Whole Wild World (30 page)

Wally would also borrow his ‘uncle' Don's Kombi to take mates on day trips to Whale Beach and Avalon. Filling the Kombi's tank at a BP station in Belmore, Wally saw a white Fiat Bambino 500, price \500. On a whim, he bought it, checking
his mum would make up a shortfall in funds. The Fiat had a soft-cover sunroof that I poked my head through as we puttered around the neighbourhood. But the Bambino was a tempestuous infant and constantly broke down. We'd be forced to nurse it home. Wally became a bush mechanic, fixing his baby with whatever did the job. He was lucky Don was a proper mechanic, with a garage full of parts. The day before we started at Benilde, we scooted down the school's long driveway, saying hi to Uncle Jack. He introduced us to Brother Leo, the principal; we were covered in grease and oil, kings of the road, jammin' and wailing to reggae on a portable music player.

‘Lakemba boys!' Brother Leo said, shaking his head.

‘Belmore actually,' I replied. ‘See you tomorrow, Brother.'

Wally crunched it into first and zipped down the drive. I popped my head through the sunroof when we got to Chapel Road, checking to make sure we were clear to make the tricky right-hand turn across the traffic flow.

Wally and I had often stayed out late in our vest-parkas in winter, singlets or bare-chested in summer to watch the street life, have a rollie cigarette or beer; more pensioners at the club than louts on the tear. From where we sat in the gutter, we saw ragged blondes in heels and short skirts jumping out of cars, engines still running, to score from an Italian dealer in York Street. We called him ‘Sugar Man' after the Rodriguez song we listened to incessantly.

Junkies made the trip at all hours; no one ever came back from the dealer looking happy – heads down, jumpy, keen to get out of there as soon as possible. It took a while for me, a child police snitch, to get a sense of the action. Wally understood immediately and had crafted elaborate stories about the rag-tag clientele and what was going on in Sugar Man's house, under the nose of elderly parents. In Wally's telling, the dealer had done time in Long Bay jail, lost custody of his kids and was sleeping
in the bedroom he'd occupied as a teenager. We sat there at all hours, on stake-out, believing a major police bust was imminent and we would have front-row seats.

‘That guy's her pimp, for sure,' Wally said of a bloke in a muscle shirt, smoking a fag, sitting in a Valiant Charger that a woman had just exited. ‘She's going off to buy smack from Sugar Man.' Although, strictly, in the song the dealer offers pills, cocaine and marijuana.

The woman came back in a hurry, agitated, and seemed to slump into her seat. It looked like they were arguing as the car burned its tyres in a loud, snarling take-off. Hey Charger!

‘I reckon she came back empty-handed,' Wally said.

We thought of ourselves as the Gutter Rats, on the edge of a gritty parade, feeling the cross-currents of a world out of reach.

‘What do you want to do when school is over?' I'd asked Wally. Never in the same class, I had little sense of his academic abilities.

‘I'm going to drive around Australia in a van,' he said. ‘I'm also thinking of becoming a park ranger or marine biologist.'

‘I'm not going to uni,' I said. ‘You can go straight into newspapers from school, like my cousin did. But she says it's almost impossible to get a job at the
Herald
or
Sun
and most people start off in the local papers or in the country and work their way up.'

‘What do you need to get a job?'

‘You've got to do really well in English, have good general knowledge and have “news sense”, which you either have or don't. My cousin told me when I go for interviews never to say, “I want to write” or “I'm going to save the world” because the old bastards who run papers will cross your name off just like that.'

‘So what are you going to say?'

‘Not sure yet. I'll probably tell them I like talking to all sorts of people and finding out what's really going on. But my dad says it won't be easy to get a job with a Croatian surname.'

‘Why?'

‘Don't you watch the news? Croatians are all terrorists.'

‘Man, it would be a lot harder if you were black.'

I'd been ‘going around' with Wally so long I'd become colour-blind, not in a good way. Empathy dissolved. My senses had stopped registering the discrimination he constantly encountered. I was vigilantly noticing tiny details, hearing the ambient noise of life, but I wasn't looking out for and listening to my best mate. The first time I saw him bleed after falling off a bike I was startled by the vermilion red gash on his black-brown forearm. What did I expect, another blood colour? I'd have to learn from others close to him about the anguish he'd experienced from the many cuts, deep into raw flesh.

14

Slow learner

Benilde High School was a two-year flight academy, designed to take only boys with the right stuff, launching them into tertiary education and the world beyond. It was minimalist and laidback, stripping out traditional extracurricular activities that bind a school, such as dancing, gambling and bare-knuckle fighting.

Pleasingly, there was no Master of Discipline. The rulebook was bare, except for two broad-ranging principles that purportedly governed our journey through this universe: honesty and respect. That covered a lot of ground; just ask Azzopardi, who was pinged for astral-travelling during religion. Not buying your round at the Three Swallows Hotel (thereby breaching both codes) was a near-mortal sin, likely to result in an intervention by Cardinal Jimmy Freeman or a letter from Rome, signed by JPII, the big fella himself. You get the spirit of the place?

We were – legend had it – the only school in Australia where students were permitted to smoke. A packet of Winfield or B&H in a Benilde white shirt pocket was as common as the top buttons undone on a blue Nazareth uniform. You were meant to have a note from parents to smoke, but the rule was never enforced. Smoking was banned in the main school building, a two-storey block set around a pebble and plant courtyard. In summer, we wore navy blue King Gee shorts with long walk socks, presumably to fit in with the geezers at the RSL or bowlo. As soon as
we got to school we were obliged to take off our ties and black shoes; for most of the year we wore thongs, runners in the colder months.

The autonomy on such things did wonders; the rebellious aspect of smoking or disrespecting the uniform was removed. There was no peer pressure to smoke, just normal nicotine addiction and the might of Big Tobacco and its hired urgers in the advertising industry.

Anti-authoritarianism shifted from the concrete to the meta- physical. The dark sarcasm in the classroom came from us, not teachers. Given there were many in a small space, with two hundred boys in Year Eleven alone, opening a locker in the confined halls was like being in a ship's cabin with the Marx brothers. Lockers were relatively spacious – if you were a textbook; a few of the boys once stuffed weedy Lehane into his, just to see if they could.

‘Are you Sam's brother or George's brother?' asked Brother Cletus, the urbane, dry-witted deputy principal behind the hillbilly name.

It's no slight on my muso cousin to say Cletus was relieved.

At this transit lounge to manhood, thank you for smoking, the guys who'd been in the year ahead of us at St John's had changed markedly: facial hair, a proprietary air around the courtyard, and a sense of urgency about Higher School Certificate exams. There were so many new faces to take in, but you could tell which guys were in Year Eleven by the colour intensity of their King Gees and the thrill of teen freedom behind cloudy puffs of smoke.

Benilde relied on five DLS feeder schools. Only thirty-five boys from Lakemba had been accepted, with the majority of students coming from Anglocentric Revesby and Bankstown. But throw in Kingsgrove and Marrickville, as well as girls from a different pool of source schools, and Benilde and Nazareth had a cosmopolitan flavour. Our school had more quirky kids
per square cubicle than anywhere west of Leichhardt: obsessives about primitive computers, Greek girls, Arabic disco, opera, the Oils, Toranas, aviation, surfing, liberation theology and hash.

There were even other Croatians. Željko and Nick were as different as two Dalmatians could be, black spots versus white spots. Nazareth had two Irenes and a Mira; the following year my twin cousins Anna and Maria would be part of the ‘Crovasion', as one of the mums put it, without quite meaning to put it so well. On occasion, we'd fall back on the mother tongue to blaspheme and bamboozle the
stranci
, our word for ‘foreigners'.

After eleven years, my days of walking all the way to school were over. At Belmore station, I'd meet Jane, the sprint queen from St Joseph's no one could catch. I'd started going out with her sister Melissa, who was still at MacKillop. Jane tolerated – just – our goofy handholding and goodbye kisses over the two minutes it took by train to Lakemba. Arriving at Bankstown, Jane and I would dash through the shopping centre, up the hill – past apprentice leerers and jeerers at Bankstown Tech – part of an intent, if rowdy, swarm trying to get to an 8.30 kick-off. Our lessons were called ‘serials', not periods, as if the learning never stopped, an ongoing soap opera of formulae and iambic. The bell rang precisely like the first three notes of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's ‘( Just Like) Starting Over'. Breaks were far too brief, more like smoko, and each day we were finished by 2.45.

‘You guys get out even before kindergarten,' principal Brother Leo said.

Still, many opted out completely. The attrition rate was high, as boys took jobs in banks or the trades. Some just needed to earn or got jack of Keats's drowsy numbness, Avogadro's number and calculus. My bright
It's Academic
teammates took the early-bird eject option, Tony finding work in a factory, Dave starting a cleaning business.

I'd taken on a long load of subjects, three more than I'd need to matriculate, with the idea of discarding cabooses at the end of the year, depending on interest and performance.

‘All the smart kids do physics and chemistry and they scale up your marks because those subjects are hard,' said Sam, who had done scarily well in the HSC and was about to start a science degree at Sydney University. ‘I'll be able to help you with them if you get stuck.'

I had to work at science, if only to behave properly in lab-based classes. Yet the prospect of getting Sam's notes was irresistible.

One discipline I was indentured to was Croatian. The leaders of the Croatian community had lobbied the NSW Board of Studies for years to have the language as an official subject. I was in the first small group to do Croatian for the HSC. Over the curriculum border, there was another cohort of students: a crack, paramilitary unit of Serbian linguists who, word had it, had been training for years in secret bush camps.

We had to put on a good show to maintain Croatian pride, Tata said. The next generation were depending on Vesna, Astrid, Irena, Katica, Ivica and, God help them, Tomislav.

Croatian was non-negotiable. In my father's reckoning, I could fail everything, as long as I kept at Croatian.

‘Anyway, the more languages you have, the more valuable you'll be to an employer,' he said.

‘So how come St John's and Benilde don't teach any languages?'

‘Rubbish schools,' Teta Danica interjected. ‘A man is measured by how many languages he has. Your grandfather could speak Chinese.'

How could anyone tell?

‘You'll be able to work as an interpreter here or overseas,' my dad said, with more hope than experience. ‘It will help you
in journalism – when you're selling newspapers, paper boy.'

He could have added another insult. Charlemagne reputedly said ‘to speak another language is to possess another soul'.
Duša
translates to ‘soul' in English; Duševićs were of the soul, rhythm, blues and gospel-backed folks singing to your soul. We had the groove, despite a hereditary aversion to the dance floor among our male kin. But my Croatian soul was stuck at age nine: immature, whiney, confused and erratic, not yet belligerent. I only ever spoke to my parents in Croatian; it stunted my ability to argue with them – not counting angry gesticulations – or embarrass us all by telling them about the things going on in my head. An uneasy peace hung over flashpoint Belmore, a battle over my very soul. It was concord by default.

In any case, as I've already declared, the Croatian I spoke was a creole, the Dalmatian dialect we used at home. Yet within it we entertained the island-speak of the Lukins of Kali, with its odd contusions on the language, random syllabic stresses and mimetically bizarre intonations. Next, we blended in the lingo of the Duševićs of mainland Ljubač, sprinkling in the patois of sheep-herders between the mountains and sea. Mama and Teta Danica had also kept up the bastardised tongue that took hold during the Italian occupation of Zadar decades earlier. What they were able to do to two decent languages within earshot of minors deserved a harsh sentence. Plus Tata had been educated in the official Zagreb-style Croatian and read widely. There was a swirl of house styles, a cacophony of usages.