How I got into Rock'n'Roll by R.J. Cardy

To start with I wasn’t interested in music one bit really until I was about thirteen. I used to listen to the radio and I saw A HARD DAYS NIGHT about fifty times but I didn’t even know the Beatos were a real band, I mean I thought they were actors playing at being a band. When I was about 7 or 8 and we were living in Coburg West in Melbourne my parents went out one night to see the Australian stage-version of TOMMY and left my brother in charge of us. He coaxed me into the swimming-pool and sat on my head until I nearly drowned so I have always had a big grudge against the Who. By the time my family came to live in New Zealand I knew who The Beatles were and Elvis and so on, in fact I remember being impressed by my 16-year-old cousin’s record collection becos he had every Beato album and every solo-Beato album (and then he also had miles of stuff like Emerson Lake & Palmer and Yes and Genesis and Rick Wakeman and the like which I said to myself I would have to listen to but then it turned out my cousin and I never really hit it off mostly becos he was six years older than me and started getting on well with my brother (then 14) who at that time and as far back as I can remember and right up to this very day hates me, so I didn’t get to hear the post-Beato English thing at all except a year later when my brother got his own stereo and started playing Pink Floyd lps like Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here which he was buying the week they came out! and in fact I liked that stuff but at the same time tended to dismiss anything my brother liked so if anybody asked me I’d say I thought it sucked but really I thought it was kind of good but then this is my very early years and I was easily impressed). (I wouldn’t have actually said "it sucked" in those very words becos as far as I can remember no one I knew was saying things "sucked" that far back but you get what I mean.) So anyway when we got to Dunedin I liked the Beatles but I thought I would grow up to be a veterinarian. I lived in Baker St and went to Caversham Primary School. My best friend was a guy called Johnny Dall who’d had some kind of freak accident involving a lawnmower when he was a toddler and his right leg had been amputated below the knee. He’d learned to walk again with an artificial leg which had to be replaced two or three times a year to fit his growing body. Since he’d been about eight, a couple of years before I came on the scene, whenever Johnny was refitted with a suitably sized leg he developed painful swelling and sometimes sores heavy with pus on his wrinkled pink stump. His injury would be bandaged and he would have to get around for a while, a fortnight at most, on crutches. When the infected area had cleared up he would return to using his "new" leg which he actually referred to like it was a person because he called his leg BIG JOHN. When I started at the same school as Johnny he was between legs and he introduced himself to me by whacking me in the liver with one of his crutches. I don’t know why I didn’t stay out of his way from that moment on, but anyway I didn’t, because not long after I was sitting round at his house where I met his mother and his six sisters and we ate pea and ham soup with toast and watched Doctor Who on colour tv. Then we started a gang called The FUKKIN BASTURDS and we had a secret den in the Mornington bushes where we hid stolen comics and smoked cigarettes. I was sort of wary of John, especially of BIG John, because every now and then he’d get mean and hit me again with his crutches and say If you think that’s bad wait’ll BIG JOHN gets back - but it never really bothered me that much until he got me to agree to help him out with this insane plan to kill one of his sisters by tying her head to one of those half-tyres they have sunk into the ground underneath the seat-ends of seesaws and bashing her head to pieces. I agreed to the plan becos I didn’t believe John was serious, I thought it was a Fukkin Basturd joke becos we were always going on about how we’d rob people and break windows and burn down houses but we never did any of these except break a few windows, okay. So I was just going along with this slaughter-fantasy for fun but then John started saying how we ought to do my own sister in first and I was saying things like Yeah what a bitch and She’s such a c*** and stuff and still just going along with him becos there was no way anything like that was ever actually going to happen I mean I was going to be a veterinarian so I had this real gentle streak - but then one day John goes up to my sister in the street and punches her in the face! She screamed and her nose was bleeding and I had to help her back home and my parents rung John’s parents and he told them that she was picking on him because of his leg! I told my parents John was lying, they told John’s parents, John’s mother came round to apologise, John got a hiding from his dad and I got a hiding from John every day for a week at the end of which he let me know BIG JOHN would be back on Monday in time to KILL me. I had nightmares about it all weekend and managed to skip a couple of days off school by pretending to be sick but sooner or later I had to go back so I decided to walk a different way there in the hope that so long as John & BIG JOHN couldn’t corner me by myself I could always scream for a teacher’s help. (John lived nearby and knew my regular route.) Anyway the new route I thought I’d take and did in fact end up taking involved sneaking thru a clump of bush on the far side of South Road called the Mornington Track. It was close to the bushes where the Fukkin Basturds den was but a bit further up the hill than that and it led to a bunch of streets I never actually walked down and can’t remember the names of. What I can remember is that my sister had a friend who lived in a brick house somewhere up near the top of the track and that her friend’s father was Dutch and smoked little cigars that smelt like dogs***. Also for a while my brother and I were sort of friendly and we bought some war comics at the dairy one day and built half a dam on the creek which flowed thru the bushes surrounding the track and had an argument about the correct pronunciation of the word "urinal". So anyway I thought by going this completely different way to school I could avoid my ex best friend beating me up, which I managed to do, but because I went this different way I was the first person to discover the body of a man who’d hanged himself from the jungle gym bars in the playground in the clearing right at the bottom of the Mornington Track near to where it opens onto South Road. I was pretty freaked out to start with, before I found the hanged man, half expecting Johnny Dall to pop out from behind a tree any second and kick me to death with his artificial leg, but after I saw what was dangling from the monkey bars I just went hot and cold, hot and cold, it must have been ages and I remember eventually I sicked up my breakfast AND pissed my pants. I sort of froze and either a lot of stuff went thru my mind or maybe nothing did becos now whenever I remember it I can’t figure out if I’m really remembering what I actually thought at the time or I’m feeding stuff back to then from now in order to keep the memory itself from seizing up altogether. Anyway I’ve thought about it a lot since and it isn’t really that important or at least it’s not as important as what happened next becos at some point I walked up to the dead guy and removed the laces from his steelcap boots. I ran away with them in my pocket and acted like everything was normal even though I was at school nearly half an hour before anyone else and I stunk. After the bell went and I got into my seat a special message went round all the classrooms warning all children to stay away from the Mornington Track "becos there’d been an accident there." At playtime all the other kids were wondering what it might’ve been that happened up on the track and I took John aside and told him about the hanged man and showed him the laces I’d pinched from his boots and told him if he stopped picking on me we could be friends again and I’d let him have one of the laces. He said he didn’t believe me but he took the lace anyway and within a few days the story of the suicide had made it into the paper and John and I started being Fukkin Basturds again and for a while things were pretty cool but then one day John reckoned I ought to give him the other lace becos he’d lost the one I’d given him and I said no and we really got into a fight and I ended up hitting him in such a way that he had to wear an eyepatch for a month and he never really could focus properly out of his left eye ever again. I didn’t know about the lasting damage I’d done to his sight until years later becos shortly after the eyepatch incident he stopped going to Caversham Primary and I didn’t see him again until we were both about fourteen and I was really heavily into playing soccer and I thought I’d be a famous soccer player and I was practising every day and playing two games a week and really digging it when one day my team came up against Abbotsford and their goalie was Johnny Dall. He told me the stuff about his eye and suddenly it was like four years just disappeared like that and he was going on about how he was gonna kick me and beat me up and kill me and kill my sister and smash my f***ing teeth in and what have you and I just went f*** it and stopped playing soccer from that day and sat around in my room for a while and read some science fiction and moved my bed away from the window and started buying records and started wanting to have a band and that’s how I got into it.