Buck and the Big Mosquitoes (Pt I)

Auckland, 1969

Buck was my best friend at the depot. 

When I’d started working there, fresh and green, he had taken me under his wing and shown me the ropes. Hell! I was only sixteen-years-old and still didn’t know shit from clay, as my new workmates used to constantly remind me. But it was all in good fun, for the men loved a laugh and I was a natural target, being so naive and inexperienced about things. How they’d pull my leg! And I was a foreigner too, a tall, gawky, long-streak-of-piss yank with a “goddamn” accent newly arrived in New Zealand and ignorant of everything, which of course added to the possibilities for hilarity at my expense. 

Because I really didn’t know shit from clay.

Anyway, about Buck. We became good friends. To me he was like some wonderful, profane, kooky old uncle. He didn’t go out with the work gangs, having had an accident years before that left him somewhat crippled, but remained at the depot to make tea for smoko breaks and clean up around the place. 

“The tea boy,” he called himself with a laugh. 

He put on his spectacles and looked up, smiling when he saw me. Today he had his false teeth in, which gave his smile a rather ferocious look. Usually he kept his false teeth in his overalls' pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief, “So as not to wear the bastards out,” as he always said.

“G’day, mate,” he called. “I’ve got a message from Pat. He said for you to take his car and collect the grog, and I should get a lift with you up to the site. Okay?”

Pat was the head foreman, who ruled our depot like a king. The men considered him a good boss, and thought themselves lucky to work for him, for there were plenty of bosses who were worse. With Pat you felt like what you did mattered, even if it was just shoveling shit from the bottom of a wet, muddy ditch. He knew everyone by name and he didn’t muck around, which pleased the men greatly. It also pleased them greatly when every now and then he put on a piss-up at one of the worksites, if we’d had a successful month with no accidents and stayed ahead of schedule. 

It was to one of these piss-ups that Buck and I, at Pat’s behest, were going.

“Any time you say, Buck,” I replied. “A beer or two would go down a treat.”

I was bragging, as Buck well knew. As a drinking man I was a rank amateur who couldn’t hold his beer worth a damn.

“I wouldn’t say no to a snort myself,” laughed Buck. “Who knows, eh lad? I might get the urge and run amuck!” 

Buck running amuck! Ha! Ha! How I hoped to see that!

“Remember, lad,” he said. “When faced with a choice of two evils… pick the one you haven’t tried yet!” 

At the bottle store getting the supplies, Buck watched as the booze was loaded into the Falcon. He leaned his broken body against the Falcon’s fender and had a smoke, counting the crates and bottles to make sure they got it right, until the Falcon could hold no more. 

“Batten down the hatches, mates!” he called. “She’s full up! Let’s shove off.”

After getting into the car Buck put his mangled legs on one of the crates of rum stashed on the floor, and made himself comfortable. Next, he reached down and lifted a bottle from a nearby crate, unscrewed the cap and took a long drink from it. 

He didn’t offer me any. 

“Not while you’re driving, Rusty lad,” he explained. “Dulls the wits, you know.” He took another swallow, then said, “It doesn’t matter about me any more. I’m old and buggered and fond of beer. But you, lad,” gulp gulp gulp and down it went, “I encourage you with the utmost sincerity,” gulp gulp gulp and down went some more, “to lay off the sauce.” 

Gulp, gulp. He took another swallow. 

“Urp!” he belched, adding, “Beginning tomorrow.”

"Okay, Buck,” I laughed. “Beginning tomorrow.”

Buck Two, Motorcycles Zero!

Auckland, New Zealand, 1970

One day Buck was regaling Derek and I with tales of motorcycling glory. 

Buck loved to tell a story, the bigger the better, and when he was in the mood these stories often entailed the destruction of a vehicle of some kind. He must have destroyed hundreds of cars and trucks and motorcycles in his lifetime, to hear him tell it.

I was very young when I started working at the depot, where men were men, the work was dangerous and the language was foul. I was a navvy in a work gang, digging ditches, mixing concrete or cleaning up with shovels after the big earthmoving machines had rumbled past. 

Buck, who was too old to go out with the work gangs, had taken me under his wing and shown me the ropes. 

He was like a kooky, blaspheming old uncle to me.

Derek was a surveyor whom I sometimes assisted when he needed some manual labor. I liked working with the surveyors. The work was easier and they were mostly good guys.

None of them however, they being educated types, could curse worth a shit.

Derek had roared up to the depot that morning on a motorcycle, and that’s what had got Buck to reminiscing. 

In this case, it was a story about the time he had raced a motorcycle at the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy Race back in 1948. “Or was it forty-nine, Rusty lad?” he asked me.

Like I should know.

“I was lying in second place, lads,” continued Buck, “behind Les Graham on his AJS Porcupine. By thunder, that Les, could he handle a motorbike! And that AJS he rode, could she haul it! The Porcupine was a beautiful machine, too, a great roaring twin with horizontal cylinders. They used to cook your shins, those hulking great cylinders that stuck out to here, with all the heat they put out. 

“How he screamed along!”

Buck paused a moment to admire another rider’s skills, before continuing.

“But a true champion knows to never give up, so I rode that Norton as fast as I dared. 

“It had rained in the morning and the road was still damp in the shadows of the trees. It was one of those English summer days, you know, so I was as cold as a witch’s tit inside my leathers as I hunkered down against the petrol tank, looking for extra speed and a chance to get out of the wind. 

“Somewhere around mile marker thirty-four I rounded a corner and must have hit a patch of oil because that Norton just slid right out from under me!

“What?” I gasped.

“I fell on my back and threw out my arms, hoping to slide rather than tumble or roll. You don’t want to tumble if you can help it, lads. That’s a bloody fact!” 

He paused to light a smoke.

“Well, boys, it was a slide I wanted and a slide I got!

“I was sliding along the bleedin road when out of the corner of my eye I noticed that Norton was sliding right along with me! Crikey-Dick!! She was on her side grinding along in a shower of sparks, spewing her guts out everywhere! 

“I could feel the terrible Black Hand of Fate clutching at my bowels and I said to myself, ‘Buck old boy, you’re a goner this time for sure!’”

Buck broke off to take a deep drag on his cigarette.

“Well mates, I collided with the bike just as she caught fire! Covered in fuel, I caught fire too, and for a while we slid along together, that Norton and me, united like lovers in perdition, until the bleedin bike exploded and I was thrown clear! 

“Luckily, the force of the blast put out my flames.”

“Eh?” said Derek.

“But it could’ve been worse,” said Buck. “It was being run over by a back marker that really did the damage!” 

“What?” asked Derek. “You were run over?”

“Yep! Carlo Ubbiaci on his MV Agusta came round the bloody corner and hit me square on as I was trying to stand up! 

“He told me later he was doing a hundred and twenty when he hit me!”

After another deep drag on the cigarette, Buck grimaced and added, “Lying bastard. Those MV’s couldn’t do more than a hundred and ten.”

(Funny, isn’t it, how a liar scorns another liar’s lie?)  

“I was facing the other way and didn’t see it coming, mate. Bloody hell, what a noise it made when she hit! They say you could hear my bones shattering from the finish line, four miles away!

“Ubbiaci walked away without a scratch,” said Buck with a shrug. “A whim of the gods. I’ve still got his tire tracks up me backside to this day!”

Fearing he would down his trousers there and then and actually show us the tire tracks, I encouraged Buck to continue. 

“What happened next, Buck?” I asked. 

“Yessir, Rusty boy, that MV bounced off me, lad! She was a total write-off too, a crumpled heap of useless metal after tangling with me! Making the score for that day Buck two, motorcycles zero!”

“What happened after that?” asked Derek with a touch of suspicion. Derek was older than me, and through lack of exercise his suspension of disbelief was weaker than mine.

“Well lads,” continued Buck. “To be honest with you, I don’t remember much more of that day. Thankfully, the human mind rejects some memories as too unpleasant, so that we might live on unaware. Forgetfulness, it’s another gift of the gods. I woke up two days later in hospital, I do remember that!

“You know,” said Buck philosophically, “Ubbiaci came to visit me while I was in hospital. They were good guys back in the old days. Good enough to show up and visit you in hospital after running you over, anyway.

“‘Buck,’ he says to me, ‘Buck, old boy, you are the luckiest bastard I’ve ever run over. I’d like to shake your hand, if it wasn’t so bandaged up.’

“Of course,” Buck reminded us, “he said it with an Italian accent, him being Italian. 

“‘It’s obvious you’re not as dumb as you look,’ he says to me.

“‘Yeah?’ says I. ‘That’s one advantage I’ve got over you, mate!’”   

Buck unhooked his glasses from behind his ear and squinted off into the distance. Quietly, almost imperceptibly, to himself he added, “Ah, lads, those were the days.”

He replaced his glasses.

As Buck had apparently finished his tale, I knew a moral couldn’t be far away. 

He liked to finish with a moral, as any good fairy tale should.

“Remember,” he said, all serious now and looking from my face to Derek’s, searching with his little eyes as if seeing into each of our souls. 

I swear he found my soul, down wherever it abides. 

Found it and made it laugh with delight!

Buck leaned in, glancing around to be sure no one could overhear, and uttered solemnly, “Some things aren’t meant to be known, lads… only believed.”

One Cannot Bite One’s Own Elbow

Auckland, New Zealand, 1970

We were in the surveyors office upstairs at the depot.

Present were Buck, Arthur, Ivan and myself.

We’d gone there to get away from the crowded tearoom and have our lunch in peace. Arthur was sitting in a office chair against the wall. Ivan and I stood, looking out the large windows at the traffic going by on Northcote Road. Buck sat in another chair, his busted old legs tucked up for comfort.

Ivan reached back for his hip flask. 

“Do not come to Tula with your own samovar, my friend,” he said with a knowing nod of his head. He took a good pull from his hip flask. I could smell the rum, sweet and heady.

“Yes. It’s a sad business when someone goes crazy,” said Arthur, almost with sympathy. “Unless it happens to a blasted jumped-up-never-come-down so-and-so like Ben.” Arthur, who was justly proud of his profanity, cursed Ben for another five minutes. 

Sympathy wasn’t Arthur’s strong suit, not by a long shot.  

“They don’t speak of ropes in the home of the hanged person,” said Ivan as he stared out the window, a gloomy expression passing over his face.

We had been talking about Ben. Ben had gone a little crazy working in the heat and dust of the worksite at Tristram Ave that summer. He had taken to wearing a helmet of tinfoil upon his head and he constantly jabbered about deadly cosmic rays. He hid in his shack at the worksite and wouldn’t come out. And other kooky stuff. 

He hadn’t shaved or cut his hair for months either. 

He had stopped bathing too, and by now he smelled pretty bad.

And by pretty bad I mean extremely bad. 

Pat, the depot foreman, had set up a pool wagering when Ben would bathe. Pat had bet big money that Ben would bathe by the 20th.

The odds said he wouldn’t.

Today was the 14th.

Buck pondered a moment, his brow furrowed. Then he spoke up. “By Thunder! Take a drum of kerosene up there, eh, Rusty boy? Arthur? What do you think? Bloody give him a bleedin’ kerosene bath, we will! We’d soon have him put right, by the gods!” 

Ivan shrugged and said, “For each wise man there are plenty of fools.” 

“Yeah, sure,” answered Buck. “But have you smelt him mate?”

Arthur pursed his lips and closed his eyes, apparently thinking. He looked somewhat like a toad in this pose. It was something to do with his closed eyes and the set of his jaw as well as the obvious color comparison to a shiny, green amphibian. 

Right then, it would not have surprised me to see his tongue dart out and snatch a fly from Buck’s forearm, eight feet away. 

Without moving his head, Arthur opened his eyes to look sideways at Buck and said, “He has to do it of his own free will, dumb-ass, or the bloody bet is null and void.”

Arthur sighed heavily and closed his eyes, the pain of both educating and insulting his conversational foes almost too much for him to bear. “Null and void, mate,” he repeated. “Uncle Pat wouldn’t like that, now would he?” 

I noticed he managed to expand the insult and include me, as I was the only one in the room who could possibly lay claim to being a nephew of ‘Uncle’ Pat. (Pat, the depot foreman, really was my wife’s uncle.) That was only fair, I suppose, since he’d already insulted everyone else in the room. He’d insulted Ivan earlier, calling him a “toothless drunken old Cossack bastard” and was now well on the way to finishing with “dumb-ass, broken old Buck.” 

It was only natural that I’d be next. 

“I wouldn’t let Pat hear you talk like that, mate, if I was you,” I said.

“Well, you ain’t me,” replied Arthur. 

Thank goodness for that, I thought to myself.

“I don’t give a crap what Pat likes,” said Buck. “He’s not my uncle, mate.” Buck thought for a minute, then said, “Dumb-asses, huh? Hell Arthur! You’d need twice the bleedin’ brains to be a bloody halfwit, you back-scuttling frog-eyed son of a sea-hag!”

“Your elbow is close, yet you cannot bite it,” said Ivan to no one in particular.     

Buck and Arthur continued to argue and squabble. Insulting each other was something they usually did when they were together. They drew the worst from each other, mostly, like a bitter, long-feuding married pair, knowing just what buttons to push for maximum effect. I was too young to understand such bitterness expressed so openly and sometimes it hurt my heart to hear them insult each other like they did. I liked Buck, and hated to see Arthur disrespect him like he did.

Arthur was more difficult to like. In truth he was a violent man with a short temper, who wasn’t afraid to use his fists to make a point. More than once he’d given me a cuff on the ear when he was my gang boss and I hadn’t jumped quick enough to suit him. But the men respected him and he was friendly when he wanted to be.  

Sometimes his bickering with Buck could be quite ferocious, much worse than today. It depended on Arthur’s mood. When he felt like it he could be witty and light and keep the insults funny, where even the insulted had to laugh and tip his hat. 

Other times he was downright nasty and brutal, spoiling for a fight. 

Buck didn’t take it personally, so he said. He could sense, as he told me in a private moment, that Arthur was really insulting himself. 

“What have I ever done to him, mate?” he’d asked me rhetorically. 

I shrugged my shoulders. 

“Nothing,” he answered himself. “That’s what!”

“Besides, Rusty lad,” added Buck. “I’m not here to be laughed at, chaffed at, or slung shit at!”

We’d laughed together, then Buck had turned serious and reminded me, “Watch out, lad. He’s a mean one.” 

So today we sat in the office and made wisecracks about Ben being crazy and Pat maybe losing the bet and the new driver who’d showed up and on his first day driven one of the Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers off it’s tread and over the embankment when he was trying to grease it.

“What an idiot!” laughed Arthur, cursing viciously. “My old mother could drive a D-9 better than that!”

“Of that I’m sure!” agreed Buck. “If you ever had a mother!”

“It’s not gods who make pots,” interjected Ivan. He reached back for his hip flask, bringing it out with a flourish. He unscrewed the cap, lifted the flask to his lips and tilting back his head drained it off with a few giant gulps. I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he drank. When he’d finished, he wiped his mouth with his hand and sighed with satisfaction.

“It’s not gods who make pots,” repeated Arthur reflectively. “You got that bloody right, mate.”

We all laughed, including Arthur. 

It wasn’t every day that Arthur agreed with anyone about anything.

Soggy Smokes

Auckland, New Zealand, 1970

                                                              

Some things are bound to happen. Why resist? 

When I was seventeen-years-old my journey from boy to man took the inevitable, some might even say false, first steps through the doors of a pub. 

The pub I refer to was the public bar of the Poenamo Hotel. The Poe was a workingman’s pub. It was filled with laborers and lorry drivers and men who made things with their hands or with their backs. Men who built things. Men who were physical. 

Our sort of place. Just a quarter-mile from the depot, it was alluringly close. 

The depot I refer to was the Northcote Depot of the Ministry of Works. The M.O.W. was widening and extending Auckland’s Northern Motorway, from its beginning at the foot of the Harbour Bridge all the way to Tristram Ave and Sunset Road and beyond as far as Albany.

It was a man’s world of earthmoving machines, dust and hard labor. And when the workday was over, there were always a few from the depot who went to the pub to unwind or blow off a little steam. I would conservatively estimate it to be about ninety to ninety-five percent. Allowing for five to ten percent error. 

Marko, for instance, went to the pub every night, usually walking the short distance still dressed, as he was now, in his work overalls and gumboots. Marko was a terrible drinker with a big thirst, so he usually wouldn’t wait for a ride, but started walking, head down looking at his dusty boots, the minute work was over.

Tonight though, we were all getting a ride. 

Marko, David from Fiji who was called that because there was another David at the depot who wasn't from Fiji, and myself whose nickname at the time was Whitey because of my very blond hair, were waiting for Arthur. Arthur was the gang boss. He gave the orders and drove the truck.

Arthur and Tom-the-Pom pulled up in the big Bedford dump truck. “Climb aboard, boys!” called Arthur.

We climbed into the back. 

Tom-the-Pom, seated inside the spacious cab next to Arthur, turned his pasty face around and grimaced at us through the window, gesticulating obscenely and mouthing profanities. He was Arthur's little toady and perpetual echo, always sucking up to the boss. Most of the men at the depot thought him an irritating little pipsqueak, myself included. He laughed at us through the window. There was no real malice in his actions though, he was just having fun. The gang was on its way to the pub, no need for insults, he just couldn’t stop himself from any kind of show of disdain towards his inferiors, as he saw us, the lowly fools who had to ride in the back. 

It wasn’t enough for Tom-the-Pom to have got the best seat, you must be seen to have got the crappy seat.

I could see Arthur inside next to Tom-the-Pom, laughing at these antics, his shoulders shaking convulsively. It was a joke of his to say that the cab was full, with just the two of them in it, and make any other riders climb into the back, where who-knows-what kind of crud or dirt had been carried earlier. 

Truth to tell, Arthur took excellent care of the Bedford and the debris from the day was hosed off nightly, but it was hardly the ballroom of the Ritz back there. Those of us interested in trying to stay clean during the short ride to the pub simply stood up, swaying and clinging to the steel mesh that protected the cab, with our faces to the wind.

In a minute we were there, joined by other workmen spilling out onto the gravel parking lot from every type of truck and car. We hailed “G’day!” to each other and lit our smokes as we sauntered through the doors into the cool interior, past the wholesale counter with its dozing attendant (he’d be busy later, at closing time, when customers purchased their take-home supplies), and into the bustling public bar itself. 

The public bar was a large room, the side opposite the entrance through which we’d come completely glass from floor to roof. The remaining walls were papered in a swirling pattern of what appeared to be highly stylized, purple flowers. 

Wooden tables were arranged about. Jugs and half filled glasses of beer cluttered the orange tabletops. 

Every tabletop or counter surface was the same shade of orange Formica, contrasting biliously with the psychedelic purple walls.  

On the opposite side ran the bar itself, also rendered in orange Formica. Patrons crowded and elbowed their way up to be met by efficient bartenders smiling behind dewey silver spigots.

Jugs of beer by the hundreds passed over the bar. 

Behind the bar neon signs beamed hideously out, casting a freakish, circus clown glow on the expectant faces of the customers, whose calloused hands, some clean and some dirty, reached out across the orange Formica exchanging money for drink. 

Beneath their feet was a beer soaked purple carpet, dotted with black cigarette burns. I say purple, but that’s just an approximation, because it was a ghastly mosaic of truly hideous hue whose pattern, thankfully, was long ago trampled into oblivion by thirsty workers' boots. 

Orange and purple, then, was the color motif of the Poenamo Hotel public bar, a design scheme whose very biliousness guaranteed to test the intestinal fortitude of its patrons, before even a single glass of alcohol was ever consumed.

When one felt the urge after a few libations, they put down their beer, unsteadily crossed the purple carpet and pushed through the men’s room door to the urinal. It was the usual contraption, a chest-high wall of stainless steel and running water against which you peed. It was usually occupied by at least three or four other patrons, standing side by side in the peculiar spread-legged way that men do while urinating. 

Being young, it only took a couple of beers to find me headed that way. 

I entered and stepped to the urinal, where I planted my feet, unzipped my overalls, and after making sure of my aim and that everything was flowing nicely, idly scanned the graffiti-covered wall in front of me.

I’ve always been an avid reader. 

I’ll read anything my eyes fall upon. 

The wall in front of me was decorated with graffiti of every possible persuasion, some with illustrations. I read a few, laughing inwardly (which is the safest place to laugh, standing at the urinal with your dick in your hand in the men’s room of a workingman’s public bar). I casually noticed the pattern certain repeated words made against the wall. Some words and phrases were repeated a lot. And written larger.

A professional looking, carefully printed sign at eye level asked;

Please don’t throw your cigarette butts in the urinal, 

as it makes them soggy and hard to light.

There’s always a comedian, I thought, laughing inwardly again.

I looked down at the drain. 

Sure enough, it was jammed full of cigarette butts.

None of which appeared in the least bit smokable.