Whole Wild World (11 page)

I know the dangers of smoking: if my parents catch me, I'm dead. More laboratory testing and a better technique are required but I'm out of cigarettes. Joza sometimes leaves a pack on the table in their kitchenette. To simply slip in there while they are home or in the bedroom is too big a risk.

One weekend Joza and Zorica were away. There was a pack next to the fruit bowl. It's open, most of the cigarettes still there. Joza won't miss one little smoke. We've got a Kookaburra gas stove so Redheads matches are in healthy supply. I lit up in the alcove behind the shed and puffed away, using a big rusty drum as an ashtray. My first drag was too deep and I felt like puking, but I settled down, took shallow drags, and smoked it down to the filter. My head was spinning. Mission accomplished.

Over several few weeks, when Joza and Zorica were away, I pilfered cigarettes to improve my technique. I was hooked on the thrill that came at every stage of this transgression. But it was a patience game because I had no money to buy cigarettes. I didn't know how to get them other than to steal. Because Joza
usually carries his cigarettes with him, all the planets need to be in alignment.

After Mass one Sunday, the solar system is in fine shape. Our tenants are away, but Peter Stuyvesant is open for business. Mama is preparing lunch, Tata is reading the Sunday paper and Sam is watching the wrestling. There's a tiny window for launch before our sit-down roast lunch. Smoko!

I slip into the kitchenette. Yes, a half-full packet on the table. Don't be greedy or stupid, just take one. I also need to go to the toilet. Easy, save time, you can take a piss and smoke in the outside dunny.

I pull the string to switch on the light. My heart is racing and I don't strike the match first time. As well, because of my turned eye even when I light the match I often don't make contact with the end of the cigarette; my depth perception is skew until I do something enough times to bring in other visual cues. I've gone through several matches, which are ending up in the toilet bowl. Success. I puff, puff, puff away in private.

The door shakes at the handle. Bang. Bang. Bang.

‘Who's in there?' It's Tata. ‘I need to use the toilet.'

I ditch the cigarette in the bowl.

‘I'm doing a poo. I'm almost finished.'

‘Okay, hurry up.'

I can do this. Don't rush. But I am rushing. Stay calm. I'm not calm. I'm waving the smoke away with my arm, pulling up my jeans. Don't forget the zipper. Oooof. Oh boy, that's not good. That felt meaty. The zipper is stuck on. Oh God!

‘Are you almost finished?'

‘Yes, yes, soon,' I semi-moan the last word, making pushing sounds, as I look down to see my dick in the zipper's metallic teeth. Surprisingly, it doesn't hurt, flesh and zipper in an equilibrium. No one gets hurt as long as everybody stays still. But I know the divorce will be much more painful than the initial argument.

‘Tomislav,
brže
!' Hurry up, Tata says.

This may be my chance to deflect suspicion from the smoking and introduce this monumental misfortune as a sympathy play. A stretch, even for me. There is only one task: free and attend the wounded.

‘I'm stuck, just a few more minutes.'

True, except for the time estimate. The damage is on the fuse-lage, about halfway along the undercarriage. I'd seen the wonders of microsurgery film at the Easter Show – there is hope. But the weight of the jeans is pulling the plane down, stretching the skin more than I thought it could bear. I'm glad I discovered this at a young age. Sit down, take gravity out of the equation. Pull skin this way, pull zipper the other. It's going to hurt, so there's no point watching the rescue and introducing a new line of nighttime trauma.

All this touching, however, has raised the stakes. There's a sudden and threatening increase in cabin pressure, like the time I'm overcome watching Penny in
Lost in Space
when she joins the psychedelic go-go dancers.

Blood. Only a drop, but this adds urgency. Steady. We can't blast our way out of this. There's one, maybe two zipper teeth holding on for dear life. It's time for lift off. Three-two-one. Ahhhhhhhhhhh! It's free.

There's blood smeared over my dick, a few more drops around the wound. Toilet paper cleans up the blood. I take a few extra sheets in the underpants for support. Pull up jeans, ever so slowly. Zipper, easy. Flush.

‘Okay Tata, I'm done.'

I can walk out of this. Alive. Smoking doesn't kill but the love affair is over. If my parents suspected the budding habit, they never confronted me about it. Lucky for me, because a beating with the belt would have been humane compared with the sort of Joso ditty, on a decades-long loop, it would have inspired.
Take it away, Tata:

Tom caught his little dick in the zipper,

He's now done with smoking and hard liquor.

My phobia from first class about growing up and being drafted to fight in Vietnam eased considerably by the time Sam leaves St Joseph's. Instead of being issued with military fatigues he begins fifth class at St John's in Lakemba, a school run by the De La Salle Brothers. He's on to the next stage of life: no girls, for one thing. St John's takes boys from all the area's parish schools. I'm now in Sister Margaret's class, the first time I've been taught by a nun. She'd been Sam's teacher as well. The comparison is inevitable.

‘He was my best student,' she says. ‘So quiet and polite. I hope you're just like your brother.'

I'm conflicted about this: she might cut me some slack as I'm from good stock, but I also fear I won't measure up to his stellar heights. Our class is located in the main, old building – perhaps it was once a church – with its rickety wooden floors and high ceilings. The classrooms sit beneath the parish hall, which is our gymnastics space for sport when it rains. At night it becomes a bingo parlour, attracting the area's high-stakes grandmas.

To my mind, Sister Margaret devotes an inordinate amount of time to our school's two highest artforms, aside from singing hymns at Mass: running writing and reciting poetry at eisteddfods. We get fountain pens (with cartridges) that are like paint guns in skirmish. It's impossible not to give someone you don't like – or do like a lot – a spray with the flick of a wrist. Learning cursive writing is akin to kindy drills: letters from first principles. But the real grind comes in our class recitation of poems for local eisteddfods. There's a poem that every group does and one chosen
by the teacher. This is the realm of Australian bush poetry – such as ‘Mulga Bill's Bicycle' by Banjo Paterson – and, for younger students, the many wondrous rhymes of Walter de la Mare and A.A. Milne. Eisteddfods were big occasions and I recall our class, with twice as many girls as boys (it was the opposite in the other class), did really well in competitions. For the boys, the temptation to throw a spanner into the works to annoy the girls was suppressed by the prospect of a celebratory party for winning first prize, which we managed to do on several occasions.

Sister tells terrific modern-day parables, mixing her personal experiences, nuns' gossip and tales from the catechism. Reading is done from
The School Magazine
, which comes monthly and has one-off stories and serials. Comprehension, my favourite activity, is done via the SRA reading kit, a big box of colour-coded cards from America with a story and questions on each. The higher your reading age, the more difficult it is, but the stories get much more interesting.

Sam and I have also started going to the library on our own, taking extra care across zebra markings. He's reading Alfred Hitchcock mysteries and will soon be borrowing exclusively from the adult side of the library. The children's library is fine for me. I am drawn to the magazines that come in cardboard binders, particularly an American one called
Boy's Life
. There are stories about explorers, natural disasters, farm accidents, stolen dogs that find their way home and profiles of famous sport stars. I'm captivated by ads for things you could never get here, such as certain magic tricks, novelties and replica Gridiron helmets for 99 cents. Can you imagine? Sam and I watched the Super Bowl on TV and tried to play it in the backyard. We knew the names of teams and some players, but it's a niche interest and difficult to properly throw the ball.

I'm in between kids' picture books and fat novels, so I opt for fact books. There's a twenty-volume encyclopaedia for young
people that I borrow at random, whatever's available. There are cut-away diagrams of machines, entries for each country, a section on flags of the world and the population of cities. The
Pear's Cyclopaedia
has all manner of cool lists, such as the order of Kings and Queens. I'm not fussy and read them all, cover to cover. The facts stick. There's joy in searching out the ‘whole wild world', which is my mispronunciation of ‘whole wide world'. Aged eight, I know the saying is actually wide. It makes sense. But because of speech laziness and the aural pleasure it brings, I prefer to keep the lovely L-sounds rolling through.

The reference books on the adult side of the library are more daunting and specific, with fewer illustrations. I imagine one day I'll be using
50 Great Australian Lives
as a source for projects. One of the best days of my life is when our family gets the 24-volume set of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, plus atlas, and joins the club to get the yearbook. I thought we had the entire world on a bookshelf, the sum of all things. If it wasn't in the
Britannica
, it was neither real nor important. The parents of some local kids had opted for the cheaper
World Book
, with its glossy pages and picture-heavy approach, a blunder in the long-term, according to the perky
Britannica
sales rep.

‘Your sons will use these books all through high school and, after that, at university,' he told Tata and Mama.

I knew ‘universe' from space and sci-fi shows, and ‘city', so I assumed he meant Sam and I would still be relying on these great books in the distant future, when we were all driving flying cars in the year 2000.

The neighbourhood was saturated with kids who went to St Joseph's, which is only a five-minute walk from our place; a two-minute run when I got absorbed in cartoons on morning
TV. There were several kids in my class or grade living in our street. Franco was right across the road. He will emerge as Frank in later years but his doting mother calls him Gianfranco. Frank is Sofia's little prince, often sitting down to a sumptuous feast at lunchtime. She always has a hot pot on the stove and the pungent aromas of Salerno pervade the kitchen, kept dark like a cavern; in the garage they have a vault of tomato sauce in beer bottles that will last until the end of the century. The only time Frank got in trouble at school was for throwing – more than once – his wrapped salami sandwich over the fence to the nuns' house. The Brown Joeys called a surprise search. Show us your lunch. That masterstroke took our napkin-matching ninja nuns right to the door of Sofia's pantry.

Carlo lived five houses away from us, while a few doors further down was Carl, who lived next door to Margaret, his cousin. That was just third grade. All those kids had brothers and sisters and they, in turn, had classmates living in houses or flats in Chalmers Street. Let's not pretend otherwise: this was one of the toughest niche markets in Sydney in which to sell school raffle tickets. If you can make it here …

Like Frank's, Carlo's parents are from southern Italy. Both fathers drive Fiats, a rare marque in those days. I often went to Carlo's place after school. He had a huge bedroom all to himself, which was taking on the feel of an Egyptian tomb: dark and elaborately decorated. His parents were much stricter than mine except in one important respect: Carlo was allowed to draw on the walls. While I was honing my ball skills and roaming at will, Carlo was being Leonardo. Like the story of the pharaohs or the Palaeolithic caves at Lascaux, you could follow the arc of this artist's life by decoding his bedroom masterwork. There are stick figures from preschool, with early attempts at letters and numbers. Over near the window, you'll find some wonderful examples of Carlo's depictions of natural history, with the
longest brontosaurus outside a museum. Observe the details of the beast's skin and large teeth, the tail that extends all the way to the skirting boards. But please, don't touch the artworks, especially as the early works are in pencil and beginning to fade.