Impractical Jokes (17 page)

After the Great Railway Coupling Fiasco, Mum began to notice Dad more and more around the college. On a few occasions she saw him in the cafeteria pulling one of his less honourable tricks ‘The Shifty Claw'.

In the laboratories, there were many tools and devices for attaching test tubes to things. The most common were clamps that you could attach to an upright stand at one end and grip a test tube at the other. The end that held the tube took the shape of a small square claw.

Whenever Dad was a little short on money for morning tea at the caff, he would put on a lab coat one size too big and take one of these clamps in each hand. The extra sleeve length would cover his hands and all that would show were the two claws. In one claw he would grip the exact amount of change needed for a can of soft drink, and he would set the other claw to the right size to hold a can.

When he ordered his can of drink, he would hand over the money and say, ‘I don't suppose there's enough there for a coffee scroll as well?' After counting the money, the lady serving him would say, ‘Sorry, love. There's just enough for the drink.'

‘That's ok. Thanks anyway,' he would say with a tone that suggested he was used to the little disappointments of life.

He would then take a seat at the table nearest the counter and, with a forlorn look on his face, make pitiful attempts to open the can. The tuckshop ladies would ignore it for as long as they could, but Dad was persistent. Biting his tongue in concentration, he would toil away at the ring-pull to no avail, occasionally sighing or looking hopefully around himself for assistance. The longer this went on, the more the ladies felt they had to do something.

If they took too long to notice him, Dad would turn up the heat. He would let the can slip from his claw and fall to the floor. He would then try a few times to pick it up, dropping it each time and shaking it up as much as possible. Finally, on the fourth attempt he would open it, unleashing a geyser of fizzy pop. He would then try frantically, but in vain, to pick up his straw and get it into the can, before giving up and simply putting his mouth over the aperture and gulping. It was never long before one of the lovely ladies of the tuckshop would come over and give him a coffee scroll.

Now, this questionable behaviour may sound like a pretty good reason to write someone off, but apparently there was something quite endearing about the whole thing. And besides, who are those cafeteria ladies to go treating an amputee any differently from anyone else? I know it was the sixties and minds were a little less open, but come on. That's just prejudiced. The bottom line—as always with my dad—was that it was funny and it made my mum laugh.

Eventually, one act of unconventional chivalry won Mum's heart forever.

One of the more squeamish aspects of obtaining a pharmacy degree is the necessary work you have to do with living things. As a child I would be simultaneously enthralled and disgusted with stories of the kinds of experiments my parents were forced to perform on an array of animals, living and dead.

One afternoon, on the tram home from college, my mother opened her purse to buy a ticket from the conductor. As she unfastened the snap, a large frog leapt out of the purse, onto her lap and made for the door. My mother went to pieces. She wasn't great with frogs at the best of times. For the purpose of higher learning she had made peace with the creatures, but after hours was
her time
. The last thing she wanted was more frogs. Let alone
surprise
frogs. She shrieked, threw her purse in the air, stood up and began running on the spot, and all of this was done in one fluid but instant movement with the kind of rapid precision that can only be achieved involuntarily. The other passengers on the crowded peak-hour tram didn't see the frog. All they saw was a mental woman do her nana and start thrashing about at frogs that weren't there. The conductor decided that this was one passenger who perhaps didn't need a ticket to ride.

When she went to the lab the next day, Mum's lab partner, Mad Mack McCormack, asked her how her night was.

‘It was dreadful. I had a frog jump out of my purse on the tram on the way home. It gave me such a fright that I—'

She didn't need to finish the sentence because Mad Mack was laughing so hard his face had begun to turn red. She responded with a stern look that seemed only to make him laugh harder. Before long his head was doing a fairly convincing impression of a beetroot and Mum knew for sure that this beetroot-headed nimrod was behind the despicable amphibious attack.

Three weeks later, Mad Mack McCormack noticed a strong odour whenever he drove his car. He tried rolling down the windows and driving faster, but the smell remained. When he inspected the car he found a dead frog wedged behind his number plate. With a suitable amount of swearing and gagging, he removed the frog and figured his problems were solved.

What Mad Mack didn't know was that this frog was a decoy frog—a frog placed in an obvious position, to be easily found, to lull Mad Mack into a false sense of security. The whole situation was created entirely to give Mad Mack as little idea as possible that Dad had extensively hidden thirty dead frogs throughout the car in the most hard to reach places. There were frogs in the sills, behind the exhaust, above the diff, beside the radiator and under the wheel-arches. None of the frogs could be seen by simple acts like sliding under the car, and removing any of them required more than a passing knowledge of motor vehicles.

This was at a time when those students with cars would provide something of a taxi service to other students to offset their running costs. Maintaining a full car was essential both socially and fiscally, and before long Mad Mack was poor and driving alone.

One day Mad Mack came into the lab and implored my mother to end the revenge.

‘I'm sorry, ok? I'm sorry about the frog in your purse. I'm sorry I laughed. Just please, make the smell go away.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘The smell. Please just make the smell go away. It's ruining my life.'

‘I mean it. I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Well, just so you know, I caught the train to college today. And I'm going to catch it again tomorrow. And the next day. And every day until the smell of dead frogs is gone from my car. So I hope you're happy.'

My mother had no idea what Mad Mack was talking about, but she had a pretty good idea of who was behind it. And as far as she was concerned, this was the kind of man she could marry.

So, if you ever wonder why Mum never had a problem with Dad's war with Richard, it was because this practical joker was exactly the man she fell in love with.

3 This is not his real name. From time to time to avoid litigation, I have sometimes changed people's names if I intend to portray them in a negative light. On this occasion I have chosen the name Krauthammer, which I got from a right-wing columnist in America whose name I find fascinating.

12

A Full-sized Gavin Wanganeen

T
he following sentence is, I think, one of the more unique sentences I have ever written: Some time in the winter of 1992 my father came into possession of a full-sized cut-out of Gavin Wanganeen.

Who is Gavin Wanganeen? The short answer is that he was a footballer.

The longer and more satisfying answer is as follows: Gavin Wanganeen began his professional football career at the age of sixteen at the Port Adelaide Magpies Football Club in the South Australian National Football League (SANFL), a curiously named organisation which, to the best of my knowledge, consists only of sides within South Australia. He received the coveted SANFL Rookie Of The Year Award and in doing so attracted the interest of Melbourne's Essendon Football Club, inarguably the greatest team in the history of all sport everywhere. In 1991 he began playing for Essendon in the Australian Football League, a national league appropriately titled on account of how it has teams from more than one state in Australia. At Essendon he took the counter-intuitively named position of attacking defender, where he quickly established himself as a player of distinction, with spectacular marking abilities and the ability to out-position his opponents. His quality as a player was matched only by his good looks, and it wasn't long before various marketing and sponsorship opportunities revealed themselves, one of which was with an instant photo printing company whose stores nationwide would feature full-sized cut-out photographs of Gavin, in Essendon playing strip, holding a football in front of his crotch. The photo printing company went under soon after. While Gavin was never held personally responsible for their demise, full-sized Gavin Wanganeens did became something of a must-have for Essendon supporters with an eye for quality.

In 1993 he received the Chas Brownlow Medal for the best and fairest player in the AFL, and played in Essendon's successful premiership team. He remained at Essendon until 1997 when he returned to the Port Adelaide Football Club who had by now joined the AFL under the bafflingly unimpressive name, the Port Adelaide Power. Rumours abounded that in order to lure Gavin back to his home town, the Power had offered him a McDonald's franchise on top of his negotiated salary. Whether true or not, this scuttlebutt really puts Australian professional football of the 1990s in sobering fiscal perspective with its American and English counterparts. McDonald's franchise or not, Gavin played for the Power as captain from 1997 to 2000. After relinquishing the captaincy, he continued as a successful player, coming third in the 2003 Brownlow. In 2004 he helped the Power win the premiership over the Brisbane Lions, much to the chagrin of petty Essendon fans who still owned full-sized cut-outs of Gavin Wangineen. In 2006 Gavin suffered a serious knee injury while playing a reserve grade match, poetically enough for his original club, the Port Adelaide Magpies, in the SANFL. By the end of his three-hundred-game AFL career, Gavin had amassed 3473 kicks, 1027 marks and 1588 handballs for a total of 5031 possessions. In 2002 he was voted the nineteenth best Essendon player of all time.

The one thing the stats don't tell you is that if you put a full-sized cut-out of Gavin Wanganeen in a place where a person does not expect to find a full-sized cut-out of Gavin Wanganeen, it will, without exception, scare the bejesus out of said person. This is a fact my dad discovered almost immediately after taking possession of one.

The photo business across the way from Dad's shop had gone under. The departing manager came over to say goodbye and brought with him a full-sized Gavin Wanganeen.

‘I'm afraid that's all she wrote, Ron.'

‘Sorry to see you go, Phil.'

‘I remember you saying your boy is a mad Essendon fan.'

‘Yeah. He gets it from his mother.'

‘Well, I figured maybe he'd get a kick out of this.'

The unintended pun was lost on the two men, who were by this point almost overcome with pathos. Indeed the scene would have been truly emotional, had it not been for the utterly ridiculous nature of the parting gift. Where pathos leads, it has to be said, bathos is never far behind.

Dad arrived home from work, parked the car and popped his head through the garage door into the living room.

‘Pammy, can you come and give me a hand with something?'

He then ducked back into the garage, closing the door behind him. By the time Mum had walked over to the garage door, Dad had ample time to grab his full-sized Gavin Wanganeen and place it in front of the door facing in. When my mother opened the door, she was greeted by the smiling face of one of the games more tenacious attacking defenders, and promptly became airborne.