boarding

In 1972 I become a resident master in Caulfield Grammar’s boarding house in East St Kilda. I’m studying to be a physical education teacher at Rusden Teachers College. The boarding house can’t attract enough school staff to live in, so appoints former alumni training to be teachers, rent-free, for supervisory duties.

The year cements my nascent friendship with Rock, already in the boarding house for a couple of years. Seminal events take place during my first year away from home. Rock and I write Harry Suckill van in orange paint on the side of my mini-van in the boarding house car park. We don’t know why, but the gesture seems important to us.

A late adolescence breaks over teetotal goody-two-shoes little me. I smoke dope for the first time and never look back. Rock knows a long-haired Monash Uni student who brings some laced heads to my tiny second-storey room one night. After a few tokes I spiral to the floor and hallucinate for hours, vomit on my new rug. I’m so limp they can’t lift me.

One freezing midnight Rock and I escort a dozen senior students to the sticky black south wicket. We transform it into a mud bath. The curator is livid. Rock introduces me to classical music and I buy works prefaced with canon and capriccio but my flirtation with dead composers dies quickly.

It’s a year for nuding up and Pink Floyd forms a backdrop to all manner of naked activities. Another night we lure twenty naked boarders up a tree on the front lawn. We start a drama group for the year 9 and 10 boarders and put on a play for their parents. T-Rex and smashing guitars feature.

During the mid-year holiday I cross the drive to Rock’s room. The window is open wide, the heater and radio on. His red MG reappears in the car park three days later. He’s been deep in the Wimmera exercising his oversized dick with its Nazi helmet on some former schoolmate’s sister.

I have noisy and frantic sex in my narrow bed in my narrow room with a buxom manic fellow physical education student. She parks her dinged-up white Fiat near the door to the dining hall. A fellow housemaster, a strutting Christian bantam, rails at my libertinism.

My iconoclastic state of mind tells me not to play footy in 1972. I can’t stay off the field, so I umpire instead. I’m a damn good interpreter and enforcer of the rules and spirit of the game.

Rock and I are harmlessly but crazily irresponsible. We hide under the bench of the locked kitchen, eat gallons of ice-cream, and determine that life is meaningless but we wouldn’t be dead for quids. We’ve stumbled on the Absurdist theory of the meaning of existence. It never leaves either of us.

The year sails by and I know I won’t be invited back. In early December the students go home to ancestral country properties in Wycheproof, Horsham, Deniliquin. Rock gets a labrador and I get a blue heeler and we romp through the empty polished corridors.

We move out the week before Christmas, the next phases of our lives about to begin.

     

Rock on.