Working Class Boy (24 page)

I don't know how people weren't killed in these fights. Maybe they were. I'm sure some of them must have been left with permanent damage but I tried not to think about this. I went along with it all, trying to get through without killing someone or being killed myself.

Eventually the gang ran out of people to fight around Elizabeth, so they would pile into cars and go into town and find people to fight there. There were always more people just like us, wanting to belt things to get rid of their frustrations, and it wouldn't take us long to find them.

Fighting wasn't the only thing we did but it did seem to take up most of our time – either fighting or bragging about our fights. In Elizabeth there were two types of people, fighters and victims, and I wasn't going to become a victim for anything or anybody.

The gang were like a pack of wolves, looking for weakness – if you looked weak, even for a second, one of them would turn on you. But most nights I was ready and struck out at one of
them first. Whoever I would hit, I had to hit really hard. This normally made them all back off in fear they might be next.

There is one night I remember very clearly, when things didn't go as easily as I thought they would. I was in the coffee shop and there was a new guy hanging around the pack. He was very big and I think my mates, if I could really call them that, wanted to find out how dangerous he was. These guys were your friends while they were scared of you or needed you. If they didn't need you, you were a target. Anyway, one of them told me the guy had been talking shit about me. We'd all been drinking so it didn't take a lot for the rest of them to get themselves whipped into a frenzy.

‘This fucking guy has been telling people you're scared of him. He lives near your house and he says you avoid walking near him,' one of them said, baiting me to see if I would react.

‘Yeah, get him. Go on, hit him.'

Their voices were getting higher pitched, louder and more desperate. They wanted someone to get hurt. I don't know why. Maybe it was because they got hurt all their lives at home or maybe they were just animals.

‘I've hardly seen this guy. I wouldn't know him if I fell over him.'

‘You'd know him. You can't miss him. He's fucking big. I reckon he'd knock you out,' one of them sniggered.

‘What am I supposed to be, scared because he's big? Is that it?' I was a bit but I didn't let on to them.

‘Yeah. I reckon you are, and I think you're letting him talk about you because he could do you in.'

I could see their eyes turning to knives and suddenly they all looked like they were after my blood, not his. I had to protect myself. I had to fight or risk becoming a target whenever they got bored.

I walked over to him as he was standing outside the coffee shop. ‘What the fuck have you been saying about me? If you want to get yourself killed, I'm happy to do it.'

He looked me straight in the eye with the look of a man who wasn't bullshitting and said, ‘I haven't said anything about you. I don't talk about people I don't know.'

This seemed like the right response to me. What more could he say? So I walked away and back towards the guys. Suddenly I knew they could taste my blood.

‘Why didn't you hit him? You are a fucking coward just like he says.'

I had always hated these stupid thug games. I'd seen them since I started school in Elizabeth and I knew if I wasn't careful, I was next on the menu. I had to do something. It was either fight him or fight six of these animals – my so-called mates.

I turned and walked after him. By this time, he had moved away from the shops and was heading home. The rest of the boys were walking behind me, snapping at my heels like a pack of starving jackals.

I had just about caught up to him as he started walking over the bridge that led over the railway line to Elizabeth West.

I could feel the train racing under the bridge, rattling it as I approached him. The wind was blowing and it suddenly felt colder. My heart was jumping out of my chest.

I reached up with my hand and grabbed his shoulder, spun him around and swung. I caught him hard right on the chin. He swayed, clearly stunned, but he didn't fall so I hit him again. This time even harder.

He shook his head and then turned on me. He smashed me to the ground and began to beat me senseless. This was the worst beating I had had for a long time. I couldn't help but think to myself as I lay on the ground being kicked to death that I deserved everything I got. Probably worse.

Meanwhile the jackals scattered like scared dogs, disappearing from sight, their high-pitched whining voices fading into the distance. Leaving me lying alone on the ground as he sunk another boot into my ribs. He left me bleeding, dazed and stunned.

After a minute I felt a hand pulling me up. It was him. I expected to be hit again but instead he helped me to my feet and stood and looked at me.

‘I told you I didn't want to fight you but you pushed me.'

I felt even dumber than I looked. I was an idiot and I knew it.

‘I live just down the road from you. I'm going home now. So do you want to walk with me?'

I'd never been belted then helped out by the person who beat the shit out of me before so this felt a bit weird.

‘Yeah, why not.'

We walked along saying very little to each other.

‘Sorry for starting you,' I muttered quietly.

‘Didn't hurt a bit.' He laughed as he looked at me.

‘That makes me feel a lot better.'

I had learned a big lesson. I would make my own decisions and do what I thought was right from then on, no matter what the consequences were. I'd rather get beaten for doing the right thing than the wrong. It was as simple as that. I never picked another fight in my life.

There were so many nights I sat alone, no longer afraid of where I came from but of what I was becoming. I was becoming just like the people in my darkest memories from Scotland. The same dreams that haunted me as a child were becoming a reality as a young man, twisting me around so much I wanted to die.

There was nothing for me at home. There never really had been. Home was a place that no one wanted to be. Mum stayed
because she had to. Our home had been shattered and put back together and was in the process of being shattered again. Mum was a human wrecking ball when she had lost interest in something or someone. She had held it together long enough for us to basically get through school and now she was ready to move on again. Life was crumbling around us again but this time she would not be picking up the pieces. We would have to do it ourselves.

She and Reg fought and there were other people around all the time. There was nothing for me to stay there for, so I wanted to leave. I hadn't worked out where I was going or what I would do. All I knew was I felt better around a gang of young guys who drank too much and ran out of control than I did near my parents and home.

There were nights when I walked through the shopping centre and there were no crowds of guys or girls hanging around, just rain falling on the footpaths where I'd seen so much blood spilled, and the wind howling around the shopfront windows. I wondered how long this life would go on before I would be made to pay for everything I had done wrong. I felt I was constantly running, only just keeping one step in front of everything that had haunted me in my nightmares.

Most of the guys had families or jobs and spent most of the week away from the shops but I didn't. They would stay at home with their mums or girlfriends and then on the weekend come out and turn into some sort of animal, but I felt like an animal all the time. I didn't want to be at home and I had nowhere else to go. I would sit alone on the steps of the pool hall waiting for someone to turn up, anyone who could distract me from my own thoughts.

Some nights other guys, even worse than me, would walk through the shopping centre. Drunk and dazed, looking for someone to hurt, they would walk from the pool hall to the coffee shop until they found someone to let their pain out on. I
would be sitting in the shadows, watching as the police dragged them into paddy wagons, beating them with truncheons. I couldn't help but see that this was what they wanted, to pay for their fucked up lives in their own blood and misery.

I would pull back even further into the shadows, ashamed, not wanting them to see me and know that I saw their pain. Then I would walk over the bridge and down the street to our house and sneak in so no one noticed me or spoke to me. I had nothing to say to anyone.

Some mornings, walking home just before sun-up, I would see the milkman delivering milk to the houses on his route. As the sun came over the horizon and shone a little light on the dark road, I would wait until he had gone out of sight and nip in and grab myself a bottle and drink it on the way home. I knew it wasn't the best thing to do but if you were broke and really thirsty, surely it couldn't be such a sin to steal one bottle? I kept telling myself that I would go back to the same house on another night and give them a bottle back but I never seemed to get around to it.

It was early 1972 when I had to run away from home to go to the Sunbury Rock Festival. My folks were trying to be tough with me by stopping me going again but I was way beyond that. They had no control over me by then. I snuck out my bedroom window and headed to Melbourne with Linda and her mates. They had a full car but they squeezed me into the back of their station wagon along with all the camping gear. I lay across their stuff for eight hours or so, smoking joints and drinking beer with them, and by the time we arrived at Sunbury they were all shitfaced, as was I. We staggered out of the car park and towards the gate of the festival.

Now, the reason I wanted to go was to see Billy Thorpe. He was my hero. He played louder and faster than anyone else in the
country. So I was really excited at the prospect of seeing him in such a great setting. I planned to watch a few bands that I liked over the weekend and generally have a good time until Thorpie came on stage on the Sunday. The best laid plans and all that . . .

We walked into the festival and found a place to set up camp and also a place to watch all the bands from. We were all organised. It was my first rock festival and I was ready to watch every band that was playing. Then one of Linda's mates pulled out a handful of pills that I found out later were Mandrax, a very strong sleeping pill that was taken in those days for fun. When you mixed it with beer very strange things happened. But they were all taking a handful or so of these tablets and they gave me the same.

Then we decided to check out what was going on at the festival, so we went for a walk. The Sunbury Festival site had a lovely river running through it where people swam naked, as you do at rock festivals. So we were down by the river admiring the view when the pills started to take effect. I sort of remember the whole world slipping into slow motion and it felt like my tongue had swollen up and I couldn't talk. ‘So far so good,' I thought. Then things took another sharp turn sideways and the last thing I remember was slipping down the bank and into the river. A veil of blackness covered me and then nothing.

I woke up in a tent. I didn't know where I was but as I looked around the tent I saw people strapped into beds next to me. It took a while but my head cleared and I realised I was in some sort of hospital tent. I looked around and saw a sign saying ‘Buoyancy Tent'. Now I had seen this tent when I arrived and knew it was a place where people who had taken too many drugs or were having a bum trip went to be looked after. I wasn't having a bum trip; in fact, I'd had a great sleep and felt refreshed and ready to rock.

I got up out of bed while no one was watching and left the tent, dancing out so it looked like I had just danced into the
wrong tent by accident. No one noticed, so off I went to find the gang. I walked back to where Linda and her friends were watching the show; they were all in various stages of falling apart, staring blankly at the stage. I don't think that any of them could even see the stage. No one knew I was missing. No one cared anyway. I could have drowned and I doubt that Linda and her mates would have even remembered that they had brought me with them. But the good news was, just as I got there Thorpie walked on stage to start his set. It was a perfect night. I had a great sleep, got hammered and got to see my hero Billy Thorpe. It was a perfect weekend really. Then we drove home.

O
n one of those cold and wet nights when none of the gang were hanging around the shops, I was sitting in the coffee shop waiting to see if anyone would show up. The Elizabeth Centre coffee shop served bad coffee and bad food to a clientele that changed from families and shoppers through the day to packs of young hooligans who came out looking for trouble at night. We used to drink the coffee and listen to the jukebox when it was too cold to hang around the corners and the car park. The pool hall and this place were all that was open after five-thirty.

None of my mates made it. Pink Floyd was on the jukebox. The sound of the cash register being tallied up for the night blended with the music, drowning out the snoring and mumbling of the only other person in the shop. This was one of my brother's friends, a bloke I'll call Steve. He had had a big afternoon and was sitting in a corner with a bottle of beer in front of him. Steve was the size of a house and looked like he was made to fight, so even though booze was not allowed in the shop, nobody was going to stop him bringing it in. By the time I got there Steve was nodding off over his beer. He had a bad reputation around
Elizabeth for his explosive temper and everyone who knew him gave him a wide berth when he was in this state.

I wasn't scared of him because he was a mate of John's and treated me like his little brother. Anyway, tonight I thought he was way beyond fighting so I wasn't worried. But he was starting to stir. Slowly, like a giant waking from a deep sleep. Mumbling under his breath. He was not happy.

‘You fuckin' . . . I don't care who you think you . . . I told no . . . Shut up and –' It didn't make any sense. Occasionally he would shout out at someone who he thought was sitting opposite him. There was no one there. He was best left alone and although I wasn't scared of him, I didn't really want to be there if he exploded. I got up to leave.

‘Bye, Jim,' he said without looking up.

I decided to walk over to the pub and see who was there. As I walked I put on my jacket. The rain was starting to come down quite heavily and I zipped it up to my chin. My leather jacket had saved my life on many a night. It had saved me from broken glass when I'd been knocked to the floor fighting and it had kept out the cold when I had nowhere to sleep. A good leather jacket was a must for a young guy growing up in Elizabeth.

I walked past the pool hall and went to cross the car park. Through the rain I saw three or four guys get out of a beaten-up old Holden and head towards me. Now these guys didn't look like they were out for a late-night cup of tea and cake. They were looking for someone to terrorise and I was the only one around so I guess they settled for me. I turned around as quick as I could and made a beeline for the coffee shop where there was at least one person who might help me. I knew if big Steve was awake I would be all right.

Steve was still in the corner when I ran in. He knew there was something going on straight away. He looked up and kicked away his chair. He was drunk and out of his mind but instinctively
he knew that there was trouble to be had, and he wanted to be involved in it. I don't think he cared who it was with, he just wanted to fight someone.

The guys from the car were no boy scouts, they were big ugly motherfuckers, but when they saw Steve start towards them they bolted for the safety of their car. But the car wouldn't start. I could see the terror in their eyes as Steve and I turned up outside the door of the choking car. They locked the doors as quickly as they could and for a second there was a look of relief on their faces.

This was enough for me and I laughed a little at how quickly the tide had turned, but scaring these guys was not enough for Steve. They kept trying to get the engine to turn over but it wouldn't; they'd flooded it. Steve was at the door and in one movement he turned the beer bottle in his hand around and smashed it straight through the side window, into the face of the bloke sitting in the passenger seat.

‘You're fucking mine, mate,' he screamed at the top of his voice. Blood started spurting out of the guy's neck. The bottle had broken going through the window and was now lodged in his throat.

I tried to pull him off but Steve kept stabbing repeatedly until I thought the guy was dead, and then he turned to go around the car to get the driver.

‘Right,' he bellowed, ‘your fucking turn, mate.'

The driver was panic-stricken and kept turning the key, hoping the car would start and get him out of there.

Steve staggered around the car to the driver's door just as the car roared into life. The driver managed to jam it into gear and skidded out of the car park, jumping the kerb and side-swiping a telegraph pole as they fled.

As quickly as it all had happened it was over and once again I could hear the rain falling on the ground around me. It was
like waking up from a nightmare. I was covered in sweat and hyperventilating and my heart was pounding like a jack hammer.

Steve turned to me, wiped the blood from his face and quietly said, ‘Let's go, I'll buy you a beer.'

He walked off into the night laughing to himself. I don't know how much damage Steve did in that attack; I never heard another thing about it. But I kept as far away from him as I could from then on.

A couple of years later, Steve was jailed for murder over an unrelated fight where he went too far and someone died. I wasn't surprised and I'm almost certain that wasn't the first person he killed. He was an absolute psychopath, but he was just one of many psychopaths we hung around with.

The local bike club, like a lot of other gangs, was filled with thugs and criminals. But around Elizabeth that didn't mean that you ruled the streets. There were as many thugs and criminals walking around the streets dressed in suits and the poor bikie gang regularly got a hiding from the Elizabeth guys, fuelled up on the same booze and speed that the bikies were on, only the non-bikies were much nastier and had less to live for. My brother and his mates used to get hammered and head to Salisbury where the bikies had their clubhouse and attack them with knives and baseball bats and anything else that came to hand.

One night I remember there was a huge fight after a couple of the bikies were beaten senseless in the city by some Elizabeth boys. They got as many of their mates together as they could and rode into the Elizabeth shopping centre en masse, ready to kill anybody that was there. Unfortunately for them, we were expecting them and lay in ambush waiting for them to arrive.

They rode in full of bravado and booze, only to be met by a big mob of young guys, ranging from the ages of fifteen
to thirty, all drunk and ready to make names for themselves. The way out was cut off by cars and the bikies had no escape. As they rode in, the boys opened the boots of their cars and produced bats, clubs, knives and bottles and ran at the bikies, going berserk. They bashed them, burned their bikes and stomped their heads into the concrete. Then drove off before the police could arrive.

It was the bloodiest battle I have ever been involved in or seen for that matter. We ran away from the shops to the sounds of sirens and bikes screaming in the night. A constant stream of police cars and ambulances passed by as we hid in the bushes, no more than two or three hundred yards away.

That night went down in local folklore. But unless you were actually there, you couldn't have imagined how brutal it really was. I was very afraid and felt lucky to be alive but I couldn't tell my friends. Instead we all bragged about who had hit who and how much damage we had done. ‘Did you see the size of that guy I king hit? He was the size of a fridge. Ha ha. He went down like a sack of shit.'

There were guys who hung with us who didn't fight all the time but they were all up to no good of some sort. A favourite thing to do was stop at the house of someone we didn't know in the middle of the night and lift their car up. This was something we would do when we were very drunk and very bored. We obviously picked a house with a small car. Then we'd put it in a place that it was impossible to get out of. The car would end up turned sideways in the driveway. Impossible to drive out. Small things amuse small minds.

Another thing that kept us amused was the drive-in movie shows. On many a night we would all go to the Shandon Drive-in to see movies and have a bit of fun. Quite often we didn't
watch a lot of the movie. Instead we would drink and fool around with girls.

We would wait until a few cars were going in and then the guy working didn't have time to think too much.

‘Right you guys, get in the boot and shut up.'

‘But it's my car, I don't want to get in the boot.'

‘But you've got no money to get in. I have, so you're in the boot.'

‘Fuck off. This is my car. You give me the money and you get in the boot.'

‘I bought the beer as well. So I've got to buy the beer and give you the money to get in?'

‘I've got the car. Do you think cars run on nothing? I had to put petrol in.'

‘All right, I'll get in the boot but I'm not sitting in the back. You never get to see anything with your big fuckin' head in front of you.'

‘Just shut up and pull your feet in so I can shut the boot or we'll miss the start of the movie.'

A couple of us would jump the fence and meet up with the car inside; others would be crammed into the boot while one guy sat in the front and drove in. It must have looked strange. I don't think normal people went to the drive-in by themselves. A stream of cars would be lined up to pay to get in.

‘One, please.'

‘You want just one ticket to get in?'

Beep, beep!
The car behind us was in a hurry. ‘Hurry up, we're going to miss the start.'

‘That's what I said, didn't I? One ticket.'

‘What's that noise I heard in the back?'

‘Nothing mate. Just my shockers. They're buggered. One ticket please. And hurry up or I'll miss the start.'

Beep, beep!
‘Come on, get a move on would you?'

‘Yeah, all right then. In you go, but I'm not stupid you know.'

‘Thanks mate. If you weren't, you wouldn't be working here would you?'

The car would speed through the gate and find a place to park up near the kiosk so we could buy ice-cream and chips. Then the rest of the gang would come walking across in front of the cars already parked and pile in. Sometimes it was too packed in the car so we would sit on the ground around the car or reverse the car in and lie on the boot and drink beer. No one ever said a word to us.

While I was still at school, I worked part-time in the local garage pumping gas. I thought it was pretty cool to actually make some money but I didn't see a future in it unless I owned the oil company, which was never going to happen. But I did make enough money working there to buy my first car.

Reg had already taught me to drive in his almost brand new Toyota Corolla. He was really proud of that car so he would give me driving lessons, hoping that I was growing up and driving might make me more responsible. It didn't help. I didn't get my driver's licence straight away either. I got it after three tries. The same guy took me for the test all three times and I didn't get any better after three attempts. I think he felt if he didn't give it to me I would never get a driver's licence, or worse, he would have to get in a car with me again. So I was ready to rock and all I needed was to get my own set of wheels, and it would be good if they had a car attached to them.

As luck would have it, a teacher who came into the garage asked me if I knew anyone who wanted to buy a cheap car.

‘It's really good,' he said. ‘I'm only selling it because I have to move away for work.'

‘I'll take it.'

I made the deal right there and then and bought my first car. It was an old Morris Oxford. I paid twenty-five dollars for it and it had a full tank of gas and six months' registration. It was a good deal, as far as I could see. What could go wrong?

He brought it over to me at the garage that afternoon and as soon as I finished work I was cruising around the shops. I thought I was so cool. All the guys around there had cars like EHs or FBs – things that sounded really cool. Morris Oxford didn't have the same ring. They drove hot rods with straight line gear shifts and loud exhausts and even racing strips across the bonnet. My car went about thirty-five miles an hour, with the pedal flat to the floor, downhill, with the wind behind it. It didn't look very cool and I don't think any amount of GT striping would have made it look any better or faster, but it was mine and I loved it.

Owning my own car meant that I didn't have to rely on anyone to get around anymore. I was free. I felt like Easy Rider with the wind blowing through my hair, but that was only because I couldn't wind the windows up. I could see this was going to be a problem in the rain but I would burn that bridge when I came to it. In the meantime I had to pray it wouldn't get cold or wet. I'm not sure the wipers worked either.

That night, myself and a few friends decided to go to the drive-in in my new car. There was a movie we all wanted to see called
A Clockwork Orange
and it was on about twenty miles away at the Gepps Cross drive-in. So we scored some acid, took one each and headed off to the drive-in.

It was all going well, we were nearly at the drive-in when we started to hit a little traffic.

‘Take it easy, Jim, there might be cops around here,' one of my mates said.

By this time, things were starting to look a little different because of the blotting paper acid we had consumed. So I decided I'd better slow down to about thirty miles an hour. The guys
were all singing and yelling out and generally having a good time. I put my foot onto the brake pedal and applied some pressure – nothing.

‘Hey guys, I don't want you to panic but I think the brakes are fucked.'