Brother Fish (10 page)

As there had never been any Aborigines on the island, as long as anyone could remember, I doubt if Gloria had seen a black man in the flesh. I was confident this wouldn't make any difference to my mum. Despite our ignorance, as a family we weren't against anything, except authority. She would, I knew, accept Jimmy as somewhat of a curiosity, though nevertheless a welcome guest. She'd probably regard him as a status symbol and drag him around to all the rellos to show him off. When all was said and done, we were a pretty easygoing mob and Jimmy Oldcorn wasn't exactly coming to the Hilton in Paradise.

Maybe
, I thought,
our lives being so different to what he'd told me about his own, time spent on the island would help Jimmy to scrub out the memory of his past
. Not just Korea but also the orphanage where the poor bugger had spent his early childhood. Or, for that matter, the Elmira Reformatory where he'd spent eighteen months and from which, at the age of eighteen, he'd been summarily ushered out of the front gates and onto the streets of the Bronx where he'd lived in an abandoned tenement as the leader of a gang of feral coloured kids known as the Red Socks.

At the age of twenty Jimmy had been charged and indicted for a stabbing using a flick-knife. The fight was with a rival Puerto Rican gang known as the San Cristos Boys. The Puerto Ricans were the newly arrived, the latest influx of migrants into New York, and the stoush was over a couple of hundred yards of Hunts Point sidewalk populated by mostly Polish Jews, earlier migrants who'd fled from the Nazis but hadn't yet fled from Hunts Point and Morrisania when the blacks and the Puerto Ricans, displaced by the slum-clearing in Manhattan, had moved in. It was a territory prized by both gangs where the shopkeepers, accustomed to stand-over tactics, shrugged philosophically and paid up for protection, but only to one gang, with the terms clearly established and not too onerous.

‘Brother Fish, it was war!' Jimmy once explained. ‘There ain't no respect on da street, man. Da cops dey ask you about something bad happen in da 'hood, you point out da deed done by a dirty Spic from da other gang an' if you see a Spic kid standing on da corner, if he look like he fourteen or more you look surprised, then you wide-eye da cop an' point, “Dat him, officer! Da Spic on da corner, he done da deed, he da gangster!”' Jimmy would throw back his head and laugh and mimic the Irish cop. ‘“You'd be sure now, Jimmy?” he asked me. “Sure, officer! I swear on my mama's grave!”' Jimmy grinned, recalling. ‘Dem bad days, Brother Fish. You don't carry no blade you a dead man, dat for sure, you in a box wid no cross to mark yo' grave. Jesus ain't gonna find no nigger wid no cross to mark da spot.'

The judge had been generous, and had given Jimmy the option of enlisting in the US Army to fight in the Korean War or, alternatively, receiving three years for causing grievous bodily harm by using a flick-knife with a larger than three-inch blade.

‘Dat judge he told me, “Jimmy, you join the army, we gonna tear up your juvenile record and drop all dem charges against you.” The judge he say I could be a cleanskin if I vol-lun-teer me for the US of A Army to fight in some place he name Koo-ree-a! He don't tell me it da other side da fuckin' world, man!' Jimmy chuckled, shaking his head. ‘Dat judge he's got me good, man. I already know from some of my buddies who left Elmira for a higher order of in-car-sir-ration what I can expect in Newark State Penitentiary. I has got myself a choice between a sore ass from bending over in da prison washroom at da pol-lite request of some big nigger who's da king, or havin' my black ass kicked by some big ol' drill sergeant while I is learning to take pride in da uniform of da United States of A-merica!'

I well recall his grin as he added with a shrug of his shoulders, ‘Man, what can I say? I's protecting my virgin ass and so I put my des-tin-ee in da hands of Uncle Sam, who ab-sol-lu-telly guarantee, as a member of a coloured play-toon in the infantry, I'm gonna have me some self-esteem of which, at dat time, I had none whatsoever.' He'd paused as he slowly shook his head, ‘Oh Brother Fish, I is sent to the 25th Infantry Division, 24th Reg-gee-ment. Dey call da “Deuce Four” and we's all niggers. Now dat ain't so bad, 'cept we got us a white officer! How's about dat? Dey telling us, ain't no coloured man can be a leader. 'Magine da e-ffect dat gonna have on us, man! Dat no way for a man to get no self-esteem! “Well fuck you, Uncle Sam!” I says. “Dat orphanage it ain't took my self-esteem, da reform-a-tory ain't took my self-esteem, da pol-ees dey ain't took my self-esteem, yo'all ain't gonna take it also, man!”'

As with me, success and the boardrooms of the world have greatly changed the way Jimmy Oldcorn speaks and today he's more likely to use the vernacular of a middle-class Australian or American, depending on where he is, though always with a Yank accent. As he's grown older, and, if he's to be believed, as a result of a pack and a half of cigarettes every day since the age of fifteen, his voice sounds as if he's mixing gravel and cement approximately halfway down his throat. It's the kind of voice to which men give their full attention, while women are seen to cling adoringly to his every word. He laughs when the latter are mentioned, and playfully changes his intonation and grammar back to when we were younger, ‘I got me a preacher-quality voice, Brother Fish. Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and me.' He shrugs, ‘So what can I say, eh? Wimmen come to me for dey salvation and it's my born-again duty to oblige them any ways I can!'

It all seems so long ago when, at my suggestion, we'd made our way from Essendon Airport to take a quick look at Flinders Street and then straight to Webb Dock to catch the
Taroona
where we bought tickets to Launceston.

We'd arrived the following morning, docking at Beauty Point on the Tamar River, and made straight for the Anzac Hotel for no other reason than it happened to be the nearest one we could reach conveniently on our crutches. In a sentimental gesture that we both still take seriously we've met here, rain or shine, on the 9th of August every year to celebrate our release from POW camp. Two old mates who have spent much of their subsequent lives together, but who still come here on this one day of the year to celebrate their friendship over a quiet beer or two. Though I had only to fly the company helicopter the short hop across from Queen Island, Jimmy was coming overnight from Shanghai via Hong Kong.

The Anzac Hotel begs a short description, for it brilliantly illustrates the anodyne grog has always been for Australians from the time the first whimpering, rum-fortified convict was rowed onto the fatal shore. It is simply a place designed for drinking. A launching pad for child abuse, wife-beating and all the consequential horrors inherently brought home from the pub. In the crudest terms, it was and I expect still is a place where men go to get pissed, motherless, stonkered, loaded, blind, paralytic, legless or any of the other euphemistic expressions for being drunk or mean-spirited that abound in the Australian vernacular.

The Anzac is one of those unprepossessing red-brick pubs built immediately after the Great War, with rounded shoulders and small, dark, beady-eyed, leaded stained-glass windows that make no attempt to appear inviting. It butts belligerently up against the dockside where you take two wooden steps up from the planked boardwalk and arrive on a steel grid in place of a top step where the dark glint of the river water below can be seen through its bars. You are presented with a pair of scuffed swing doors fixed with dirty brass kick plates with the injunction ‘Push' painted on the left-hand door. You push your way into a room about fifty feet in width and perhaps twenty-five in depth. The bar facing the door is fifteen or so paces from the entrance and stretches the entire fifty feet of the room except for two small openings at either end, one that leads to the ‘males only' toilet and the other to the rear of the bar.

While age may have wearied the Anzac, it has done nothing to make it respectable. It has always been a bloodhouse, and to this day remains faithful to its roots. It comes as no surprise therefore when you notice the sign painted on the wall behind the bar which announces, ‘Females should not feel they are welcome'. This is a fairly recent addition and its careful, almost polite phrasing is at odds with the remainder of the establishment. I can only assume it is designed to technically overcome the fairly recent anti-discrimination laws. In fact, the original sign ‘No women allowed' in larger-than-necessary black lettering immediately to its left, has been so lightly overpainted that it can still be clearly read as a warning to any errant university student brave enough to assert her feminist rights.

The walls of the bar room are tiled to shoulder height in six-inch highly glazed bottle-green tiles, as is the facing wall of the bar with the exception of fifteen tiles halfway up, at its centre each containing a large glazed and raised yellow capital letter that collectively spell out:

‘THE GALLIPOLI BAR'

The walls above the tiles and the ceiling, striped with fluorescent tubes, are painted a high-gloss enamel of pale green, while the floor is constructed of red building bricks with the three feet or so nearest the bar worn distinctly concave from the effect of eighty years of the dockside workers' hobnailed boots. The fact that the floor isn't covered in sawdust, as it was when Jimmy and I first came here in '53 and for a great many years thereafter, has nothing to do with adding ambience but may have something to do with today's health regulations.

However, despite all its obvious faults, the Gallipoli Bar at this early hour is spotless, with none of the smell of stale cigarettes and fermented hops so redolent of early-opening pubs. Whoever designed this room in those dark days after the end of the Great War did so with the singular purpose of making it easy to clean after a bunch of drunks had caroused, fallen about, thrown up into the sawdust and generally misbehaved until closing time. This process is clearly designed to employ the liberal use of a garden hose, as the tap to which it is attached can be seen to the left of the doorway with the brass handle temporarily removed in case some inebriant attempts to play silly buggers. The efficiency of the cleaning process is further aided by the absence of tables, chairs or bar stools. The Gallipoli Bar is standing room only, based on the premise that you stand up until you fall down whereupon you are dragged out onto the wharf by your mates. At closing time, the publican sweeps up the broken glass and hoses the human detritus out of the front door and down the guttering grille acting as a welcome mat, and into the harbour below.

But there is something about the Gallipoli Bar and the Anzac Hotel that could never have been anticipated by its misanthropic designer, a single touch of spontaneous humanity that changes everything.

Perhaps I may digress for a moment.

It has been my observation that men feel compelled to leave their mark wherever they go. By this I don't mean castles and ramparts, ruined buildings and ancient walls. Instead, I mean the small marks that individuals make to ensure that their passing has been noted. It may be a heart with the initials of a girlfriend carved into the smooth green bark of a gum tree, or a name scratched in the dark onto the wall of a solitary-confinement cell adding another mute presence and obdurate defiance to the hundreds of names and initials of those who had gone through the same humiliation. Today, young blokes leave their mark like dogs pissing on a post, their spray-can graffiti vandalising the outside of carriages of commuter trains or corrupting a vacant wall on a city building by turning it into a giant doodling pad containing a series of multicoloured angular and arcane names. Lacking even this talent to doodle with spray paint, some simply destroy an anonymous surface with a hurriedly swished obscenity in red or black. Names or announcements, ‘Jack loves Jenny', are written under bridges or on the sides of overpasses, even chipped into the stone of great pyramids and temples, or they deface the walls containing cave paintings, themselves ancient graffiti that overpaint the marks made by the passing of a hundred generations.

And now here, in these anonymous tiled and sterile drinking premises, humans have once again wrested the initiative from the cynical brewer who, thinking his working-class patrons deserved no better, caused the Anzac Hotel to be designed to be little more than a pig swill. As a rite of passage, crudely carved along the full length of the dark polished surface of the wooden bar are the initials of every local lad and returning veteran who left the Launceston dockyards to fight a war. When a young bloke failed to return or a veteran passes on, a highly polished brass nail is hammered into the surface next to his initials, so that today the bar fair twinkles, a night sky of the dead. At the end of the bar stands a small box on the facing side of which is written in gold lettering, ‘Lest We Forget'. Each morning and evening a fresh beer with a good, clean head is stood upon the box to remember fallen comrades who once stood, fresh-faced with elbows touching, at the Gallipoli Bar.

Ten years ago the story of our annual appointment in the Anzac Hotel on the same day each year became the subject of a newspaper article in the Launceston
Examiner
. The following year the proprietor approached us.

‘You guys are veterans from the Korean War, aren't you?' We both nodded. ‘Yeah, righto, we put it to the blokes, the regulars like . . . and they reckon after twenty-four years you're entitled.'

‘Entitled?' Jimmy asked with mock surprise. ‘Don't tell me we're getting a drink on the house!'

The barman gave him a sort of half-grin. ‘No such luck, mate.' He produced a pocket knife with a well-worn blade, and placed it on the bar in front of us and indicated the surface of the bar. ‘Go ahead, fellas, do us the honour. Carve your initials.'