The Glass Canoe (9 page)

FOOTIE

The pub football team staggered up from the Southern Cross around seven o'clock some time in February.

If they were lucky they would get in four or five weeks training before the competition started in April.

Some didn't come straight from the pub, they worked till seven. By half past eight or nine, training was finished and all hurried dirty down to the beer again, which went off at ten.

Training was on a double field on a slope. Kids played there in the daytime and dug holes you could hide a dozen beer cans in.

During the season, on the field, any old-fashioned notions of amateurs playing for the sake of the game and helping an opponent to his feet and fair's fair and who cares who wins as long as we enjoy our football were not merely forgotten: they'd never been learned.
You didn't rip one in because last year or last round or last match that bastard ripped one in to you: you hit him first and on principle, to soften him up. To let him know he had to watch something besides the ball.

There was no philosophic acceptance of defeat. You lost not because you weren't good enough, but because you made mistakes. That centre wasn't brilliant: your cover defence was lousy.

If a manager lost the funds and later drove round in a new car, that was human nature. You would talk to him and drink with him and not a word said.

At the yearly football dinner, after you'd tried your hardest to get double portions of chicken and you'd cornered the jugs of beer up your end of the table, and you'd all gathered on stage to sing together to an audience of waiters and thirty guys had fallen forward in a heap off the stage down the steep steps and you'd grabbed all the leftover prawns and ducked out to put them in the car, and you were rolling, staggering, singing, fighting drunk; after all this you quarrelled with the management to keep the place open another hour.

When you went away to Orange with a team and played up the night before and got beaten on the Saturday and kicked out of the pub that night, you formed up in marching order and climbed the wall to the verandah on the first floor and marched in through the windows and slept in the lounge on the carpet.

And when you had a benefit night for the Darkfella who got killed doing a delivery run in his truck, there was a detective-sergeant on the roulette wheel.

And when Red was sent off for swearing at the ref, and instead of going off punched the ref and was disqualified for life and the club rubbished the whole team so the team could no longer play, no one said a bad word against the club or against Red, they drank with Red and laughed about the game, and thought the club must be right and spent both training nights and Saturday in the Southern Cross as if nothing had ever happened and there was no such thing as football. They were free to go to the races now, but only went when they were at Rosehill. They didn't like to be too far away from the pub. Something might happen and they wouldn't be in it.

Now and then someone talked about reviving the team, but it was more in the nature of philosophical speculation and the talk would get on to great games of the past. Like the time the whole team turned up drunk when Anzac Day was on a Friday, and a team of large players from Randwick-Botany slaughtered us twenty-four three and offered condolences and best wishes for the future after the game to our team of mainly small players, and in the second round the small players murdered them eighteen nil.

Or the games in the Juniors with Birrong that ended in free-for-alls.

That wasn't good enough for Bob and me. We got everyone to put their names on a football and we deflated it and set it up in the pub. We'd blow it up again if the team revived.

It would be great to get out in the paddock again, running upfield, the ball under your arm, head down, a bit of blood on your lip; waiting for the satisfying bump as your shoulder invaded ribs and stomachs; the crunch as the packs went down and the opposition took a step back; the exhilaration as your centre or winger dived over the line at the end of a movement; the fierce joy when your arms settled affectionately round two knees, your shoulder nestling comfortably into a thigh or a buttock and both bodies gliding through the air with the other player underneath.

It took two years before we blew up that bloody ball again.

THE GREAT LOVER

Sex oozed from every pore.

He had pregnant women, engaged girls the night before their weddings, kids from high school, Sunday School teachers, anything with a hole in the right place and brush round it. His taste was all-embracing.

The way he put work on a new barmaid was shocking, and highly successful. He had a very convincing tongue.

He even had a hanger-on. Tom would hang round for the scraps. Sometimes a woman on the outer with the Great Lover would approach old Tom, who would promise to get her back into favour. On certain conditions. Tom had a tiny stubby one. He shaved the hairs from round it to make it look longer, but this itched and scratched so much he was always touching himself. And because he was always touching himself, he was
always horny. I thought of him as the Shorthorn, but I didn't make a noise about it. They would have crucified him with a nickname like that. As it was, the publican once summed him up by saying, ‘Bloody old Tom: says little, never thinks and does sweet fuckall.' Tom had worked two days in the cellar for him.

The thing about the Great Lover was that when you looked at him, you could see what women saw in him. A lot of blokes, you look at them and you wonder what even their mothers saw in them. Not him. He was alert, neatly built, had a sexy-looking head, a vigorous, adventurous smile, he could talk, and he never thought of anything but sex. Apart from the daily crossword, of course, and the gallopers. It was a pleasure to come in and see that cheeky head over the crossword.

When he got out of jail the thing he liked best was to drive a truck round. He worked for the dairy company for a bit as a mechanic first. One day the boss told him to drive a milk truck ten miles and deliver milk to a milk bar. He was a mechanic; this wasn't his job, but it was Saturday and the regular drivers didn't know, so off he went with the truck and twenty cans of milk and set up the proprietor's milk pump in the first drum. The pump was no good, couldn't get suction. The Great Lover had to heft the drums about six feet while the shopkeeper watched.

‘What about giving us a hand?' he says.

‘You the driver. You deliver the milk,' said the Greek.

‘Your pump's dirty,' countered the Great Lover.

‘So get the health inspector.'

‘I might do that.'

‘So I get the transport union.' And the Great Lover shut up. He was still wearing mechanic's overalls. After an hour he'd emptied six cans, and gave up in disgust. Back to the depot.

‘You brought back fourteen?' said the boss. ‘Christ, when I was a mechanic and they put that job on me I brought the lot back. That was six years ago. Has he still got that rotten pump?'

He left and got a job doing straight deliveries. He was so quick on his feet he'd be finished a whole day's run by one-thirty and worked at the bar—drinking middies—till four, which was knock-off time. When overtime was on, he'd work in the pub till five, then report back and clock off. The truck was discreetly hidden round the back of the pub. There were some big trees there.

The Great Lover had always been generous. Even when he was a kid.

One day he took a chick down to the beach, and took one of the boys with him.

‘She had a real fair skin,' he says. ‘I did her in the water, on the rocks, the sand, all over the place. And by this time me mate's going mad. I don't know what
I'm going to do with him. So I say to her, Give him one. She makes a fuss but in the end she says to me, Only for you. And she gives him one. Later she hawked the fork, but she still wanted to be in love with me. I told her, I don't care what you do in the daytime, just be there when I get home at night.'

When he got married to a girl that doted on him, and still does, he was down the pub so often she used to get mad, and round about half past nine one Saturday night, after he'd been there all day, she appears at the door with his pyjamas and throws them into the pub and yells out, ‘You might as well sleep here.'

She had the sort of grim love for him you've seen on women determined to love their man, and determined their man will be on deck to be loved.

He bet on the horses, usually listening to the races over the pub loudspeaker with all the other devotees. The money he put into bookies' pockets wasn't funny. He went to the races in search of the golden fleece and came home shorn.

One day he came home drunk as a lord.

‘I lob home, and next thing she's abusing Christ outa me. So I try to stand up straight at the kitchen table, and begin to peel out these dollar bills I won at Rosehill. She was still giving me the rounds of the kitchen when I came out with tens and fives and twos and by the time I reached forty she'd shut up, by fifty she was smiling, by sixty she was on my side and by the
time I'd peeled off seventy she was kissing me and by the time I got to eighty she was jumping up and down, beside herself. I was RS by that time but she made me give her one before she'd let me go to sleep.'

He was seventeen years and ten months when he first went up.

‘The bastards would keep 'em there eighteen months on remand often. They had no folks or lawyers. Fifteen months was nothing. When it sank in that I'd drawn two years I cried like a baby. I had two months to go till I was eighteen, so they waited two months and then gave me two years in the Bay. Now I'm a criminal and I never stole anything in me life. Christ it was cold at Long Bay. They moved me to Bathurst, where I really froze. When I got out it took me two months to thaw out. Then a bit after that I had a fight with Mick here, he give me a fractured cheekbone—here, see the line?—and I got six months for that. I wasn't supposed to be in the pub at all. One of the conditions.'

I never found out what he was inside for. I asked him if he knew any of the heavies.

‘I know blokes you wouldn't want to even whisper their names.'

‘You know Chewy Hughes?'

‘Nice feller. In for twenty-two years, then out. The next week he put a broken bottle in someone's face, and he's in again for life.' His monster took over any old time, grog or no grog.

He'd been there talking to me for too long. His wife rang, he finished his beer and drove off in the truck to clock off and qualify for his overtime, and made his way home, where he discharged his obligations.

He played with us, sometimes on the wing, usually fullback. In the showers he used to sling off at my grey hairs. Despite his size, my old feller is surrounded by grey. Always worried about his next one. No other part of me is grey.

BEST WISHES

Mick got a job at Blacktown RSL.

‘It's unbelievable,' he said to us when he had a free afternoon. ‘There's a mile of it there. Long as you've got a nice white shirt on and your black bow tie and you're sober and speak nice, they're all over you.'

He patted his flat stomach.

‘It helps too if you look fit, no beer gut and all.'

We wouldn't have argued if he did have a belly. He looked into the distance over the rim of his tilted glass. If his thickened eyebrow ridges allowed it, he would have had a smile on his face. You couldn't expect one round his mouth, he had his lips permanently pushed forward to cushion a sudden attack of king-hit, the main tribal and inter-tribal disease.

‘Last night there was this singer. Beautiful. Not a bad singer too. When she's finished her act for the
night, she comes out and there's a mob of officials, the Preso and Secretary and so on, all round her, wanting her to sit at their table. She looks round the whole place, doesn't miss a trick, and says no. They talk to her, tell her she's got to be looked after, but she still says no. She's carrying these bags, with her costumes in and whatever singers carry round.

‘She lights on me, probably 'cause I figure the best place to be is right by the main door out to the foyer. She leaves their party, walks up to me and says Buy me a drink, big boy.'

Mick straightens up and nearly beams, face permitting.

‘So I take her bags and sit her at a table with a mate of mine that I know won't go under my neck, and get permission from the official party to have a drink with her. They're dirty on me, but they have to agree 'cause she's such a success with the members and she's got a contract for more performances.

‘OK. We're at the table and all she wants is one drink. Then she gets up. Carry my bags, she says. So I carry her bags out to the car, put 'em in the boot and she gives me the keys and says, You drive. Where? I say once I'm behind the wheel. Round a bit. So we drive round a bit, and I say, Where to now? And she says, Do I have to ask? Find a place, big boy. So I find a place, under some trees at the end of a street that goes nowhere, and we have a root in the car. And I tell you,
she's beautiful. Then I take her back near the club, she takes the wheel and away she goes and I go back in the club and they ask me, Where the hell've you been? I tell 'em the truth and no one believes me.'

‘That's the way it goes,' says Danny, who was more than half molo by that time. It was nearly five, after all.

Mick's thinking. We leave him think for a bit, then he comes out with it.

‘I've had thousands of 'em. Easy ones. You know, the ones where you just have to strike up a bit of a conversation and look neat and speak nice to 'em and next thing you're in their pants.'

He paused and thought again.

‘But,' he said. ‘But I've never met—never had—one of 'em that you could call a decent root.'

‘What do you mean, Mick?' I say. It's something that's often been on my mind. What I've found is that these ones that are hot for it, well they're hot for it all right, but they're just like a bloke when he wants it and just wants it alone and doesn't care who it is and how quick it's finished. They rip their pants off and crowd you in as if they're dying of starvation, then it's all over in two ups and they're on their way. They haven't done any particular thing you'll remember, they haven't made love in any sense at all, they've just had a root and that's all they want. Good bye. All you remember is a face, perhaps, and maybe a place. Like
a lane, or under a bridge or in a car. You know, you might remember what model car it was.

‘Well,' Mick says. ‘I don't know. I don't know how to put it. Christ, I don't even know what I mean. All I know is, I've never had an easy one that was any good.'

We all put our heads down and thought a bit more, but no one had anything to add. Except Danny, who answered my thoughts.

‘Shit, I can't even remember their faces.'

There was no action in the pub then and no one felt like playing pool. Young kids that had just graduated were on the tables.

Mick got to other things.

‘My first day there, this American entertainer was playing. Winifred something. Well, it surprised me. I have to go to the dressing rooms with messages and to get autographs signed, and there's this big name entertainer shaking like a leaf.

‘Would you mind? I say quietly as I can, and she signs a few, and I go out respectfully. Then when it's time for her act, her face is still down at the mouth, she looks really miserable. She walks along towards the stage, then a yard before the curtain she pulls her mouth open wide like this'—and Mick did the same, and though it wasn't entirely a broad flashing personality smile, we got the picture—‘and goes over to the piano, and off she goes.

‘You sort of get the idea they're always smiling, don't you. Yeah, and those autographs. Sometimes the members would give me two or three coasters to get signed, sometimes a dozen. But you can never tell. Once they went mad, it was a Saturday night and my pocket was out to here with 'em. And you wouldn't want to know, she was so down in the mouth I wasn't game to go in and ask her. So I sat down backstage and wrote Best Wishes and signed her name to forty-eight place-mats and gave 'em out to the members and they were happy as Larry. Next morning I see her name in the paper about something or other and I've spelt the name wrong. Two t's instead of one.'

He liked you to laugh if he felt he'd made a funny.