Impractical Jokes (5 page)

Dad stood toe-to-toe with Richard, looking him directly in the eye. He slowly lifted a slightly trembling finger, directing it to the spot right between Richard's eyebrows and spoke with a calm unnerving focus that gave you the feeling something irreplaceable had been broken deep inside him. If you were casting this scene in a movie your first choice would be a young Clint Eastwood. Your second choice would probably be an old Ed Harris, but that's largely because he's apparently great to work with and a young Clint Eastwood just isn't available anymore.

‘Richard,' Dad intoned, jabbing his finger with each of the following five words, ‘This' poke, ‘is' poke, ‘not' poke, ‘over.' Poke.

He then turned around, strode purposefully out of the garden and walked home.

From that moment on Richard Opie lived in a state of perpetual dread. My father was not a naturally intimidating man, but Richard knew that when it came to implied threats of petty, juvenile, vindictive revenge, Ronald Pickering was a man to be feared.

In the interests of personal safety Richard refused to attend any summer social functions held in proximity to bodies of water. No pools, no lakes, no rivers, no fjords. In the end, with most people's houses and public gathering places ruled out, Richard determined that he would only socialise if it involved dinner inside his house or at a restaurant he deemed to be safe. As a consequence, over the following months Richard became progressively more housebound, taking on an enigmatic Howard-Hughes-like reputation.

After three months of this Richard, usually a sociable kind of chap, was starting to go a little stir-crazy. Sensing a chink in Richard's defences, Dad booked dinner at what could only be described as a la-di-dah restaurant. A five-star, silver service, string quartet, ice sculptures aplenty, jacket and tie compulsory, la-di-dah restaurant. Dad figured that the better the restaurant, the more Richard would let his guard down, assuming Dad would never pull a stunt in a place like that. Richard was a sitting duck.

The afternoon before the dinner, Dad went to the restaurant, tipped the waiter and had him hide a small sports bag under their table. Dad had a plan fiendishly clever in its simplicity and, to be honest, the only thing that made him nervous was that the waiter hadn't asked any questions. In fact the guy seemed genuinely comfortable stashing a mysterious package in his restaurant for a twenty-dollar handshake and no questions asked. This was clearly a pre 9/11 stunt. Dad had visions of Michael Corleone's dinner with Sollozzo and McCluskey and was more confident than ever that he had indeed picked the ideal place to settle family business.

Despite some early edginess on Richard's part, by half-way through the meal things were going well. By all reports the entrées had been spectacular and as the mains hit the table Richard really began to relax. When the nearest fancy-pants waiter was called upon to open another bottle of plonk the mood became positively jolly. Dad, however, remained fairly taciturn, appearing to focus primarily on his meal. Richard, glad just to be out of the house, more than made up for Dad's sober demeanour. With the unwitting confidence of a rube tourist unaware that he's walking through a bad neighbourhood, Richard merrily plugged any gaps in conversation.

‘Oh, I've missed this, Ron. I really have.'

‘Hm.'

‘Oh, yes. A couple of good friends, out having a nice meal. Everything as it should be.'

‘Hm.'

‘Yes. I'm so glad that we could put all the ugliness behind us and just get on with things.'

‘Hm.'

‘And a great choice of restaurant, too, Ron. Really well done.'

Just as Richard was fully embracing his role as the poster child for a false sense of security, Dad calmly reached under the table, pulled out a water pistol, stood up, drenched Richard from head to toe, sat back down, put away the water pistol and continued with his meal. The string quartet didn't skip a beat, the hum of conversation at the restaurant didn't fluctuate and the suspicions of management were never aroused. As Dad proceeded to take another mouthful of his meal and smile nonchalantly to surrounding tables, the whole situation had a strange air of normality. In fact, the only sign that anything had happened at all was the saturated man with the look of utter astonishment on his face. Notwithstanding the fact that he had just watched my dad produce a weapon, stand up and open fire, Richard really hadn't seen it coming.

It could have ended there. A couple of moist middle-aged men, a couple of tasty japes and a respectable one-all scoreline. It could have ended there, but it didn't, and it wouldn't for another nine years. You see, when maturity is the first casualty of war, things tend to escalate.

4

Behind Enemy Lines

I
n the face of his public embarrassment, Richard, a man with impeccable taste, natural sense of flair and readily available disposable income, invested in two of the most expensive water pistols available on the open market. They were the exact shape of a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. If you are au fait with machine guns you will know precisely what I mean. If you don't have a basic catalogue-level knowledge of machine guns you may be thinking it's a pretty odd way to describe what a water pistol looked like.

To clarify, at one time I could have been described as a little ‘machine gun curious', much in the same way some boys were into spotting trains or could recognise a biplane by it's landing gear. Like so many adolescent hobbies, that time has passed. Machine gun studies have gone the way of my marbles, footy cards and playing Leisure Suit Larry on my 386 computer with the dwindling hope of some kind of sexual experience. So many things that fascinate the mind of a young man are banished to boxes on garage shelves in order to make way for the real life concerns of being a fully-grown human man. Most of those banished fascinations are remembered with a wistful nostalgia, often shared with friends as a memory in common. You can laugh about how Garbage Pail Kid collector cards were far superior to their Cabbage Patch counterparts; you can delight in the reasoning of how a Fanta yoyo was better than a Sprite yoyo. But for some goddamned reason, if you mention at a barbecue that you know the differences between a Browning and a Glock 9mm and which is suited to a particular combat situation, people change the subject pretty quickly.

But moving on from my firearm proclivities, if you are still interested to know what the water pistols looked like, then the H&K was the weapon of choice for the diabolical fiends that terrorised the Nakatomi building one Christmas, making the life of one John McClane very difficult, but making
Die Hard
an unmitigated action blockbuster.

Much like a real H&K, the water pistols had to be ordered from Germany though clandestine channels. Richard sent order forms to European business contacts and made payments in Deutsche marks to offshore accounts with sinister names like the Strasbourg Feuerwaffe Novelti Korp. He then waited months for delivery. Just as he had begun to give up hope, they arrived one May morning in 1987 in a small timber crate that had to be opened with a crowbar in undeniably theatrical style.

And these babies were worth the wait. Made of a solid metal construction, the replicas were no less impressive than the German originals and if the words ‘state of the art' can be applied to water pistols, this is what they were. The designers had done away with the laborious and altogether embarrassing pump system so often forced upon the recreational water pistoleer. There is no greater indignity than having the perfect ambush undermined by a firing action that makes you look like your masturbating the detached arm of a gaily-coloured robot. In contrast, the German uber-pistol was completely battery-powered, meaning that it would fire continuously at the mere depression of the trigger. Not only that, but it had removable ammo clips which could be filled with water and instantly replaced should you run dry. But by far their greatest feature was that they had a small speaker built into the barrel and when you pulled the trigger they made a loud and very realistic machine gun noise.

How loud and how realistic cannot be underestimated. The sound was deafening, terrifying and spectacular. This brought with it an unforseen bonus feature. If you fired at someone with this water pistol, you would not only wet your target, but they would immediately wet themselves as well. Richard had a fairly good feeling that these weapons represented a water-war endgame of sorts. They couldn't be topped. When he unleashed them on Dad the current feud would, for all intents and purposes, be over.

Richard had the means; he simply needed the opportunity. It came one Saturday. As was their custom in the late eighties and early nineties, Dad and Richard were with their friend Ian enjoying an afternoon of watching the St Kilda football club get unceremoniously destroyed at Moorabbin Oval. I'm fairly sure that none of the men actually barracked for the Saints, but the ground (known colloquially as ‘the Cage') was less than ten minutes from home and they all liked football for football's sake. They could stand in the outer, drink beer, yell at umpires and be at home or the local Chinese restaurant by five-thirty. When you feel no emotion for the team being consistently pummelled into the notorious Moorabbin mud, that makes for a pretty good afternoon.

The Cage was also the location of the pinnacle of my football career. After years of hard work and handball drills at my local Vic Kick Footy Clinic, I was given the opportunity to play in a little league match during the half-time break of a St Kilda game. Being a relative local, I was drafted to play for the Saints. They weren't my team. I was and will always be an Essendon man. But on this occasion that didn't bother me. That, I reassured myself, was just the way footy was now, what with pre-season drafts and salary caps. You had to play where you were sent. Besides, I was eleven years old, had shiny new boots and was pretty sure that I was one talent scout away from snapping the winning goal in a VFL grand final. I wasn't going to miss that opportunity by being precious about whose guernsey I was wearing.

The game itself was a low scoring affair. While the ground was actual size, we were not. We barely had the legs to run the ball to our forward line, let alone the strength to keep it there long enough to score. Our adversaries were the Bulldogs from the tough western suburb of Footscray. They seemed to be fitter than us, which we put down to their time spent evading police. By half-time we were down by three unanswered goals and things were looking dire. As the coach gave us a pep talk, I couldn't help but think my time to impress the talent scouts was rapidly escaping—a pretty heavy thought to wrestle with over an orange and a cup of cordial. The pressure was amplified by the fact that the change of ends had placed me in the outer forward pocket, directly in front of Dad, Richard and Ian. My pulse became quicker and audible as I resolved that, come what may, I would have an impact on the game.

It didn't take long. Moments after the centre bounce, Sammy Austen took possession of the ball and burst through the pack faster than I had ever seen him run. This I put down to an abject fear of being caught by the thugs in pursuit. He spotted me on a lead, slammed the ball on his boot and breathed a sigh of relief at the fact that without the ball, he just might not get bashed.

The ball sailed towards me and time stood still. Every scratch match, marking practice and skills drill boiled down to this one moment. I was perfectly poised to realise every childhood sporting dream I had ever known. Or at least I was, until my opponent planted two hands firmly in my back and sent me to the ground, before taking the mark that was clearly meant for me. No whistle was blown. No free kick was awarded. Time reanimated and my heart sank.

Furious at the injustice, I stood on the mark with my arms in the air, painfully aware of Dad and Richard's gaze. As my opposition number took his kick, I turned around to see where it went. It was a particularly sluggish attempt and barely made the ten-metre journey from his boot to the back of my head, knocking me to the ground and rebounding towards the boundary line. Tim Baker, the one player on our team who was actually any good, effortlessly scooped the ball up in one hand, evaded two defenders and snapped a belter of a goal running at full tilt and only a couple of feet from the pocket boundary. The crowd erupted. And by that I mean a tipsy Richard yelled from the boundary, ‘That's using your head, Charles.'

Those gathered around, laughed.

On the verge of tears I turned to tell Richard to shut up, but stopped myself as I caught sight of my dad. He was smiling. Not at Richard's joke, but at me. We went down to Footscray by seven goals to one, but I felt like a winner.

If this were the only momentous personal event to take place at the Cage, it would still hold a special place in the hearts of Richard, Dad and myself. But, as I mentioned, another afternoon at the Cage was particularly memorable, and that was because a conversation which took place in the outer over a few beers was the catalyst for an act of all-out war.

The afternoon the war was reignited, the pummelling of the Saints had been particularly extensive and by the time Ian had gone on the half-time beer run, Richard had started to make plans for the evening.

‘So, Ron, what are the plans for this evening? Cheryl's out for the night. Your place or mine?'

With his almost regal accent and effortless turn of phrase, Richard could sound distinguished in any situation. The fact that Richard was standing next to a man who had opted to urinate against the boundary fence rather than take on the grandstand urinal queue did remarkably little to reduce that distinction. As if swept up in Richard's pomp, Dad forgot himself and gave a dangerously honest answer.