While Nan sat shaking her head beneath the fluorescent lights by her proliferating green pot plants with dusty leaves, Pop was always helping me out, whether I wanted help or not. He came around to get me from Woolworths with his scarf and brooch and big chunk of wood, threatening to castrate any man who came near us. To save money he refused to catch the bus into Liverpool and walked instead. Nan said, 'he's going to get robbed one day.' He carried all his money that he made from his lottery win in his grey army pants pockets and his footstep was deliberate, even in thick socks with the elastic gone and holes connected together by gaffer tape and cotton. One day a young homeboy approached him and tried to push him around for the money and Pop said, 'why don't you get yourself a good bloody decent job and a bloody haircut!' The youth ran away. Nan said, 'he was lucky that time.'
Earlier that night the westies had come into Woolworths, 'cause Dom was looking for a woman to call his own. The girl in the group, named Yvonne, had tried to befriend me and I was very lonely right through to my core. I wanted to join up with their group; even if I was intelligent, I could hide that well enough. Unfortunately the big Italian guy in the group (that's Dom - short for Dominic) got a huge crush on me. And I mean big time, like he was real nice to me and shit, but he never heard anything I was saying. He never looked into my heart and found my fear. He never knew that there 'weren't no mutual attraction' between us. Instead he drank bourbon because it was sweet and listened to Meatloaf. This was because Dom was thinking with his second brain. I knew men had two brains and that when they were thinking with their second brain, it never made any sense. Although my Aunty Lily from Toowoomba had said, 'that's the time when ya ask 'em for the money!'
Tonight the group from Canley Vale had deliberately come through my checkout, so that Wayne could plead with me on behalf of Dominic. He gave it his best shot. He said, 'Dom loves ya, mate. 'e loves ya from 'is heart, not from 'is balls.' Even though I didn't want to be Dom's woman, the pathetic part of me was flattered and I ended up giving in and going to a house party out at Blacktown with them that weekend. As it turns out, it was a real rough bikies' do in someone's overgrown backyard, around a big old bonfire, close by a cow paddock. The rented communal house had smashed-in green fibro from a mix of too much kick boxing, domestic disputes and cask wine. An archeological example of the present culture. I took my friend Tracy along for a good night out. She liked the quiet life and never forgave me afterwards. She said, 'what are we gonna do?'
By the time most of the boys and 'their womans' were too stoned and pissed to notice anything beyond their own faded denims and beerguts, we knew we had a clean run. We ended up ringing up my father to come and pick us up. We made our escape as all the toughest, tragic, most psycho, drunken bikies started running backwards and forwards through the bonfire led by the hosts in their black t-shirts, full of marijuana and inflammable spirits. I waited around long enough to see if one of them would go up like a firecracker, but it was time to go. The last thing I saw was Dom's flabber guts galloping along beside my father's Ford. My father saw Dom in the rear vision mirror and said, 'I wouldn't piss on him, if his arsehole was on fire.' Dom was like an unloved stray who had been left behind, his sad dark eyes becoming lonelier as the grease from the rump steak and scorch of cheap rum settled into his soul, to be stored as fat for a cold night, flat out on his back on the frosty lawn, the spread of The Blue Mountains icing up in the distance.
But it wasn't over yet between me and the opposite sex. The next week dad took us all to Luna Park on the north side of the city, but I slipped into the pub around the corner and got pissed with one of dad's new mates. His name was Little Dirk. He was a skinny alcoholic blow-in from Holland, who was hitch hiking around Australia, smoked quantities of pot and played a mean game of poker. He reckoned some genuine Aussies ripped him off by driving away from a petrol station with his backpack in their Holden ute. I said, 'they probably just forgot about it. Either that or they were drunk'. We got drunk on vodka, while my father watched my brothers on the rides and pretended to enjoy himself while sober.
On the way home I vomited onto little Dirk's lap in the Ford station wagon. He had tried to make me lie down there, so that my face would be closer to his prick and so that he could start imagining things. Dad was driving and the two of us were sitting in the front seat. I was trying to hold the vodka and hot chips down together. The salty air from the wharf in my nostrils, the seagulls and quay lights, fast and blurry and faster all at once. Every seagull's mournful cry seemed to be an omen of prophecy for my digestive release of the rocking topsy turvy boat dish. 'Oh fuck, I'm gonna throw up.'
I felt Little Dirk's strong tanned hand suddenly pushing my face down by my long dark hair. But I was too drunk to stop him doing it. His big belt buckle on his faded blue jeans was hurting the back of my head. My father kept driving. I was really sick and the car began to spin like a carousel. Even as dad was making a right hand turn, I was flying out from the insides of a dirty great merry-go-round. Then I was its endless heaving music rising and falling, its centrifugal force at one with the continental drift. The hot chips washed up into my stomach from a salty ocean as though it was a shoreline. Soon the quiet relief of hot thick vomit came streaming out of my mouth and nostrils all over Little Dirk's crutch. He yelled out in his thick Dutch accent, 'for fook's sake, oh Gary, your fookin' daughter's fookin' sick all fookin' over me.' Usually I became very afraid of choking on my own stomach acid when I chundered, but this was simply like a billabong flooding its banks. It was a full and gentle vomit, easing between little Dirk's legs. He was a captive vomit catcher, a true hero in my time of need and I, rather than falling in love, was able to throw up undisturbed and in peace.
I went home to my mother's townhouse and dad and the others waited out in the car, while Little Dirk tried to carry me up the stairs to my bedroom. My younger brother switched the front light on saying, 'she's pissed again,' and Little Dirk kept yelling out, 'switch der fookin' light orf, Dale! Switch der fookin' light orf!, ... as we stumbled and cuddled and tried to grope our way into the bright hallway, like two footballers tripping up a scrum in a big weekend game, the vomit all over us. He finally got through to me once I was lying on my back across the made-up bed saying, 'you've turned from a spunk into a punk.' 'Fuck you,' I said. But I would never do that. 'Fuck you, prick. Now fucking piss off.' I made up my mind the next day never to drink again, just like I always did after a big night out on the plonk. My little brother tooted the horn and Dirk went back to the station wagon shaking his head. Fuck school on Monday. I wasn't going back to that fucking prison shit hole. Fuck that!
Dad drove them all back around to his house at Rose Street. My brothers were happy not to be going to school again that week. Shortly after they were all out of sight, mum arrived home from the plastics factory and not long after that she smelt me out. I didn't know she was there, but later on she said, 'I smelt something, so I went up the stairs. I sniffed like this ... snff snff ... snff snff ...' She exaggerated the movement so that she looked like a rabbit smelling out the broadest greenest leaves in a lettuce patch. She stood in her blue uniform and said, 'and there ya were rollin' in vomit. So I shut the door and went ter bed.' That was the usual extent of our mother and daughter heart to heart.
The next day dad picked me up. I had to work at Woolworths down the road. I had a headache like a wrecking ball and wore my dark welding glasses that Rick had given to me. Dad had his dark glasses on as well. So father with hangover met daughter with hangover. I managed to work for about two hours of my casual supermarket job, before I fell arse over head onto the Arnott's biscuits display, completing the final crushing of the precious Monte Carlos in their new packaging and the manager said, 'you better go home now.' 'Save a biscuit, save a life,' I mumbled behind my dark glasses.
Dad came and got me and drove us back around to Rose Street where Little Dirk the Dutch man was waiting for me, with his jacket and jeans still washed in my vomit from the night before. I was expecting him to say something romantic after our game of poker. Instead he picked up his torn jeans and chased me around the front yard trying to wipe the vomit on me. Saying 'clean dese fooking jeans! Go on, clean 'dem.' I thought to myself, it serves him right for trying to make me lay down with my head in his lap, because I didn't want to give him no head job. Besides when someone is sick and drunk it's best that they remain upright, which stops them from throwing up.
When I worked at Woolworths all these blokes tried to pick me up all the time and finally this one man got drunk and had to be escorted from the building. He was hollering, 'oh, my little China! My little China doll eyes! She's got the eyes of China! Oh, my China doll!' Normally a quiet regular customer, he now took to performing by the freezer section. The manager looked at me as if to carve me in two, as though this man's idiotic behaviour was somehow my fault. Yet I enjoyed serving people and had always offered to carry this old codger's paper bags out to his car. It seemed harmless enough. He was about fifty years old, older than my father. I tried to be nice to him, but I still managed to do the wrong thing. The manager had to remove him from the store and then got cranky because I was wearing red nail polish. That day I took my injured confidence into the aisles and quietly associated with the product ticketers. There was a price to pay for everything, it seeemed.
I was taught to remove the price tag off potential gifts, so as not to embarrass the person that the gift was being given to, as if the price tag would suggest - the gift given with expectation of the gift returned. Perhaps the buyer was frightened of receiving a gift from Woolworths themselves and they wanted to pretend that it came from a more expensive store. Just look what I have given you! It's worth $39.95. Yet with all price tags removed it became simply - a nice thought. I thought you would like this, rather than it being worth something - just like we were worth something to Woolworths - a wage saying, 'this is what you are worth, do not prove your worth above or beyond it, just stick to what you are worth and what you are worth is a Woolworth's pay packet, at least for now or while you are worthy enough.' There was no excelling or putting oneself out, unless you were ethical, an idiot or both.
The expectation was very unlike what I used to do at Woolworths, which was to look after the customers, by allowing starving old men on pensions to nick things and help women with children lift their bags into the car. I enjoyed the giving to people, their friendly smiles and gratitude was an extra bonus. Even though I never got caught doing this, the sociopathic thug of a boss called me a 'fuckwit' and I eventually got the sack, because I had gone too far beyond what was expected of me. In this place we were taught to always smile, no matter how we felt inside and to say that the customer is always right, even if they were wrong. Instead my smile and laughter was real and for the times I didn't want to smile, I put a toy smile on my checkout and told customers that it was my permanent smile. It always got a laugh. The customers aren't as stupid as the store managers make out. If the store mafia had known that I had been helping the hungry on welfare to help themselves to free groceries and distributing dinner sets to women in the housing commission, I would have got the sack a lot earlier and most likely the police would have been called in to collect all the dinner sets from all the kitchens.
The fact was that the store manager was a big fake and Woolworths was make-believe-land. They hated people behind all those permanent smiles and they hated their staff even more, because they had to pay them a wage for their false loyalty and they hated the customers the most, because they could never get enough of the holy dollar out of them. They were always aiming at the weakness or desire, in the mind and the heart, that would make the customer reach into the purse or the bank account. They would have preferred just to have huge wallets opening themselves up and scattering the silver and notes throughout the store, but most customers used Eftpos or Credit Cards. They would have prefered that customers were walking poker machines constantly erupting with jackpots for the winner who was Woolworths at Hoxton Park Road, the lucky store! But until that happened, they had to pretend to like the customers as real people, human beings, sentient life, whom they would constantly try to deceive, coax and con into believing that Woolworths had what it took and was what they all needed, when it was in fact the other way around.
Because I liked people, I was hated by the store management. I wrote my extra hours in the book that they didn't have to pay me and they hated this honesty, because it carried with it an exception to the rule, a potential troublemaker for later on if push came to shove and they didn't want to be the ones to go down. It said, 'I am exceptional amongst cashiers and quickly slipping beyond the standard or what is required of me.' What was required of me was genuine dishonesty. In order to get the job I had to mentally and verbally fuck the store, bend over with blindfold on, saying how I loved it and how loyal I was to it. The store owned me and it loved me from its balls, not from its heart. My part time employment after school and on the weekends meant that I was fully engaged to the second brain of Woolworths, even if on a casual basis.
During the interview process, the management relied heavily on arse-lickers who had existed in every profession where there was an arse to be licked throughout the history of human beings and more bullshit than you could get a shovel under to go with it. It had nothing to do with the fact that I needed money to buy my school books. Nothing at all. In fact, I was here to throw myself at the mercy of a capitalist feeding frenzy and work for nothing, because Woolworths was so great and I was so grateful. And it was only through the compassion and understanding of the Woolworths management that I would be paid anything at all, and for that I would be truly and eternally grateful. The interview was very overdone, and the stupid but smart but ultimately stupid ones, played up to the senior staff with their best permanent smiles. We were all required to be grateful, to simply pretend and as soon as we really believed that to be nice and courteous to customers was real and the right thing to do apart from and outside of our supermarket training, we got the sack.
They day I got the sack I cried at the checkout and refused to smile. I wore bright red lipstick and nail polish. I did my hair up in knotted ponytails with twenty elastic bands and I howled like a baby right where all the customers could see me and I refused to move. The customers looked genuinely sad and concerned to see a checkout operator cracking up. They didn't know what to do with their groceries or how long it would take them to get out of the carpark. But I had finally had enough and wanted the pretending and falseness to end. My sobbing, or the sobbing of any checkout girl who hated her job, meant the end of capitalism as we knew it. The supervisor ushered the dazed customers quickly along to the next checkout, where the girl was still more like a machine gobbling incomes up. 'Can I help you? Thank you. Have a nice day. Can I help you?' And a free set of steak knives in the coldness of the gaze.
My mechanism had shut down and even in such a disposable society, no one knew what to do with the truly broken things. I had failed the corporation by becoming human, miserably, honestly and sensitively human. The last thing I saw before I walked out with my pay packet was a bloodied pig's head and a tray full of trotters arriving on a trolley, with a smiling customer who held up a can of Mortein and asked, 'does this damage the ozone layer?' Then I knew I must have been living in a dream. I wanted a life where I didn't have to reach down and drag a pig's body parts along the checkout in a blood trail. Yes. This was normal. When I left I thought, I have not been brought into this world to suffer but to live ethically and joyfully. I wondered if getting the sack from my own permanent smile had been about the ozone layer or simply the first step away from what my family did to me and had taught me to do to myself.
