Whole Wild World (34 page)

‘I have to go,' he said. ‘See you tomorrow, my friend.'

They parted, intense in their stride, re-energised, it seemed, by the encounter. They were like Sam Sheepdog and Ralph E. Wolf in a Chuck Jones
Looney Tunes
cartoon, clocking off after
a hard day. Did Croats and Serbs argue like this on the steps of the library?

I was sitting at lunch with Sam and his mate John. Suddenly, they appeared to stiffen. A woman of their age had come to our table.

‘Hi guys. Will I see you at the meeting today?'

‘Not sure,' Sam replied. ‘I'm with my brother.'

‘I think I have a tutorial then,' said John.

They'd once engaged in a lunchtime conversation with a group of people who were born-again Christians and, ever since, had been dodging their advances to attend Bible study.

‘You should try to come anyway,' she said, a hopeful smile on a moon-round face, ‘because it's going to be a lot of fun.'

Sam would evade the clutches of Jesus' Pentecostal sirens. Yet he was vulnerable to the call of Julie Mostyn, the Patti Smith-style singer from the Flaming Hands, and other new bands on the Phantom Records label such as the Sunnyboys and Le Hoodoo Gurus that played at the Sydney Trade Union Club in Surry Hills. The venue was on steep Foveaux Street, on the path from Central to the SCG. It was a temple for kids who dressed head to boot in black and worshipped new wave music.

Sam could be reserved or withdrawn. But with a schooner of Tooheys Hunter Old, wedged among the bodies in the cavern to see the headliners just before midnight, he was a freer spirit. He'd go all over town with his mate Cip to see touring English acts like XTC, the Cure, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe in small venues; young local bands such as INXS and the Church were breaking through, playing to tiny crowds at the uni's Manning Bar. I'd only go to big gigs at the Hordern or where door policy was not strict for underage punters. I was just a novice. The morning after I first saw the Sunnyboys at the Sylvania Hotel, I'd given myself whiplash, couldn't look down to eat my Special K.

My gang were A-list gatecrashers at eighteenth birthday
parties. Between the five of us – Harpo, Pip, Jane, Jackie and me – we covered every subgroup at Benilde and Nazareth. Every hairstyle as well: red-brown curls (Harpo), blonde ( Jane), cut-short red ( Jackie), floppy black (Pip) and wavy brown (me). An invitation for one was treated as a ‘plus four', an open door for all of us. The boys did the driving, given our fathers owned cars with grunt and room: Kingswood, Falcon and Leyland P76, a much-maligned model we honoured as ‘the Beast'. If there were ever a fire or flood in the cockpit, the five of us could take sanctuary in the back seat. Harpo was the Beast's pilot, taking us to squash, the gym, basketball and to pick up the girls after their Thursday-night shift at Grace Bros. Roselands. We shared an intimacy and the same sense of fun, secure in the knowledge none of us was reckless, as we roamed the district for parties, from the riverside mansions of Picnic Point to the flat lands of Lakemba.

Untethered, seeking out different things, the five of us would split up as soon as we got to a party, checking in to top up our drinks from a shared stash of beer, wine, tequila and Southern Comfort. ‘Rock Lobster' or ‘Funkytown' might bring us all to the dance floor. For me, a good outing was talking to as many girls as possible, something you couldn't do at a disco.

Our religion classes were mixed in Year Twelve and I was keen to hear what girls had to say about faith and morality – actually anything they had to say about anything. I was post-bloke. At parties, alcohol made it easier to talk, words just flowed; after a saturation point, conversation unravelled, physical urges were either climaxing or obliterated. The ride home in the Beast was akin to a gathering of war correspondents in a hotel lobby bar, trading gossip and advice, each of us, apparently, having attended a separate party.

After Mass at St Anthony's one Sunday, a grey-haired, grave-faced man approached Tata. I knew he was a bigwig in the community. As ASIO itself had found, there were so many cultural, sporting and political associations, it was difficult to keep track. Tomo was the president of the Croatian Club in Marrickville and he asked Tata if Sam wanted to work part-time at the club. There were uni students working as waiters on Saturday nights when the club hosted
zabave
, or entertainment, folkloric performances and weddings. They needed extra hands. We talked about it at home and Sam wasn't keen.

‘Do you have to be eighteen?' I asked, perhaps even before Sam had completed his ‘No'. ‘Could I work there? What exactly do you have to do? How much is the pay?'

A trial was arranged for me the following Saturday evening at seven. Black pants, white shirt, black bow tie.

‘This will help you with your Croatian,' Tata said. ‘Maybe you'll make friends with students. Who knows, you might even meet a nice Croatian girl.'

Bickering, petty jealousies and power struggles – just like the old country – had split Sydney's Croatian social clubs into several tribes, not taking into account the ones that had been formed by pre-war Dalmatians who identified as ‘Yugos'. Tata was aligned with the pioneering Surry Hills clique. The Marrickville club, a whole floor of a commercial building on a busy corner, was a breakaway, precipitated by a bitter fight over finances. But it had become the dominant venue over time, helped by its links to the soccer club. My dad had been refused membership/he'd never be a member if they begged him. It was a détente moment, Nixon to China.

I thought my Croatian was up to working specifications, declensions aside, but I wasn't prepared for Ante, the diminutive, worrywart club secretary–manager from the island of Korčula via Perth. He also spoke an island dialect that was impossible
to understand, especially as each sentence is built on ‘fucken', ‘bloody' and the private parts of the mothers of other waiters.

I think he wants me to clean the poker machines near the ashtrays, wash the pool players with beers and go to the bar and get him a ‘lemon scotch' (without ice), whatever that is. Tata sits quietly in the public bar as I do a couple of hours of odd jobs, collecting empty glasses and cleaning ashtrays. Ante says to come back next week at 7 pm to do a full shift and hands me \12. I'm thrilled with \6 an hour; a concert ticket for the Capitol or Hordern is around \10. As the only person in the family with a paying job – welcome back to the working class, son – it also means I will be commandeering the Kingswood on Saturday evenings.

On my first night I work with waiters Željko and Stipe, or Bill and Steve. Both are in their early twenties, tall and slim, students at the University of New South Wales. My parents have known theirs for a couple of decades. Because they are five or six years older than me, we never became friends. I recall them solely in national costume – Steve a dancer, Bill played squeezebox – something I'd triumphantly avoided.

‘Just ask people what they want to drink and then get it for them from this side of the bar,' said Bill. ‘Mostly people just call out
konobar
, waiter, as you're walking past.'

‘Hey Nedo,' Steve calls to a wolfish middle-aged barman, lank fair hair and a fermenting beer gut. ‘This is Tom, he's going to be working with us. Can you give him \30 for a float?'

Nedo counts out notes, gets me to sign for them.

‘Who do you belong to?'

Chewing a toothpick with gold-capped teeth, Nedo looks me up and down: another flighty pony to break in or break. Oh, I belong to him in the master–servant of bar hierarchy. Nedo would prove to be a persistently snarly taxi-dispatcher, grunting in two languages, several dialects. You were required to order
drinks in such a manner as to save him duplicating his pouring effort or trips to the fridge. He could hold five mixed drinks in his left hand, four between the fingers, one nesting in the palm. I was told to work a section close to the bar, on Steve's side of the auditorium. I was soon darting from the hall to the service area of the bar, learning the prices, making change, and getting to know cocktails.

‘What's a Black Russian?'

‘It's Kahlua, vodka and Coke,' said Steve. ‘But we use Tia Maria here instead of Kahlua.'

The first night is a swirl of faces and orders. I clock off at 1 am, just after the band plays the Croatian national anthem and everyone is meant to stand to attention. Being blind drunk or foreign is no excuse; self-appointed tough guys summarily deal with breaches of protocol. At home, I still can't sleep at 3 am, my legs ache, head like a cash register totting up imaginary orders of two Bacardis and Coke, a Scotch and Coke, white wine spritzer and a schooner of Reschs.

‘Always order the beer last, so it doesn't come flat to the table,' says Jure, a kinder, calmer barman who knows my dad.

The men at the Croatian club are macho, cruder than anything I've heard from uncles. When my father is driving and cut off in traffic, he'll yell
majmum
. Monkey. Sam and I swear but only in the vernacular of Catholic schooling and, occasionally, Lebanese, luxuriating in its throaty exclamations. At the club, among the tables of card players, a serious breed with the blank stares of assassins, there is a constant murmur of ‘your mother's this, your mother's that'. Placing a bug here would yield spy agencies transcripts of semi-pissed, woman-hating gynaecologists on a Vegas binge. But among the heavy drinkers and poker-machine addicts, and when the bar is busy on a big night, the cussing is on a Chernobyl-meltdown scale. I marvel at the sheer obscenity, the invocation of the Holy Trinity and Virgin Mary,
the leaps in logic and gymnastics. Unborn babies are cursed, animals are verbally castrated, nobody is spared.

But it's not just the venom; the concision is subatomic. So much energy and derision in so few words. This is a creative discourse, with metre and assonance, one that deserves a unit on its own at Saturday language school. I try to follow outbursts from a little bloke called Stipe, a moustache like Yosemite Sam, who doubles as a waiter when we are under-staffed. You make a small mistake, order a Scotch and dry instead of a Scotch and Coke, and your whole lineage is banished, the progeny of donkeys raped centuries ago.

The club pulls in every strata of the community and in no time I know everyone, what they drink and if they tip. So, too, the entire play list of house band Deep Image, from Elvis's ‘Suspicious Minds' to the
Bosansko kolo
, with its two-beat rhythm below a squeezebox fury. And everyone gets to know me, a
konobar
, calling out drink orders whether I'm at church, soccer or in my school uniform.

Bill and Steve, doing optometry and law at UNSW, don't treat me like a schoolboy. My cousins their age are already married and are marching into big-time adulthood. Bill and Steve are keeping that at bay, obsessed with the beach, fishing and cars – pulling them apart and driving them F1-style through the city's sleeping streets. After work we head to Kings Cross to lounge in the Kellett Street café where David Bowie discovered the model/ waitress for his ‘China Girl' video.

Because they're playful and tactile, the bosses think Bill and Steve are gay; one or two ask me if they are. The pair speak about women with the precision of wine connoisseurs; a bottom, thighs, lips yield the kind of microanalysis and vivid description my English teacher is looking to me to deliver on White, Eliot and Shakespeare. They're aficionados who discern hidden value, pervs who were not getting any. But their fantasies are generously
shared. Saturday nights are an education and a paid gig. The cash is stacking up inside my Croatian cigarette box. I see a low-slung car – none cheap in the early 1980s – on the horizon.

Getting home at three on a Sunday morning is not out of the ordinary, but one time I stayed out until 5.30 with Irene and Mira, who'd gone to the club with older siblings and friends.

‘Were they Croatian girls?' Tata asks, bleary-eyed, trying to speak over my aunt's volley of insults, aimed at both of us.

‘Yeah, they're from school. We went back to one of their houses to talk and I lost track of time.'

‘Whores!' Teta yells, eyes afire. ‘
Pasha
! Who knows where he goes and what he does?'

I work, I save, I dream. Next year I'll vote. Labor. One day, pay tax.
Pušti me na miru
.

‘Okay, I'm going back to bed,' my dad says, not angry or even relieved, just spent. ‘Teta's been driving me nuts for the past two hours. We're going to ten o'clock Mass at Summer Hill. So are you,
skitnica
!'

Drifter. Rambler. Bum.

16

Above the clouds

It was a casual conversation between two mates working on the new house, my dad and I passing tools to and fro. I'd been looking for an opening to sneak in the big issue – the drop in thrust at school in my final year – that had been on my mind for some time but, like the pros, I wanted it to feel like it had just popped into my head.