Road Tripping
If I’d known what was in store, would I have turned around and ridden straight out of that pub car park? Would I have gone inside, heard out the plan, seen the threats, the dramas, the disasters that would unfold, nodded sagely and said no? I doubt it. I would have gone along, because I wouldn’t have trusted my foresight to peer into such a tangled reality with any accuracy, and I would have assumed that a twisted story like this one could only be fiction. And I would have been wrong. I swear, every word of this story is rooted in truth. Sure, the names have been changed to protect the guilty, the complicit, the completely crazy and the just plain stoned. But this really and truly happened. Although my memory may have added an embellishment or two...
Early 1980’s, a late summer afternoon, midweek at the end of a hot, tedious day. Studying anthropology at the University of Western Australia can be a soporific experience at the best of times, but on a sultry afternoon with the temperature hovering somewhere above ridiculous, it’s pure cruelty. As soon as I was free of the clutches of a nameless professor who had droned on about brain sizes for two excruciating hours, I zipped around to Steve’s Hotel to wash the taste of Homo Africanus out of my mouth with a few cold lagers.
It wasn’t yet quite late, late afternoon – closer to four – and the crowd in the bar was small. Over by the pool table, three other regulars stood like a triadic cabal, plotting something obviously nefarious, judging by their quiet tones and furtive looks. Or maybe they were always like that.
Tall, austere, crafty and devious Beanpole stood at the apex of this triangle, expounding. Beside him stood Tex, a Nedlands farmer with a raucous laugh, a mess of yellow blonde hair, a growing gut and a prodigious thirst. And Grenade. A seventies acid casualty with shifty eyes, an over-developed sense of paranoia, and an unfortunate tendency to leap straight from the pin-pull to the explosion without giving bystanders (victims) the courtesy of a countdown. All good friends of mine.
I joined in the conversation and was swiftly brought up to speed. The essence being that Beanpole, an expert cultivator of a certain strain of the sativa family of botanicals, had a sudden need to remove a pile of furniture from a small property about three hours south east of where we stood. He had borrowed a Ford F100, hooked up a trailer and two willing helpers, and a third would be very welcome. As an inducement, there was a carton of beer in the esky, and under the spare wheel in the back of the F100, a large bag of some of his finest flora. The legendary Purple Madness. Dope of such near-mythical potency it had been known to reduce hardened stoners to quivering, gibbering bags of jelly and hunger.
I was in.
We dropped off my bike and I grabbed a jumper and a change of clothes, wrenched the first of a great many seriously destructive cones, and got on the freeway south. The plan was to enjoy a leisurely and well refreshed drive to the property, sink a few more beers and work on further depleting the stash, sleep like innocent children, and in the morning load the trailer and wend our way home. A sound, eminently achievable plan. And it worked like a charm until we were about three hours out of Perth.
The journey thus far had taken closer to four hours, because Beanpole was driving a little under the speed limit (not to mention a little under the weather), and because we’d stopped a few times to quickly re-stoke the stone. It was about nine and we were half an hour from our destination when a set of blue flashing lights appeared behind us, strobing on the dashboard and the rearview mirror like a bad hallucination.
‘
Shit,’ said Beanpole as he pulled over. Tex and your correspondent had the good sense to be anxious; Grenade looked agitated and appeared to be preparing for a fight. His jaw worked noiselessly and his fists clenched and unclenched with mechanical repetition.
The spot we’d pulled over was by a steep embankment made when the road had been blasted straight through the middle of a hill. ‘Get ready to piss off up there and disappear into the bush if I say run,’ said Beanpole through gritted teeth. Clearly not his first rodeo.
I must say, though, given the intensity of the situation and our immoderate ingestion of THC and alcohol in the preceding hours, old Beanie handled it very well. The cops’ curiosity was clearly aroused – four blokes driving around the south-west late at night with an empty furniture trailer and improbably bloodshot eyes was hardly a circumstance they would disregard – but Beanpole was relaxed, even charming as he reeled out a completely plausible sounding but utterly false name. Enquired as to whether he could produce a driver’s licence or other document that might corroborate this information, Beanie looked thoughtful. ‘Hmmm, it might be in the glove box,’ he said, knowing full well that it could not be because such a document did not exist, and if it did, what would it be doing in the glove box of a borrowed truck? ‘Ay Tex,’ he called, maintaining the charade with admirable sang-froid. ‘See if me licence is in the glove box will ya?’
Tex rifles around in the aforesaid compartment for a moment and says, in a loud, clear voice, ‘nah _____________ (using Beanpole’s real name, which bears not even a remote passing resemblance to the pseudonym supplied to the policeman), it’s not there.’ Am I really the only person that noticed that? I begin to think I am losing my mind.
At this point, policeman #2 has his torch out and is running the beam over the interior of the cab, and then over the tray of the ute. Nothing to see but the plentiful supply of empty beer cans that we passengers have been tossing back there with monotonous regularity for the entirety of this well-lubricated voyage, and the spare wheel with the incriminating package full of dangerous contraband that’s wedged beneath it but highly visible through the rim. My legs prepare to either collapse or carry me up the steep embankment post-haste, and at this juncture it’s a split decision as to which will happen. But somehow P2 doesn’t see the bulging bag or doesn’t deem it important enough to warrant further investigation, and is unperturbed by the volume of dead marines rolling around in the tray. This is the country in the early eighties, after all – a time in which today’s young people believe that driving drunk was mandatory. Besides, P1 seems to be wrapping up the interview.
Crisis averted, everybody got back in the vehicle and we resumed our objective, retrieving a steadying beer as Beanpole started the truck. As he pulled out, our fearless pilot noted that the police car had spun a fast U-turn, and was heading back towards the town about half an hour behind us. ‘Shit,’ he says. He seems to start a lot of sentences that way. ‘They’re heading back to M___________. I might have given ‘em that name last week, so it’s possible there’s a warrant for that individual.’ If he existed. ‘If that’s the case, it’ll take ‘em about an hour of travel and digging to figure it out, and another three quarters to work out where we are and get there. Probably with reinforcements. I hope you boys are up for a bit of furniture loading in the dark? If we can get off the property before they get there, I know a back way out.’
We’re going through with the plan? Not escaping with all possible alacrity? I make a note to extract additional recompense for this unexpected acceleration of the program. ‘We’ll have time for a cone when we get there, won’t we?’
‘Oh shit yeah.’
Attaining the address without further incident, we quickly sparked up our appetite for hard labour with a generous serving of the Purple, and set to work. All went smoothly, with the only wrinkle coming when Grenade moved a sheet of corrugated iron, revealing a mouse nest underneath, with dozens of tiny, pink, hairless mouse babies wriggling in the feeble porch light. Ignoring my cries of horror and pleas to stop, wearing a maniacal grin and with a demented glint in his eye, Grenade proceeded to stomp and wail until they were all squashed or escaped. Beanie and Tex, who’d been moving some heavy item inside, came out to see what all the ruckus was about, to find Grenade proudly surveying his grisly work, and me standing there as if in some kind of slow-motion stoned nightmare. I shook it off, and we got back to it.
By one am we were leaving the property with a full trailer and tray. The frenzy of work and the fury of Grenade’s killer dance had evaporated any inclination for weed or beer, so we settled in for the long, dark, slow drive.
Nothing happened for an hour. A full sixty minutes full of the joyful absence of adventure – and misadventure – that lulled us into a false sense of security. We were beyond the jurisdiction of the M___________ police, the furniture had been fully loaded and properly secured – I was gratified to note that there wasn’t a single proscribed item among it all – and the only thing left was to coast home and crawl wearily into bed.
The giant boomer that landed on the road two feet from the bumper of the lumbering vehicle had obviously not received the memo. This fellow – a kangaroo of such gargantuan proportions that he could have carried me in his pouch, if he had been a her – was already leaning into his next jump when the driver’s side headlight slammed into his shoulder, and his head snapped around the front panel, leaving a couple of teeth in the driver’s side door. Beanpole, once again cool under pressure, brought the rig to a clean stop, and we all stepped out to catch our breath.
The right headlight was kaput, the roo was comprehensively deceased, and the conviction that nothing else could possibly go wrong was upon us. That we’d had more than our allotment of misfortune, along with all those tinnies and bongs. Oh, foolish optimists! Oh flyers in the face of divine wrath! Fate is never that kind.
Beanpole and I had a long discussion on that very topic as we walked several kilometres through the chill pre-dawn spookiness with two ten litre fuel cans, and then back again with full ones. As always, he found the positive slant. ‘We were lucky,’ he said. ‘We ran out of juice three k’s from the only 24 petrol station in the south-west.’ This was true. In those days, most petrol stations closed at 5pm, but this particular one had a night bell so you could wake up the owner. As we filled up the cans, we told him to get himself a coffee, because we’d be back for a full tank in half an hour. ‘And we had spare fuel cans handy,’ grinned Beanpole. I had the odd sensation that I both respected and detested him right then.
Mercifully, almost miraculously, we drove the rest of the way home unmolested by policemen, kangaroos, mechanical failures, Grenade detonations (he looked quite docile asleep on Tex’s shoulder) or any other major hindrances. Beanpole dropped me off at home not long after six, and I slept the day away. When I caught up with Beanpole at Steve’s that night he said he’d gotten his furniture stored, his mate’s truck repaired, repainted a different colour and fitted with a new set of plates, and a fresh batch of the Purple ready for testing. We slipped down to Tawarri for a spliff.
Early 1980’s, a late summer afternoon, midweek at the end of a hot, tedious day. Studying anthropology at the University of Western Australia can be a soporific experience at the best of times, but on a sultry afternoon with the temperature hovering somewhere above ridiculous, it’s pure cruelty. As soon as I was free of the clutches of a nameless professor who had droned on about brain sizes for two excruciating hours, I zipped around to Steve’s Hotel to wash the taste of Homo Africanus out of my mouth with a few cold lagers.
It wasn’t yet quite late, late afternoon – closer to four – and the crowd in the bar was small. Over by the pool table, three other regulars stood like a triadic cabal, plotting something obviously nefarious, judging by their quiet tones and furtive looks. Or maybe they were always like that.
Tall, austere, crafty and devious Beanpole stood at the apex of this triangle, expounding. Beside him stood Tex, a Nedlands farmer with a raucous laugh, a mess of yellow blonde hair, a growing gut and a prodigious thirst. And Grenade. A seventies acid casualty with shifty eyes, an over-developed sense of paranoia, and an unfortunate tendency to leap straight from the pin-pull to the explosion without giving bystanders (victims) the courtesy of a countdown. All good friends of mine.
I joined in the conversation and was swiftly brought up to speed. The essence being that Beanpole, an expert cultivator of a certain strain of the sativa family of botanicals, had a sudden need to remove a pile of furniture from a small property about three hours south east of where we stood. He had borrowed a Ford F100, hooked up a trailer and two willing helpers, and a third would be very welcome. As an inducement, there was a carton of beer in the esky, and under the spare wheel in the back of the F100, a large bag of some of his finest flora. The legendary Purple Madness. Dope of such near-mythical potency it had been known to reduce hardened stoners to quivering, gibbering bags of jelly and hunger.
I was in.
We dropped off my bike and I grabbed a jumper and a change of clothes, wrenched the first of a great many seriously destructive cones, and got on the freeway south. The plan was to enjoy a leisurely and well refreshed drive to the property, sink a few more beers and work on further depleting the stash, sleep like innocent children, and in the morning load the trailer and wend our way home. A sound, eminently achievable plan. And it worked like a charm until we were about three hours out of Perth.
The journey thus far had taken closer to four hours, because Beanpole was driving a little under the speed limit (not to mention a little under the weather), and because we’d stopped a few times to quickly re-stoke the stone. It was about nine and we were half an hour from our destination when a set of blue flashing lights appeared behind us, strobing on the dashboard and the rearview mirror like a bad hallucination.
‘
Shit,’ said Beanpole as he pulled over. Tex and your correspondent had the good sense to be anxious; Grenade looked agitated and appeared to be preparing for a fight. His jaw worked noiselessly and his fists clenched and unclenched with mechanical repetition.
The spot we’d pulled over was by a steep embankment made when the road had been blasted straight through the middle of a hill. ‘Get ready to piss off up there and disappear into the bush if I say run,’ said Beanpole through gritted teeth. Clearly not his first rodeo.
I must say, though, given the intensity of the situation and our immoderate ingestion of THC and alcohol in the preceding hours, old Beanie handled it very well. The cops’ curiosity was clearly aroused – four blokes driving around the south-west late at night with an empty furniture trailer and improbably bloodshot eyes was hardly a circumstance they would disregard – but Beanpole was relaxed, even charming as he reeled out a completely plausible sounding but utterly false name. Enquired as to whether he could produce a driver’s licence or other document that might corroborate this information, Beanie looked thoughtful. ‘Hmmm, it might be in the glove box,’ he said, knowing full well that it could not be because such a document did not exist, and if it did, what would it be doing in the glove box of a borrowed truck? ‘Ay Tex,’ he called, maintaining the charade with admirable sang-froid. ‘See if me licence is in the glove box will ya?’
Tex rifles around in the aforesaid compartment for a moment and says, in a loud, clear voice, ‘nah _____________ (using Beanpole’s real name, which bears not even a remote passing resemblance to the pseudonym supplied to the policeman), it’s not there.’ Am I really the only person that noticed that? I begin to think I am losing my mind.
At this point, policeman #2 has his torch out and is running the beam over the interior of the cab, and then over the tray of the ute. Nothing to see but the plentiful supply of empty beer cans that we passengers have been tossing back there with monotonous regularity for the entirety of this well-lubricated voyage, and the spare wheel with the incriminating package full of dangerous contraband that’s wedged beneath it but highly visible through the rim. My legs prepare to either collapse or carry me up the steep embankment post-haste, and at this juncture it’s a split decision as to which will happen. But somehow P2 doesn’t see the bulging bag or doesn’t deem it important enough to warrant further investigation, and is unperturbed by the volume of dead marines rolling around in the tray. This is the country in the early eighties, after all – a time in which today’s young people believe that driving drunk was mandatory. Besides, P1 seems to be wrapping up the interview.
Crisis averted, everybody got back in the vehicle and we resumed our objective, retrieving a steadying beer as Beanpole started the truck. As he pulled out, our fearless pilot noted that the police car had spun a fast U-turn, and was heading back towards the town about half an hour behind us. ‘Shit,’ he says. He seems to start a lot of sentences that way. ‘They’re heading back to M___________. I might have given ‘em that name last week, so it’s possible there’s a warrant for that individual.’ If he existed. ‘If that’s the case, it’ll take ‘em about an hour of travel and digging to figure it out, and another three quarters to work out where we are and get there. Probably with reinforcements. I hope you boys are up for a bit of furniture loading in the dark? If we can get off the property before they get there, I know a back way out.’
We’re going through with the plan? Not escaping with all possible alacrity? I make a note to extract additional recompense for this unexpected acceleration of the program. ‘We’ll have time for a cone when we get there, won’t we?’
‘Oh shit yeah.’
Attaining the address without further incident, we quickly sparked up our appetite for hard labour with a generous serving of the Purple, and set to work. All went smoothly, with the only wrinkle coming when Grenade moved a sheet of corrugated iron, revealing a mouse nest underneath, with dozens of tiny, pink, hairless mouse babies wriggling in the feeble porch light. Ignoring my cries of horror and pleas to stop, wearing a maniacal grin and with a demented glint in his eye, Grenade proceeded to stomp and wail until they were all squashed or escaped. Beanie and Tex, who’d been moving some heavy item inside, came out to see what all the ruckus was about, to find Grenade proudly surveying his grisly work, and me standing there as if in some kind of slow-motion stoned nightmare. I shook it off, and we got back to it.
By one am we were leaving the property with a full trailer and tray. The frenzy of work and the fury of Grenade’s killer dance had evaporated any inclination for weed or beer, so we settled in for the long, dark, slow drive.
Nothing happened for an hour. A full sixty minutes full of the joyful absence of adventure – and misadventure – that lulled us into a false sense of security. We were beyond the jurisdiction of the M___________ police, the furniture had been fully loaded and properly secured – I was gratified to note that there wasn’t a single proscribed item among it all – and the only thing left was to coast home and crawl wearily into bed.
The giant boomer that landed on the road two feet from the bumper of the lumbering vehicle had obviously not received the memo. This fellow – a kangaroo of such gargantuan proportions that he could have carried me in his pouch, if he had been a her – was already leaning into his next jump when the driver’s side headlight slammed into his shoulder, and his head snapped around the front panel, leaving a couple of teeth in the driver’s side door. Beanpole, once again cool under pressure, brought the rig to a clean stop, and we all stepped out to catch our breath.
The right headlight was kaput, the roo was comprehensively deceased, and the conviction that nothing else could possibly go wrong was upon us. That we’d had more than our allotment of misfortune, along with all those tinnies and bongs. Oh, foolish optimists! Oh flyers in the face of divine wrath! Fate is never that kind.
Beanpole and I had a long discussion on that very topic as we walked several kilometres through the chill pre-dawn spookiness with two ten litre fuel cans, and then back again with full ones. As always, he found the positive slant. ‘We were lucky,’ he said. ‘We ran out of juice three k’s from the only 24 petrol station in the south-west.’ This was true. In those days, most petrol stations closed at 5pm, but this particular one had a night bell so you could wake up the owner. As we filled up the cans, we told him to get himself a coffee, because we’d be back for a full tank in half an hour. ‘And we had spare fuel cans handy,’ grinned Beanpole. I had the odd sensation that I both respected and detested him right then.
Mercifully, almost miraculously, we drove the rest of the way home unmolested by policemen, kangaroos, mechanical failures, Grenade detonations (he looked quite docile asleep on Tex’s shoulder) or any other major hindrances. Beanpole dropped me off at home not long after six, and I slept the day away. When I caught up with Beanpole at Steve’s that night he said he’d gotten his furniture stored, his mate’s truck repaired, repainted a different colour and fitted with a new set of plates, and a fresh batch of the Purple ready for testing. We slipped down to Tawarri for a spliff.