Ambrose Ambles

 Twelve Caesars.

Book Two..."The Raconteur"

Part one..

Any skills I have as a raconteur I have learned by careful observation of those I met in my youth..as my skills in the trade of carpentry were first taught by the tradesmen I worked with and honed by experience, so were those oral storytellers in my formative years..in front bar and camp they would tell tall story and tale, with either exaggerated excitement or subdued laconic humour or cynicism…Most could very well be script-illiterate, hence their falling onto the oral telling of their lives…or their audience could be likewise complex language unlearned and the use of gesticulation and voice inflection a necessary ingredient to tale and verse…and in those time of youthful enthusiasm, I listened..and listened closely..and watched, because in those times it was not the place for a youngster to interrupt or talk over an older person…certainly NOT if they were telling a yarn..for the teller of such things were a valuable commodity in a working camp, far away from family and home..

In these times of higher education, it must be seen as ironic that the passing of both the front bar style of oral storytelling and the raconteur to be then replaced with written word which itself has now fallen into disuse and the mainstay of story telling is the visual media..so lazy have we become that even the listening of tale that may demand some intelligent deciphering and interpretation of nuance with experience, so we have given over such method to the simple viewing of situation drama on television or movie-screen.

Verily have we come the full circle from the days of the Coliseum and Hippodrome where participation in the action or drama required little more than attendance and the turning of a thumb up or down..much the same as “channel surfing” with the remote controller on the television.

So let me take you on a journey into my learning of the tricks of the trade of storyteller which I picked up alongside my adventures as a journeyman carpenter, where our whole generation abandoned our parent’s set ideas of work and lifestyle to go on one fucking hell of a wild ride to an uncertain destiny without a single adult in the game!

The Raconteur.

Raconteur, raconteur tell another tale,

Oh please old raconteur, never one to fail.

Tell us of your olden times,

Tell us of your time in jail,

Tell us oh tell us, old man…

Those times of such travail.

Epiphany…

I wrote this piece quite a few years ago. It was an attempt to both explain and understand that moment of decision in my late teens, in the later years of the 1960’s when the urge for revolution was so explosive in our Boomer generation. The thing is, while we were full of the life and want for a new social beginning, AND were keen as mustard to get started in it, we really didn’t (or at least ..I..didn’t !) have any flamin’ idea where it was going to take us!..It was one crazy, hell-raising ride into adventure, with not one adult around to give guidance or example..just partying on for years and years!..the old rules were torn up and the new ones had yet to be written..and when they finally were, it was on the shredded shirt-tails of what was then a conservative Australia..
Well..the job was done and still is done and all this old boomer can say is ;
“ Goodbye to all that!”!”

An interesting phenomenon can happen to a young person when they reach their mid to late teens, there is a moment of awakening to the situation around them, the life they are living, the social circle and familial surroundings that guide their every-day movements and decisions. They can have a sort of psychological awakening and either fall totally in-line with the accepted dogma of society, or they can totally rebel and reject the “boring-as-batshit” lifestyle of their parents and peers and go off in a completely different direction. Some of the “baby-boomers” famously did just the latter….I was one of those.

Now, to my mind, there were three different phases of baby-boomers…There are those born directly at the end of the second world war, the more inflexible of these grew up with the mind-set of their parents : Conservative, militaristic, socially servile.

The second wave from the start of the fifties to the middle fifties were expected to follow such sentiments as their older siblings, but they did not..Oh!, they did for a while, as tender youths, but then they rebelled, even against their brothers and sisters!

The third wave, till the early sixties, are the misguided conservatives we have in power now! They have leap-frogged back to the fifties in a caricature of what they perceive as their parents control mechanisms and are an exaggerated version of that conservatism.

I am of the middle set of boomers…and man!…did we ever rebel! It wasn’t just a case of :”Oh, I think I’ll go in a different direction”…It was an emphatic…”I’m outa here!”..and I can remember the exact moment when I stopped being the aspiring apprentice carpenter and became the son from hell!

There were three things that awoke the liberating spirit within me, the first was a book, the second was music and the third that sealed my fate was an incident.

Let me explain.

I was an avid reader of books in my early teens…you probably know the type of books..: Crime, mysteries, war, adventure…that sort of thing…I was a regular “young boys own” kind of fellow, till one day, in the mid sixties or so, whilst about to catch a train, I was looking at a book-stand for something to read, and in a hurry, I bought this book that had on its cover a war theme…I bought the book and caught the train….the title of the book : “Catch 22″…I fell in love with that book…I still love it! I’ve consumed it so many times, like one consumes a lover, a hunger insatiable till you next see them! When touching is not enough and total immersion is demanded..a beauty!

In 1967, The Beatles released their “Sgt. Peppers” album…Talk about a bombshell!…Never, never before in my own world of music had such a magical mix of bizarre and sublime sounds been cast upon the airwaves. You cannot honestly tell me that you can listen to that album and not be swept away with the mesmerising musical magic….and that moment when the calliope lilts in “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite”…”…and of course Henry the horse dances the wALTz…”…..glorious! magical!, marvellous! To HELL with Elvis!…and then came Hendrix and The Stones.. who wants the crappy crooners? Just turn up the volume!

The third incident was the defining moment, when the combination of the first two awakenings jelled with the third and I went home to sleep on a new and exciting desire.

Again, it was 1967…the end of that year, I was nearly seventeen…it was Summer…….I don’t suppose the name ; Bodo Skrypek means anything to you? Why should it?…But just roll that name around and off your tongue  a couple of times….obscure? abstract?…..intriguing isn’t it?…But I kid you not..it is a real name. As a matter of fact, he nearly got into a punch-up with a copper one night who thought he was having him on giving a name like that!

Bodo was a “Rocker”….you know?, in the days of Mods and Rockers…Bodo was a Rocker of the first order..The BSA Golden Flash motorcycle with the cow-horn handle-bars, the black leather jacket and chrome shoulder-chains, black stove-pipe jeans and stud-belt with “ripple-sole” shoes, the tats, the snarl..blonde, “flat-top” crew-cut and the sartorial exactness of a Jimmy Dean, but with all the aggro of “Chopper Reid”, if Chopper was around in those days!

You’d understand what I mean if I tell you that he cultivated a meticulousness of both dress style in matched sleekness with his motorcycle..he used to clean his motorcycle, that fetish of masculinity, engine and spokes, with a toothbrush!…that machine was a black and chrome beast, an android extension of his physical personality, he could toss it around like it was a coin in the twirl of his fingers. It was totally phallic… Bodo WAS the fifties personified. We adored him…. We feared him!

So…

One summer night, at the top of Brighton Rd. and the junction of Schofield terrace and Ocean Boulevarde, three of us gathered near “The Monument” ; a tall, cylindrical column with three rifles triangulated and propped to each other on top of the column, still in-situ but moved a little to one side of the road, a testament to war. Three of us were there..: Pommy Len with his Honda, Ron Parker with his 350cc. Beeza..and myself, the youngest by a couple of years, with my Yamaha. It was the early days of the emergence of the Japanese motorcycles…themselves a bone of contention amongst the motorcycle purists who mostly scorned the “Jap-crap” for British machines, of which, amongst the Rocker brigade, Triumphs and BSA reigned supreme…Norton was acceptable, but just,: the intellectuals choice…the rest were, in the vernacular of the times..:”poofter bikes”!

We were there, at the S-bend in the road, at the monument, just milling about, dead-still night, nothing to do and no intention of doing it! And then Bodo rocks up on his Golden Flash Beeza…sees us, does a U-ee and pulls up and parks with one automatic quick-flick of the side-stand whilst simultaneously dismounting…He lit up a cigarette…(where did it come from..magic! there it was, the lit match already somersaulting away into the night). He stands, we gather around to the “flame”…moonlight and streetlight phosphorose man and machine, memory fixed to time and place..did I know it was the end of an era…

Jacta alia est!

My senses were alert..I don’t know, something was stirring in me, a portent?..Did we talk? I don’t remember, did we animate? I don’t remember..But next thing, another motorcycle comes around the S-bend and pulls up. I do not know him, but Bodo does..even some sort of respect…he rides a Suzuki “Hustler”, the quickest bike off the mark for those days…his pillion is a blonde girl, long..blonde hair…they are both about eighteen, no crash helmet, no shoes, just “T” shirt and casual denim jeans…but maaan!, they looked so cool and relaxed, they didn’t get off the bike, just straddled it and conversed with Bodo, who, after some little time in discussion on the merits of particular motorcycles, tired of the conversation and tried to “hit on” the blonde girl pillion who, with a disdaining toss of her blonde hair, seemed to scorn him!…a new ideal, a new generation!..I saw it, the vulnerability, the loss of attitude….

The young man started the motorcycle and with a casual adieu..and that’s what it was ; an adieu..They turned and accelerated down Brighton Rd with such amazing speed and unity of line, that even Bodo paused in the action of putting his cigarette to his lips. I Iiked that look of cool denim, the girl, the bike the attitude….an Epiphany! I wanted it!

There seemed like a long, long silence between the departure of those two prophets and any action on our parts…That machine and its’ passengers just went…whoosh, no thundering roar of engine, no aggro from the young man toward Bodo’s attempt on his pillion, just a swift, smooth departure from the point of disturbance toward serenity..the red tail-light a point of distinction fading into the distance.

“I wonder”, said Bodo suddenly,”How fast I can get up to coming down that road?”

He was turned gazing up the new stretch of bitumen of Ocean Boulevarde…None of us commented, it was a rhetorical question, for he had no sooner said it than he had flung his smoke away and mounted his bike and still with the kick-start at the nadir of its stroke, the motor throttling, the side-stand snapped closed as he leapt the bike out onto the road, wheel spinning in a smokey arc while the bike aligned itself to point up the open road.

We three moved our bikes and ourselves down the road a little to where the bend straighten out toward Seacliff. We stood on the edge of the kerb and waited.

You could hear him before you could see him as he came thundering down that boulevard like a summer storm barrelling down…that Beeza was screaming, a throaty howl. Christ, he was flying!…then he appeared just as the road went into that long, broad sweeping bend of which we were at the zenith. He was already pitched at a low angle as he went into it at a speed of at least a hundred plus miles an hour….as he floated toward us, the bike howling with a spraying shower of dazzling sparks shooting from the muffler and foot-pedals as that big, beefy, Beeza bounced, bottomed and scraped on the bitumen.

Len and Parker leapt from the road edge to the back of the footpath….I stayed where I was…I don’t know why, except I was mesmerised in the theatre of this performance..for that ‘s what it was ; a statement of braggadocio in the face of  rejection…Bodo had lost face with that girl, with that young man…with us..certainly with me, I wanted nothing of it, no more big-noting, no more aggro, no more warrior tactics….I wanted liberation from that whole social network , screw them all! Though of course, I couldn’t voice those specific thoughts as I stood there rooted defiantly to the kerb. I wasn’t going to respond to the automatic fear….I know now ; with mortality being the only certainty, the whole world runs on bluff.

Sure enough, Bodo swept past so close to me I could smell the engine oil and feel the heat of that motor. He was still braking as he neared the Seacliff junction..but I couldn’t care less, for I had already mounted my Yamaha and was quietly making my way home…I had a lot of thinking to do.

As I lay abed, thinking about that young man and the girl, the fact that they didn’t get upset or angry, they just “walked away”…and that is what I did to that life back then..to my job, to my parents, to my home, to all the expectations of that boring-as-batshit society…it’s what we all did, a whole generation almost, spontaneously, I didn’t get angry, I just..walked away!

Those times marked the beginning of a new world of opportunity for social and metaphysical change..the big building companies that ran multiple trades within their construction contracts came to an end..the old family industries built up by an older generation had reached the end of their days with the passing of that old generation, the younger inheritors made drastic and unsympathetic changes with the challenging of the unions and the long-held principles of wages and conditions…

Saturday mornings then were a special moment for us youth in our little group. This was in the days of our mid-teens, too young to go to the pubs but old enough to have a motorcycle licence. All of us, to a lad, were apprentices...most of us were in the building industry.. a couple in the Auto industry. Our take-home pay was such that we had to make our own fun, fortunately, petrol was at such a low price (relative to our income) we could go tear-arseing through the hills playing at boy-racers, like our heroes on the Isle of Man TT. Circuit.

What has one gained

When a tally done?

Are pelf and possessions

Worthy of time gone?

If a smile is lost

And bright eyes grow dun.

We would meet at a certain cross-road and take off into our favourite “runs”. If it was a short run, we would go through Coromandel Valley / Clarendon...if it was an all-day affair, it would be the Murray Bridge run on what is now the “old road”, through Mt Barker, Nairne, Kanmantoo / Callington. With long straight stretches where you could unwind the bikes to see how fast they would go. On the winding roads, we’d make a single file, snaking through the corners on what was understood as ; “The Right Line”, after a short film of the era that featured a racing bike on Oulton Park, with the camera fixed to the front and it took you through the “line” most suited to the fastest speed in the corners...I believe the bike was a Manx Norton...I remember the throaty big-piston sound that they had....a thrilling ride ..then!

Sometimes , on those long straight lengths of road we would ride side by side and exchange chatter, my Japanese two-stroke a higher pitch than Ron Parker’s BSA or Russel Hamby’s Triumph...those British bikes had a certain smell of hot oil and a distinctive hum of chain driven gears...those Brits loved chains!...But I loved that smell of burning oil...it also was prevalent on the old steam trains, a smell of steam and oil would sometimes shisssh out from the front drive of the train as you walked past...shishhhwhoosh!..and there was that smell.

So I am now clasped in a hold,

I cannot stay young,

Dare not grow old.

But cannot stop feeling

What my heart  be told.

Was life,

And all its promises,

But a Judas kiss !

 

This idyll went on for several years in my youth, work was there, a sense of permanence was there, routine was in place and the reward of the inviolate weekend to relax permeated through the whole of society. Mums and dads were at home, doing things in the garden or the house, dinner, mundane as it sometimes was,  was always there. Kids were climbing trees or running over paddocks and we teens were going to the beach or the pictures watching banal American “teen-flicks” with Annette Funnicello, Gidget, Eric Von Zipper and a host of rhinestone cowboys and other ghastly indoctrination pieces. We were being shown “the good life”, the “American Dream”, like when television came along and we got “My Three Sons” or “Leave It To Beaver”, ”Father Knows Best” ..then those series of “Crime doesn’t pay” gumshoe-detective genre I believe was in the mix also. One is inclined now, with the wisdom of age, to ask ; “What were the adults thinking!!?”

But now, we do know just what “they” were thinking.

They were showing us “The Contract”. An unwritten agreement that “all this” could be yours if you stick to the line and the terms of the contract and just do as you are directed. It was the age of wall to wall Conservative Liberal Governments...Federal, State, Local, one great big broad church of conservatism with a capital “C”. The endless long-weekend with work aplenty, radio, tv, the flicks, sun, surf and an endless horizon that seemed as if it could have gone on forever....an endless ;”Come Saturday Morning”..and it wasn’t us workers who broke the contract.

Bring me no roses.

Bring me no roses, on this sad day.

No fancy words, no bright eulogy, pray.

Bring nothing but your tears,

Your regrets and fears..for what has gone awry,

And what is now come into play.

My people are dead, their works repealed,

Their strikes, their rights, their hard-won wages reviled.

Their lives of toil and camaraderie forgot,

Traded away as an auctioned lot,

Along with their “crude and clumsy jot”.

Their fumbling demands for rights at work,

Dismissed by “class-less” finishing-schooled jerks,          

With soft, crème’d hands and a tongue that is forked.

No..bring me no roses on this, such a day,

For I am still weeping for my lost comrades..

Give flowers to the “pretty people” as they go about their play,

The soft, sweet scent will hide the stench as they betray.

 

I was apprenticed to a builder who held a major contract with the then Housing Trust, and he ran one of those old family businesses, a Latvian whom I now suspect of being one of those Nazi collaborators in the 2^nd. WW. I worked in the joinery / machine shop. I was in my third year of the apprenticeship and I was keen to extend my carpentry knowledge with a stint on the job with roofing and wall structures. I asked if I could leave the joinery shop and go on the job.

I was told ; no, as there was only sub-contractors on the job, not company employees.

I then asked if I could be assigned with one of these subbies so I could learn more about carpentry. I was told no, and that was the end of it. ..I was to stay in the shop.

I then started to wonder how this system worked.. Why were there so many apprentices in proportion to tradie joiners?...Were these “joiners” really tradesmen or just bench-hands? I soon worked out that not only were the workers there not tradesmen, but that there were more apprentices as that was the cheapest labour...and when I queried both the “apprenticeship commission” and my union on the situation, I was told to shut-up and not to make trouble.

Our Father.

 

That meager kitchen light

Cut his reflection on the glass.

He looks…the collar of his overcoat tugs,

A fumbling with the latch.

 

Another dawn interminably,

The workplace calls him down.

The trains, the jostle, the silent journeys

Through winter’s cutting edge.

 

Though visible within my memory,

No touch, no talk, no sound,

But an awkward gentle smiling,

That baleful knotted frown.

 

The evening family rosary;

Pray God maintain our health.

HIS prayers I’d say were directed

To stay the creeping stealth

Of years, that cut a swathe

Through the patience of the man,

The blocks, the bricks, the working tools

Raised welts of callouses on his hands.

 

When the cup of love went empty,

Would do to fill it up with wine.

He drank to forget the future,

He drank for Auld Lang Syne!

 

The weakness was his, they tell us;

The drink, the swearing, the hand

That struck us fiercely stinging…

But I see the courage in the man.

 

And though his “achievements” were empty,

And poverty enriched our band,

I’d do worse than esteem his persistence,

Nor prefer I memories of “better” men.

 

 

 

So there it was..; the perfect fool’s paradise..; The factory filled with cheap labour churning out a product for a conservative govt’ being run by a conservative opportunist with the permission of conservative govt’ authority overseen by a conservative / right-wing union.. As long as the status quo was maintained, all would be sweet..; Work would come in, wages would go out, “The Real McCoy’s” (with Walter Brennan) or “Rawhide” (with Ward Bond and Clint Eastwood) would keep repeating and every weekend would be another ; “Come Saturday Morning”.

But the bastards got greedy, they got away with the shit wages and conditions for so long, they saw it as their privilege, so that when the workers did finally get some unions with balls and did kick up about it, they got heavy and then the shit really hit the fan! It was called Vietnam and protest songs and freedom!

In the end, it was the “mechanics” of the life we lived that called the shots on how we behaved..shop-floor working lives that filled the working week and allowed us the weekend to binge on entertainment..whether that be wild rides through the winding hills roads on our motorbikes or as we came of age to drink, the bingeing on booze on Friday / Saturday nights to recover on Sunday ready for Monday..Such a life style became routine.

“One must forgive the young their foolishness, for without them, there would not seem so much wisdom in old age.”…Socrates.

Ah!..Friday nights, didn’t we look forward to them. But we were young and carefree in those days. A group of us young bucks would meet after work at the Seacliff Hotel on Fridays and imbibe of the amber fluid and see what came of the evening. We were mostly working lads, so our thirsts were dry and encouraging.

I happened to be the first there that night, so I’d only taken my first drought of beer and settled back one-arm-on-the-bar surveying the scene, when in walks Mark. Mark was a big stocky fellow then, before the years and a beer-gut increased accordingly.

“Another schooner please, Noela.” I said to the barmaid before Mark reached me.

“G’day mark..How’s the land lie?” I greeted him.

‘Hrmph!..not much better than yesterday..ta, Noela.”

“Why the long face?…Say!..I heard you bought yourself a car!”

“HAD, you mean..past tense…an’ I only had it three days!”

“Righto then”, I turned and put both my forearms on the bar-top..”out with it..what’s the dirt?”

‘Bloody Mick!” Mark spat the words out.

“More!” I demanded.

“Last night we were in here having a drink”, he started..( I motioned to Noela for a beer for myself and nudged the coins on the bar and gave her the wink and a sign to keep refilling them). ” You know then that car I got from one of Mick’s mates who was going back to Sydney or somewhere and it had a “yellow canary” on it for bald back tyres?…Well, Mick suggested I buy the car ’cause I could get it for a song.” Mark paused for a drink and a sigh, then continued…

” But I haven’t even got a licence..I said to him..’You’ll get one one day’ ,said Mick ‘ and until then I can drive you around, since I don’t have a car.’….Mark rolled his eyes..”Say!..have you heard about Mick’s car?”

“I have not” I replied.

“Ah!…it’s another story..I’ll tell you later..he smashed it anyhow….again!” Mark waved his hand as if to erase the thought from his mind.

“Well,” he continued “I’d had enough beer by then to be a little bit foolish, so between one thing and another, I bought the car….’ 64 Falcon…green…..I think!”.

Mark sighed and plonked his hand down on a packet of smokes which he flung the lid off in an angry gesture and lit one up ecstatically.

“A man’s a fool!” he philosophised.

“Well, we were in here last night, me, Mick and Jim….You know  Jim..the bullshit-artist?…yeah, that’s him!…me and Jim and Mick, just where we’re sitting now..and the car’s there outside the window in the street and I was feeling a little proud, I admit it, I’d never owned a car before, you see?…”

“Anyway..(yes thanks, Noela)..we’re sitting here an’ Mick leans over to Jim and me and whispers like it was a national secret…: ‘I know where I can get a good “deal” tonight’…”

“Oh yeah!” I said “Where; The Brighton?”

“Yeah..good heads..good price too!”…Mick was keen. Suddenly, there was “Brain’s” face hanging over my shoulder..”How much?” Brain asks.

I tell you, if there’s even a sniff of dope within half a mile of Brain, he’s on to it. And God!..doesn’t it look like he’s full of it ! If it can be smoked, drank chewed or injected…..but then I ‘spose that’s why he’s called “Brain”….oh God!…his eyes!!”

“How much?” Brain repeats himself..he’s standing there trembling like a distempered dog..anyway, between the long and short of it, we scrape our money together… I lent Brain his share..and we send Mick to buy a bag.”

“He gets back about an hour later lookin’ like he’s smoked half of it away. He gave us the nod from the door and we all finished our beers and went out to the car. He showed us the “deal”.

“And the rest, Mick!”, Jim said…He knew Mick like he knows himself, eh?..After a good deal of threatening from us he handed over some more he’d kept ‘ for commission’  he said.”

“Well, we decided to go up to the lighthouse and have a couple of joints. Mick’s driving like he usually does, so he does a few ‘ring-a-rounds’ on the grass and we park and smoke away……When we decided to go, Mick does another bunch of 360’s just to make an idiot of himself and then goes and slides the car into a ditch on the slope and gets stuck…of course, you know Mick..; plants his foot till smoke’s pouring off the tyres!”

” ‘Hold on dickhead!’..I shouted, ‘ we’re not going anywhere like this…we’ll have to get out and push’…we were standing at the boot, all off our faces as it was…’ No, Mick….YOU..stay in the car and steer….ok?…yeah, right ‘….Well, there we were, an the stars were shinin’…shinin’ an’ the lighthouse light is goin’…blink..blink…FLASH!!…jeez, y’know..it was a beautiful night….so it took us a little while to notice the grass had caught on fire under the car..probably off the muffler..up it went!…WHOOSH!…’ Mick, Mick’, we yelled (shoulda’ kept our mouths shut!) an he got out just in time. Man..we were panicking. Brain was freaking out, he just stood there moaning, ‘ Oh man, oh man’..and staring.”

“I’ ll go to a house’, I shouted, ‘and call the fire brigade’. I tell you I went to four houses over the other side of that gully before someone would listen to me. I don’t blame them on reflection, I dunno what I was sayin’..and the people in the forth house could see the problem without me babbling a word. He just looked over my shoulder and the grass on the whole side of the hill was on fire. I heard the sirens then and it was all over bar the shouting….When I got back to the fenceline, Jim, Mick and Brain were standing there silhouetted against the flames. Jim went into bullshit mode and started to detail about how it reminded him of “when he used to burn the sugar-cane crops up in Bundaberg….”..I told him to ‘ shuddup, Jim..just shuddup!’.

“Well, that was last night. This morning, I wasn’t feeling too good, but around comes Mick to pick up me an’ Jim an’ we drive up to the lighthouse to see the damage. The car’s a writeoff, gutted except the rear-end and the boot…you know those new tyres I put on to get the coppers to wipe off the “yellow canary”?…well, someone stole both wheels… must’av been the only thing on the whole car worth saving….and to add insult to injury, I’m standing there, really depressed an’ thinkin’..; ‘ well..at least I owned a car for three days! ‘….suddenly Mick makes this gasping sound, like a sharp intake of breath, leaps to the passenger-side door, throws it open and flips open what remained of the glovebox.”

“Oh SHIT !”…Mick cried painfully..”There was a whole “deal” in that glovebox!!”

“Man…I coulda’ wept.”…Mark shook his head disbelievingly. His hand plopped down again on his smokes.

“Two pints this time thanks, Noela”. He sighed.