. Another valuable lesson learned. Girls also like the shy, lost guy—a role I will play to much success when I eventually hit my twenties and actually start having sex with anyone who looks at me twice.
But at fifteen, I’m content to go by her house at 2:00 a.m., sneak her out her bedroom window, and find an unlocked parked car so we can steam up the windows with some harmless kissing and rubbing. I then walk three and a half miles back to my home at four in the morning, nursing the most staggeringly painful brace of aching balls in the history of teenage love, curl up with my guitar, and dream of glory. I’m sure I and my painful testicles have a doctor’s visit in our future until a kid at school clues me in to “Mr. Blue Balls of the Unrequited Boner.”
Still crazy in love with her three months later, I leave her—for the lame reason that I’m afraid she’ll eventually leave me. I wonder where I
got the idea that all my relationships have to end painfully? Couldn’t be the incessant friggin’ traveling since the day I was born, could it? Huh? D’ya think? With John and Tania both gone from my life (for now, anyway), there is only my fellow executioner Rob remaining, and in no time at all, even he takes a powder. Gone. Army brat too, y’know. And I’m basically left alone, save for a few not-so-close friends at school.
After the forced breakup of the late, great Icy Blues, I start looking for bands that might need a young, insecure guitarist. I find one in a bunch of older guys who call themselves Moppa Blues and focus on the more obscure songs of Little Walter, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters, and other black American blues artists I’ve never heard of. I change my allegiance from pop to blues in a heartbeat and immerse myself in the Moppa Blues guys’ formidable record collections.
By the age of sixteen, I’m running with a very different crowd. Although music has brought us together, we are a very disparate group. The singer, Snowy, is a twenty-three-year-old ex-convict who has a nasty growl of a voice. Dennis, the twenty-five-year-old bass player, seems eloquent and arty to me, and he’s deep into the history of the music we are trying earnestly to reproduce with varying degrees of success. The drummer, Jim, is an old schoolmate of my brother’s. The roadies and hangers-on are made up of fellow ex-cons the singer has met in prison. Needless to say, these are not people I would normally have hung with, and I’m in over my head. The fact is, I am fast becoming an insecure, self-conscious, teenaged mess.
Late, Late at Night Page 9
