Smoky Joe's Cafe (2 page)

He looks at my hands, he's wearing these thin plastic
gloves so he don't have to touch me. ‘It says here you're a mechanic by trade, Mr Thompson.' He looks up from the form in front of him, ‘It just could be something you've picked up in the mechanic's workshop, probably battery acid.'

Battery acid! Doesn't he know I'd know if I'd spilt battery acid over the back of me hands?

‘I'll take the precaution and give you a note to the Shire Health Inspector,' he says and starts to write as he continues talking. ‘As for your insomnia and anxiety, it's perfectly natural, an adjustment to civilian life. I'll give you a prescription.' What the bastard was really saying was, ‘You Vietnam vets oughta pull yerself together.' That's my interpretation, that he thinks we're a bunch of wimps and to go home and get on with our lives with the help of a cocktail made up of Moggies, Valium and Scotch.

But I digress. I am aware that Vietnam is forgotten history, a sort of national disgrace we've swept under the political-conscience carpet. It was a war where Bob Menzies, who was Prime Minister of Australia at the time and therefore father of the nation, reckoned a bit of a stoush would do our lads the world of good, make real men out of us. Well, if those weren't exactly his words, it's the same difference. He thought it would be
good for Australia, good for the national character, or a similar piece of total and utter bullshit.

So, for the moment, if you'll forgive the impertinence to Menzies and Holt, who followed him, let me talk about those who were regular army and those, like me, whose names got pulled out of the barrel to go to Vietnam on behalf of the national character and our undying friendship with the U.S. of A.

We were the blokes who returned from Vietnam to find that the national character now required that we be treated like a bunch of mercenaries guilty of war crimes. It seems the real heroes were the nice little boys and girls who marched in the Anti-Vietnam rallies chanting slogans, waving the Viet Cong flag and passing a joint around while the cops looked on. We came back to an Australia where smoking dope was fashionable among the young trendies, who thought of themselves as weekend hippies and after-hours flower children.

The church, as usual, switched sides, with the Vietnam moratoriums specked with back-to-front collars. Then, of course, there were the trade unions, urged on by the Labor left, who had their digit finger severely up their bums trying to make a stink in Canberra.

Well, back home again I soon enough find out that I can't work for any bastard, not even as a builder's
labourer. I'm a qualified, three-certificate mechanic by trade, GM, Ford and Datsun, passed all the courses as well as topped my tech course. I'm aware I'm no Einstein, but I'm not exactly a bird brain neither. But I can't get under a car without going into a blind panic. I try to keep my nose clean as a labourer, but soon enough the building foreman looks at me the wrong way, or in my fevered brain I think he does, and next thing I've got a fistful of his overalls and his gumboots are a foot off the ground. Being a real big bloke with the post-Vietnam blues is not a likeable combination and I'm beginning to hate myself more even than I hate the civilian world I've come back into.

When I first came back I tried running a service station, took over the BP franchise in the small town where I was born in the Riverina. My folk have been here for four generations, long before the irrigation canal. My great-grandfather and his brother Jim came up overland by wagon from Sydney and they started up a blacksmith shop. Jim, it seemed, was a bit fond of the bottle and took up with an Aboriginal gin and went walkabout. Anyway he disappeared from the Thompson family history never to be heard of again. My great-grandfather died working at the anvil and my grandfather took over from him and did the selfsame,
died with the blast furnace at his back and a hammer in his hand. If they went to hell the devil would've handed them a hammer each and they'd have carried on like nothing had happened. Then my old man turned the smithy into Thompson's Garage, the first petrol pump in town. There have been Thompsons in Currawong Creek since before they dug the first dunny.

Well, eventually the old man, carrying on the family tradition, dropped dead while pumping petrol. This was while I was away in Vietnam. BP took over the site and developed it into a state-of-the-art service station just about the time I got back.

I come back a bit of a war hero, well in Currawong Creek anyway, where there didn't seem to be any anti-Vietnam backlash, which says something for the town at least. The Bank of New South Wales give me a loan. ‘Always been a Thompson running things mechanical in this town,' the manager says, dead chuffed with himself as I sign my flamin' life away as the local BP franchisee.

Green and yellow are the BP corporate colours, the colour of the jungle and my own cowardice. Not a very promising start in the service station business with me shitting myself every time I crawl under a ute. Being a BP dealer doesn't last long. Any skills I may have
previously possessed in public relations I shat into my greens fighting the Noggies in a rubber plantation at Long Tan. Sure enough, one day I end up chasing a local shire councillor down the street, brandishing a monkey wrench, determined to brain the fat, pompous bastard.

My fault, of course, something he said that wasn't meant to sound the way it did. Anyway the shit hit the fan. What with me not willing to back down and several of the other big hats in the shire copping a fair share of Thommo's aggro. Suddenly the whole town's driving to Fisher's Bend twenty clicks up the road to fill up with petrol. BP gimme the bum's rush and a Thompson ain't running things mechanical no more in Currawong Creek.

So, being the brain-damaged fool I am, the next thing I try on is marriage. I'm lucky enough to still have my childhood sweetheart, Wendy McDonald, stick with me through all the flak. Her folk own Smoky Joe's Cafe, and, while I should have known better and she should have run a mile, we eventually get hitched.

I'm the luckiest bloke in the world but, of course, it doesn't take long for me to abuse the privilege. I come home pissed more often than not. I'm behind six
months in the payments to the bank and they foreclose on me.

I'm now feeling ratshit all the time and getting these bad headaches which make me lose me temper soon as look at anyone. The rash, sweats and acne is getting worse, with no explanations for the reason. The chemist can't do nothing and the local quack shakes his head. I'm a flamin' mystery to the medical professional and if I wasn't such a big mean bastard, the quack at Veterans Affairs would probably accuse me of malingering so as to cop a disability pension.

Wendy and me are fighting. It's not only grog's the reason, I'm now into dope as well in an attempt to stay sane, or at least calm. Mixed with grog and pills it's not exactly acting like a health cure.

Then Wendy's old man drops dead in the middle of making a mixed grill for a tourist. Poor old bugger. Like me old man, he died on the job. But I've got to say this for him, in this one-horse town he played the music he wanted and he died to the strains of The Drifters. Wendy says he called the grease trap he's run since the fifties Smoky Joe's, because he never got over the songs of two Yanks, Leiber and Stoller, two Jewish blokes, Yanks, who, it seemed, loved Rock'n'Roll, Rhythm and Blues, and Jazz.

‘Them two wrote songs that make people want to get up and dance. Not like the bloody rubbish you hear these days,' he'd snort to anyone he thought didn't dig the music that went all day and half the night in the cafe. He'd point to the jukebox which only had his records in it, he'd filled the coin slot with a drop of lead and fixed it so it played continuously without anyone tampering with it. If you didn't like the music at Smoky Joe's, tough titty, it was the only cafe in town. The Chink's was the only other place you could go to eat.

‘You can't pay for music like that,' her old man would say, ‘it's God's gift, Elvis, The Coasters, B. B. King and Miss Peggy Lee, now they knew how to sing a number. Mr Leiber and Stoller,' he'd say their names in a real respectful tone, ‘may have been a couple of Jews but, I'm tellin' ya, music-wise they got it right every flamin' time.' It don't seem to matter to him that most people in Australia haven't like heard of some of these musicians. He has, and that's all that matters.

I reckon being took to your maker in the middle of a song you dig in a huge way is as good a way to die as a man can get. Like dying to your own background music.

Anyhow, we played Peggy Lee and Elvis at the funeral and, after the wake at Smoky Joe's, Wendy and
me did the washing up and stacked the dead marines in the yard out back and just took up from where the old man left off.

We even kept all the old jukebox records and had them transferred to a continuous tape and played them in the same order her old man liked them played. Smoky Joe's is about as close to tradition as this piss-hole in the desert we call Currawong Creek will ever get.

Well, a man couldn't catch a fly with his mouth open, next thing Wendy's fallen pregnant. When she's well and truly up the duff, there's no money for help in the cafe and I'm as busy as a one-armed wallpaper hanger. I'm the short-order cook and serving at the tables, I'm chief bottle-washer and I'm standing behind the counter, scratching the rash on my crotch and trying to remember to smile at the locals. As well, I'm pushing Wendy's old girl around in her wheelchair, she's got what she calls her ‘arty-ritus'.

The silly old cow spends most of every day chirping instructions at me like a cockatoo with a cuttlefish up its bum. She's also constantly reminding me that the ‘Dearly Departed', which is how she has now come to address Wendy's old man Cec, left Smoky Joe's to her and Wendy, that half of the grease trap is hers. ‘Tell me
which half and I'll leave it for you to cook and clean and wash up, you stupid old cow!' I'd say, losing me block.

That gets her cackling on a treat, ‘You don't deserve me daughter, you're no-good rubbish, not like your father or the Dearly Departed, salt of the earth them two!' For once in her life, she's right on the money. I couldn't get a kick in the balls in a street fight, I'm a bloody drongo. In between morning sickness Wendy's trying to make peace between us two and I'm not doing the right thing by her. So you can see we're not exactly playing happy families at Smoky Joe's Cafe.

The baby is born, it's a girl and I'm instantly in love and everything seems fine. Then when she's three she starts to slow down, lose energy, it doesn't take too long to know there's something wrong. We take her to the quack and then down to Sydney and she's diagnosed with leukaemia and has to have chemotherapy. If that don't work she'll need a bone-marrow transplant. The specialist in Sydney says she's got about a 20 per cent chance of making it. If the chemo doesn't kick in we've got to find a bone-marrow donor. The odds of finding one are enormous and it's gunna cost more money than I'm likely to make frying bacon ‘n' eggs for the rest of me flamin' life.

‘Could have happened to any family anywhere,' the fat quack at Repat says and shrugs his shoulders. ‘It's not our responsibility anyway, the Veterans Entitlement Act does not include second-generation casualties, you'll have to take her to a public hospital. Next patient please, nurse!'

All I can think is Agent Orange. Agent Orange has done this to my kid, my beautiful little girl! It's my fault. It's Canberra's fault. It's them bastards in the Pentagon. We're stuffed. Wendy and me are stuffed for the duration. Nobody wants to know. Our precious little girl is just another statistic.

Then one morning early, while I'm hosing the pavement outside the Smoky Joe, a ute pulls up. ‘Hey, Thommo!' a voice calls out. ‘'Ow ya goin', mate?'

It's Shorty di Maggio, same name as the baseball player who married Marilyn Monroe. He was our platoon sergeant and an army regular who had fought in the Malayan Emergency up ‘til 1960, then stayed in the army afterwards. He was our sergeant in D Company of the 6th Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment, 6 RAR. His job was to whip us into shape and get us combat-ready in Australia. I gotta hand it to the bastard, he did the job real good.

I remember the first time he stood in front of a
bunch of us blokes who'd just marched in from the school of infantry. He brought us all to attention. ‘Platoon! Lissen in,' he says. ‘This is your life from now on, you've joined the army and you will visit exotic and strange places like this shithole they call Vietnam and, when required, you will kill. That, gentlemen, is your mission.'

Shorty's folks own a farm about t'other side of Fisher's Bend in the irrigation area. Currawong Creek is in the Dry, we don't have irrigation. I haven't seen Shorty di Maggio since before Anna was born and here he is, same as ever.

Well, to cut a long story short, I fry him a plate of bacon ‘n' eggs and throw in a bit of tomato, couple of snags, toast. He then proceeds to tell me he's been to see the two other blokes in the Riverina who came back from Vietnam and who were in our platoon and he's organising a reunion. He doesn't ask what I think of this idea, he's still the sergeant, which I guess when you've been in the regular army is a lifetime habit. You're not too interested in some grunt's opinion.

‘How about we use Smoky Joe's Cafe for the big event? There's also seven of the blokes coming up from Sydney,' he says. ‘Animal, Flow Murray, Bongface, Gazza, Killer Kowolski, Ocker Barrett and Macca.
Mate, it'll be like the movie,
The Dirty Dozen
. All of us back together!'

There are others in the platoon, of course. Of the original thirty men there are those who died in battle, some are ‘Geographicals', which in our post-Vietnam lingo means they've gone bush or taken up a wandering lifestyle, and then there are some who've settled their lot, got their shit together or never lost it and don't want the renewed memories. So ‘all of us' means Shorty's found some of the platoon who were at Long Tan and wants a reunion, though Christ knows why. I know better than to ask.