Impractical Jokes (12 page)

‘Sure. Why?'

‘Charlie's really getting into papier-mâché.'

‘Really?'

They would look at me with a mild disbelief that I matched with my best ‘struggling artist' face, the look a young Picasso may have had if he needed his dad to ask around the neighbourhood for spare paint and a slightly fractured view of things.

‘Yeah, he's mad for the stuff. Isn't that right, champ?'

‘Oh, you know me. I love to mâché.'

If you go back far enough, I think you'll find most of the greats worked in news and paste at some point.

‘He's used up all the papers at home, so if you could help us out . . .'

Before long, and without exception, the mark would be handing over a stack of dailies.

‘So what are you making with all this stuff?'

‘I'm working on a pyramid.'

‘Good for you.'

As we walked back to the car my dad gave me a look of pride mixed with fear. Pride that I shared his love of the game, fear that I had lied so easily and that he could quite possibly never trust me again.

And so it was that on the third Saturday when Richard went out to his driveway, he found no less than two hundred newspapers, all perfectly wrapped in cling film, covering his entire driveway. By all accounts he spent an hour sifting through them, inspecting each one. He found tabloids, broadsheets, locals, internationals, farming periodicals and journals of record. The one paper he didn't find was that day's paper with an ad for Opie Ties. That particular paper was up a tree.

Seven days later he came out to discover there simply wasn't a paper.

As far as we knew, in four weeks, Richard had not once seen his ad.

Within a few months, Richard was faring a little better. The ads had all run successfully and the good people of Bavid Bones seemed thoroughly satisfied. Opie Ties were a welcome addition to their range and to the necks of men across Australia.

Once you become something of a player in the mens-wear business, sooner or later people will start coming to you for fashion favours. Not always a great advantage but one fine November morning Richard's phone rang with a matter both urgent and welcome.

‘Richard Opie.'

‘Richard. It's Ron.'

Richard beamed. His secretary had not seen him smile this much since he inked the deal with the Bones Corporation.

‘Ronnie. What can I do for you?'

Dad could hear in Richard's voice that he was smiling. This made him nervous, but he chose to ignore it.

‘Look, I've got a family wedding this weekend and I really need a new tie.'

‘Absolutely, Ron. Describe your suit.'

‘Now, Richard, before we go any further, I have to tell you that this is really important.'

‘Of course, Ron.' Richard's smile was very broad now and Dad could hear it.

‘I mean it, Richard. The wedding is for Pammy's side of the family and I could really do with some good public relations after the last wedding.'

‘The last wedding?'

‘I'd rather not go into it.'

‘How am I meant to decide on a tie if I don't know what public relations disaster I am trying to overcome?'

‘Ok. There may or may not have been some inappropriate dancing with the mother of the bride. But that's not the point. The point is I need a good tie.'

‘Getting back to where we began, describe your suit for me.'

‘I'll be wearing a navy pinstripe and a white shirt. I just need something simple and conservative that doesn't scream “life and soul of the party”.'

‘Not a problem, Ron. I will make a tie especially for you.'

At nine o'clock on the morning of the wedding, Richard promptly arrived with the tie. Dad lifted the lid of the box to check that there would be no surprises. He confidently expected a tie in the shape of a fish or embroidered with the phrase ‘I get first crack after the divorce', but what he found inside the box was a charming red tie that matched his suit perfectly.

‘It's perfect. Thanks, Richard. I really appreciate this.'

‘All part of the service, Ron.'

‘Seriously. You're a real mate. I can always count on you.'

‘That's true, Ron. I am nothing if not reliable.'

It wasn't until that afternoon, when Dad was getting dressed, that he took the tie out of the box, only to discover that it was in fact an eight-foot tie.

As my father didn't wear ties that often, the irregular length was initially lost on him. He struggled with it for about ten minutes. Most of that was spent trying to choose a sensible starting position for the broad and narrow ends of the tie. Then, after a few false starts, he made a valiant attempt at a windsor knot. After this failed miserably, he figured perhaps a shelby would be more appropriate. This came out worse than the windsor, and so a four-in-hand was called for. Compared to attempts one and two, this was a disaster. Figuring that he may have been on the right track to begin with, he tried a half-windsor. Who knows? Maybe he just gave it too much windsor. It wasn't until the end of the tie hit the floor for the fourth time that Dad noticed my mum was looking on in hysterics.

‘What's going on, Pammy? Is this length the fashion now?'

‘Not quite, Ronnie,' she said through hoots of laughter.

‘Bloody Richard!'

Mum was really laughing hard now. Partly because the tie was hilarious, but partly because when my father dresses, he has a habit of putting his pants on last. As a result she was looking at her husband, in a shirt, socks and underpants, with a tie that started normal at the neck but ended in a crumpled coil at his feet and a look of confused fury on his face.

‘Well, what am I supposed do with it?'

‘I don't know. Maybe tuck it into your shoe?'

As it turned out, this wasn't far from the eventual solution. For the entirety of the wedding, my father had to keep his jacket fully buttoned, lest he reveal that a good three feet of tie was stuffed into his trousers. At least, thanks to this precarious set-up, there would be no inappropriate dancing.

9

A Tale of Two Toilets

F
or a short while, life returned to normal for the Opies and the Pickerings. Richard went back to making regulation length ties for commercial purposes and Dad went back to dispensing medication and pretending to drink pregnancy samples. Everything was as it should be. The only thing that took place that was even a little out of the ordinary was the renovation of the second story of our house which began in the summer of '89–90.

Anyone who has ever lived through a renovation will tell you that it is one of the most godforsaken, pain-in-the-arse activities you can subject yourself to. There are pitfalls, drawbacks, disappointments and wholesale fuck-ups that are almost impossible to predict and even less possible to prevent. The people you assume to be experts often turn out to be cowboys, deadlines you thought were inflexible bend on a whim and on an almost daily basis you find yourself thinking, ‘I must remember every detail of this because I know that one day I'll be repeating it to a current affairs reporter.'

Yet people persist with this masochistic farce. Why? I put it all down to propaganda. Do you know a phrase you never hear? ‘Our renovation was finished ahead of schedule, came in under budget and exceeded our expectations'. Do you know why you've never heard that phrase? Because renovations occur in the real world and phrases like that occur only in the fantasy land of radio advertisements for companies that perform renovations.

And advertisers aren't the worst offenders. A chronic overabundance of renovation shows on television have given regular people like you and me a dangerously unrealistic expectation of the ease and success of home alteration. In this ‘house porn' all we see is some well-built guy enthusiastically pounding away at a wall with a sledgehammer, never breaking a sweat, and giving the camera a calm smile that says he could renovate for hours on end without needing to take a rest. Meanwhile, his buxom co-host with the cut-off shorts and immaculate hair is such a natural at painting and decorating that she never gets so much as a spot of Island Tide splashed on her blouse. They can work solo, in pairs, trios, or groups and never miss a beat. And when these dynamos finish the job, their hair is still as perfect as when they began.

What you don't see are the false starts, tears, swearing, injuries, floods and genuinely relationship-threatening conflict. You don't see the three-day argument over a tap. You don't see an architect, a carpenter, a plumber and two homeowners all pretend to do a poo in a woeful attempt to settle a disagreement over what height the toilet roll holder should be placed at. You don't see the living room piled high with a whole family's worldly possessions because all of a sudden they have no upstairs to keep it in. You don't see the builder and the dad uncover the adolescent son's secretly stashed copy of
Playboy
or the awkward conversation which follows that evening when the adolescent son comes home from school. You don't see the grandparents shipped off to a six-week lawn bowls and poker machine retreat on the Gold Coast while the family moves into their two-bedroom house because theirs is no longer deemed liveable according to UN human rights standards. And you don't see the youngest child, the aforementioned son, miss out on a bedroom at said grandparents' house and end up sleeping on the floor of the dining room with the family dog. These are the things the renovation shows don't show you.

From memory, I only agreed to go along with the ‘reno' because I had been lured by the promise of a larger bedroom. But as with all such promises, the devil was in the fine print. I was never told I would have to sleep on a floor, I was never told that my family would be set to full-time-grumpy for a whole four months and I was never told that while my new bedroom would be larger it would also be noticeably smaller than my sister's.

All of that now said, there were some good things that came of the renovation. First, everyone got a sink out of the deal. My parent's en suite had two sinks, my sister's and my bathroom had two sinks. We were a four sink family. Among numerous other tiny blessings, this meant no more holding toothpaste in your mouth while waiting for someone to finish washing her hands because she'd pushed in after going to the toilet. This may seem like a tiny improvement, but after dealing with this kind of sink negotiation over a number of years it represented a giant leap towards family harmony.

The other great windfall of the renovation was that we had a surplus of toilets. The two upstairs toilets had been replaced and we were left with two perfectly good porcelain thrones with nowhere to go. We contemplated just leaving them on the nature strip out the front of our house and letting someone take them but in the end we decided against that on the off-chance that someone actually tried to use them. The repercussions were too hideous to risk.

Instead, Dad and I decided that with a little effort they could be put to very good use. First, they were filled with soil and potting mix which, combined with their innate drainage properties, made them excellent flower beds. We then waited for the first cold snap of winter and planted daffodil bulbs. When spring arrived a few months later, the bulbs sprouted and began to flower, and they really were something to behold. The crisp white of the porcelain contrasted with the black of the soil, created the perfect frame for the bright splash of yellow provided by Mother Nature. They were arguably quite beautiful and Dad and I were justifiably very proud—we had made the mature transition from minor tomfoolery to high art installations. Great art is often controversial, and these toilets were definitely designed to polarise. Personally, I may not know much about art, but I know what I like. And I what I like is a handful of daffodils growing out of a commode. Sure, some would argue that they were just a couple of old dunnies with some flowers stuck in them, but that's the great thing about art: it's open to interpretation.

Once the daffodils were in full bloom Dad and I decided it would be wrong not to share our artwork with the wider world. And where better to place them than at the entrance to Richard's business headquarters so that anyone coming to meet Richard, creator of high quality silk ties, had to first pass through this rather surreal, and highly sanitary, welcoming station? The toilets were there from eight in the morning, yet it wasn't until four in the afternoon that anyone thought to mention this to Richard.