One for the Road (29 page)

Someday there may be the stray itch like the longing for a cigarette, resurfacing years after kicking the habit. And certainly there will be other travels, other adventures. But setting off alone, with a swag and only my finger to move me along—those days are done.

I greet this insight with wistful relief. I’ve exhausted the discipline, or it has exhausted me. And the world has changed with me, of course. When I started hitching in the mid-seventies, it was an article of faith among young people that a hitchhiker should not be passed; a van or Volkswagen on the horizon was as good as a bus ticket. Added to that were middle-aged parents with children of their own on the road, plus ex-Okies, ex-servicemen, ex-beatniks and anyone else who had traveled by thumb or forefinger at some point in the past. All together, that gave you a fair slice of the population to rely on for rides.

But gradually the old brotherhood of the road is disappearing. Maybe it’s just that the Volkswagen drivers of the seventies have moved onto Volvos and BMWs, sealed off from the world of the roadside traveler. Or maybe it doesn’t take much for people’s natural suspicion to reemerge. A few Sons of Sam, the occasional Midnight Rambler, and Edna starts nudging Norm to keep on driving.

A bit of eye contact and conversation is enough to dispel the distrust, which explains why I’ve been lucky getting rides at roadhouses and gas pumps. But if those same drivers passed me standing by the road, with only my forefinger and smile as a character reference, they weren’t likely to stop.

I force myself off the bed and out to the motel pool, a brackish moat with water the temperature of molten pig iron. There is a single sunbather lying supine on the concrete. He is well tanned, but he has the drawn, hollow look of a man at the tail end of a bender. A fountain, no doubt, of pub-touring advice.

“I’ve seen the sun rise for the past three days,” he confesses, rising on one arm to light a cigarette. Me too, I realize wearily. Four, in fact. He sucks at the cigarette. “One more night and I’m history.”

Doug is twenty-five; I would have guessed thirty-five at least. He came from Sydney six months ago and has been living at the motel ever since,
working at one of the bars at the Diamond Beach Casino—an establishment known locally as the “shearing shed” or the “chip factory.” Unfortunately, Doug moans, “they don’t pass the proceeds along.” But they are generous with the drinks, which is what gets Doug into trouble. His shift ends at 2
A.M.
but he typically “kicks on” for several hours.

“Too bad you weren’t here yesterday,” he says. “Depraved, mate. Really wild.”

Apparently, as in the Nor’west, Sunday is
the
drinking day in Darwin. The action peaks in late afternoon at “the Rage in the Cage.” That’s when half of adult Darwin crowds into Lim’s Rapid Creek Hotel, a prisonlike pub with a concrete floor and wire mesh for walls. “The cage keeps the action in but lets the spew out,” Doug explains. “Also makes it easier for them to hose the place down the morning after.”

Charles Darwin would be struck by the devolution of the species that has occurred at the Top End since the
Beagle
landed here in 1839.

I ask Doug what my chances are of finding some action tonight.

“Monday’s kind of quiet,” he says. He pulls at his cigarette. The smoke seems to give him some deep, primal nourishment. “But I think we can find you a rage at a few local venues.”

Doug’s itinerary runs as follows: The Nightcliff for an apéritif (“leave early, before the fights start”), the Victoria Hotel to hear music (“group called Scrap Metal on tonight”), and Fannie’s Disco to kick on until 4
A.M
. (“local joke about it: ‘go to Fannie’s for a stabbing’”).

“There’s a gay disco on at the Settler’s pub if you’re into that,” he says finally. “Otherwise, just the casino and the usual run of a dozen or so pubs.”

Like he said, kind of quiet.

I invite Doug to give me a personalized tour. But he has to work until two. “Anyway, I’m getting too old for this. Three nights running is all I can take anymore.”

I wash a few clothes in the pool and bake them in the late afternoon sun. It is a futile attempt at achieving respectability—and a misguided one. At the Nightcliff, where I arrive around sunset, a drinker is overdressed if his stubbies are the same color as the plastic on his thongs. It is also the sort of pub where a man feels naked without a tattoo on his arm.

The pub is plain and smoky, and chock-a-block with bikers. Human limbs not encased in casts have the pale, shriveled look of having just been
liberated from plaster. But it’s hard to see much flesh beneath the tapestry of tattoos. Most of the bikers are covered in both plaster and India ink—plus keys, studs, rings, chains, and maces. Every time one of the men moves toward the bar it’s like a knight in armor clunking across a castle floor.

Beneath all the hardware is a racial mix reminiscent of Broome: whites, blacks, Chinese, Malays, and one man who has rendered his race indeterminate with tattoos. I can’t help staring at a particularly vivid scorpion on his upper arm, peeking beneath his T-shirt sleeve at the plaster cast that begins just above the elbow. The man looks Chinese, maybe Indonesian.

“What ya staring at?” he yells. I was wrong. Genus ocker, species aggro.

“Just your, uh, decorations. Could you pull up your sleeve so I can see the full show?”

“I’d have to pull my pants down to do that, mate.” He’s glaring at me now. “What’s so funny? Hunh? What youse smiling about?”

An involuntary grin always crosses my face in tense situations.

“Do you want the full show, mate? Hunh?”

Before I can answer, a hand grips my elbow and begins leading me outside. The arm above it has no plaster and no tattoos, nor is there any hint of violence in the voice that accompanies it. “Steer clear of the feral natives. We’re a bit tamer out in the beer garden.”

A moment later I am seated at a picnic table with a curious collection of drinkers. My savior is a man named Lloyd, who is passing through Darwin with a theater group. He likes coming to the Nightcliff to “soak up some local color.” His companions include a long-haired hospital orderly, a dissipated young actress, and a mammoth, shirtless Maori who doesn’t state his occupation. But he whittles deftly at a wooden spoon, then promptly sells it to another drinker for a few dollars before carving another.

The others amuse themselves by counting ambulances, which scream down the adjoining highway at regular intervals—like every minute and a half.

“Usually the ambulances are coming here,” the hospital worker says. “They were too late the other night, though. Bloke chucked in his cards before they got here.”

Chucked in his cards? This isn’t the casino. “What do you mean?” I ask.

“He croaked, mate,” the Maori says, running the penknife across his throat and grimacing. “Went out of here a stiff.”

The death was nothing special; after all, the Northern Territory has a murder rate five times the national average. But a biker having his throat cut led to a radical reform at the Nightcliff: a large sign announcing that children are no longer allowed in the pub.

“Killing’s one thing,” the Maori says, returning to his whittling. “But kids getting killed would be serious shit.”

Apparently, most of the fights are started by “gin jockeys,” which the unabridged Darwin dictionary defines as “white males who get black women drunk, fuck them, and then beat them up.” The man I spoke with at the bar is one of this charming breed. When the gin jockeys ride in, usually on motorbikes, most of the black drinkers retreat rather than resist. But Aborigines hold sway in the public bar, where whites are unwelcome. Even gin jockeys respect the color bar.

As the evening wears on, a few theories are floated as to why there are no fights tonight. The orderly argues that everyone is “too stoned” on a crop of joints that circulates openly in the pub. The Maori thinks everyone’s still a bit hung over after the serious Sunday drinking. And the actress blames the quiet on an end-of-month cash shortage.

“It’s easy to be sober when you’re broke,” shy hypothesizes. I search the bar in vain for signs of sobriety. “Wednesday’s the first of the month,” she continues. “Things will be back to normal by then.”

At nine o’clock a few of the ambulatory drinkers kick on—or limp, rather—to the Victoria Hotel. The “Vic” is a tame-looking place in a downtown pedestrian mall: hanging plants, brick walls, and a huge ceiling fan that sweeps the sultry air one way and then another. Nor are there any bikers in evidence, but every other group in the world is represented: Rastafarians, rednecks, mung beans, American tourists, women in tight red dresses, Aboriginal men, white-haired hippies, a man with a bicycle. The place is a kind of Noah’s Ark of all the curious species that collect at the Top End.

The band hasn’t started playing yet, but already half the bar is dancing. A shaggy-haired jackeroo clad in stubbies, singlet, and a grubby stockman’s hat is doing “the bump” with an Aboriginal man. They knock hips for a few minutes, embrace, and slap each other’s palms in a drunken “high five.” Then they return to their dates.

Another two men perform a roughneck go-go routine from atop bar
stools, waving their arms over their heads like caged girls at the back of a TV dance show. One of them falls onto the floor, taking his beer with him. No one seems to notice.

Meanwhile, three men in black leather pants—Scrap Metal, apparently—are going through a seemingly endless succession of sound tests. “Testing. One, two, three. Testing.” Pause, haul in two more speakers, haul out two others. Plug in three hundred more leads. “Testing, one, two, three….” They litter the entire bar with wires and speakers and discarded fuses. When the music finally starts up, close to midnight, it is almost indistinguishable from the feedback that the speakers have been coughing out for the past two hours.

I move on to Fannie’s Disco, which is only a few blocks down the mall. Thankfully, it doesn’t live up to its reputation for quickly drawn blades, at least not tonight. All I see is a blinding strobe light and a mass of dancers who are either blatantly underage or way overage. Two girls, who look not a day over ten, are teaching a gray-haired man in a safari suit how to dance. He holds their hands for a few minutes, then drifts off on his own, shuffling his feet from side to side and moving his arms backward and forward in a repetitive motion, as if opening and closing a pair of French doors. He appears very pleased with himself.

The girls, meanwhile, face each other and bounce up and down, as if they’re jumping rope, which is what they probably do when they’re not hanging around Darwin pubs at 1
A.M.
on a Monday night.

The week may be just beginning in Darwin, but time is running out for me. I can barely lift my beer glass, much less try to jump rope or open French doors. I make my way to the toilet and splash cold water in my face. The urinal is full of broken glass. Time to move on.

The Diamond Club Casino is still doing a brisk business at 1:30. Apparently, the high rollers—fatcats from Singapore, Saudi sheiks, drug smugglers—are ushered into a back room for the privilege of tossing away their millions in private. I don’t qualify. So I crowd in at a roulette table with the masses, clutching chips and watching a little metal ball spin around a giant, brightly colored wheel. I make short work of the roulette table; or, rather, it makes short work of me. By two o’clock the last of my loot has vanished beneath the croupier’s ugly little chip sweeper.

There are still a few coins in my pocket so I hand them over to the one-armed bandits: obese poker machines with names like Winners Circle, Aristocrat, Dollar King. I feed my last dollar coin to a monster named Dreams and listen to the rumble of money traveling through the pokie’s gut on its way to the casino bank.

Busted. Finis. Done like a dinner. I consider finding Doug for a free drink at the bar, but think better of it. I have no intention of seeing another dawn. The party’s over and I’m glad to see it done.

No one else shares my fatigue. Outside, the street is still busy with drinkers and gamblers, stepping from cabs or stretch limousines. I seem to be the first person to call it a night—at 2
A.M.

Except for one couple, reclining on a wall by a fountain, back to back, fingers intertwined, murmuring to each other over their shoulders. They are well dressed but somewhat disheveled, as if, like me, they’ve just crapped out at the casino. His tie is undone, her high-heeled shoes are off and dangling loosely from one finger.

They murmur for a moment more, kiss once, and climb off the wall. Then he bends over and claps his hands. She jumps onto his back, and they trot off down the street, going clippety-clop into the tropical night.

It is a pleasing, connubial image. In a few hours, when the morning breaks, I too will be headed home, no longer alone.

She will come with me next time. We’ll be restless together.

A taxi pulls out of the casino and I leap off the footpath to hail it. The last mile and a half of this odyssey will be done in style. Except that I don’t have a penny left to pay the fare.

“Got room for a hitchhiker?” I ask, flashing the driver my best roadside smile.

“Get stuffed.”

He roars off before I have a chance to return the compliment. My luck, it seems, is finally spent. I fall in behind the couple traveling piggyback and begin the long journey home on foot.

I haven’t explained certain oddities of Australian word usage, such as pubs being called “hotels,” or the fact that “tea” usually refers to dinner.

In alphabetical order, with American equivalents:

Abo:
short for “Aborigine,” usually used in a derogatory manner.

aggro:
unpleasantly aggressive.

Akubra:
a brand of hat, stiff and broad-brimmed, worn in the outback.

Anzac Day:
a day of remembrance. Anzacs were WWI soldiers from Australia and New Zealand, many of whom died on this day at Gallipoli.