Chariots of Fire, in My Neighbourhood

Ambition it may have started out as - another dewy-eyed ever-after romantic vision in my immature brain - but the more I fantasised about the encounter, re-living it by burying my face in my pillow at night, the more my longing turned to lusting.

Not that there is anything wrong with lust.  Lust is a fantastic motivator. People driven by lust have achieved great things.  Mark Anthony’s lust for Cleopatra led him to create the Caesar salad; Lois’ Lane’s lust for Superman led her to create RP7 lubricant and rust preventer; Fumble-fingers Gideon Sunback’s lust for his girlfriend Gertrude caused him invent the zipper; Napoleon’s lust for Josephine led him to create that famous phrase: “For Christ’s sake, please not tonight Josephine, I have ze gastric reflux burning my bosom again!”
Perhaps Napoleon is not a shining example of lust-driven creativity but I can assure you that my growing hunger for the once-glimpsed beauty was about to drive me to greater achievements.

I was becoming desperate to see her again, wondering how to go about arranging another encounter, wondering if she was involved with that muscly looking guy in the red sports car when an awful truth began to dawn on me: If she was going with that gorillum, what would she see in me? When I looked at myself in the mirror to see how I shaped up against her Bluto beau,  I got - quite frankly - a bit depressed. I looked like a white skin sack half full of bones and jellymeat. I‘d be rejected at the gate of the Pal dog food processing plant.  I painfully decided that I wouldn’t really want the object of my affections to notice me in that condition and set about redressing the deficit a little.

I’d heard that having a tan makes you look fitter so I painted myself all over with that quick-tan stuff. Twelve coats of the muck.  I don’t know what I did wrong but I ended up glowing like an orange safety suit – all over! I could stand in the back yard at night and read a comic by the glow from my face. It took days to scrub the orange colour off and I when I did, I was worse off than before – I was hot pink all over! Man, was I depressed. There was no escaping the painfully bloody obvious: I needed a body, preferably one that didn’t need painting to look acceptable.

I got seriously depressed when I priced a new set of muscles. The equation at the gym is quite simple. The more money you had the more muscles you could get. I had enough money to develop three muscles in one of my arms or a large-ish one in my leg — that was all!  It looked like I was cut off before my prime until... I started to use my head. Surely a bloke should be able to effect a torso overhaul without using a bankcard; with just his brains. And I reckoned I could.

Jogging was the answer! I would run my way to physical fitness and dashing good looks. And, as I needed to look fantastically strong and handsome in a week or so,  I started work straight away.

I was concerned that running would only develop my legs (I was still cautious of this after the cycle couriering episode)  so I hit on a way to balance things up. I found my old boxing gloves and filled them with lumps of lead before strapping them on. By shucking my hands up and down and all around I would give the old animal-farms a good work-out at the same time I was developing titanic thighs. As for the other parts, I decided that I could sort them out as they became noticeable by their deficiency but, in the meantime, if I wore shorts and a singlet all the muscled parts would be showing and that’s all that counts, isn’t it?  
The gloves were very heavy and I could feel my muscles developing straight away. There was a danger that my arms might stretch and let my knuckles drag on the ground but I was prepared to take the risk. After all, if things didn’t work out I could get a job as a floor tiler and maintain a healthy back through the course of a working career.

I did a quick warm-up in the front yard, listening to Mrs. Saunders next door coughing and spluttering with another dose of the ‘flu. As I heard her energetically blowing her endlessly running nose I set off on the path to fitness that would keep me from such trifling ills forever.   I cruised out of the front gate, turned onto the footpath and run smack into the biggest spider’s web you could imagine.

I hate spiders. It’s not that I don’t like them — I LOATHE them. I have a morbid fear of them crawling on me and, I just knew one was doing so because I caught sight of the big hairy sucker the instant I hit the web. And allow me to inform you that this daddy was so big his web had been safety-tested by the BLF.

Completely unashamed and almost unhinged by terror I let out a God-awful scream and started thrashing at my back and head with my gloves hoping to frighten the hairy bugger off. In my panic I forgot about the lead weights in my gloves and three seconds into the first round I had myself on the deck in a TKO.

I was in a semi-conscious state but still thrashing and twitching on the ground when I became dimly aware of Mrs Saunders leaning over me, rolling up her handkerchief.

‘What’s the matter with you, boy?’ she demanded.

Fear had almost robbed me of my voice. ‘Geddid orf - geddid orfff!!!’ I gasped.

Mrs Saunders was the neighbourhood do-gooder when she wasn’t down with ‘flu. She had recently taken a first aid course, no doubt to justify her timely appearance at the scene of any gory emergency, and now she was fairly jumping at the chance to play doctors and nurses again.

‘You’re having a fit, boy,’ she informed me as she avoided my swinging gloves. ‘You lads shouldn’t be allowed to do boxing. Look what it did to Cashews Clay. He went nuts and became a Mohammedan or a Seven Day Inventor. Be careful -  you’ll bite your tongue. Here, bite this instead.’

I know she was only trying to be helpful but when I realised that the object she had just stuck in my gob was her rolled-up snotty handkerchief I went ape.  Spiders ceased to exist as I spat and clawed at my tongue. I was up and off like a whirling dervish, flattening everything in my way. I threw up six times before I found her garden tap and hosed out my mouth. Mrs Saunders’ front yard looked like a cyclone had destroyed it. She took such a fright she didn’t go outside the front door for three weeks and some days.

As for me,  I was young and recovered quickly - lust is also a great healer -  and kept on with my plan, only the next time I went jogging I went in the opposite direction.

Jogging is very good for you, as I might have said earlier, and I quickly began to feel the benefits. After I had jogged two blocks I was as fit as a Coorong kangaroo. I figured that in a couple of weeks, with this system of mine, I could knock the wax out of Rambo’s ears, both of them with one hit. In two months I could be setting world records tossing dead whales or tunas, or whatever it is, at Port Lincoln, with one finger. In six months I would be so well-developed I would be able to get my comb out of my back pocket and into my hair without even using my hands, just the muscles in my back.   With these Olympian visions in my mind I inflated my chest and floated down the footpath in a state of euphoria. What happened next made me wish I were in the state of Tasmania.

As I blissfully pounded along beside a low brick fence my dreams were shattered by a sudden violently verbal attack by the biggest, ugliest German Shepherd I have ever seen. (I’m sure you know I mean the canine variety).

The mongrel must have heard me thumping along the footpath and hidden himself behind the fence in order to scare the wits out of me. He certainly did that - and much, much more. He scared me so much out of me I had to shuffle all the way back home to the shower and change my grundies.

People shouldn’t be allowed to keep sneaky dogs like that. The cowardly hound had ruptured my pride as well as my dreams and the more I thought about it the madder I got. I decided revenge was the answer. So, the next time I went jogging, I took a rolled-up and taped newspaper whacker with me just to make sure that the craven cur ended up on the wrong end of the surprise attack.  I thumped extra loudly along the footpath, and even managed a snatch of singing when I could afford the breath, in order to give the dog ample notice of my approach. Up came the low brick fence... up came the hound, all teeth, tongue and slobber, barking like a politician at election time.

But the glint of cruel delight in his eyes dimmed to fear as I whipped out the whacker and got him a beauty right across the snout.

‘A-a-a-r-r-r, shaddup!’ I yelled, punctuating the wallop. This time it was the dog’s turn to be surprised and he let out a frightened yelp.

Unfortunately, my pleasure was to be short-lived. In my eagerness for revenge I did not notice the dog’s mistress hiding in the shrubbery with a rake. She had been pretending to scrape up leaves but I believe she was actually playing full-back for that mongrel.

‘Hey, you leave my dog alone,’ she yelled, striding towards me and swinging the rake menacingly. I got the impression that she may have swung that rake in the dog’s direction a few times previously because as soon as the mutt saw the thing it became the object of his growing anger — the rake, that is, not her. Fuelled, perhaps, by painful memories, he threw himself at the rake and latched firmly onto the handle. The lady screamed. The dog growled viciously and I stood frozen to the spot.

Suddenly, from behind the house came two small children who started yelling, ‘What’s the matter....?  Leave Mummy alone...!’ Just when I thought they were going to save their mother from the dog they jumped the fence and started chewing on my ankles.

‘Stop that, ya little rats,’ I hollered at them raising the whacker in mock threat.

‘What the hell’s going on out there...?’ came a booming roar from the front door of the house as the father appeared on the scene and came storming across the yard towards us. I panicked and tried to run away but the two kids were still gnawing at my ankles. They didn’t like getting dragged along the footpath and started putting on a bit of a turn.

‘Leave those kids alone, you peda... pedagogue,’ roared the father as he thundered towards me. With my legs anchored the only thing I could think of was to fling the whacker at him. In one of those amazingly lucky when-you-least-expect-it shots, the end of the whacker got him right between the eyes - on the bridge of the nose. And, in a Logie Award winning display of over-acting, he dropped like a sack of spuds off a vegie truck.
‘Help! Help,’ screamed the slightly hysterical woman while kicking her prostrate husband. “Get up and help me, you lazy hound!”

Then, amazingly, two elderly people emerged from the house, with two little wire-haired terriers in tow. I don’t know what sort of a house they were running in there but there was enough people inside it to make a census taker to lick his pencil twice. They all came tottering over to our little melee.

‘What’s going on? Be off with you...Here Tuppence....Here Tiny....No, Tuppence...NO!!!’

But it was too late. The toey little terriers seized the opportunity to get stuck into the German Shepherd while his attention was diverted with the rake. They quickly discovered that the Shepherd suffered from a bit of that attention deficit disorder and  almost instantly, a monster dogfight erupted.

Into the middle of all this rode the paper boy on a pushbike. He swung out around the crowd and tossed in the paper. It caught the father in the ear as he was trying to get up and avoid the snapping dogs at the same time.

‘Oooaaagh!’ he roared theatrically. This further angered the wife who employed the now free rake as a javelin and brought down the paper boy with a jab in the pannier. A neighbour who had been watching ran to the aid of the boy. He was backed up by a couple of local dogs that had been attracted by the noise and then the fun really started. By the time the men in blue arrived there were so many injured and maimed they had to call an ambulance, a couple of doctors and a vet to patch them all up before they took us humans to the holding pens.

The funny thing was, the only damage I sustained was a bad case of soggy sneakers and frayed socks. That seemed to infuriate the battered crowd every time I put in an appearance while they were getting first-aided, so the wallopers sent me to the cooler in a patrol car by myself, which served to uphold a kind of grudging peace. They also gave me my own cell but it was opposite one occupied by the heavily bandaged group who were glaring at me so fiercely that I was beginning to understand what a leg of lamb must feel like in an oven.
I knew I’d really upset my family with this escapade because they let me cook in the oven right up to the point where the cops had started to charge me rent.  But dad eventually sprung me - just as my skin started to crackle and ooze gravy.  But by then, I had a record.  I bore the stigma of a jailbird!

The question that arose like a greasy breakfast trying to see daylight again was: would the highly-attractive object of my desire want to go out with a crim who had a stigma? Or any other small, unfashionable Japanese car, for that matter.

o-0-o

To Chapter 7 - Breaking up crappy homes