Impractical Jokes (15 page)

‘Jesus, Harry, are you all right?'

As Harry's head lolled from side to side, everyone moved towards him hoping to catch him should he fall.

‘Harry, say something.'

Harry took a deep breath. The kind of deep breath one draws just before they pass away or dive under water to find their wedding ring on the bottom of a public pool. Just as the concerned gallery got within catching distance, Harry lifted his gaze to the group and bellowed, ‘There's
snowwwwww
business like
snowwwww
businesss, like
snowwwwww
business I
snowwwwwwww
!'

And with that the all-singing, all-dancing fuckwit chorus joined in with their most vigorous recital yet. Somehow this seemed to break the tension. Soon the women joined in, a few bottles of wine were opened, and the children were reassured that their parents' marriages might last through the week.

Shortly after Dad decided that in his historical state, bed was the best place for him. The only problem being that from the kitchen, the bedrooms were at the bottom of a flight of twenty stairs. Realising that walking down these stairs posed a potentially lethal obstacle, my father hatched an alternative method. He sat on the top step, legs akimbo, and composed himself. When he was all set, he turned around to address the group.

‘I'm hisstreee, Pammy. I'm hisstreee.'

Then, as though launching a toboggan, he pushed himself off the top step with both hands, getting slightly airborne, before bouncing his posterior off every step on the way down. He lay in a motionless heap at the bottom of the stairs for about five minutes, before collecting himself and crawling off to bed.

Truly, there was no business like snow business.

The next day, the Mount Buller Hangover Federation hit the slopes. On the first run my Dad took a tumble and didn't get up. The rest of the group laughed and skied off down the mountain. The Pickerings waited for a while, but when Dad didn't stir Mum made an executive decision that we should leave him. We skied to the bottom of the run, caught the lift back up and when we skied back down we found that Dad still hadn't moved.

‘Dad? Are you ok?'

‘No. I think I've broken my thumb.'

We fetched some first aid officers and, en masse, followed Dad to the mountain hospital. His transport was a ski-born stretcher, pulled at about knee-height by the skiing ambos past crowds of curious onlookers. Richard followed close by, drawing as much attention to Dad as possible.

‘Make way, please everybody! This man has a serious incontinence problem! If he doesn't get to a hospital immediately, we could all be swimming in frozen wee.' Dad, for his part, was waving to the crowds like the queen passing in a carriage, although dignity was definitely not his co-pilot.

At the hospital, X-rays confirmed that dad's thumb was broken in two places and his arm was set in plaster. The entire group took Dad back to the lodge and looked after him, which wasn't easy because he was being a dreadful sook. He was a little hung-over, in a lot of pain and constantly on the lookout for a way to make that apparent to anyone who would listen. Within fifteen minutes of being back on the sofa at the lodge, he was holding court, making a list of things he couldn't do anymore now that he was missing a thumb.

‘I'll never write a novel. You need a thumb to write a novel . . . Hemingway had thumbs . . . Can't do up my fly anymore. I'll just have to leave it open forever, I suppose . . . Can't peel a potato. You need mister thumb to peel a potato.'

This last one was weird for two reasons. First, it was an odd activity to be mopey about missing out on. More importantly, I had never in my life seen that man peel a potato. Worst of all, though, he was adamant that nobody was to write on his cast. Everyone wanted to have a bit of fun and write something silly, but he insisted that he needed to look respectable for work on the Monday and under no circumstances was anyone to put anything on his cast.

In the end, everyone had had enough of his bad attitude and Richard wasn't backward in telling him so.

‘Ron, you're being a pain, and boring and insufferable and we think that you should just go to bed.'

‘Fine. I will then.'

And he took a handful of pain-killers, washed them down with a big glass of red wine and headed off.

Now, the problem with saying that under no circumstances was anyone to put anything on his cast was that Richard would immediately start thinking of circumstances to put something on his cast. And so Richard waited outside Dad's door until he heard him snoring. He then snuck in, put superglue all over the cast and sprinkled it with gold glitter. It was spectacular. A disco-cast straight out of the seventies. It was possibly his most brilliant revenge on Dad yet.

Or at least it would have been, had Dad not rolled over in his sleep and rested his head on his cast. He woke up in the morning with the cast stuck firmly to one of his eyebrows and it is safe to say that over breakfast the shits were well and truly cracked. Dad stormed into the kitchen and, despite limited visibility, made a beeline for Richard.

‘Richard bloody Opie! What the bloody hell were you thinking? My hand is stuck to my bloody head! How! Could! You! Be! So! Stupid!?'

It was these last six words that brought Dad completely undone. He intended their staccato delivery to be punctuated with aggressive hand gestures, but for some insane reason he was attempting to gesticulate with the hand stuck to his head. As such it looked like he was yanking himself around the room by his own eyebrows.

Richard attempted an apology, but couldn't stop laughing. Nobody could. All the inhabitants of the lodge had now made their way into the kitchen and formed a circle around my father. Their laughter seemed to disorient him and he started wheeling around and lashing out at anyone he could fix his monocular gaze on.

My mother attempted to console him, but was literally crippled with laughter. And when she wasn't laughing, she was just saying, ‘I'm hissstree, Ronnie. I'm hissstreee.' The angrier Dad got, the funnier it became. He tried to lash out, but his cast kept taking his forehead with it.

It would be years before my sister and I would either respect or obey my father again. Henceforth if he ever told us to do something, be it tidy our rooms or do our homework we would simply put our hands to our eyebrows and say, ‘Sorry, I didn't get that.'

Receiving no sympathy from anyone in the lodge, my dad then attempted one of the funniest things in history. He attempted to storm off in a huff, into the snow, with an arm attached to his head. First, he stormed over to the coat rack. He grabbed his beanie and proceeded to hook it over his elbow and stretch the other end over his head. The result was that he appeared to have a large triangular-shaped tumour sticking out the side of his skull. He looked in the mirror and seemed unjustifiably satisfied, as though the ridiculous angle of the beanie was in some way a statement. To my father, if it was possible for a beanie to be rakish, this was it. He then grabbed his parka, put his good arm through one sleeve and began whirling like a dervish. He then stopped abruptly. The empty sleeve kept spinning until he caught it with his good hand, stuffed it into his pocket and stormed off into the snow. Sadly, I don't think he even heard the applause.

Down at the hospital, he didn't fare much better. The doctors tried to be sympathetic, but it was impossible. They simply couldn't stop laughing and therefore were unable to begin removing the cast from my dad's head.

‘I don't see what's so funny. This is a serious medical condition.'

The angrier he got, the more they laughed and so his abuse got louder. Soon word got out around the hospital and a crowd formed.

‘No wonder you're working on a bloody mountain. None of you could get a job in a real hospital!'

Some doctors were dispatched to get on the phone and tell other doctors who were off duty to get to the hospital immediately. As crowd numbers rose, so too did Dad's temperature.

‘I'm a pharmacist you know. I've got friends in the AMA. I'll have you all reported to the ombudsman!'

This pitiful threat of mid-level bureaucratic punishment was enough to elicit functioning medical attention and a team of two doctors and two nurses used a solvent to free the skin and a razor to detach the eyebrow. So in the end, my father, who didn't want to look foolish, was left with a face missing an eyebrow and one arm in plaster cast covered in gold glitter with a solitary eyebrow embedded in it.

At this point it looked as though Richard had won the winter campaign, but my father refused to be beaten. Hell bent on revenge, his plan was simple. Before leaving the hospital he insisted, in return for his not filing a formal complaint, that the doctors give him an eye-patch. An hour later he trudged through the door of the lodge with a forlorn expression on his face, looking for all the world like the saddest yet most flamboyant pirate in history. Everybody crowded around to ask what was wrong.

‘The doctors at the hospital spilled some solvent in my eye trying the get the cast off. I have to have some tests when I get back to Melbourne, but they're pretty sure I've lost the sight in my right eye.'

Of the chorus of sympathy, one anglicised voice spoke louder and more desperately than all the others.

‘Oh dear god, Ron. I am so sorry. I feel dreadful.'

‘Oh, you weren't to know, Richard. What's an eye between friends.'

‘No, Ron. You are too forgiving. I promise, and you are all my witnesses, I promise that I will never pull another prank as long as I live.'

At this point Dad looked at Mum and she swears that under that eye patch, she saw him wink.

As always, it was my father's commitment to the deception that made it truly spectacular. The next morning when the group were heading off skiing, they implored him to come with them but he refused.

‘No, I couldn't possibly go skiing. Without this eye I've got no depth perception. I'd be a danger to myself and others.'

By now the sympathy was off the charts. And rightly so. This was a significant price to pay for a prank. To pull this off, Dad couldn't ski for the rest of the week. But the best thing was neither could Richard, who made a grand gesture of staying back at the lodge to wait on Dad hand and foot. Peeling him grapes, pouring him expensive wine and feeding him steak cut into individual bite-sized pieces.

To his credit, Dad played the martyr to perfection.

‘Ron, are you comfortable?'

‘Who said that? Come closer into the light. Oh, Richard. I couldn't see you. Maybe the other eye is going now.'

‘Oh dear. Ron, I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do?'

‘More steak?'

Dad kept up the act for a day and a half, until we were leaving. When we got to the car park and were about to drive away, Dad looked over at Richard, lifted his eye-patch and winked at him. He then burst out laughing and drove away.

You might think Dad had won, but he did have to go to work the next day with a cast unevenly caked in glitter and most of an eyebrow stuck in it.

11

Must Have Good Sense
of Humour

I
think that the role of my mother in all of this deserves some discussion. I would hate for anyone who reads this book to be under the impression that my mother was an innocent, passive, entertained but often inconvenienced bystander to the shenanigans of her husband. This could not be further from the truth. Pamela Pickering was more than complicit; she was integral. Oftentimes pranks would be her idea, she merely had a great knack for assuming a safe distance after the fact so as to appear neutral. This kept Richard Opie in a constant state of underestimation and my mother in a position of immense power.

Thus many things that would, to most wives, seem senseless, intolerable and childish were, to my mother, cornerstones of her and Dad's relationship. To fully understand this, I need to tell you about how they met.

My parents met at the Victorian College of Pharmacy in the sixties. Before you entertain any ideas of the Summer of Love and budding young chemists using their lab time to make hospital-grade LSD so strong you could taste sound, I should add that this was the
mid
-sixties so the strongest thing anyone ever made was a hospital-grade coffee strong enough to help you cram for exams.