Goodbye Crackernight

by Justin Sheedy

  What Sofia meant precisely by ‘marry you’, I cannot imagine. In hindsight, we really should have nutted it out that night. In the moment I assumed she meant the same thing I meant by it, something along the lines of ‘you and me together forever’, and by ‘me’ I meant ‘me only’. By contrast, it became apparent in the days that followed that Sofia either defined ‘marriage’ as ‘acting around Justin as if he isn’t there’, ‘open’ marriage at best, or had clean forgotten about the whole thing. Thus, my first love fizzled.

  Juliette’s first love was Bill Peach, the presenter from the ABC TV program This Day Tonight. It was her favourite show and I remember that clearly as I’d wanted to watch something else and was having a force-10 sulk. But no, we were minding her while her parents were overseas, Juliette was our guest and she had to watch This Day Tonight. As the man came up on the black-and-white screen, little Juliette exclaimed, face full of wonder, ‘One day I am going to eat that peach.’

  She was also in love with the star of the Canadian Mounty Show. She never missed it. The trouble was, Juliette seemed to think that television was interactive, or ‘two-way’. Sitting really close to the telly and talking to the screen, when the object of her affections didn’t answer she went ballistic.

  Sex Education

  I was six.

  ‘Mum …’

  ‘Yes, darling?’

  ‘Mum, how do people get “related”?’

  She gave me The Look. Her face was pained. She started slowly, reluctantly … ‘Well, when two people are married, the father puts his penis …’

  I literally backed out of there. The hideous subject was never spoken of again.

  My next experience of anything ‘sexual’ was the book, Where Did I Come From? I found it in a cupboard at Steve’s house. This was a magic moment as this was the kind of thing that would never exist at my own home. Tremendously excited, I opened to page one and saw a picture of a mother and a father in a bath, as well as a sailing boat floating in the bath with them. On the next page, they had left the bath to go to bed, and there was a picture of the bath, now empty. Whatever the message was, it was lost on me. I thought, the sailing boat’s gone. So what?

  Another of my early sexual experiences was watching The Benny Hill Show, or rather, trying to. There wasn’t a Sunday night I didn’t attempt a secret look at it, hoping against hope the TV room might be empty just at the point when the gorgeous ‘Hill’s Angels’ came on. (The single time I was caught peeking at them I got a slap.) Oh, there was also the day a girl fainted on a very hot day at school. The teachers put her in the shade, took off her shoes and had her with her feet in cool water, and I saw her knickers (!)

  My Deepest, Darkest Secret

  At this point, I suppose I should tell you about my dolls. My nude dolls. (We backtrack a bit here as I wasn’t sure about owning up to this, but here goes …)

  At the age of three, I had in my personal possession certain plastic Barbie dolls. They were hand-me-down things of my elder sisters and had been passed to me as my sisters were getting too old for them, while I was still too young to be given toys of my own yet. I was so young I used to be sent to bed at 3 pm on a Saturday. I wasn’t tired – I’m still not – so I used to play with these things to pass the time. I couldn’t help it if they were Barbie dolls long since discarded and by now lacking their clothes, could I! It was all perfectly innocent.

  Okay, they were nude, they robbed banks, they gave kids Chinese burns for no reason, nicked their bikes, serial sociopathic bike-nicking Chinese burners, if you like. So I christened them the ‘Bad Rudies’. What of it? All right, all right, I admit it; the game turned me into the man I am today. Look, I’m sorry I even mentioned it. It’s been privately dogging me my whole life. These dolls were like the Ring of Power in search of an owner. The first time I told my wife about it (the sole human being who’s heard of it until you right now), she couldn’t have sex for two whole days she was laughing so hard. Every time we’d try it, she’d crack up uncontrollably.

  Now she will not even refer to the whole sordid matter of the Bad Rudies. No. She will only refer to it as ‘Baaad Ruuudieees!’

  Oh, and that’s not the end of it. She doesn’t call sex ‘sex’ anymore. Guess what she calls it.

  Bad Rudies

  Something Mike and Carol Brady never had. They just sat up in bed reading, like your parents did.

  The first sexual thing I ever witnessed was a teenage couple having significantly more than a smooch in an FJ Holden. I was six, it was some kind of church picnic at a place backing onto the bush, I got bored and thought I’d go exploring. After a short walk down through some foliage I noticed the parked car with two ‘big kids’ in it about fifty feet off and that they hadn’t seen me yet. I froze. Goodness, what were they doing? I must say, whatever it was, it was fascinating. To this day, every time I see an old FJ Holden I feel all funny.

  The Wonder Years?

  With no through-traffic in Howard Place, you could lie down on the road with impunity. During daylight saving, Sarah and I would stretch out on the asphalt of the culde-sac still warm from the day, looking face up at the dusk as the first stars of twilight came out.

  Man, was I a lucky little boy. I actually had two girls-nextdoor. In stereo – one on each side, and each adjacent family had a pool! No, we didn’t have a pool. Yes, my father was a dentist, but we were too poor for a pool somehow. Feel my pain. Luckily the Whites pulled out some palings from the wooden fence between our houses and built a gate. We could use their pool anytime, they said, without even asking. On the other side, the Jacksons said all we had to do was jump their fence. Clearly, each family was trying to save our pride, given our abject poverty. I loved to swim, and particularly in the morning hours. That point was always crucial to me. In the morning light, even if it was slightly chilly, the pool water had an opalescent quality to it which, if missed, filled me with an acute feeling of loss, a sense of time running out. Years before I knew what the words meant, I had an in-built sense of pre-emptive nostalgia. Yes, an afternoon sense of nostalgia for the morning.

  If all this reminds you of the above-named TV show, then don’t worry. The surviving footage of my own ‘wonder years’ is pathetic. Just like on the opening credits to that show, my next-door neighbours had a grainy Super 8 film reel of me. It was taken in the backyard when I was six, on the occasion of my kindergarten birthday. The silent footage shows a game of ‘Oranges and Lemons’, that ancient game where the children form a circular chain and file beneath the linked arms of two older siblings who sing the song, ‘Oranges and lemons ring the bells of Saint Clements.’ When they stop singing, they bring their arms down to trap a child between them, who then wins a prize.

  But do you think I could bear the anxiety of potential capture? In scratchy celluloid, there are all the other kids, beautiful, graceful little souls filing like angels beneath the arms of the singing siblings. And there’s me desperately wanting to be a part of it yet flailing outside the circle, arms and legs pumping in a near hissy fit. If only a psychiatrist had been present.

  The next-door neighbours screened it for me once again when I was about twenty-one, back on a visit from my inner-city terrace. To them, it was still just as funny as it had been on that afternoon back in 1974.

  Then, with no actual footage of my gutter-jump phase, Mrs White, as usual, had everyone in stitches by acting it out for them. Good old Mrs White.

  Chapter Three

  Bullies

  Steve told me he didn’t have any bullies at his school, no doubt because Steve was tall for his age.

  I did though. His name was Bruce Banner.

  Living just a few streets away down the lane, I’d inherited him from something my brother had done. I never found out what, but Bruce used to punch me really hard for it whenever he passed me in the convent playground.

  I never ‘dobbed’ on Bruce. Being a ‘dobber’ – our word for reporting a wrongdoer to a grown-up – was considered cowardly. (If
only bullying had been instead.) Maybe I was just scared that, if I did, next time he’d punch me even harder. He was ten and I was six, but he towered over me as any tenyear-old does when you’re that little. Now I think of it, if I had dobbed on the fuckwit, the Mother Superior would have come down on Bruce like the Angel of Death in a bad mood. Maybe I didn’t as I was such good friends with his younger brother Kelvin. Maybe that was what Bruce operated on. Either that or he knew my own brother was safely a few miles away at Marist Brothers Eastwood, as all us boys would be after fourth class.

  Funny about bullies, isn’t it. They seem usually to be those who have been bullied themselves, then who’ve chosen to continue the cycle, as opposed to those who’ve consciously chosen to do the opposite. They then only ever put on the bully mask with the advantage of numbers or superior size to their victim if operating alone. Possessing no natural authority, hence their need to steal it, whatever their profile, the bully’s basic motive is always utterly simple.

  A bully is, because it can.

  I always remember the ‘Responsible Adult’ note on fireworks: ‘WARNING. Device to be used only in the presence of a Responsible Adult’. I had a mental picture of the ‘Responsible Adult’. It was something all us kids would become one day. As a ‘Grown-Up’, things would be different to how they were in the school playground. You’d stop getting bullied and punched ‘n’ stuff. I was very young.

  One time after the end of ‘big lunch’, I was called out of class to comfort Kelvin Banner. He was watching on from the verandah as his big brother remained all alone in the playground, stuck up a tree and in pain. Mrs Sweeney said that Kelvin could use a friend at a time like this. I was glad to have been chosen, and when I joined him he gave me a grateful smile.

  The fire brigade were called. As I watched on with Kelvin, a supportive arm around his shoulders, I looked down at poor Bruce, laughing at him on the inside. It felt like justice. He’d made me suffer; now he was suffering, and I was glad.

  I could be a bit of a bully myself, on occasion. I have this vivid memory of stamping really hard on Nathan Silk’s foot once and making him cry. It happened down the bottom of the playground where the ground had eroded to a fine, powdery dust. I remember him bent down in mute pain, his face hidden from me, and seeing his teardrop plop onto the dusty ground, myself not quite believing what I’d just done. But I was very sorry about that and never stamped on anyone’s foot ever again. Any promising future career I might have had as a bully ended right there. I had just inflicted significant physical pain on another, and the sensation hadn’t agreed with me one little bit.

  Though not a patch on Juliette, I’d say I was more of a bossy boots than a bully, always telling others what to do. I used to lead a conga line of kids home from school on an ‘Adventure Trail’, and not just once either. A bunch of kids got off the bus at my stop, various ages, about ten of them heading the same way as me. I showed them what I thought the most ‘exciting’ way down Devon Street, through a fork in this tree then that, along the deepest gutter on Waterloo Road, the longest section of brick fence you could walk along, a slalom course between a line of bushes. Anyway, my little game caught on.

  Afternoon Telly

  Every day after school, our front door in Howard Place was left open. Seamus O’Rourke was the little boy who lived down the lane – literally. My first friend from school, immediately after it Seamus would march up the lane, walk in and sit down comfortably on the couch next to me in front of the telly without even speaking. I thought it odd first time but soon got used to it. And oh, the TV we watched! If ever there was a key formative influence on my childhood, this was it. Yes, we watched a lot of it, but it was such good quality TV.

  It all started with an addiction to Bugs Bunny, and to all the rest of those wonderful left-field Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1950s: Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn, Elmer Fudd, Pepé Le Pew, and Daffy Duck, Daffy always playing a Hollywood B-list try-hard, anything from a desperately incompetent Robin Hood to ‘Duck Dodgers … in the 24th and a half century!’

  That cartoon, just for example, was visually magnificent. It begins with Duck Dodgers entering Space HQ on a moving walkway which draws him beneath a gigantic ‘all-seeing eye’. This sinister object, to which Dodgers seems oblivious as it tracks him, has nothing to do with the cartoon’s plot at all; it’s simply there. It has also long since been regarded by film critics as serious art.

  Now, our parents enforced strict limitations on the amount of afternoon telly we watched. Maybe that was why Seamus was always over. If they’d ever realised what a marvellous education these shows were, what Heaven-sent stimulus they were for our budding brains, they would have done precisely the opposite. To them, cartoons were just trash TV, empty fodder for kids only and something they shouldn’t watch too much of. ‘Should be outside playing cricket,’ Dad would say, ‘or actually doing yourself some good by reading a book.’ They never understood that a lot of these cartoons were adult-level comedies, and here we were as children directly benefiting from them. I think it was one of the creators of Sesame Street who said that the best way to educate children and the deliberate approach of that show was to talk slightly above the kids’ heads, causing them to make the step up, thereby raising their own cultural competence over time. I believe this was precisely what we got out of the high-quality afternoon TV during the seventies. If only our parents had known …

  From the Road Runner Show, for example, we were introduced to one of the cornerstones of human intelligence: a sense of irony. It was only years later when at university and studying film that I read Road Runner’s creator, Chuck Jones, confirming that, yes indeed, The Coyote had discovered Archimedes’ Principle for himself, yet with an ironic twist; namely, that if he had a fulcrum and a lever long enough, he could make the Earth fall on himself. Jones had consciously created Coyote as a parody of the human figure doomed by the ‘Curse of Knowledge’. Yes, each one of his cause-and-effect schemes to ensnare the Road Runner was immaculately reasoned and worked out on paper, yet it was his very ‘human’ rationality that brought him unstuck each time, by contrast to the Road Runner, who was merely instinctive. It was superb social satire.

  We were even introduced to the notion of the ‘fanatic’, the Coyote having initially chased the Road Runner as he was actually hungry, only to lose sight of the end for the means. He’d started out with a knife and fork, these becoming discarded for his endless ‘ACME’ gadgets, until he became nothing but the ultimate consumer, the mail order ACME junkie.

  There was some wonderful locally produced arvo TV as well. Cartoon Corner was a favourite, featuring some excellent improvised comedy by Daryl Somers, Ozzie Ostrich, voice-over man John Blackman, and Murray, their sound effects man. Mum never caught on to the fact that their humour was pretty wicked most of the time. How could it be? It was only a kids’ show! At the same time, this team had just started their live Saturday morning program, Hey Hey It’s Saturday, a ‘variety’ format show featuring absurdly comic segments, competitions and a high level of audience participation. Audience members would turn up in weird and embarrassing costumes, sometimes on a given theme, sometimes for no reason at all, prizes being awarded not for the best rendition of a popular song but for the very worst. For me, the show’s supreme moments were when Blackman was able to reduce Somers, the show’s host, to tears of laughter. It was all live-to-air and he could be absolutely helpless for long minutes.

  Integral to my daily dose of cartoons was ‘afternoon tea’. This was a religious institution of my childhood. Mum would make slices of white bread spread thickly with peanut butter, accompanied by big mugs of milky coffee. She never failed us, directly due to her own childhood memory of always being hungry when she got home from school, her working mother never home yet and no food in the house even if she had been. They didn’t even have a fridge! Luckily for me, we did, my mother was home, and I loved afternoon tea so much, it gave me such a feeling of contented wellbeing that if I’d missed a sin
gle afternoon of it I think I would have died. Though one afternoon always stuck out for me.

  One day during the Holy Sacrament of afternoon tea and Cartoon Corner, my vision became momentarily distracted past the TV by a beautiful, pale green light dappling the liquidambar trees down the side of the house. I said to myself, ‘This is wonderful. I’ll always remember this,’ as if conscious of the possibility that it might not always be so, that my childhood was merely a moment passing.

  For some strange reason, The Monkees also had that effect on me. (There goes my old pre-emptive nostalgia thing again.) Racing home through the dark winter afternoons to watch the show, I had an acute sense that I was witnessing a style and era recently passed, something slipping away from my own time yet not quite gone from it. How, at the age of six, I could possess such a notion, I haven’t the faintest idea. It remains something completely mysterious to me. At six, I was consciously aware of feeling as if I had this foreknowledge of The Monkees, as if I’d lived before or sensed them from the womb. I was passionate about the show, about its music especially, but please explain to me why, when watching it, I would actually shed a secret tear while Mum was preparing dinner behind me in the kitchen. (Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking: I may have been a tomgirl, but I did not have a crush on Davy Jones. All right?! Well, all right, then.)

  It was due to these shows that laughter, music and art were becoming integral to my being. And watching them with Seamus after school always seemed such a comforting, cosy experience.

  Towering Teenagers