Stuff about me

During part of my teenage years my Father had a girlfriend.  The six of us, my Father, the girlfriend, her two kids and myself would often be involved with different activities.  These ranged from visits to such riveting institutions as the State Library of NSW and the State Archives of NSW to holidays away together.  My brother and I were used to visits to these institutions and generally found things to amuse ourselves with while our Father did his boring genealogy.  Turns out his girlfriend also had an interest in genealogy and so it led to the four of us kids having to amuse ourselves while our parents poured over riveting reels of microfilm and sheets of microfiche.

* During the proof reading I remembered the Milperra Massacre.  Probably isn’t important but it’s one of those things that have stuck in my mind because we were only a few kilometres away when it happened.  It also gives a better date reference then I previously gave.  See Milperra Massacre

When I was a little older, probably around 16 or 17, I was excused from the weekend stays at my Father’s girlfriend’s house and after about the third year in a row to the same holiday location for Christmas I was allowed to stay behind.  It was a little odd in that I wasn’t trusted to stay in our apartment by myself but my Father was OK with the idea of me staying at some boarding house type establishment down the street.

Around this time I’d dropped out of school to work at K-Mart.  As touched on in earlier blog entries I made friends there and we formed a group of friends comprising of people from work and school.  Over time this group grew into friends of friends and probably peaked at about eight or nine of us socialising together.

Some of the group were closer mates than others and often it was the original core group that would gather at my place on Friday and/or Saturday nights for sessions of drinking, smoking pot and for a brief phase a few of us dabbled in speed. At the time I was having a ball.  I had a new found freedom and sense of responsibility which I flaunted in the true tradition of being a teenager.  My place was the place to be on weekends.  Thinking back it was probably more about my place being more convenient than hiding by the river or some other discrete location to indulge in our recreational escapism.

I only lasted at K-Mart a few months before I resigned.  I started in the Home improvements sort of section which I enjoyed.  It was all a hardware, tools, paint and very manly stuff.  I was 16, fresh out of school, working and obviously a man now.  This department suited me to a tee.  For some reason I was moved into Plastic ware which I thought couldn’t be further removed from the previous department.  I was wrong.  They next moved me to Crockery and Glassware.  I was increasingly displeased with working there. I think that started showing through when I took some sickies.  It was only a few but I’d only been there a few months.

At around the same time I had my first serious girlfriend.  At that age I considered it a serious relationship because my only previous girlfriend and I did little more than kissing and some infrequent groping.  With this girlfriend it was obviously serious because we were having sex.  At 16 sex is a serious thing, albeit clumsy and sometimes unsatisfying.  At the beginning of the relationship I figured that dating her wasn’t the wisest of moves mainly because my best friend had just broken up with her.  I knew I was the rebound boyfriend but I was the rebound boyfriend that was having sex so I went along with it.

I don’t think I fell in love with her but being the first sexual partner I felt a closeness to her I hadn’t felt before.  I felt some degree of closeness to the first girlfriend but not like I did with the current girlfriend.  To this day, despite being basically used by her to get back at my mate, I still have fond memories of her.  To be honest, and I hadn’t really thought about it before, I guess I was using her to some degree too because I made efforts to keep the relationship going, partly because I liked her but logically I think, and especially at that age, partly due to the sex.

Back to K-Mart; At around this time the relationship with the girlfriend was heading downhill.  I think she was talked out of seeing me by my mate’s sister.  One of the duties I was given at K-mart was to write down damaged goods.  We were to note the price and description of the product and in what way it was faulty.  It seemed like such a waste but no one was interested in giving the goods away.  It was imperative that they were destroyed and disposed off.

While I was cleaning out the plastic ware section of the store room I came across a lid to an hamper that I was unable to find the hamper for.  I put it to one side incase the hamper turned up so that I could pair them up and put them on the shelves for sale.  One of the Area Managers spotted the lid and angrily demanded why it hadn’t been written down.  I told him my reason then watched him remove the lid from the shelf and jump up and down on it until it was ruined.  I proceeded to do the necessary paperwork.  In the column for the reason why the product was no longer salable I wrote “Jumped up and down on by Area Manager”.  At the time I thought it was amusing but a I suspect the Area Manager didn’t.

Not long after, days or weeks, I was summoned to some office.  I don’t recall now if it was HR or the store manager.  I was told to sit down and we discussed my future at K-Mart.  He told me that it was obvious that I wasn’t happy at K-Mart and suggested that I should resign.  He then proceeded in handing my a piece a paper and pen so that I could write my resignation letter.  I didn’t know any better and it hadn’t occurred to me to involve the union that I was forced to pay money to so resigned thinking to myself “I’ll show them!”.  The innocence of youth.

A while after K-Mart I went through a string of jobs and for around a year I seemed a maintain a consistent pattern of working for three months then spending three months on the dole.  I was living at home, had no financial commitments, I didn’t care if I was working or not.  I enjoyed working and being responsible but I also enjoyed bumming around doing very little even though it usually meant that I had very little money to spend.

By now I’d stopped hanging around with the original core of friends.  The guy from K-Mart was still at working there, my mate from school was still doing his apprenticeship and we sort of grew apart from there on.  I still spent time with him but a lot less frequently then we used to.  It was around then that I started spreading my friendship wings and hanging out with other people.  More often then not it was another new friend and myself hanging out and doing regular teenage stuff.

One kid I was hanging around with was a couple of years younger then me and I think looked up to me as the older, wiser guy.  He was there the day the sticky brown stuff hit the shiny spinning things.  We were both at my place and I had most of a carton of beer in fridge thinking it would be hours before my Father would be home and I’d have plenty of time to clean up.  I hadn’t considered on how I’d sober up and as it turned out that ended up being a non issue.

He came home earlier then expected and soon spotted the beer in the fridge.  Turns out that that was the final straw.  He told me I had until the end of the month to move out.  From memory I packed some stuff and moved out that day.  I had no real idea of where I was going to stay but I still seemed to have a sense of “I’ll show him” about me and left.

Without background it reads like my Father was pretty harsh by kicking me out.  Up until that point I was a shit of a kid.  I lied, stole, came home drunk, came home stoned (but I think he thought I was drunk then too and I didn’t see the need to correct him).  Home life was an odd mixture of strict rules regarding things that seemed fairly unimportant and also a freedom that a lot of my friends were jealous of.

In some respects I think it was maybe it had it’s upsides.  To at least some degree it demanded that I had to grow up and grow up fast.

I stayed in a variety of places like the room above the elevator shaft in the building that a friend was living in.  The cement floor wasn’t terribly comfortable but the room was warm. It wasn’t long after that I heard of the existence of Men’s homeless shelters.  That was the beginning of a few years of living on the streets and in different homeless shelters over a few different states until I moved to Perth in around 2001.

It was a downhill spiral for a number of years and saw the introduction of the pills I was taking recreationally.  I’ve lost count of the different number of shelters I stayed in and the number of consecutive months when I was stoned on these pills constantly.  It was literally months on end during which I was under the effects of them.  One of the side effects of the pills that ranged from vaguely amusing me to scaring the absolute shit out of me was the hallucinations.  After a few bad trips I managed to better monitor my intake and mostly those episodes while still maintaining the numbness I escaped to under their influence.

And now it’s almost midnight.  Time to proof read, upload and go to bed.

I moved to Parramatta when I was nine and started at the local primary school the next year.  I became mates with a guy from the school that lived nearby and we often hung out together.  We did regular stuff like going to the school during the weekends to play cricket in the cricket nets, what videos at his place (he was the first person that I knew that had a video recorder, it was a Betamax with a corded remote control).

We ended up at the same high school, our friendship continuing.  He left high school after year 10 to start an apprenticeship and I was insanely jealous.  My Father insisted I finish high school so that I could go to university.  Via my friend I had a taste of the ‘real world’ and wanted out of school.  I soon lost interest in school.  I lasted about half of year 11 and ditched about half of that.  I found a job at a nearby by K-Mart then told Dad that I planned on leaving school and starting work.  To my surprise he didn’t put up much of an argument and my working life was about to start.

While working at K-Mart I befriend another guy, and subsequently his younger brother.  As time went on the four of us often hung out together.  My mate from school was about my age, the mate from K-Mart several years older and his brother a year or two younger.  Back in those days we smoked pot mostly and drank occasionally.  One or two of us dabbled in a few other recreational drugs at the time too.

On one occasion a number of people went to ‘find’ some pot that had been spotted earlier.  I wasn’t invited to come along but some other guy, who I vaguely remember going to our high school at one point, was.  I was a bit disappointed at missing the adventure but shit happens.  The night, by all accounts, was a success, and I was tasked with hiding my mates stash at my place because he didn’t want his parents to find it.  I was pretty easy to be talked into things at the time so I agreed to hide it at my place.

Unfortunately the temptation was too much for me and I started sampling the stash. Over a period of time I got a little carried away with how much I was sampling and the weight of the bag was noticeably lighter.  It had yet to be dried out so I tried making the weight up a little by sprinkling some water into the bag.  It wasn’t long after I handed the bag back to my mate that my plot was foiled.

The three mates and the blow-in turned up at my place one night with what I gather was revenge on their minds.  I got the sense that my mate from school had been talked into extracting revenge on me in the form of a beating.  He started the beating and between the few of them it continued on for I’m not sure how long but it seemed like hours.  He hit me a few times about the face, which I fully expected to hurt quite a lot but it wasn’t too bad.  I’ve often been more scared of perceived pain then actual pain.  The blow in wanted to take part in the beating too, I’m not sure why, I don’t see how it affected him in the first place.  He chased me and I kept my distance for around half a kilometre or so of near enough to sprinting then gave up to face the music.  Some sort of fancy kick later and I was missing a front tooth.  A little later the younger brother of the guy I had worked with had a beef with me over some stick throwing incident I was supposed to have done to his girlfriend several weeks ago.  His efforts were a waste of time, he attempted to knee me in the balls and missed and got my thigh then he left it at that.

What hurt most, mentally, was that my mate had given me a beating over something that I thought was fairly trivial.  Sure we’d had little bouts of violence in the past but it all seemed like good natured fun.  In this case he was clearly angry and wanted to hurt me, at least that was my impression.

To this day I’ve never really forgiven him.  We kept seeing each other and hanging out after that but it was never the same, not for me at least.

We caught up in Parramatta several years ago.  I was over from Perth for a relative’s Birthday and he and I made plans to catch up.  We had a few drinks, chatted about old times and what we were doing with our lives currently.  By this time is was about six years after the incident but I still hadn’t let it go.

I think not letting it go says more about me then about him.  Who knows, that was twenty years ago now, people grow apart, we may not have stayed as close friends anyway.

My guess is it stems back to childhood.  I don’t recall my Mother or Father actually saying “I love you” as we were growing up. For the sake of some fairness there is a lot of my childhood I don’t remember either.  I can’t tell the difference between what are memory of photos and slides of life before I was around four years old.  That was when we moved to Blacktown (NSW).  I have some memories of Blacktown and memories start getting clearer after we moved to Parramatta (NSW) when I was nine.

Logically thinking my parents marriage may have been in a state of breaking down during at least some of those first four years.  I don’t remember exactly how long after we moved to Blacktown when Mum moved out.  My memory is that it was when I was four (fact checking reveals it was closer to when I was six, the date of their divorce was my 7th birthday).   This means it can’t have been long was a couple of years after my brother was born.  He’s four years  younger then me.

I don’t specifically remember them fighting but as the story goes the first thing I said after my Father told me that Mum and Dad were going to be living separately was that I wanted to call my Aunty and tell her that the fighting had finished.  Based on that story I gather I must have seen, or heard, them fighting.

There are only two times that I recall telling my Father that I love him.  Once was Christmas day when he bought my Brother and I bikes for Christmas.  The other time was not long after my mates Father had died.  I don’t recall the initial cause of the trauma but he suffered some knee injury and at the time he seemed liked he’d be OK.  Days later a blood clot made it’s way to his heart and he had a heart attack.  At least that’s how I remember it.  One night not long after that we were out drinking at some club a long way from where we lived.  My mate and both got pretty smashed and during what was one of my rare instances of violence I tried to pick a fight with a few guys while I was in the restroom.  We left shortly after.

I’m not sure what triggered it but I saw that my mate as crying and it got to me me and I cried too.  I insisted that on the way home we detour via my Dad’s girlfriend’s place so I could talk to him.  That was the second time I recall telling him I love him.  It isn’t about not loving him just saying it hasn’t come naturally to me except for during, so far, a marital situation.

I’m not sure why but I tended to be a bit of a problem child at home and, mostly, a well behaved kid at high school.  I wasn’t, usually, rude to teachers, I followed their instructions, mostly, and only rarely got into fights with other students.

One year, I think around year 9 or 10 which would make it 1984-5, there was a massive fruit fight in the Math’s quadrangle.  Fruit was flying everywhere and I had a great time watching it but didn’t take part in it because I knew that doing so may get me into trouble.  It seems there are varying degrees in taking part in a fruit fight.

I don’t recall who it was now but someone asked me to throw them an orange that was sitting near me my feet.  Keeping in mind that I didn’t want to be part of the event as such I rolled the orange over to him justifying internally that that wasn’t really taking part in the event.  It seems that one of the head’s of department didn’t share my view.

A number of the guys that were involved with the fruit fight were caught and called before one of the head’s of departments for reprimanding.  It seems that they were quizzed about who else was involved.  I never found out who it was but someone told the teacher that I was involved.  I was questioned about my involvement and told them honestly that all I did was roll an orange across to someone that had requested it.  The teacher in question decided that my punishment should be the same as the rest and I was to get ’six of the best’ as they referred to it.  ’Six of the best’ was a term they used whereby the teacher whipped your open hands with a cane, three on each hand.

I thought that this was completely unjust and told the teacher as such.  I refused to take the punishment and left the teacher’s staff room.  I figured that maybe there was some justification for rolling the orange but it certainly didn’t warrant the maximum punishment.

I lived with my father and at that time my mother lived in the same suburb.  For a period of time she looked after us before and after school while dad was at work.  I decided to walk the 2-3km to her place to plead my case and she’d get me out of the punishment.  That said I still wanted to go back to school that day because it was sports day and I didn’t want to miss out on playing volleyball against some other school (we were doing quite well at the time).

I’d convinced myself my mother would back me up during the walk from school to her place.  Turns out I was wrong.  She told me to go back to the school and take the punishment.  What a let down.

The whole process took a number of hours.  The bus that was leaving to the school we were playing volleyball against left was leaving soon so I made my way back to school and approached the teacher.  I told him that I was ready to take my punishment but felt it was overly harsh under the circumstances.

I’d only had the cane once before and at the time the teacher described it as ‘the tickler’ (I was in primary school at the time).  ’Six of the best’ sounded like it was going to hurt a great deal more so naturally I was scared.  Still not a fan of pain to this day.  After a few attempts at the teaching swinging the cane at my palm and me moving it I managed to keep my hand in the line of fire and was surprised at difference between the perceived amount of pain and the actual amount of pain.  I wasted no time keeping my hand held out for the remaining two whacks then quickly produced my other hand for it’s three.

As soon as the punishment was finished I rushed out an on to the bus for this week’s game of volleyball.