Working Class Man

by Jimmy Barnes

  I had to go back to my life and wait until I could stand in the eye of the storm again. Some shows it didn’t happen but most it did. Maybe not for the whole show, but there were always moments. Precious and needed.

  THERE WERE A FEW guitar players who failed miserably. There was one guy who played on my next album, Two Fires, who shall remain nameless but let’s just say he had played with a lot of big names overseas. He came out to tour with me and never made it through the warm-ups. He was one of these guys from California who had more front than grunt. He had a lot of issues. Weight issues, so he was on all sorts of wonder diets. He talked about his colon and what came out of it. He had drug issues so he was always on the lookout for Narcotics Anonymous meetings, which was fine, but he talked about them all day. He drove my Australian band nuts. Of course, we could have all done with NA meetings too, but we didn’t want to go anywhere near one. In fact, we avoided them at any cost.

  We had done one or two little shows before heading to the big cities, when one day he turned to me in the car. ‘Hey Jimmy, I want to talk to you.’

  I remember thinking, ‘Fuck, what has he eaten now?’

  But he didn’t want to talk about that this time. ‘Listen, Jimmy. I want us to look like we’re all having a good time up there on the stage. But I don’t want you near me. Don’t touch me. I don’t want any sweat on me, okay? I’m happy to rock out and I’ll make all the right moves and all that. But fuck, we’re only pretending up there, okay? It’s just a show.’

  There was silence in the car. The band were waiting for me to kill him. It wasn’t just a show. This was our lives. Every night for years we laid it all on the line. I had bled for shows like this. These shows were the only thing that kept me sane. And this guy thought it was just a show? I was speechless. Was he serious? Is that what he thought I wanted from him? To pretend? I watched the road and he went back to talking about how happy he was since he had gotten his divorce and married that young girl.

  For the rest of the trip I thought carefully about what he had said. Was I taking him the wrong way? Maybe I had missed something. We drove into Warrnambool not long before we were due to go on. I kept my distance as I went through my warm-up, which in those days consisted of drinking half a bottle of vodka, snorting a gram of coke and screaming for an hour. By the time I hit the stage I was pumped. I had brushed off what he’d said and wanted to concentrate on doing a great show. About a third of the way through I walked to his side of the stage. I wanted him to know I didn’t hold a grudge. I stood next to him and immediately he went into a stance which I can only describe as Los Angeles Rock Guitar Player Stance Number Seven. But he made sure I was out of his reach. The rest of the band, including myself, were saturated with sweat. This gig was one of those old-style, boiling hot pub shows that we used to do with no air conditioning because the publican had turned it off to make the punters drink more. The rest of the band looked like drowned rats. This guy didn’t have a bead of sweat on him. He’d had the crew set up a small fan just beside him and I could see the creases he’d ironed into his jeans. Now he was pouting and posturing away in front of me. I snapped. I grabbed him by the back of the neck and the seat of his pants and threw him into the crowd. He landed a few rows from the stage. I felt better already. He tried to get back on stage but I blocked the way and shouted over the screaming of the band, ‘Fuck off back to America. Now. You don’t belong here.’

  By the time we finished he had packed his guitars and was back at the hotel. Then one of the crew took me aside and told me, ‘Listen Jim, he wants to have a word with you. He says you were out of line and acted totally unprofessionally but he’s willing to forgive you and give you a chance.’

  I sent the roadie to pick him up and drive him back to Melbourne and put him on a plane home. He didn’t get it. He never would. I haven’t spoken to him or seen him since. We don’t mix in the same circles.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  this was a racing car and I was a lousy driver

  THE WHITE HOUSE, 1988–89

  INSTEAD OF BUILDING A family home that would bring us closer together, Jane and I built the White House – a home that had everything I had dreamed about or seen on television growing up. Every single thing my parents never bought us kids, and a whole lot more. I could buy whatever we needed, so this wasn’t a problem – I was the biggest touring and recording star in the country. Money grew on trees. Well, if it did, I would have bought a few money trees too.

  What we really needed was for me to be at home, sorting myself out, stopping the drinking and whatever else I got up to on the road. But I wasn’t ready for normal family life. Everything I did was exaggerated. Our home was a normal family home on steroids.

  Jane wanted me to have everything I wanted. She was used to having everything she wanted, so this didn’t feel strange to her. In fact, I was still trying to live up to what I thought she wanted from a husband, in every way except the things that mattered most. She needed a husband who was faithful and loving.

  I didn’t know how to be normal. I had never seen a normal family. The families I knew were all fucked up, full of abuse and deception and violence and more. So I was trying to fake it until I knew how to be a good husband, and what I lacked I tried to make up for by buying Jane anything she wanted. I was running out of money, but more importantly I was running out of time, fast.

  Even the extension wasn’t big enough. The house was beautiful and we had rooms for ourselves and the children. We had five bedrooms in all and a huge kitchen and lounge room but we needed more. We should have stopped then but we kept on building. Looking back, I don’t know why. Maybe I needed more places to hide my face and Jane needed some distance between us. We never consciously wanted to be apart but the house ended up so big we needed an intercom system to speak to each other.

  Fred the builder came back and this time we added a new wing, with a study and a formal lounge that doubled as a theatre room. We extended the kitchen to include an old baker’s oven. It had been used about one hundred years earlier in Yackandandah, a town down near the Victorian border. We had it dismantled brick by brick and transported to our house and then carefully reconstructed in our kitchen. It was a work of art but unfortunately you had to burn a whole tree to get it up to a temperature that was operational. Once it was running you could have cooked an entire cow in it, it was so big. We used it once. We didn’t cook a cow, just bread.

  We had a Japanese teppanyaki table so I could cook and throw food at the kids at the same time. We found a ten-burner antique Kookaburra stove that we had restored and installed and we also put in a complete indoor barbecue. The kitchen was so big we could cater for parties and often did. A typical family Sunday dinner could be as large as thirty people. Downstairs we built a full recording studio so I could make albums without leaving the house, and a billiard room that had a fireplace so big you could walk into it, complete with a 1930s Art Deco corrugated glass bar. We bought the bar and a container full of other stuff while we were shopping one day on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.

  We only bought things we needed though. Like the three full-size fibreglass cows that we stood outside on the grass. When people drove along the road at the end of the hill they looked real. We used to stand them up in trees to confuse the neighbours. We also bought a 1950s jukebox, complete with a catalogue of original singles, and a handmade leather and sterling silver Bohlin saddle. This was a beautiful piece that had been used in the movies and I really loved it, but unfortunately it was a Western saddle and my horse would only use an English saddle. The rest of the container was filled with stuff that wasn’t as useful.

  We added a guesthouse above the five-car garage we built to house the Ferrari 246 Dino, circa 1975, the 1960 Mercedes sports car and the 1962 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray that I hotted up so much Jane refused to travel in it. This was a racing car and I was a lousy driver. I hardly drove any of them. I drove a 6.9 litre Mercedes-Benz that was way too fast for Australia; consequently I los
t my licence a few times.

  Oh yeah, and we built an indoor swimming pool. You could swim to the outdoors and back inside, so you didn’t have to get out of the water outside. I had seen this at a hotel in Canada, somewhere where it snowed. The pool had ozone filters, one of the first in the country to use this system. Swimming in this water was like swimming in a mountain creek. When the gas heaters were turned on, the pool was so warm you could have cooked lobsters in it if you wanted to. Next to the pool we built a gym and a steam room.

  To finish all this off we also bought two angels carved in the 1600s for a Baroque church somewhere in Germany. Then we had to build a pond in the middle of the driveway to mount them beside. The angels were an accidental acquisition. An antique dealer begged us to buy them because someone with too much money and no taste wanted to buy them and have them sandblasted or painted to make them look newer. We bought them and left them with the four hundred years of history that was covering them intact. They looked beautiful. Dark and mysterious, they welcomed people to the house.

  All these things and this building work cost a fortune and I thought I had a fortune but it kept disappearing. We all flew first class. The kids were two feet high and they slept in first class on airplane seats that could have fitted three of them on one seat. They ate caviar and foie gras. I didn’t know any other children who ate caviar. We stayed at the best hotels in the world, in the best suites, with butlers and maids. So did anybody who travelled with us. We threw our money around to anyone we thought needed it. We could always find more. I borrowed more and more money to pay for everything. I soon found myself in massive debt. To make things worse, interest rates started rising and they didn’t stop. I had to work more than ever, just to pay the interest on my loans. Interest rates got to 26 per cent and I found myself running uphill. I had bought all of these things to make up for my mistakes as a husband. I should have been staying home and working on our relationship but instead I was on the road more and more, making more mistakes and getting further away from the ones I loved.

  But good things happened to us too. We had the most beautiful children in the world and we both adored them. We were blessed. I was a million miles from where I’d started out.

  I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT BEING poor is like having a disease. It eats away at you slowly. It knocks you down and you have to pick yourself up, only to be knocked down when the next bill comes in. My mum and dad’s disease was incurable. It was passed down from their parents, who contracted the disease from their parents, and so on and so on. There seemed to be no cure and if there was one, we couldn’t afford the treatment. There was no way that things were ever going to get better. I watched as Mum got her hopes up, only to have them torn down or punched out of her every single day of her life. Just like a disease, there are secondary infections too – alcoholism, violence and shame, to mention a few. Every one of them can kill you on its own, but put them all together and the prognosis is bad. You won’t die fast but you will die. Slowly, painfully, without any hope. Eventually it will bury you. If you are lucky enough to get by for a while, you will be racked with pain and fear and guilt. I know my mum and dad felt it and I watched them suffer. They thought we deserved better, even if they didn’t. They felt they must have done something terribly wrong to be struck down by such an evil disease.

  I used to walk through the shops with my mum and she could never look people in the eye. I wondered why. Now I know. She thought everybody knew she was sick. They knew she was poor. She wasn’t worth anything. The only time she did look people in the eye was to spit venom at them. ‘What are you fuckin’ looking at, eh? Come on kids, don’t worry about these people. They don’t know what it’s like te struggle. Get oot o’ my fuckin’ way.’

  Mum would pull us quickly past some poor unsuspecting person she thought had more than us. More anything. Just more. Straightening our clothes and sticking my hair down with her own spit, acting like she didn’t care at all. But she did. I could feel it. Her disease was bad and I could feel it in my bones too. I knew I had it.

  ‘Don’t worry, son. One day you’ll leave aw this shit behind ye,’ she’d say as we walked away. ‘You wait. The whole world will be yours. You’re lucky. You’re no like me. You’ll get away from here. I know it.’

  When I did get away, it was as if I had turned against my mum. She hated that I had anything. I tried to share all I had with her but she wouldn’t have a bar of it. In fact, she threw it back in my face. ‘I don’t want yer money. I don’t need anything from you. You think you’re so good. You wait. When it’s all gone you’ll be back here with us where you belong. Mister high and bloody mighty.’

  So I was convinced it wouldn’t last. I’d end up back in the gutter where I belonged, just like Mum said. For years that’s what I was expecting, and when it didn’t happen, I did my best to make it happen. That’s where I belonged, in the gutter like the rest of my kind. The disease was still lingering in me. It was strong. I drank. I drank way too much. I could feel the shame even when I had nothing to be ashamed of. The same shame my mother and father felt. I could hear that familiar voice. It screamed inside me, ‘Who do you think you are? Get back where you came from. You’re not fooling anyone.’

  EVERYTHING I TRIED TO do for Mum wasn’t enough.

  ‘Mum, I’ve bought you a beautiful house. It’s right next door to me so you can see the kids.’

  The house was on ten acres on a property adjoining us, with four bedrooms and a view that looked straight down the valley. It was a beautiful home. I thought she’d finally be happy.

  ‘Well I don’t need a hoose. I’m happy in Elizabeth. I’m no livin’ in a fancy hoose, surrounded by snobby bloody neighbours. Looking over the fence doon their fuckin’ noses at me. And I suppose you think I’m gonna be yer babysitter, do ye? Well, I’m no.’

  Eventually she and her husband Ray moved into the house but she never came near us. She lived less than one hundred yards from her grandchildren. We were hoping she would spend time with them. She never visited once. When I took the kids over to see her, it was as if we were putting her out. I tried to include her in the life we were living but she wasn’t comfortable with any of it.

  One day we took her for lunch at a dear friend’s house. She lived in a big old house, filled with beautiful art and antiques. Mum sat there scowling at everyone, with her lips pursed, as if she’d been forced into something horrible. Our friend was warm and friendly, going out of her way to make my mum as comfortable as possible.

  Halfway through lunch as our friend went out to get the next course of the meal, Mum looked around the room and then turned to me and said with a voice full of poison, ‘Ye’d think with all this fuckin’ money she could buy some new furniture, eh?’

  Then she sat back with a smug look on her face, as if she’d let me know, in no uncertain terms, that she wasn’t impressed by any of it. Lunch was lovely but the shine was gone out of the day. I couldn’t wait to take her home.

  A few months later she called me up and announced in her usual acid tone, ‘This hoose is too fuckin’ cold for me. I’ve got arthritis. Ye should have thought of that, shouldn’t ye. Anyway, I want to go and live back in Elizabeth with ma real friends.’

  ‘Mum, the house isn’t cold. There’s central heating and an open fireplace.’

  ‘Ye think I can afford wood, do ye? We’re no all millionaires, ye know.’

  ‘But Mum, you don’t have to buy wood. I pay all the bills. You just have to relax and enjoy it. It’s all for you.’

  ‘How can I relax in this toffy bloody place? I know naebody here. And I don’t want tae know any of ’em. It’s lonely for us here. We want tae go back where we belong.’ Mum always spoke for her and Ray. I hardly heard Ray speak, come to think of it. Ray was either a listener or an idiot. Probably a good thing considering he was living with Mum.

  She never thought of spending time with her grandkids. That’s when I realised that Mum didn’t have a maternal bone in her body. She never had.
She wasn’t cut out to be a parent. I just wish she had of thought of this before she had six children. But we all live and learn.

  I was starting to learn too. After about six months I rang Mum.

  ‘Hi Mum. Why don’t you come back to your house? It’s sitting here empty. Waiting for you.’

  ‘It’s no ma hoose. I don’t own it.’

  ‘Mum, I bought it for you.’

  ‘Well I don’t want it. You can fuckin’ sell it as far as I’m concerned. I’m never coming back tae that cold miserable place.’

  I was hurt but I was angry too. Nothing ever made her happy and I swore to stay away from her if I could. I put the house on the market but I asked one more time before I sold it. ‘Mum, are you sure you don’t want to come back up here with us?’

  ‘No. I’m happy right where I am.’

  I sold the house the next week.

  Months later I heard that Mum had told my brothers and sisters that we had thrown her out. ‘They threw me oot on the street. Right on ma arse. I loved that hoose. It was that bloody dragon woman. I know it.’

  Mum apparently had a new name for Jane. I was furious but Jane couldn’t care less. My mum could never hurt her. Not like she could me.

  JANE TOLD ME SHE was pregnant again with our fourth child. This was the best news we’d had in a long time. Our babies were a source of joy to us. No matter how much we fought or how bad I felt, the babies made us smile.