There are some personal stories which I return to and re-write, mostly because while they describe unpleasant circumstances of my boyhood – abuse, domestic alcoholism, the threat of AIDS – they still seem to me like gifts. Not gifts in the sense of “everything-that-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger”, but simply as gifts to a story-teller. In an essay about surviving his plane’s crash landing, Martin Amis wrote that the writer has a vampiric relationship to their experience. Well, I agree.
And so this recent sports column was the third time in about 15 years that I’d told the story of me and Magic Johnson; the following will be the third time in six years I’ve told this Christmas story (or fourth, if you count its comically exaggerated use in my novel). I don’t return to these stories because I think they’re infinitely yielding. I return because they seem like gifts that I’ve failed to honour. Stories I should have told much better than I did, and maybe – just maybe – this time will be different.
Of course, it won’t be. Perfection is impossible. But I like to think there’s something honourable in this Sisyphean obsessiveness. Or maybe that’s just another story I tell myself.
Merry Christmas, folks – and many thanks for reading this year.
I’m not sure how it came about that we moved in with my alcoholic uncle and his two sons that year. Our new home was still being built, I know that, and my father worked at the nearby airport. But that small convenience was eclipsed by the much greater inconvenience of the disorder and mutual antagonism that prevailed that year. I can only think that the financial hardships of each party conspired to make the arrangement attractive. My uncle would become a landlord; my parents would presumably pay less rent than they would have elsewhere.
It was 1987. I was six. My two cousins, both older, were rough and resentful of our occupancy. Their home was a small bungalow built in a depressed suburb of Perth, all cheap weatherboard, buffalo grass and a rippled asbestos fence out back. From the unkempt lawn loomed a tilted Hills Hoist, stained brown with bore water. Dented Tonka trucks and disfigured GI Joe figures were contemptuously scattered around. My uncle was a Bobcat operator, and these earth-moving toy trucks were popular gifts to his children.
I remember the kitchen best. It was where my uncle did the bulk of his drinking. It existed like a headquarters for him, but from where he plotted nothing but his own stupefaction. Beside the fridge, stacked upon the lino floor, were columns of Coke and Emu Bitter cartons. On the table was an ashtray, portable stereo and the detritus of KFC. The stereo’s sole mission that year was fanatically repeating Farnsie’s Whispering Jack very loudly. It drove my father nuts.
My uncle drank until he was in a state of supreme incoherence. It began with the drunk’s pitiful sentimentality – pitiful because it was rarely expressed sober, and, in resolving itself in theatrical self-pity, revealed the subject of his greatest sentimentality to be himself. Many committed drunks are pretty good at – or at least attempt – ingratiation, not least so that they can attract an audience for their laments.
Eventually, as we knew it must, he would become frighteningly insensible. Even his sister and children could not understand him. The kitchen would now be reeking and foggy from the long, lit chains of Winnie Blues; the crushed empties scattered around like the boys’ toys outside. But then, the deranged monologues ceased. It was time to sleep it off. What monsters he was trying to exorcise, if any, I don’t know.
*
It was in this house that I began doubting the existence of Santa. You might expect a child in these conditions to tighten their grip on fantasy, but mine loosened, and I started thinking that Father Christmas might be a strange hoax. This erosion of my faith wasn’t merely owed to the imperfect conditions of my home. There was another, accidental origin.
Before he was a taxi driver, my father was a pilot in the air force, and he remained as fond of aircraft as my uncle was of John Farnham. Dad could identify a plane merely by the sound of its engine, and from a young age I was captive to his lectures about the mechanical specs of any plane that flew into sight. Dry as these lectures were, I learnt a thing or two about aviation and transport logistics.
A few weeks before Christmas, my dad discovered that one of the world’s largest planes, Lockheed’s C-5 Galaxy, would soon arrive in Perth. Living near the airport gave us a neat vantage. On the designated night, as the two of us waited on the front porch to watch the Galaxy descend, he explained to me its awesome capaciousness.
My dad didn’t know it then, but at that moment I began to question the capacity of a sleigh to distribute a global consignment of presents. I’d seen replicas of it at the shopping mall, and knew that the bearded man’s ride was considerably smaller.
Not that the Galaxy’s scale could be properly grasped from a distance at night. I sensed it only by its lights, the impressive sound of its engines and the awed quiet of my father. In fact, my impression of the plane was probably entirely borrowed from standing at my dad’s knees watching him watch it.
My faith in Santa was conveniently ambiguous. Despite my scepticism, I was certain that he – whoever “he” was – still owed me some spectacular gifts. My sense of entitlement followed from my consideration of his naughty/nice scheme and my belief that my quiet acceptance that year of my uncle’s cigarette smoke and violent eruptions had qualified me as the latter. Instead, I was brought a Ken doll and gastro.
On Christmas morning, I woke to more Farnsie and a graphically distressed gut. I’m not sure which one of these, specifically, had startled me from sleep, but never before had I experienced this kind of intestinal violence. From my foldable bed in the family room, I leaned over the side and emptied myself shamefully on the floor.
My mother rushed in, then rushed back out to retrieve a bucket. Returning, she removed the unopened bag of Wizz Fizz from my stocking, which lay, undiscovered, at the foot of my bed. It is, as you probably know, a finely powdered sherbet and irresistible to children – if consumed, my digestive system would have experienced a catastrophic meltdown.
I was moved to one of my cousin’s beds, something to which he strenuously objected. He did not believe in offering comfort to the enemy, and my ghostly appearance couldn’t persuade him otherwise. But it had been decided.
So there I lay on Christmas Day. Occupying my enemy’s bed and staring at the Ozzie Ostrich poster taped to the back of his door. Between gut spasms, I sought distraction by moving the few articulated joints of my Ken doll and reminding myself of the presents I’d vainly desired.
My parents periodically came to empty my bucket, re-fill my water, and deny my self-destructive requests for Wizz Fizz. But soon their visits became less frequent: my uncle, an Irish Catholic who had seen in Christ’s birth a reason to drink even more vigorously than usual, was soon requiring more attention than me.
To the kitchen’s familiar smell of cigarette smoke was added the stench of burnt chook. My cousins were crushing the heads of their old army figures with the wheels of their new Tonka trucks. Accepting that the roast bird was unsalvageable, someone went to collect buckets of KFC, while my father walked another lap of the block, presumably to release the tension that would have otherwise expressed itself with a fist to my uncle’s throat – a natural expression, but one that would have rendered his family homeless.
Meanwhile, the noise of my demonic retching was obscured by the 40th play of “Take the Pressure Down”. Isolated in my cousin’s room, I’d exhausted all possible configurations allowed by my doll’s joints, and so was grateful for the additional gift that my woozy uncle later brought me himself. It was a plastic replica of an assault rifle, and, as grateful as I was, it offered me further proof of the non-existence of Santa when my uncle said that he bought it himself.
My father had flown fighter jets, fired Gatling guns and jumped from planes. He’d also lost his mum to cancer when he was eight, and then effectively lost his father – not long back from three years in Changi’s camps, the loss of his wife prompted in my grandfather a long and unexplained vanishing.
Dad was resilient, and very quiet, but that Christmas was a test. The kitchen was a chaos of smoke and hostility, his son was incontinent and Whispering Jack was threatening another rotation. If my father’s pride proceeded from his belief that he could kindly control his family’s environment, then that Christmas it would have been quite poorly.
It’s Boxing Day, and my stomach bug’s retreating. My uncle’s sleeping it off, and my cousins have gone to their mum’s place. The house is quiet. The grass, weeds, pocked fence and Hills Hoist are all at peace.
I’m watching the cricket beside my bucket when my father walks out to the front porch. I follow him. He’s just standing there, his back to me, and perhaps I want to tug his shirt and say: “Hey Dad, when’s the Galaxy coming back?”
But I don’t.