The funny times
Without Prejudice
Being married to Bob would never be easy but it could be funny. I never laughed so much with any of my men as I did with him. Thats not to say I haven't loved another more but I certainly haven't laughed so much. But then as my Sister reminded me, Bob was before Lauren died. And after you lose a child you are never quite as happy, or even laugh as much as you did before, when your child was alive. But Bob could be funny, often in a cruel way and usually about someone else and always, always as an Ocker he was at his most funniest.
He had one friend, a policeman who he called "Man's not a camel", and he "could eat the sweat out of an Afghans undies", " eat the horse and chase the jockey", "I'm as dry as a Nuns clitoris " he talked tough and was. Slicing his arm on the fan under the bonnet and just lifted his arm up and got me to drive to a friends house, Jill Cooper who was married to Ian Cooper, the footballer. And she just stitched it right then and there, no anaesthetic, saying,
"you're a tough guy aren't you? "
He washed out a petrol tank once for twenty minutes before touching it waith the tip of a MIG welder and it exploded over his chest, boiling water, and he arrived home with a tee shirt up to his neck and I didn't know until I ran my hand over his chest the next morning in bed and his skin came away and he screamed. So did I!
He was supposed to have kicked a cow to death once as it kept kicking off it's cups and he killed the kids Sheep as it ran over his fresh concrete. he had guns, a pistol he was arrested for, and rifles and once Yvette marched out to the back yard and pointed one at the kids over the back fence and threatened to shoot them. He fought with the neighbours, physically, punching on with Mr de Kok and Les in the court we lived in. He was drunk often shitty often and loved a fight.
He had a customer once, who he nicknamed, "Deadline Doug", and he learned how to be a business man and he loved love loved having money. A lot of money and he would work till he dropped, teaching loys of misfits how to fence as fast as he could and they never could.
We did the remand centre in town once and had to join every Union to stay at on site, and Bob lost it and I had to go in and negotiate with The Union Man, who Bob said looked like his face been through a "thousand wars" And it was actually John Halfpenny that helped me and showed me how to keep one set of books for our subbies who were paid metre rate. And another set for the unions that showed our 'boys' were on wages. he took me into a work hut and sat me down and showed me what to do and then we were allowed back on site. Bob hated unions with a passion and never wanted to join any but we had to join the BLF and other Unions to be allowed on Goverment sites.
Bob had a friend, a young Dutchman who loved Unions and there was a lot of winding up each other about it. But Tako was our gate welder for years took us to the opening of the Westgate bridge as he had worked on it and we watched Jaws there and came out vowing to never get back in the water again. the girls were only little then and came out "peaking" off their heads.
The best jobs we had in the old days were the races people that lived over near Gisborne and they always paid cash. And as soon as you finished and so did Kevin Dennis. The only ones we had trouble with were builders, always 3 month payers and Government jobs, interminable time to get paid and the Smorgons, where he had met Tako, who was working for Skilled Engineering. With the Smorgons they were so late in paying that Bob parked himself in the office one day and waited until they handed him a check, just to get rid of him. People in Toorak amd Mount Eliza didn't pay and old age pensioners in Noble Park did and gave you a cup of tea and a biscuit as well.
We fenced by the headlights of the F100, and one weekend he took us to Port Arlington for a family holiday and the next thing me and all the girls, Alena a toddler of 15 months, only were holding up chain mesh and tying it off in a gale. Our back yard was a tip of mesh and posts and we had slings of pipe out in the front yard. One subby loading up a trailer and driving out taking half our brand new hand made Timber fence Bob had completed only weeks before. it took 5 years and a lot of threats by me before it was done. I even went to the extreme of getting a quote from another fencing company, before bob sent the "boys" around to fix it.
We fenced golf courses, setting the posts overnight and going back the next day to find teenagers had ripped them all out and thrown them in the lake. Our tool bill was incredible as Subbies left tools on site and we learned to provide them with a set and charge them for them, a little out of their wages each week. I had to learn the first computer ever, from the accountant, in 1983 and what a dinosaur it was, just a PC. I had to learn how to book keep and do pays and do administration and do tax and Super, and group certs, we also made lunches for the boys and sold them too.
He once told his Sister Pauline that he had a job for her and when she asked sweetly what it was, his answer,
"Kick starting jumbos at Tullamarine airport".
Pauline was a big girl in those days and she was rightly furious, Bob had been working on that one for weeks.
He made fun of everyone and sometimes even himself.
He was outrageous.
He walked in one night to our house at Keysborough where I was sat with the Sri Lankan spray painter. Bob had decided to get his two S model valiants done up from bare metal.
"Well," he said, "have you rooted her yet,???"
And the man had blushed and turned away and so had I.
One time he was on his way home to watch some title fight and as soon as I saw his car in the driveway I jumped up and changed the channel from Days Of Our Lives to the boxing.
Bob stormed in to the house and in to the bedroom.
"Where is he ???," he demanded.
"Who???". I asked back, wondering what the hell he was doing.
"Your boyfriend", he sneered.
"My what ???" I asked puzzled.
"I saw you jump up from the sofa and run off", he said.
I explained what I had been doing but I don't think he quite believed me.
He thought he had gout once, I told him he had just bought new boots, but he went to the doctors up the road anyway, and in his short shorts and workboots stomped in to the doctors surgery and stopped dead. He had stomped in to a couple's lounge room, and they were sitting there open mouthed eating their lunch.
"oops", he said. "Wrong house"
Turned out he had a case of "New Boots" Syndrome, after all.
When we were first married we went to Yarra Valley with deb as a baby of 3 months. We were entirely unprepared for the trip. It was Labour Day weekend and the workers from Otter Fencing were camping at the Boss's, Jack Otter's farm. I have no idea what Bob's idea was for us but alcohol played a large part. We had brought nothing with us to stay overnight like the rest of them and were too embarressed to tell anyone. Ray Otter's wife was a bit more astute and asked if she could take Debbie in the house. we readily agreed and Bob absolutely got slaughtered then. We lay in the back of the freezing station wagon trying to huddle together to keep warm. It was beyond freezing and we didn't even have a blanket.
Bob was up bright and early the next morning and they all started drinking again. By that night he was so under the weather it was unreal. Luckily or maybe unluckily for them, Mr and Mrs Otter asked us into the house for the night with baby. Bob passed out from alcohol and exhaustion in the bed made up in the lounge room. Early in the wee hours I woke up, hearing loud water running, there was no Bob in the bed and then suddenly he got back in bed, and farted loudly, And fell back asleep. I lay there for a full twenty seconds before I started shaking him violently.
"Mmmphhh, what??", he mumbled.
"Bob, Bob did you just get up and pee on the floor", I asked.
No answer, He was back in the land of nod.
I got up and slid in wet on the floor. I turned the light on, not wanting to wake the kindly Otters, their bedrooms branched off the lounge room, directly. I gasped aloud.
Not only had my husband peed on the floor but all up and down the piano keys of the upright prized piano. he must have waved that old fella of his up and down the keyboard thinking he was outside or something. Yellow urine dripped down onto the big puddle he had made on the carpet. I dithered and tried to wake him again, terrified someone was about to get up. But he was comatose.
So I grabbed one of debbies towelling nappies and blotted at the puddle on the floor and then attempted the piano keys. You have no idea how hard it is to mop up urine from piano keys without plunking them and you are shaking with cold as the temperature in the Yarra Valley is always about minus 3. It was a nightmare and took me more than an hour to get it cleaned up. There was a big wet patch on the carpet, right in the doorway to the kitchen. I figured if anyone asked I would say I had dropped Debbie's bottle, even though she was breast fed.
But the next morning Bob woke early and I told him what he had done, so we very, very quietly we packed up and snuck out. We arrived in the first town to stop and have breakfast and fully expected Ray Otter to come along and berate us for his ruined carpet. we were so young we laughed about it and then got really paranoid about it. Bob could not afford to lose his job, over a slight mistake like that. And Jack Otters wife was Italian if I remember rightly and had given us the evil eye when we arrived, no doubt as I looked all of 15 with a baby.
That was not the only time Bob peed in the wrong spot and I have heard this same thing happening of a lot of drunken men. When Bob was older and the girls were teenagers he used to bang heads with them a fair bit. His especial hate was that the girls had started sneaking out at night to go to clubs. And that was annoying because they would take the fly screens off the aluminium window frames and leave them off. Then they would get warped or bent and wouldn't fit back on. it happened so much that Bob was ready to give in, but he still kept getting irate over it.
Thursday nights were Bob's weekly drink with the boys and he would drive that GT home from the factory absolutely out of his gourd. So one night the two facts collided. Bob came home legless, sometimes he would only make it to the kitchen or couch and the girls and I would drag him into bed by his ankles. But that night we were fortunate and didn't have to drag him down the long hall, he made it to our bedroom and passed out. I went to bed and during the night felt him get up. We had an ensuite on the left of our bedroom, Bob turned right, instead and slid back the window for some reason and went to pee. He put his hand onto the flyscreen to steady himself and all he got was fresh air. No flyscreen.
So he flew through the window, dick in one hand, clutching at empty air with the other. I heard a muffled scream and a crash, I was laughing so hard I couldn't stop. the air outside the window turned blue with expletives and evil mutterings against the girls. I had to muffle my laughter in the pillow. Next thing there was banging at the bedroom door. I'd forgotten the lock on the bedroom door. I could barely make the door as I was doubled over laughing, tears streaming down my face. I opened the door to him and he was scuffed around the edges a little with a scratch on his head. He was swearing his head off. I couldn't talk for laughing. He glared at me and stalked off to his side of the bed. Through out the night I kept exploding every so often with laughter. He didn't speak to me for a week.
Being married to Bob would never be easy but it could be funny. I never laughed so much with any of my men as I did with him. Thats not to say I haven't loved another more but I certainly haven't laughed so much. But then as my Sister reminded me, Bob was before Lauren died. And after you lose a child you are never quite as happy, or even laugh as much as you did before, when your child was alive. But Bob could be funny, often in a cruel way and usually about someone else and always, always as an Ocker he was at his most funniest.
He had one friend, a policeman who he called "Man's not a camel", and he "could eat the sweat out of an Afghans undies", " eat the horse and chase the jockey", "I'm as dry as a Nuns clitoris " he talked tough and was. Slicing his arm on the fan under the bonnet and just lifted his arm up and got me to drive to a friends house, Jill Cooper who was married to Ian Cooper, the footballer. And she just stitched it right then and there, no anaesthetic, saying,
"you're a tough guy aren't you? "
He washed out a petrol tank once for twenty minutes before touching it waith the tip of a MIG welder and it exploded over his chest, boiling water, and he arrived home with a tee shirt up to his neck and I didn't know until I ran my hand over his chest the next morning in bed and his skin came away and he screamed. So did I!
He was supposed to have kicked a cow to death once as it kept kicking off it's cups and he killed the kids Sheep as it ran over his fresh concrete. he had guns, a pistol he was arrested for, and rifles and once Yvette marched out to the back yard and pointed one at the kids over the back fence and threatened to shoot them. He fought with the neighbours, physically, punching on with Mr de Kok and Les in the court we lived in. He was drunk often shitty often and loved a fight.
He had a customer once, who he nicknamed, "Deadline Doug", and he learned how to be a business man and he loved love loved having money. A lot of money and he would work till he dropped, teaching loys of misfits how to fence as fast as he could and they never could.
We did the remand centre in town once and had to join every Union to stay at on site, and Bob lost it and I had to go in and negotiate with The Union Man, who Bob said looked like his face been through a "thousand wars" And it was actually John Halfpenny that helped me and showed me how to keep one set of books for our subbies who were paid metre rate. And another set for the unions that showed our 'boys' were on wages. he took me into a work hut and sat me down and showed me what to do and then we were allowed back on site. Bob hated unions with a passion and never wanted to join any but we had to join the BLF and other Unions to be allowed on Goverment sites.
Bob had a friend, a young Dutchman who loved Unions and there was a lot of winding up each other about it. But Tako was our gate welder for years took us to the opening of the Westgate bridge as he had worked on it and we watched Jaws there and came out vowing to never get back in the water again. the girls were only little then and came out "peaking" off their heads.
The best jobs we had in the old days were the races people that lived over near Gisborne and they always paid cash. And as soon as you finished and so did Kevin Dennis. The only ones we had trouble with were builders, always 3 month payers and Government jobs, interminable time to get paid and the Smorgons, where he had met Tako, who was working for Skilled Engineering. With the Smorgons they were so late in paying that Bob parked himself in the office one day and waited until they handed him a check, just to get rid of him. People in Toorak amd Mount Eliza didn't pay and old age pensioners in Noble Park did and gave you a cup of tea and a biscuit as well.
We fenced by the headlights of the F100, and one weekend he took us to Port Arlington for a family holiday and the next thing me and all the girls, Alena a toddler of 15 months, only were holding up chain mesh and tying it off in a gale. Our back yard was a tip of mesh and posts and we had slings of pipe out in the front yard. One subby loading up a trailer and driving out taking half our brand new hand made Timber fence Bob had completed only weeks before. it took 5 years and a lot of threats by me before it was done. I even went to the extreme of getting a quote from another fencing company, before bob sent the "boys" around to fix it.
We fenced golf courses, setting the posts overnight and going back the next day to find teenagers had ripped them all out and thrown them in the lake. Our tool bill was incredible as Subbies left tools on site and we learned to provide them with a set and charge them for them, a little out of their wages each week. I had to learn the first computer ever, from the accountant, in 1983 and what a dinosaur it was, just a PC. I had to learn how to book keep and do pays and do administration and do tax and Super, and group certs, we also made lunches for the boys and sold them too.
He once told his Sister Pauline that he had a job for her and when she asked sweetly what it was, his answer,
"Kick starting jumbos at Tullamarine airport".
Pauline was a big girl in those days and she was rightly furious, Bob had been working on that one for weeks.
He made fun of everyone and sometimes even himself.
He was outrageous.
He walked in one night to our house at Keysborough where I was sat with the Sri Lankan spray painter. Bob had decided to get his two S model valiants done up from bare metal.
"Well," he said, "have you rooted her yet,???"
And the man had blushed and turned away and so had I.
One time he was on his way home to watch some title fight and as soon as I saw his car in the driveway I jumped up and changed the channel from Days Of Our Lives to the boxing.
Bob stormed in to the house and in to the bedroom.
"Where is he ???," he demanded.
"Who???". I asked back, wondering what the hell he was doing.
"Your boyfriend", he sneered.
"My what ???" I asked puzzled.
"I saw you jump up from the sofa and run off", he said.
I explained what I had been doing but I don't think he quite believed me.
He thought he had gout once, I told him he had just bought new boots, but he went to the doctors up the road anyway, and in his short shorts and workboots stomped in to the doctors surgery and stopped dead. He had stomped in to a couple's lounge room, and they were sitting there open mouthed eating their lunch.
"oops", he said. "Wrong house"
Turned out he had a case of "New Boots" Syndrome, after all.
When we were first married we went to Yarra Valley with deb as a baby of 3 months. We were entirely unprepared for the trip. It was Labour Day weekend and the workers from Otter Fencing were camping at the Boss's, Jack Otter's farm. I have no idea what Bob's idea was for us but alcohol played a large part. We had brought nothing with us to stay overnight like the rest of them and were too embarressed to tell anyone. Ray Otter's wife was a bit more astute and asked if she could take Debbie in the house. we readily agreed and Bob absolutely got slaughtered then. We lay in the back of the freezing station wagon trying to huddle together to keep warm. It was beyond freezing and we didn't even have a blanket.
Bob was up bright and early the next morning and they all started drinking again. By that night he was so under the weather it was unreal. Luckily or maybe unluckily for them, Mr and Mrs Otter asked us into the house for the night with baby. Bob passed out from alcohol and exhaustion in the bed made up in the lounge room. Early in the wee hours I woke up, hearing loud water running, there was no Bob in the bed and then suddenly he got back in bed, and farted loudly, And fell back asleep. I lay there for a full twenty seconds before I started shaking him violently.
"Mmmphhh, what??", he mumbled.
"Bob, Bob did you just get up and pee on the floor", I asked.
No answer, He was back in the land of nod.
I got up and slid in wet on the floor. I turned the light on, not wanting to wake the kindly Otters, their bedrooms branched off the lounge room, directly. I gasped aloud.
Not only had my husband peed on the floor but all up and down the piano keys of the upright prized piano. he must have waved that old fella of his up and down the keyboard thinking he was outside or something. Yellow urine dripped down onto the big puddle he had made on the carpet. I dithered and tried to wake him again, terrified someone was about to get up. But he was comatose.
So I grabbed one of debbies towelling nappies and blotted at the puddle on the floor and then attempted the piano keys. You have no idea how hard it is to mop up urine from piano keys without plunking them and you are shaking with cold as the temperature in the Yarra Valley is always about minus 3. It was a nightmare and took me more than an hour to get it cleaned up. There was a big wet patch on the carpet, right in the doorway to the kitchen. I figured if anyone asked I would say I had dropped Debbie's bottle, even though she was breast fed.
But the next morning Bob woke early and I told him what he had done, so we very, very quietly we packed up and snuck out. We arrived in the first town to stop and have breakfast and fully expected Ray Otter to come along and berate us for his ruined carpet. we were so young we laughed about it and then got really paranoid about it. Bob could not afford to lose his job, over a slight mistake like that. And Jack Otters wife was Italian if I remember rightly and had given us the evil eye when we arrived, no doubt as I looked all of 15 with a baby.
That was not the only time Bob peed in the wrong spot and I have heard this same thing happening of a lot of drunken men. When Bob was older and the girls were teenagers he used to bang heads with them a fair bit. His especial hate was that the girls had started sneaking out at night to go to clubs. And that was annoying because they would take the fly screens off the aluminium window frames and leave them off. Then they would get warped or bent and wouldn't fit back on. it happened so much that Bob was ready to give in, but he still kept getting irate over it.
Thursday nights were Bob's weekly drink with the boys and he would drive that GT home from the factory absolutely out of his gourd. So one night the two facts collided. Bob came home legless, sometimes he would only make it to the kitchen or couch and the girls and I would drag him into bed by his ankles. But that night we were fortunate and didn't have to drag him down the long hall, he made it to our bedroom and passed out. I went to bed and during the night felt him get up. We had an ensuite on the left of our bedroom, Bob turned right, instead and slid back the window for some reason and went to pee. He put his hand onto the flyscreen to steady himself and all he got was fresh air. No flyscreen.
So he flew through the window, dick in one hand, clutching at empty air with the other. I heard a muffled scream and a crash, I was laughing so hard I couldn't stop. the air outside the window turned blue with expletives and evil mutterings against the girls. I had to muffle my laughter in the pillow. Next thing there was banging at the bedroom door. I'd forgotten the lock on the bedroom door. I could barely make the door as I was doubled over laughing, tears streaming down my face. I opened the door to him and he was scuffed around the edges a little with a scratch on his head. He was swearing his head off. I couldn't talk for laughing. He glared at me and stalked off to his side of the bed. Through out the night I kept exploding every so often with laughter. He didn't speak to me for a week.
