Swimming to the Moon Page 8

  Sir is woken by a banging on the cubicle door. A man is jumping up and down so he can peer over the door. The waiter’s angry face comes into focus. ‘Are you alive?’ he asks. ‘There’s a girl waiting for you inside.’

  Sir endeavours to appear sophisticated as he reels damply towards their table: a tortuous route which seems to take hours. His head is pounding. ‘Just needed to refresh a bit,’ he explains. Madam’s eyes are glazed and grim. She’s holding a stick of decorative celery between her fingers like a cigarette and pretending to smoke it. Her stole is on the floor.

  The other customers are finding their table of some interest. Sir assumes a nonchalant pose, glancing languidly out to sea while topping up their glasses in a backhand motion with Barossa Pearl. With closer attention the wine might have landed inside the glasses.

  At this point the waiter arrives with the bill. ‘We haven’t had dessert,’ complains Sir. ‘We need this table now!’ the waiter insists.

  The bill is $4.10 more than the money he has. Madam stops smoking the celery stick, rummages in her purse, and loudly counts out $4.12 in coins on the tablecloth.

  As the waiter throws the loose change out the door after them, the sun is just setting.

  THE SNAKE PIT

  I was up to my elbows in classic coastal photographs the other day, researching historic material on the nation’s beaches at the request of the National Library of Australia, when suddenly I was blasted out of my studious reverie.

  There on the desk, among the tasteful Max Dupain beach images, fell a swag of photos of the Snake Pit, the once notorious concrete terrace on the Scarborough beachfront that infuriated the establishment and the media, terrified parents, and symbolised rock’n’roll rebellion in the 1950s.

  There were bodgies and widgies jiving to Elvis and Bill Haley, glimpses of petticoats as girls were being thrown into the air – and crowds of awestruck onlookers watching the dancing, as if viewing circus animals performing. And I must say that by today’s standards the whole scene seemed incredibly innocent and sedate, even wholesome.

  The vast gap that had suddenly opened between my recollection of the Snake Pit’s disreputable reputation and the way it appeared now was so oddly fascinating that I sought information about its origins. This was available in unusual quantity, thanks to the wide documentation of the early days of rock’n’roll in Perth, especially the online article ‘Snake Pit Days: A Fragment of Perth’s Rock’n’Roll History’ by Andy Andros, Diane Lewis and Dr Cecilia Netolicky.

  The name Andy Andros certainly rang a bell. He was known as Perth’s top bodgie back then, with a reputation that spread far beyond Scarborough. According to the article, ‘Andy was known as “the Pit Boss” in those days. He helped diffuse conflict … Because of his duties, his hamburgers and milkshakes were free, and he had his own parking spot.’

  I can believe it. One Saturday afternoon I saw him arrive unexpectedly at North Cottesloe beach with a bunch of his cronies to discuss some cultural grudge or other, and very soon he was ‘diffusing conflict’ with western-suburbs boys all over the place.

  One day a promoter, Joe Lynch, brought a team of boxers to the Snake Pit, set up a ring, and challenged the rock’n’rollers to fight. The boxers won one fight, the rockers won five. Andy Andros’s three victories started his bantamweight title–holding career.

  An example of the media’s disdain for the Snake Pit was a Sunday Times article in January 1957: ‘Society has a way of dealing with people who cause trouble. Sooner or later it locks them away in institutions, reformatories or gaols, where they can cause least trouble. So it’s doubly fortunate that bodgie behaviour and a bodgie’s future really have little appeal for West Australian youth.’

  Of the Snake Pit subculture, the article said, ‘Our job is to help them to develop character and personality, and eventually to achieve a well-balanced, tolerant and constructive social outlook as grown-up members of society.’

  The Snake Pit began on a cement pit adjoining Ye Olde Kool-Korner Kafe, owned by an American, Don Erichetti, on the corner opposite the old Scarborough Hotel. Erichetti came up with the idea of setting up a hamburger bar with a brand new jukebox from America that played straight through, without needing coins. Soon swarms of working-class teenagers from as far away as Victoria Park, Mount Lawley and Fremantle were flocking there, and aspiring bands such as the Red Rockets, Bill Blaine and The Dynamics, The Saints, and The Roulettes began setting up on stage to launch their careers.

  The boys at the Snake Pit favoured classic bodgie garb: black jeans, black T-shirts, black desert boots; the girls wore either jeans or skirts with petticoats, and desert boots with iridescent pink, orange or lime-green laces. It should be remembered that there were no drugs back then, no kids were drunk, no one carried weapons, and any blues were fistfights only.

  Nevertheless, reinforced by the media of the time, society generally had a negative attitude towards the Snake Pit. ‘Anyway,’ sniffed the Sunday Times, ‘the best jivers in town aren’t even necessarily bodgies or widgies. Lots of young people who have never worn stovepipe pants or sloppy Joes in their lives can show the milk-bar exhibitionists points when it comes to jive. For these young people have been taught to jive by professional dancers engaged by the Education Department.’ I’d like Andy Andros’s views on that.

  CORDUROY MAN

  Smart yet informal, outdoorsy yet intellectual: this was the cool image I desired in the winter of 1976. I wanted the clothing (and associated charisma) of Robert Redford as the Watergate reporter Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men. And here was David Jones’ menswear department offering me my dream: a three-piece, corduroy suit. Mustard-coloured.

  Clearly, a corduroy suit not only helped a young reporter win scoops and the hearts of attractive female researchers, it had the ability to bring down presidents. In a casually businesslike way, hair attractively tousled, someone like me could look impressive wearing it while sitting on a chair backwards. (Spinning an office chair around and sitting on it backwards was what impulsively intelligent young men did in movies. Though in my experience, strangely, seldom in real life.)

  Unbuttoned and matched with a loosened tie, a telephone, a takeaway coffee and an attractive researcher, a corduroy jacket impressed with its significant message: You corrupt bigshots trifle with Corduroy Man at your peril. Meanwhile, a corduroy jacket could be carelessly slung anywhere: over a bar stool, the editor’s desk, the couch in the attractive researcher’s apartment. Where it lay was then undeniably your territory.

  So this would-be Corduroy Man informed the David Jones salesman, yes, he’d take the suit. Not only that, he’d happily don it then and there. And off he went, a mustardy figure of serious intent, his trousers whooshing, pfft-pfft, pfft-pfft, back to the office.

  It was a journey of only about 200 metres from DJs to his desk, but the sound of the suit preceded him. By the time he reached the office, his clothes had already broadcast his arrival.

  It wasn’t just the legs of the corduroy pants rubbing together that made such a racket, it was the jacket as well. Its material was strangely stiff and crackly. When his arms swung back and forth (a condition he soon discovered happened regularly when walking), the jacket and waistcoat made two separate crunching noises, like two people eating potato chips.

  Not only did the jacket’s lining rasp against the outer cloth, but the waistcoat’s wale rasped against the wale of the jacket. (The wale being the vertical ribs of cloth: the whole point of corduroy and looking like the investigative reporter Robert Redford.)

  And so, Corduroy Man ushered forth on the day’s reporting assignment: covering the Supreme Court. His bow to the presiding judge on entering was more humble than necessary, but it didn’t matter. Never in the court’s history had a reporter taken so long (several years, it seemed) to walk across the solemn court room to the Press table. Never before had the legal system been totally hushed, all eyes, ears and evidence arrested by the drawn-out whoosh-whoosh, crackle-crackle
of a mustard-coloured suit.

  Robert Redford hadn’t had this difficulty. He would never have been able to secretly meet his source Deep Throat in underground carparks if his every step and arm movement set off a one-man band. Maybe if I jettisoned the waistcoat (it was too hot anyway) all would be less noisy. Next day the jacket was a little less loud: it only sounded like one person crunching chips. My pants still went pfft-pfft, pfft-pfft. I didn’t wear the suit a third time.

  Sadly, although every woman to whom I’ve mentioned the mustard corduroy suit over the years has burst out laughing, corduroy retains a special place in my heart, if not my wardrobe. Especially since Hollywood still insists on dressing in corduroy any actor playing a writer, artist, academic, architect or musician. (Though, clearly, film sound engineers cleverly eliminate the whooshing and crackling.) And they look cool, I think, even the ones with elbow patches.

  A little investigation informed me that I’m not alone. There is even a Corduroy Appreciation Club in New York. Its members had a huge celebration on November 11, 2011, the date most resembling their beloved fabric, 11/11/11, and every member had to wear three items of corduroy at once.

  As for Corduroy Man’s ensemble, it ended up as a donation to a church fete and was snapped up immediately by a fashion-conscious hobo. Its mustardy sheen has long faded, but every so often as he roams the streets and garbage bins of the inner city, I hear the whoosh and crackle of his approach.

  LUNCH

  Lunch was my best subject at school. Aged sixteen and weighing not quite sixty kilos, I daily polished off six rounds of my mother’s sandwiches, three pieces of fruit, a couple of biscuits and a slice of cake. And I started eating well before actual lunchtime, surreptitiously breaching the lamb and salad sandwiches under my classroom desk at about 10.00 a.m. Mind you, I’d swum a couple of kilometres of the Claremont Baths before breakfast, and trigonometry made me feel faint anyway.

  I suspect the Friday lunch was also what I was most noted for at work. Back in the halcyon, big-spending eighties, solid lunching was even expected of journalists and authors, and it was certainly required conduct for Perth businessmen, who still hold the national (maybe international) record for imaginatively excessive dining.

  One thing never changes. As everyone knows, Friday is by far the best day for lunch. Friday can be anything. Expectations that you will return to work after lunch lessen from ‘maybe’ to ‘nil’. Some Friday lunches have been known to end on Monday morning.

  These financially pinched days, when my home-based lunch is a quick sandwich, I look back nostalgically to lunches past. It wasn’t just the intake of food I enjoyed. I loved the change of personnel and scenery and socialising. I liked the information it delivered and the way it divided the day so neatly. It provided the only rakish note in the workaday week.

  Publishers’ lunches (sadly, like the big book launch, definitely a thing of the past) were the best ones of all. The food was heartily ethnic, the alcohol more free-flowing and the company more relaxed. Also, they were paying and the lunches went on longer.

  As a rule of thumb you can take it that any four stockbrokers (fish, white wine) will be out of a restaurant in two hours; six real estate agents (steak, red wine), two-and-a-half; and forty-two Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board clerks (weiner schnitzel, crème caramel, beer, two speeches and three songs), three hours, depending on whose birthday it is, or the popularity of the girl getting married.

  A proper publishing lunch of the mid-eighties, however (Greek hors d’oeuvres, casserole lamb, stuffed capsicums, baklava, retsina, beer, Metaxa brandy, beer, coffee, Metaxa, beer, beer) was only getting started at three thirty and might take until 6.00 or 7.00 p.m. to find its feet. In those five or six hours of Friday afternoon was concentrated the complete human condition.

  In any era the casting of the lunch is important. Some of the more popular lunch casts are Workmates, Duos, Clients, Employer–Employee, Associates–Rivals, Ceremonials, and (popular among women) Friends in Need.

  The most interesting arrangement is, of course, the professional man and woman who aren’t partners (or not yet) but are publically lunching together. They might have actual work business or potential business between them, or they might have none. They might not know quite what they’re doing there. But they know that lunch is safely possible for them, while dinner is not.

  One or both might pretend to be interested in romance but in fact be after a different kind of deal. If it actually is a seduction lunch, at least one person will pretend not to know what is going on. The possibilities are endless and the course of the lunch can change at any moment. Male–female lunching can be like walking a tightrope.

  In a place like Perth, with its zealous potential-romance spotters, this is where the chaperone comes in. Invited to lunch in this Unclear Situation, the chaperone is there not so much to keep anything risqué from happening, but to convince the rest of the restaurant – and everyone who will very soon hear about this lunch – that nothing is happening.

  All that’s required in casting the chaperone’s role is that the person chosen (preferably another woman) be able to sit there through the entire lunch – and preferably leave the restaurant with the first woman. If the chaperone leaves early, she might as well have stayed home. By lunchtime tomorrow all Western Australia will know of the man and woman at the table together.

  And the gossipers won’t be talking lunch, they’ll be talking breakfast. Lunch might be a game, but breakfast is the real thing.

  QUIZZING SANTA

  I have the rare good fortune to claim Father Christmas as my oldest and most entertaining friend, known since our respective ages of five and six. Granted, his credentials are only valid in Hong Kong, where he’s the official Santa Claus, but in the teeming Chinese city-state he’s a celebrity of some magnitude.

  He arrives there each year to an airport press conference during which he’s asked to opine in English and Cantonese on everything from the melting of the Arctic ice cap (not surprisingly) to Miley Cyrus’s antics (not so expected) and his musical preferences, leading to such headings as ‘Santa Claus Slates Rap/Prefers R&B’.

  In his off-duty months, he’s a general-and-arcane-knowledge whiz from Perth named Kim Newman, a former advertising copywriter known since childhood as Ogga, whose lifelong interest is quiz shows.

  I mention Ogga now because there he was again the other evening, beaming from the television screen while contesting, and winning, $20,000 from Eddie McGuire on Millionaire Hot Seat. Because he informs me of his upcoming appearances, I’d previously watched him pick up a cool $40,000 from the nasty Cornelia Frances on The Weakest Link. Another time, as the friend in phone-a-friend, he’d helped a nineteen-year-old win $250,000.

  The quiz game is no picnic though. You have to be sharp. I had also impotently shouted at the TV screen: ‘Mulligatawny! Chicken-noodle! Onion! Gazpacho! Vegetable!’ when on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Eddie McGuire gonged Ogga when his mind suddenly went blank and he couldn’t remember nine different types of soup.

  His life in the quiz game began as a child member of Bob Dyer’s audience in radio’s Pick a Box. ‘I thought, imagine winning five quid and a year’s supply of soap just by knowing that Robert Menzies was the prime minister. I was hooked.’ Prizes followed in the Coca-Cola Bottlers Club (two shillings), the Pioneer Club (a block of Snack chocolate), Rumpus Room (lollies) and the Ranch Riders’ Show (comics).

  By fifteen, he was a radio-quiz veteran. Then came the big payday. On Channel 7 he beat the adult reigning champion on Tuesday Date and won £60. He kept his hand in by creaming the competition at hotel trivia nights. Then the big time beckoned. Sale of the Century with Tony Barber, a revamped Pick a Box with Bert Newton, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, The Einstein Factor.

  Interestingly, Ogga says that quiz competitions have changed. The earlier shows used to be cutthroat ‘with the nervous contestants waiting like gladiators’ in the anteroom. ‘On Sale of the Century, in swag
gered the reigning champion, Richard Richardson. “That’s him,” we whispered. He sensed our anxiety and in a brilliant piece of oneupmanship killed us with his bravado line, “Ah, more lambs to the slaughter!”

  ‘These days there’s a brotherhood and sisterhood. Everyone wants to show their knowledge but we know that luck plays a bigger part than knowledge. People are competing for glory rather than money.’

  As for his life as Hong Kong Santa, the authorities chose him for his knowledge of Cantonese and, well, his appearance. ‘They insisted Santa had to be a gweilo, an Asian was no good. Funny, I didn’t look like Santa at all when I first got the gig a decade ago, but I sort of grew into him, and now I don’t even need the false beard.’

  He’s such a big drawcard in the department stores that the Chinese cannily extended the Christmas season from October to March. ‘The actual date’s no big deal to the Chinese,’ he says. ‘They thought, this is going well, why stop at December twenty-five?’ A fairly entrepreneurial Santa himself, his son now joins him in Hong Kong. He’s known as Santa Claus Junior.

  Though Father Christmas is a Hong Kong celebrity, his role is very different to that of the jolly chaps at Myer and David Jones. ‘There’s definitely no kiddies sitting on my knee. And I’m not just there for the children. I’m regarded as a gweilo Confucius figure. Serious men, women, very old people, come to be photographed next to me while I impart wisdom. It’s quite a responsibility.’

  Well, he does know a lot of stuff.