A Chance Meeting that Changed the World as I Knew It

My experiences at trying to find exciting work in the world of business and trade had left me feeling a little uneasy and I decided I needed a rest from it for a while. That was the way I saw it. The way my father put it was that the business world probably needed a bit of a rest before I threw myself at it again. Nevertheless, I still had the desire to do something with myself. I always feel sickening waves of an unknown fear sweep over me if I am idle too long. My father, in what passes for sympathy, suggested I should start work as a yard cleaner and lawn-mower — good, healthy outdoor work for a young feller like me. And it would get me out of his sight.

I did like the sound of it, though — that outdoors life. And it had certain prospects. For example, the thought of eventually becoming a rich landscape gardener by selling dirty big rocks and scabby old logs to foolish money-bags for thousands of dollars really appealed to me.

I applied a little more thought to the matter and soon I was getting lost in a dream where I was a tall, tanned ranger in a national park, saving gum trees, koalas, wombats, dingbats and cumquats from a bunch of nature terrorists by thrashing them within 2.5 centimetres of their lives, and then re-arranging the Blue Mountains to get the best effect. It was around about that time when dad woke me up and showed me a copy of the notice he had put in the window of the local deli. It dobbed me in good and proper. The first person to answer it would probably expect me to turn their weed-infested back yard into a scale model of the Botanical Gardens. Dreaming of being a hero is one thing, having to work at it another thing altogeteher.

As a learning experience, though,  it certainly shed some light on the sort of people who use the services of a yard-cleaner. For example, if a lady wants her yard done it’s probably because the work involved is too heavy or dirty for her. But, if a bloke wants it done you can write your own ticket he’s a lazy coot who’s been waiting for a sucker like me to come along, and his back yard will resemble a demolition site — or worse, as I was soon to discover.

After a couple of routine mowing and weeding jobs that had tricked me into thinking the job was a piece of cake, I found him: the lazy, tyrannical obnoxious old coot! I’ve never seen a back yard like it before or since. I even wrote a letter to Greenpeace asking it to be declared an environmental disaster area.  The little mongrel been waiting for me - or someone like me - to fall into the trap of advertising for work of this kind.
I couldn’t mow the grass because the whole yard was peppered with bits and pieces of old rubbish which I had to rake into a pile first. He stood over me all the while, pointing out the pieces that I missed all the while puffing on a grubby, smelly pipe.

By the time I had all of the rubbish raked into a neat but large, stinking pile, I’d just about had enough of his nit-picking so I accidentally jabbed him in the gob with the end of the rake handle, sending the pipe flying in a shower of sparks.

It felt good doing it but it didn’t go well for me. The sparks set alight something awfully flammable in the pile of rubbish and it went up with a muffled explosion.

The old bloke flew into a panic because he had a big chicken run in the back yard and he didn’t want any of his chooks cooked by me. I had to spray the whole area with the garden hose to stop the spread of the fire and douse the burning rubbish. After I got that under control I tried to mow the grass but his mower was so old and weak it choked on the grass, which was now wet, and died in two minutes flat. Not knowing what to do I rang dad, who in my opinion was responsible for all this, and asked his advice. He suggested I ride home, borrow his ute and mower and a drum for the rubbish and get back to work and why didn’t I think of that myself.

Why, indeed? Back in the lazy old coot’s back yard, he nearly bit through his pipe with excitement when he saw me arrive with a ute full of tools and a large drum for the ashes of the rubbish - just the thing for removing ten years of chook poop from his chicken run!  What a sloppy, smelly mess that was. I’d sprayed it with the hose when the fire was in progress and the floor of the chook run was slowly turning  into a breath-snatching toxic spill of unimaginable stench.

I shovelled the ashes and the sloppy guano into the drum, practically filling it to the rim, and, in the magical absence of my formerly omnipresent overseer, risked  a hernia and a slow painful death from splashes of the putrid stuff by heaving the thing into the back of the ute by myself. I loaded the mower and half a ton of grass clippings onto the tray, begged for my money (the lazy old prick had just as magically re-appeared when the lifting was over) and headed off to the dump across town.

It wasn’t a terribly hot day but I was steaming. I didn’t smell too good either but that didn’t prevent me from stopping in town for a cool drink and the chance to settle down a bit. I found a parking space, plugged the meter, and went across the road to an outdoor cafe to relax. In almost no time at all a couple of my old school friends discovered me, no doubt the smell led them to me, and we spent a glorious half hour terrorising the pedestrians and motorists by skateboarding all over the footpath and road.

With my keen eye I’d selected one side of the road as having the best slope for a speed dash and was gleefully chicaning my way in and out of the footsloggers when I looked ahead of me and spotted a pair of muscle-bound square-heads in the distance, entering the driveway of a gym. Not wishing to have a confrontation with a sub-intelligent species I looked around for a chance to leave the footpath and get killed on the road when an unexpected thing happened — a clown in an open-topped yuppie-cart pulled out of a closer driveway and stopped right in front of me. He hadn’t seen me but his girlfriend in the passenger seat did... a split second before I smacked into the side of the shiny red toy.

My knees left two large dents in the passenger door and I ended up face down in the girl’s lap with my feet waving in the air. I didn’t see what happened to the skateboard but I can tell you about it from an eye-witness report. It shot out from under the car, hit a rise in the kerb on the other side of the driveway and brought down one of the foot-propelled gym-gorillas.

Let me tell you something about gyms and fitness. Gym work-outs may build up monster-looking muscly bodies, but a below-average to scrawny body like mine, powered only by fear and adrenalin, wounded knees and all, can leave those muscle-bound Magillas for dead any day of the week, with their biceps, triceps and peccadillos hopelessly twitching and flexing in frustration and anger.

All I can remember clearly of the incident is the earth-shattering glimpse of the girl who now bore the imprint of my face in her lap – a bit like the Turin shroud -  as I removed myself, apologised and broke the land speed record.

I lied a bit there.... I can also remember her smiling at me and mentioning something about it being all right that I got so personal on our first meeting. I could tell her companion, the driver, didn’t agree that it was all right – his veined throbbed and his pimples glowed fiery red. And on the strength of that, I disappeared and kept myself out of sight until the red car and the other gorillas had finally moved off.

To make matters worse for me, while I was hiding up the street, I spotted a Brown Bomber casually strolling down the road, sending people (by proxy) into uncontrollable fits of rage by writing parking tickets and attaching them to various windscreen wipers. Without even seeing my meter I knew it had expired and was drawing the Bomber, ever so surely, closer and closer, like a dung-heap attracts a fly.

As soon as the killer-gorillas had gone I sprinted down to where my car was parked and arrived just as the Bomber got to it. Thinking quickly for once, I yelled to the bomber when I got to the car, ‘Hey, that meter’s broken and one of your blokes has already chalked my wheel!’

‘Where?’ He asked in a sneering manner, ‘I can’t see the mark!’

‘Well, I saw the sneaky bugger get down on his knees and chalked the bottom part of the tyre. Check it out for yourself, if you don’t believe me.’

He didn’t believe me, so he got down on his knees to have a look for the strangely-placed chalk mark which gave me just the time I needed to jump into the car, kick the engine over and pull away without getting a ticket.
However, I didn’t count on the drum of chook manure losing its balance with the inertia of the hasty take-off, tipping out of the ute and landing upside-down on the well-deserving Brown Bomber. Nevertheless, I drove off happily, amid the cheers and applause of spectators, without realising that my neat, practical father had stencilled his name on the drum.

It’s loss was soon made good. We got the drum back, along with a summons, a court appearance and a couple of fines. But these were of no consequence to me for I had seen her: the girl of my dreams. I’d had an accidental intimate encounter with her, and she had smiled at me. From that moment, I made it my life’s ambition to find her and get her away from those ugly apes, into my own clammy clutches.

o-0-o

to Chapter 6 - Chariots of fire