‘I’ve never seen any of his films …’
‘You didn’t miss anything.’
Their son Xavier was a nice kid and we got along fairly well
after a while though we’d never be close, perhaps because he was so far ahead of me in his outlook. He never fought with his siblings or with his parents. When I mentioned I’d noticed this, there was a mild pity for me in his expression.
‘What would that achieve?’ he offered.
They were rich, as their forebears had been. But they appreciated every little thing that their wealth brought them. Everything they owned, from the smallest electrical device to the largest piece of furniture, had something remarkable or delightful about it. Though they weren’t being showy in revealing this from time to time, rather, they were sharing with you their delight in such things. Yes, everything they owned was also the best that money could buy. ‘Saves having to buy two,’ I once heard the father murmur.
They spoke with a cultured accent, English-sounding but with something underneath it, almost their own accent as if being from their very own country. I’ve since met rich people, ‘blue blood’, ‘old money’, as far as anything can be called ‘old’ in Australia, who, despite all their advantages, have what I like to call ‘no idea’. Completely aristocratically pig-ignorant and useless. Not this family. They were a living, breathing education.
So, what did I learn from my exposure to them? Be rich and have everything you want, becoming master of all you survey? Well, yes, but more than that. It was that contentment comes from knowing who you are. Because they surely did. Sometimes people behave as if the world revolves around them. Sometimes it actually does. This family were living proof of the following lesson: if (big ‘if’) your self-confidence has a sound basis, apply that confidence and the whole world will follow. These were the kind of people from whom you learn that a class act is never an act. Also that people with true class never, ever use the word ‘classy’.
But the most important thing I learnt from them was something very important about myself. My show-and-tell days not quite having passed, one night before bed I was spinning an elaborate account of an experience I’d had at Scout camp where I’d thrown an egg at someone and had had one thrown back at me; however, trying to impress father and son and make up for my lack of everything they so naturally possessed, I’d exaggerated this into a full-scale war of raining eggs. After long moments, the father paused, fixed me with the most enigmatic smile and said the following, verbatim.
‘How many of these eggs do you imagine you threw?’
‘Ah, well, I don’t remember how many exactly …’ I stumbled with a nervous laugh.
He didn’t have to say to me, ‘Look, I know you’re lying. Yes, it’s a harmless lie, but why, boy?’ He didn’t have to. He may as well have said, ‘If you want to impress people, tell the truth. That will impress them.’
All the World’s a Stage
In Sixth Class at the Marist Brothers, I would be up on the platform in front of the class on a regular basis, but not for show-and-tell; I didn’t want to be a bullshit artist anymore.
I started writing and directing plays for the class, my star cast in alphabetical order: Kelvin Banner, Michael Hayden, Seamus O’Rourke, Stanley Werner. The class had been divided up into groups and set the project of putting on a play each. Our group actually put one on. I asked our teacher Mr Merritt if we could keep doing them. He said, ‘Go ahead, young man.’ We satirised ads of the day, also TV shows like The Love Boat, Simon Townsend’s Wonder World and Chips, to name a few.
Though Wonder World was an interesting magazine-format program for kids, a highly irritating feature of it was Townsend’s dog, ‘Woodrow’, an enormous, dribbling bloodhound that sat at his desk as he presented the show. Townsend so loved this dog that all it had to do was drop a great gob of saliva onto the desk and Townsend would go into giggling vapours of affection for it. The class cheered when Michael Hayden, playing Townsend, picked up a life-sized, furry toy dog and smashed it in murderous fury against the classroom blackboard.
For Chips, a show about two super-cool LA motorcycle cops, my design was very simple, probably why it was so effective – it was caricature. Having taped the show’s funky opening theme directly off the TV one night, I had Michael and Kelvin sit side by side on low stools up on the classroom platform, facing the class, each with a pair of dragster bike handlebars held out in front of them. As I pressed ‘play’ on the cassette deck, Michael and Kelvin became the show’s coolly swerving, self-adoring heroes and brought the house down. I’ll never forget the look of barely restrained delight on Kelvin’s face at the class reaction, as if to say, ‘This is working! This is working!’
The pair went on to slay all manner of baddies – bank robbers, pimps, corrupt city officials – purely by swaggering in and striking an ‘I’m God’s gift to women’ pose. By caricaturing the program, we were in fact showing how silly it was and I suspect that’s what the class responded to so warmly.
These matinees were mostly of good quality, the class in stitches more often than not. Though, to tell the truth, one production bombed and I received an introduction to yet another fact of life – the critic. After the effort in question, Mr Merritt had left the room briefly and one kid stood up and pointed out to me quite sincerely why this comedy hadn’t worked where others had. Our first plays had been really good, he reassured. We’d hit on a good formula. But we couldn’t just keep on repeating it. My deliberate strategy had proven wrong – they needed something fresh.
The troupe and I spent a string of lunchtimes workshopping what this ‘something fresh’ might be. Unfortunately, we never found it. And the school year was coming to an end.
I wonder what my fellow thespians are doing now. What they’ve done with their lives. They were great guys. Yes, I penned it all, but they made it happen for me and taught me a fundamental lesson: in life, you can never get anything done alone.
Comedy
By the age of twelve, next to the opposite sex, comedy had become the most important thing in my life, the addiction that had started with Bugs Bunny having graduated to The Kenny Everett Video Show. It never occurred to me that Everett was being so intensely gay, the eccentric British humour of the show akin to oxygen for me. (I didn’t know the Village People were gay either!) I loved all the characters Everett played, especially ‘Sid Snot’, a leather-clad rocker spiv with lines like ‘First ten years of me life I thought me name was Shut Up’, also ‘Angry of Mayfair’, a suspender-belted arch-conservative who would close his tirades about anything and everything by smashing the camera lens with his umbrella. Oh, and it also featured the R-rated dance routines of ‘Hot Gossip’, or as Everett referred to them, ‘naughty bits’.
I first became aware of this show watching TV with Xavier on one of my ensuing visits to Palm Beach. What had me an instant disciple was a short cartoon called Bambi Meets Godzilla, by New Zealander Marv Newland. The black-and-white animation began with a shot of delicate little Bambi grazing at flowers by a stream to the gentle opening oboe strains of the William Tell Overture. During this sequence, the opening credits scrolled up the screen over Bambi ever grazing, with just the subtlest of movements from the little creature every now and then.
‘Bambi Meets Godzilla – by Marv Newland’.
‘Written by Marv Newland’.
‘Directed by Marv Newland’.
‘Produced by Marv Newland’.
All the time, Bambi is idyllically grazing, the music serenely wafting.
‘Bambi’s wardrobe by Marv Newland’.
‘Marv Newland produced by Mr and Mrs Newland’.
Then, with no warning and filling the entire screen – thooomp – the gargantuan foot of Godzilla thumps down onto a flattened Bambi, legs splayed terminally beneath it.
‘THE END’. Closing credits roll just as above, including the acknowledgement re Godzilla having appeared ‘courtesy of the Mayor of Tokyo’.
That cartoon wa
s a turning point in my life. It gave me my first ever truly ‘adult’ laughing fit and I have never looked at the world around me the same way since. This was iconoclasm.
One of my favourite segments of The Kenny Everett Video Show was a cartoon called Captain Kremmin, a wickedly comic parody of the old Flash Gordon sci-fi serials. This was also played on the radio and was so popular that it was played on two opposing radio stations at the same time each week. I wasn’t a fan; I was a fanatic.
Every Monday morning I would climb the steep Hillview Road from Eastwood Station to school with my ‘tranny’ glued to my ear. This was before ‘tranny’ meant ‘transvestite’; it meant ‘transistor radio’. Way before Walkmans, infinitely before iPods, we listened to trannies – small, cheap radios which bore the label ‘Made in Japan’. At the time, this was synonymous with ‘inferior product’, back when ‘Sony’ meant something very different to what it does now. Back before that company put so many local and American electronics companies out of business, ‘Sony’ didn’t mean ‘world-beating excellence’, ‘best you can buy’; it meant ‘small and cheap’. Anyway, I was so compulsive about Captain Kremmin that on any excursion we ever took, I’d piss off all the other kids by insisting that the bus driver play cassette tapes I’d made of the show.
‘Aw, Sheee-dy, not again!’ ‘Nah, you’ll love this, you’ll love this, this is a good one!’
Another revelation for me from that time was the Marx Brothers, their black-and-white films regularly being shown on TV on Sunday afternoons. My God, they were from 1935 and they were so funny! But more than that, Harpo’s performances could jump from perfect insanity to perfect solemnity. In A Day at the Races, he plays the piano with such gusto that it self-destructs section by section, then completely. Only then does he take the iron piano-wire frame, arrange it upright and play it like a harp, and in a way I can only describe as holy.
In Go West, he plays the harp on an American Indian fabric loom, his performance hypnotically beautiful. When he finishes, the Indian chief standing behind him places his hand on Harpo’s shoulder in a moment of sacred silence. Even at the time, I could sense that Harpo had just been playing in honour of a people dispossessed.
Whether verbal or on the piano, I didn’t so much take to Chico’s performances, which were more restrained, until I realised the golden secrets of comedy that they were demonstrating: economy and timing. For me the main man was Groucho.
Harpo comes in to see the doctor, played by Groucho, Harpo completely terrified. Groucho takes his pulse (long, silent pause), then: ‘Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.’
For me, these moments seemed to hover over reality and made me feel like I was too. They were introducing me to something I would much later learn to be called ‘surrealism’.
(Groucho): ‘Don’t point that beard at me. It might go off.’
Lines such as these were, to me, like the sun coming up.
The bedrock of all comedy is the keen observation of life. Whether I was keenly observing the world around me as a result of my immersion in comedy, I can’t say for sure. One thing is certain, however. By this time, I was very definitely in the habit.
The Immortality of Youth
Try as you might, you couldn’t kill yourself at Crackernight anymore. Gone were skyrockets, bungers, thunders, ball-shooters. There were still crackers of the pretty Roman candle type, and you could always sustain third-degree burns, but the chances of actually doing yourself in were by then pretty slim. I’d have to find other ways. These I found, and how I didn’t kill myself many times over, I’ll never know.
The streets surrounding Howard Place were hugely long and steep and I used to rollerskate down them. Yes, I had finally graduated from jumping off the gutter.
People who go rollerblading today are generally seen wearing at least some kind of knee or elbow protection, sometimes even a helmet. Indeed, it’s required by law that kids today wear a helmet even if just riding a bike. There was no such law back in Howard Place. I could have hit a stone at thirty miles per hour, taken a tumble and actually survived if I’d been wearing a motorcycle helmet and full carbon-fibre body armour. Luckily for me, I never hit that stone and never took that tumble. If I had, I’m sure I would have sustained at least major skin abrasions. Hell, I could have suffered serious head injuries.
I used to pretend I was an Olympic downhill skier and crouch into a face-first, aerodynamic ‘racing tuck’. Sometimes I was George Lazenby escaping Blofeld down Piz Gloria in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. If I’d hit a car, there’d definitely have been a funeral in Howard Place. Ah, the certainty of youth that it will live forever …
The Opposite Number
My motive for working so hard to be the best roller-skater I could possibly be was the oldest known to Man, or rather, to Boy.
Girls.
By the age of twelve my key goal in life was to impress the opposite sex at the Carlingford Rollerskating Rink every second Saturday. I failed miserably in this task, of course, being thrown off the speed skating event time after time.
I was spending less and less time with Steve and Juliette during this period. We still saw each other, but we didn’t seem to muck around as much anymore. The reason for this was because, even though I was the classroom goodie-goodie, I’d become friends with the toughest boy in Sixth Class, one Jim Stone. The teacher had placed me next to him to help him with his maths.
Jim was a master rollerskater and having sex with girls at age twelve. God, how my nascent hormones envied him. At twelve he looked about eighteen, certainly to his local newsagent, who’d sell him Playboy magazine without question. As a flow-on effect of this, I saw my first ‘Ladies with No Clothes On’, of which Jim became my dealer.
What Jim got out of our odd-couple partnership, I’m not quite sure. Maybe the Sixth Class drop-out liked being superior to someone, which he was to me, infinitely so in terms of rollerskating and sex. Maybe it was that I made him laugh.
‘Jim … Do you reckon that girl’d like me?’
‘Got hair on y’balls yet?’
‘Nope … But any day now. Any day …’
Jim insisted that, during the school holidays, I should join him on a government-run ‘National Fitness Camp’. I’d been on one of these camps about a year previously and had absolutely hated it – Nazi camp counsellors, atrocious food, dirty all the time, no midday movies. What a waste of a school holiday! Never again. Never, ever again. Jim assured me we’d get girls …
I said yes.
We hadn’t been on the night bus to Lake Keepit for half an hour when Jim pointed out to me an attractive girl who, just like him, was twelve but looked eighteen. ‘Watch me get this girl,’ he pronounced. Which he did. All I got was a fitful doze. That night, my ‘embryonic sexual envy’ became no longer embryonic.
I saw hardly anything of Jim on that camp. I’m not sure if he was having sex with the girl the whole time, but every morning she seemed completely exhausted for some strange reason. Luckily for me, the Sixth Class ‘theatre set’ – Michael, Seamus, Kelvin and Stanley – had come along as well and we had a pretty good time too – canoeing, archery, shooting air-rifles and camping out. We met kids from the Western Suburbs, the food was very nearly edible and the camp counsellors here were friendly and relaxed, although they made a daily public announcement that campers must stay in their own beds after lights-out.
I met a really nice kid there, a smiling ‘gentle giant’ type. I forget his name as we never exchanged letters afterwards and I never saw him again. It seemed completely innocent and heterosexual to me when, stark naked in the shower block one night, he laughed as he told me how a certain girl here was known to be interested in him because he had actual hair on his balls. I looked. You couldn’t miss it; indeed he did. I certainly didn’t have any yet. It was the first I’d ever seen, the pure white pubic hair that is a young boy’s first. Just the two of us alone somehow, I was glad for him and hoped he’d get the girl.
The h
omosexual potential in that situation never occurred to me at the time. He may have been straight as an arrow. He may have been providing the opportunity for something to happen between us. If ever I was going to emerge as gay, it would have happened there. It didn’t. Perhaps for the simple reason that I was completely obsessed with girls.
Other strange things happened to me at that camp. There was a girl who was always around me and the theatre set. She was quite beautiful, highly vivacious, confident and talkative, and I wanted her.
One night, as we all lined up for the dining hall, I had a beanie pulled down over my face with sunglasses over the front of it which I flicked up and down while doing Groucho Marx impersonations. This was getting a laugh out of the kids surrounding, including the girl in question. A sparkling smile on her face: ‘Who is it?! Who is it?!’ she begged.
I whipped the beanie off to reveal my identity at which point her expression dropped flat.
‘Oh. It’s you,’ she sighed.
I don’t think I have ever felt more crushed in my entire life than in that single moment.
There was another girl somehow always with us. This one I thought beautiful too, but she was very quiet. And she really was beautiful with long, slightly wavy, light brown hair, the darkest eyes and a calm about her that made me lose my train of thought mid sentence. Though she was constantly near me, I don’t think I ever heard her speak. Maybe I should have spoken softly and directly to her one time instead of holding court. I learnt something from her though; that the single impediment to getting exactly what you want can sometimes be that it’s right in front of you. She also reinforced my Golden Rule for All Boys … Act, boys, act!
Goodbye Crackernight Page 17
