RAZZ – Chapter 7

© surmon 2008

Breaking Up Crappy Homes

With all these interruptions and setbacks I was falling behind schedule to re-invent myself before trying to arrange another encounter with the woman of my dreams.

Apart from falling behind schedule I was creating collateral damage. I was aware of a feeling that I had become a thorn, yea and verily, a spike in my parent’s sides. When I was at home with them, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that they radiated strongly towards me, that my recent run-in with the law had wounded them deeply and that I’d stand a better chance of getting six numbers in the X-Lotto before forgiveness was meted out.  My brother and sister dealt out to me such cold ignore that walking past either of them left on me the impression of a fridge standing open. I was treated like a leprous pariah all because I got the family name in the paper. Of course I managed to get it into the courts... again, as well as the police files... again - and I don’t know where else it got noted down  - but it obviously irritated them.

More to the point, I irritated them. And life at home became uncomfortable so I set out to change my living arrangements to the better, I thought, for all concerned. I admit, now, and back then, that it wasn’t all for the benefit of my family. What I wanted was for this new girl to meet a single, sophisticated bloke (me) with his own pad and income, and love would automatically blossom into a torrid but satisfying arrangement that would leave me wrung out like a dish rag and smiling ear to ear. With thoughts of that beautiful agony painfully wrinkling my brow, I hunted high and low for a job and somewhere to live at a cost that wouldn’t run me into negative figures. The accommodation actually came along before the job.

I’d had the usual run-around — all the share places I wanted to be in didn’t want me to be in them. I decided I’d be better off looking for a place that I didn’t like.

I saw the ad in a local paper: “Person wanted to share house with truck driver.”  My first thought was that he might drive for an ice cream company, or better yet, a brewery. I called the number and made contact with an answering machine that told me the address, the cost of the rent and to get myself over there pretty quick or miss out!

This appeared  to be a golden opportunity. The rent was easily affordable and the place wasn’t too far from town.  What was the catch?

I rode my pushbike around to the house of the truck driver. The joint was in darkness. But I liked the casual atmosphere of the place — the waist-high weeds and grass, the old lounge chair on the front verandah, the note on the front door that said: “If you’ve got this far, you may as well go inside! The door is unlocked. I’ll be home later.”

No self-resecting person would go any further. I did.

I pushed the door open and stepped into the front room. It was pretty untidy in there and full of furniture of all kinds. The owner must be some kind of eccentric. I got to the kitchen and saw a note on the table that read: “If you’ve got this far and you’re not a burglar you can have the second bedroom. There’s some beer in the fridge. And if you are a burglar — I was lying about the beer.”

And then in brackets underneath it said:  (Also, mister robber, the TV is kactus. If you want a good one, try next door - he’s an insurance salesman. Got lots of stuff all covered by replacement policies.)

If that’s all the “catch” was, I didn’t mind. I could see why earlier home-hunters may have been put off but I wasn’t - I liked the place. I strolled back to the front room and settled down to wait in a huge old lounge chair in front of a shabby old black and white TV with broken knobs and wires dangling out of its face. Ten minutes is a long time with a busted TV. But soon, I heard crappy music blaring loudly up the street and right into the driveway. Then it switched off, and car door slammed and footsteps clumped up to the door. Then I heard a loud pranging noise and a lot of swearing. I’d left my bike in the dark on the verandah.

‘Who’s in there, a fucken’ postman?’ demanded a loud, even uncouth voice.

I went to the door to apologise and shift my bike and met my soon-to-be house-mate, Lockie Tattersall — Tats to his friends — hopping on one leg and rubbing the shin of the other.

‘I’m really sorry about that,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the fellow, standing up to this full 6 feet two inches, ‘you weren’t to know that we use the front door to go in and out of the fukken’ house!’

Tats’ nickname actually came more from the colourful decorations that adorned his arms and upper torso than from his name. As well as the tattoos, he also looked a bit rough around the edges and was the complete opposite of the sort of person I had in mind to share my first living-away-from-home experience. But he was solid as a gold brick underneath the shabby exterior.

Tats was an interstate semi driver and wanted somebody to be in the house while he was away on long trips. As there was no other person who had made it this far, and I had apologised for cracking his shin, it looked like I’d found myself a new home. I went back to announce this fact to my parents.

When I was at school I was almost expelled for starting one of the most unusual fights they ever had on the premises. Having had a desire to answer to higher callings that weren’t actually summoning me, I joined the School debating team and sat on a panel with some of the school’s nerdiest egg- and propeller-heads to debate some esoteric notion in eloquent rhetoric. It wasn’t just my unfamiliarity with subject that caused all the problems, it was that I didn’t actually understand what the word ‘debate’ meant. At home something that started out as a ‘debate’ usually ended up in a fight. Often a real fight — just as did this school debate. I might just add that while egg- and propeller-heads are pretty good at the witty verbal thrust and parry, when they break free of the shackles of civility and respond to a bit of “fight or flight” activity, they seem to release an ugly amount of pent-up frustration. And in truth, it was their animal behaviour that deeply disturbed the principal and, in doing so, saved me from expulsion despite the fact that it was I who had yanked the first tie and blacked the first eye.

Anyway, when I announced to my parents that I had successfully found lodgings and would be moving out the following weekend we had a ‘debate’ about it. Strange, considering their general lack of interest when I announced my intention to find some single-person accommodation some time before, but there you have it! You could say parents are unpredictable but they probably felt secure in their smug opinions that I’d soon be back, humbled by failure, submissive, and happy to be home and bludgeoned into numb obeisance that would prevent me from ever mentioning “leaving home” again. I can only suppose that they were annoyed about being wrong.

When the kitchen chair dad threw pinned me to the plasterboard wall and mum told me to get out and never come back you ungrateful wretch I knew they were very upset about being wrong. I left home with virtually the clothes on my back. Tats wasn’t surprised to see me return later that night.

‘Did they hit the roof?’ he asked quite candidly. I nodded. ‘They’ll grow out of it. Have a beer. Watch some TV,’ he added.

‘It’s broken, Isn’t it?’

‘That’s just camouflaged with an old TV cabinet. Turn it around and underneath she’s a full colour stereo job — it’s the opposite to real life, Razz.’

Once I’d settled in things started to look brighter. Tats reckoned he could get me a job in”the furniture business” — something he’d been associated with ever since he was kicked out of reform school.

I liked the idea of being in “the furniture business”. It sort of ran in the family. My uncle Roy was once set to make a fortune in the furniture business. He invented the non-stick chair for students too lazy to get off their bums.

The idea was to put Teflon on the seat of the chair so that the lethargic learner would slip off the chair at the slightest movement and thus be kept on his or her toes. It was a clever idea and showed some promise without actually enthusing the teaching fraternity who preferred their charges sedated, if not completely asleep. However a slight error in the manufacture of the chair prototype produced a radical innovation in school furniture that had huge untapped potential.

Somehow or other the Teflon got put on the underneath of the seat instead of the top, and my uncle, always an opportunist, was quick to realise that he had invented the revolutionary Boogie Resistant Student Chair! Snot, dried or sticky, would not - could not - adhere to the underside of the seat. A stranger could sit on the chair, grasp the seat and shuffle it under or away from a desk with fearless impunity.

For a while there, we thought that Roy was set to make more money than Bill Gates with his new invention, but things did not go so well for the chair in the trial runs with real students.

He tested twenty-eight chairs on a class of year 12’s and within half an hour riot and panic reigned. Just imagine twenty-eight nose-picking students with their sticky boogies glued to the ends of their fingers, and the bottom of their chairs stubbornly refusing to accept those grubby nose nuggets.

Some of the girls fainted and half-grown male students broke down as they tried to wipe the conk berries on their trousers or socks and even each others’ clothes. It was a pitiful, gut-wrenching sight, so until students are taught how to use handkerchiefs, plans for the boogie-resistant student chair will remain on the drawing board or, in Uncle Roy’s case, in the sideboard. The debacle also caused the education board to reject out of hand, any other clever seating ideas which upset Roy greatly. Ever since then he has locked himself in a wardrobe to sulk but, while the experience confirmed some suspicions I had  about educators, it made me realise the potential in furniture.

Reasoning states that if everyone has a bum they have to put it on something when they sit down, there is, therefore, a fortune to be made in manufacturing chairs. I was prepared to start at the bottom, so to speak, making stools and toilet seats, eventually working my way up to knocking out antique dining room settings, lounge suites and pool tables. Furniture is a noble business, I asserted. I believe Jesus was in the furniture business - a custom kitchen fitter or French polisher or something like that - and look what happened to him! Well...  once I actually got into the trade and learned its history I felt sure I’d be able quote a better example.

With a heart full of hope and a head full of matching teak built-ins, I accepted Tats’ offer of a job. On the day he specified I took myself, dressed in the appropriate working clothes and clanking with saws and hammers, to the address he’d written on a card for me. After a sorting out my misunderstanding with one of the foremen on the job at the address, I hung up my apron and carpentry tools and started work... as a tramper on a furniture removal van!

At first I found myself wishing Tats had explained things a bit better when he said “the furniture business” but I soon discovered that I actually liked the removalist job. I was never allowed to wreck the furniture at home and now I was getting paid to do it, even though being a tramper is pretty hard work at times. The work was fairly easy. I was one of two idiots — workers  — who carefully ran the furniture out to the truck while the removalist lovingly shovelled it into a heap and covered it up with a wrap before the owner saw it.

‘There’s money in this game!’ announced Robert, the other idiot (my co-worker) with the voice of experience ringing loud and true, because he was right - he found $1.35 in the first lounge chair we picked up!

This discovery made me aware of possibilities and in minutes the rest of the lounge chairs and sofas in the house were in tatters as a minor gold rush broke out.

‘A bloke I know found a ten pound note under a carpet once,’ said Robert, suggestively.

‘What’s a ten pound note?’ says I, taking the bait.

‘I dunno for sure but I think it’s something like pirate’s treasure, pieces of eight,’ he replied.

That was good enough for me; I’d’ve settled for pieces of seven. In almost no time at all, the lady - whose furniture we were moving - was also going to be taking the carpet, the lino and the floor tiles with her because if we went to all the trouble of ripping up the stuff for a few lousy cents,  it was going in the van, along with the skirting boards and wallpaper!

We were nearly through stripping the wallpaper when we were called away for more serious work — the piano.

The useless thing was upstairs - on the first floor. How the hell it got it up there must in the first place have been a task and a half unless they held it up in the air with a crane and built the second floor around it. Getting it down looked incredibly difficult but, in the end, proved to be quite easy.

We dragged the thing over to the top of the stairs and balanced it on the steps. The chief removalist, being really strong and determined to make us look puny, took the lower end of the frigging racketmill while I Robert and I took the upper end. As we eased it off the landing and down the staircase, Robert stood on  my toe.

It didn’t hurt but I wasn’t going to let him get away with it so I kicked his ankle. Then he tried to cork my arm. When I grabbed his ears and twisted them is the point where the piano got away from us.

The removalist had a good grip on the bottom side of the piano but he must have lost his footing and couldn’t stop the thing from finding its own way to the bottom. The piano accelerated down the steps like a rocket sled with the chief hanging onto his end of it, swearing so venomously that he burned the lacquer off the piano top.

It’s a good thing for him that they don’t make houses as solid as they used to. The piano, with the removalist glued to the front of it, hit the bottom landing at about 150 Km/h and went straight out through the front wall of the house, and across the garden, eventually shuddering to a stop near the removal truck where it completely disassembled itself. Robert and I simply peeled the chief off the end panel  - to which he was almost pressure welded - and set him aside to recover while we threw the pieces of piano into the truck.

After the removalist recovered the work seemed to go very quickly. He appeared to be in a hurry to get away. I got the job of moving the fish tank.

I tried to transfer the fish into a jar of water but I lost them down the drain while I was emptying the tank. When the boss found me I was busy putting some sardines I had located in the kitchen into the jar of water, hoping that the lady would assume her goldfish had not survived the journey.

Then I learned something unusual about the boss - he was a gambling man. He bet me double my wages that the jar and I could not fit into a removalist carton. Now, I’ve been in some pretty tight spots before - and got away -  so as far as I was concerned he should just give me double the money and we’d all go home but, a stickler for details, he made me prove it. So I did.

Then I learned that he liked a bit of a joke as well, because as soon as I was in the box he taped it shut and loaded it onto the truck. Boy, did I laugh! I thought that was very funny.

The next day I was still laughing at the gag but as I was getting hungry in the carton I ate the sardines. The following day I had to drink the water as well. Talk about funny.

I was still laughing on the third day when the lady we’d moved opened the box in Perth and discovered me in there.

Of course,  the lady became a bit distressed when I popped - giggling crazily and all squint-eyed - out of the carton; quite a bit distressed, in fact.

But I got to stay in her new house for a couple of days after that. At least until she came out from under sedation. I felt it was the least I could do - look after the house and unpack some more of the boxes. I just asked the doctor to give me a bit of notice before he sent her home in order that I may have time to clear out because the shock she got seeing me appear from the carton will be nothing compared to the one she’ll get when she sees the piano pieces piled up in the lounge room.

o-0-o

To Chapter 8 - Close Encounters