Impractical Jokes (19 page)

When lot six was opened to bids, a lot of hands went up early. Clearly Dad was on to something. But above the seven dollar mark the competition thinned out rapidly, with most of the interested parties rightly judging that with nearly four hundred parking meters in the catalogue and less than a hundred and fifty people in the room, there was a very good chance they could secure the parking meter of their dreams at a price that suited their lifestyle (that being the lifestyle of a bespectacled weirdo with stains on their pants). Dad had two main competitors: a man wearing army fatigue trousers with a ski jumper; and the only person I have ever seen wear a reefer jacket and cravat with grey tracksuit pants. These were losers to be reckoned with.

Dad's strategy was to bid confidently and without hesitation, creating in his opposition the impression that his infinite funds were matched only by his infinite enthusiasm for this particular parking meter. This was the ‘intimidate them with genuine idiocy' strategy. As the price sailed past ten dollars, twenty and well into the mid-thirties, it became clear that both G.I. Mental and Captain Reefer Madness shared the same strategy. Clear to everyone, that is, except my father who had officially ceased thinking.

Once the bidding got above forty dollars, Dad refined his strategy. Enthusiasm wasn't enough—this would take recklessness. With no prompting from the auctioneer, Dad started making bids at five-dollar increments. This in no way intimidated his opposition, who continued to bid in one-dollar units. In fact it didn't change the course of the auction at all, other than to make the meter ridiculously expensive as quickly as possible and make the auctioneer's job of keeping tally much harder.

At seventy-five dollars, G.I. Mental dropped out with a fairly theatrical, ‘this is bloody ridiculous'. If you are to take only one thing from this story, it should be this: when someone wearing camouflage cargo pants and a woollen ski jumper with snowflakes and pine trees knitted into it suggests that your behaviour is beyond that of a reasonable person, it is time to stop and take a good hard look at yourself.

You will be unsurprised to learn that my father neither stopped nor took said hard look. As far as he was concerned, his strategy of non compos mentis bidding had just paid dividends, effectively removing fifty per cent of his competition. He dropped his bid increases back to a dollar and focused his gaze on the only remaining imbecile that stood in his way.

At ninety dollars, I decided that someone here had to be a grown-up.

‘Dad. The guy in the reefer isn't going to stop.'

‘I don't fear the Reefer, son.'

‘Oh Jesus,' I thought. ‘We've lost him.'

When the price clipped over the one-hundred-dollar mark, even Captain Reefer Madness began to realise this was out of control. Or at least that is what I inferred from his developing something of a twitch whereby he would almost cluck like a hen before each bid. When the bidding reached one hundred and ten the clucking became more pronounced and was accompanied by an involuntary stamp of the foot. I seemed to be the only person in the room concerned by this. Everyone else remained calm. They'd seen it all before. Clearly these were seasoned losers.

When the hammer finally came down, we were the proud owners of a fully operational, second-hand, red parking meter at the bargain basement price of one hundred and twenty-seven dollars. Some would say that was too much to spend on a parking meter. Others would say that one hundred and twenty-seven dollars for a parking meter of that quality represents serious value. Where you stand on that issue rests largely on whether you are the kind of industrial-strength loser that would attend a parking meter auction.

So we had a parking meter. What wasn't certain was
why
. After some debate in the car on the way home, we decided that the logical thing to do with a parking meter would be to cement it into Richard's driveway. That way he would be the only person on his street that had to pay to park at his own house. The parking meter was placed in our shed and would stay there until we had the means and opportunity to execute what had become known as Operation Lovely Rita.

Over the coming months, Operation Lovely Rita took on an air of near-mythic importance. My father, whose favourite films include
Dam Busters
and
The Dirty Dozen
, saw this as his opportunity to pull off one of the great strategic manoeuvres of the soon-to-be-ending century. It was imperative that it be discussed in strictly hushed tones, with nobody outside our immediate family being trusted with the information.

‘I was over at Grandma and Grampa's today and—'

‘You didn't tell them about Operation Lovely Rita, did you?'

‘Not really.'

‘What do you mean “not really”?'

‘I might have told them we bought a parking meter.'

‘Charles Anthony Pickering.'

I knew he was furious because he'd rolled out my full name.

‘How many times have I told you? All information regarding the planning and execution of Operation Lovely Rita is on a strictly need to know basis. And unless you live under this roof, you don't need to know.'

‘But it's Grandma and Grampa.'

‘Loose lips sink ships, son.'

‘Yeah, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't—' ‘What do loose lips do?'

‘They sink ships.'

‘That's right. They sink ships. And I will not have any ships sunk on my watch.'

Needless to say significant security and intelligence threats like my ailing grandfather and eternally good-natured grandmother would never sneak under our radar again. What we completely failed to be concerned about was the steady escalation of the operational blueprint.

A month to the day after the auction, Dad came home from work excited.

‘Come out to the car, champ. I've got something to show you.'

He had something in the boot, wrapped in a blanket and caked in mud. At first glimpse it looked like a leg he'd dug up from a shallow bush grave. The only thing that stopped me believing that it could be was that Dad was so cheerful and excited to show it off to me. He opened the blanket to reveal a metal cylinder about a meter long, with four handles spaced evenly around one end and a propeller-shaped blade system at the other. It looked like a cross between a jackhammer and a corkscrew.

‘What is it, Dad?'

‘That, my son, is a rotary fencepost digger. It will dig straight down, bringing excess dirt to the surface and it will do it ten times faster than a shovel.'

I was going to ask where the hell he'd gotten a rotary fencepost digger from, but thought better of it. I'd seen a parking meter auction. I didn't even want to imagine the freaks at a rotary fencepost digger auction. Country losers. Imagine the stains on
their
pants.

A fortnight later Dad returned home from work, again excited and again with something to show me. Sticking out of the boot this time was our bright red parking meter, now welded to the end of a long steel pole. Dad was visibly proud.

‘So, exactly how long is the pole, Dad?'

‘Eight feet.'

‘Isn't eight feet a bit excessive?'

‘I don't think so. Not if we cement it four feet down.'

‘Well, we do have a rotary fencepost digger.'

‘Exactly, my boy!'

We now had all we needed other than opportunity, and settled in for what turned out to be an excruciating four-month wait for our chance to strike. You see, we deemed the installation of a parking meter to be a major project with the potential to cause something of a commotion. As such we felt it best to execute the plan at a time we knew Richard wouldn't be home and preferably late at night to minimise the suspicions of neighbours. In retrospect, the first part of this theory makes perfect sense. The second does not. Waiting for Richard to go away on business before excavating his garden is a very logical strategy. For starters it would enable us to use his hose to make the concrete, not to mention allowing us to carry out the digging over multiple nights should we encounter any difficulties. But thinking that scurrying about with digging equipment in the middle of the night would minimise neighbourhood suspicion is utter lunacy. If you do something nefarious in broad daylight, you may look slightly shifty. If you do it at night, you may as well be wearing T-shirts that say ‘I'm guilty and will not be requiring legal representation'.

It's a lot like stealing a piano. My grandma used to tell me the story of two men who stole a grand piano from a department store during business hours. They parked a truck out the front and walked inside, carrying clipboards and wearing overalls. They went straight to the assistant manager of the music department, pointed to the biggest Steinway on the floor and said, ‘We're here for the piano. Your manager told us to come and pick it up.' While the hapless assistant manager signed the shipping form on the clipboard, he directed the sales staff to help load the piano into the truck. Then they all shook hands, exchanged pleasantries and the truck drove off down the road. The next day when the manager came in he turned to his assistant and said, ‘Did somebody buy the Steinway?'

Later, when the assistant manager was telling his story to the police, they would ask if he got a good look at the men who stole the piano. He would have to reply that yes, he did get a good look at them, particularly when he signed their form and helped them load the piano into the truck. My grandma would finish by explaining the moral of the story.

‘So you see, if they'd broken in at night, they would have looked suspicious, never have gotten the piano out and probably have been caught. But because they were smart, did it during the day and looked like they knew what they were doing, nobody suspected a thing.'

‘Grandma, do you want me to steal pianos?'

‘No, Charles. I want you to be a movie star like Cary Grant. But if you're going to steal pianos, I want you to do it with class.'

But for some reason the piano theory went out the window when it came to Operation Lovely Rita. Having a heightened sense of covert danger was far more important than a sensible strategy and a feasible escape plan should anything go wrong. Dad had decided this manoeuvre had to feel dangerous. And so, when we found out that Richard and Cheryl had to go to Europe on business, we put fresh batteries in our torches, dressed in black and loaded up the car with our cache of quasi-agricultural armaments.

One night in June at around midnight we headed around to Richard's. We had a pick, a shovel, a rotary fencepost digger, a parking meter on an eight-foot pole and a small bag of cement. In accordance with our planning, we parked the car a block up the road from Richard's house. Our thinking was that should we get caught in the act, the last thing we wanted was for anyone to get our licence plate number and trace it back to us. That's right. If we were apprehended with a pick, a shovel, a rotary fencepost digger, a parking meter on an eight-foot pole and a small bag of cement carrying out unsanctioned public works and civic improvements, we were to remain as anonymous as possible. And if upon apprehension we were to be asked what we were in fact doing with a pick, a shovel, a rotary fencepost digger, a parking meter on an eight-foot pole and a small bag of cement we would say, ‘I dunno. Nothing.' The theory being that this would so defy comprehension that we would probably be filed straight into the too-hard basket and simply be asked to move along. Failing that, we would claim never to have seen each other before in our lives and that this whole thing was a baffling coincidence. Oh, yes. We really had thought this through.

After breaking the surface of Richard's lawn, we went to work with the fencepost hole digger and bugger me if it didn't churn through the dirt. It was amazing. It dug a cylindrical hole, straight down.

Dad and I got cocky.

‘I thought it would work, but I had no idea it would work this well,' I said.

‘Start mixing the cement, champ. We'll be done in five minutes.'

Oh, how wrong we were. After two minutes of rapid progress we hit something metallic.

It is a proven scientific fact that if you are digging a hole and you hit something, you will think it's buried treasure. As I stooped to see what booty I had unearthed, I heard a hissing sound. I stooped closer and noticed that dirt was literally flying up into my face. I tried to pat down the soil but that just made larger clumps of soil fly up at me. With each handful of earth I grabbed, the situation seemed to get worse. As my action became more frantic, the hole simply got bigger and the hissing louder. Dad, sensing my distress, decided to get involved. Adopting what was possibly the loudest stage whisper in the history of the world he asked, ‘What's going on?'