6. Becoming Wild Bill

When Young Bill was ten and Neil was seven, Old Bill discovered they’d been smoking the cane chairs.

In those days smoking was still good for you and everybody did it except kids - mainly because they lacked the disposable income.

An excellent substitute for tobacco was to be found in the cane used for the construction of tropical furniture. A single cane chair could produce hundreds of porous tubes the length and consistency of a cigarette. Young Bill would cut a couple of smokes from the underside of one of the veranda easy chairs and take Neil, already his faithful puppydog, behind the Hibernian Hall for a few puffs. It was rather a harsh smoke because of the lacquer but the boys had great fun daring each other to do the drawback, blowing smoke rings and emulating Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957), a famous smoking stylist. 

Nobody noticed for months.

Then one day, weary from a hard day of humping sugar bags round the wharf, Old Bill threw his skinny arse dramatically down on a verandah lounger. This particular chair was one preferred by the boys for the mildness of its malacca. Most of its substructure had already been turned into cigars.

The weakened seat offered no resistance to Old Bill’s skinny arse as it continued it’s unhindered descent to the floor. An antimacassar flew into the air and neatly draped itself over his eyes. Naked tacks tore through his drill trousers and drew blood from the small of his back. The headrest shot forward, whacked into the back of his head and caused him to bite his tongue. Convinced he was being assaulted from behind, Old Bill screamed like a girl. 

Mum Mason rushed from the kitchen to find her hysterical husband wrestling with the furniture.

That night Mum educated Neil while Old Bill did some good to Young Bill.

In the tiny lounge room they stood back to back and whirled like a two-seater merry-go-round propelled by their squealing progeny. They didn’t stop until an uncoordinated backswing entangled the belt and the razor strop. It was quite romantic.

It was the first time they’d done anything together in years.

The cane-chair hiding was the final straw that set Young Bill in direct opposition to everything his father stood for. He set his foot and vowed a Henceforth - "Henceforth I will oppose all tyranny - especially from that old bastard," he said. 

He awarded himself the soubriquet Wild Bill to distance himself from his dad. The name Young Bill implied the existence of an Old Bill and Wild Bill didn’t even want to imply his father. That’s how wild he was.

Neil took to the name right away. Wild Bill was his hero. Wild Bill loved Neil too. Neil was already displaying an uncanny gift for saying the wrong thing at the right time.

When Old Bill heard about the name-change he issued a threat. He said, “If you don’t stop that nonsense I’ll Take off my belt and you know what’ll happen then?”

 “Your pants will fall down,” said Neil.

Wild Bill laughed all the way through the hiding.

The extra zip Old Bill was putting into Wild Bill’s education was a direct result of a lesson Mum had taught him seven years before. The lesson was this: “You’ll never put another human torpedo inside me”.

The birth of Neil had a lot to do with it. Neil was a huge baby with a huge head and he came out arse backwards. Mum heaved and cursed at Old Bill but no amount of straining would discharge the macrocephalitic Neil. He stayed there with his huge head wedged inside her like someone reluctant to back out of a tunnel - one long last look at the old place before joining the world. 

So, at the age of twenty-five, Old Bill had to rack his cue, as they used to say.

Now as a thirty-two-year-old, never-going-to-be artist with two kids and a permanent snooker on the middle pocket, people still told him to count himself lucky. That’s because this was 1936, seven years into the Great Depression.

“Count yourself lucky you’ve got a job at all,” they’d say.

The people who said this were the men in Old Bill’s gang. Those days before container ships and bulk-loading, wharfies worked on steel-hulled ships in forty degree heat in gangs of six – two on the wharf, one on the deck, one on the winch and two in the hold.

These were the members of Old Bill’s gang: Slimey Thomson, Lord Foulmouth, Shifty Stevens, Sad Les and Turd Murdoch.

Talk about depression.

© Ray Lillis 2012