Monday back at work and after work Balga kept The Royale in his mind. Mrs. Freeman had piles of Pix and Australasian Posts and he went through them looking for information on these Bodgies and their music. The woman talked on, but he ignored her as he flipped through picture after picture until he came to some of black American singers wearing what the Bodgies wore and what he wanted to. He could picture himself dressed in the drape suits and as for rock’n’roll music—the square writers called it an ugly jungle music infecting America. A negro music catering to the animal passions of the young, and there was a photograph of two white youngsters jiving to the beat. Balga smiled and the next evening went to one of the newsreel theatres that showed the latest shorts and lo and behold there was the black guy called Little Richard pounding away at a piano for a few precious seconds. Balga didn’t have a radio, but he wandered into a shop and emerged with one. He listened to the music and was disappointed. Old sounds sung by the likes of Vera Lynne and Theresa Brewer as well as Buddy Williams, Burl Ives and Nat King Cole. Only once his ears pricked up as a group called The Coasters sang a song with a wailing sax.
Balga kept away from the Royale for a few days as he felt he had to be right for the place. After all he was as a Black man with an American father and an uncle who was a blues musician. He thought through his new identity. In Clontarf, Sporting Life was a favoured magazine among both brothers and boys. It featured mainly men and he had avidly followed the life and fights of Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion of the world. Now he felt he was one of them; but first how to get the threads? He had the right coloured skin and even the hair, but it was cut all wrong and as for his Phillip Marlowe clothes, my God, they belonged to old men. They weren’t what was that word “hep”.
Balga saw a shop in Barrack Street, between Hay and Murray. He stopped entranced by the clobber in the window. The clothes were gone, real gone as one of Fast Eddie’s expressions had it. They were what he needed to make an impression in The Royale and he had his week’s pay in his pocket. He went inside and a young bloke looking a bit like the movie star Tony Curtis took him in then looked away as if he didn’t exist. An older man came out of a back room. He trotted over to Balga. ‘What can I do you for,’ he said with a Pommy sense of humour.
‘How much are t’ose shoes,’ Balga asked, pointing at a pair of brown suede shoes.
‘You wouldn’t want to know, you just wouldn’t,’ the bloke replied getting his goat. Now he hated both of them.
‘Well, try me,’ he snarled curling his lip.
‘Twenty pounds!’
‘Okay,’ Balga said with a shrug, ‘and t’ose pants, t’at drape coat, and t’at t’in tie?’
‘Trousers, ten pounds ten; drape sports coat a cool thirty five and as for that tie just five. I can let you have the lot for two fifty.’
‘Can’t you count,’ Balga snarled. ‘I’ll think about it and see if I can get ‘em for less.’
‘You can’t,’ the Pommy smiled and the young man grinned.
Balga was depressed: but he wanted those clothes. He needed them; but on his lousy pay he could hardly afford the tie.
He walked on, crossed over the railway tracks into William Street. His lunch time was almost over, but what the heck. He came to a barber shop and there were illustrations of the Bodgie cut in the window and he went in to be confronted by an Italian man who sat him in a chair, pushed his hand through his hair and then asked him what he wanted done with the broom.
“Dunno, but something to go with the times.’
‘Can give you a flat top, flatten the sides so they look long and, well, what else can I do?’ he finished with a shrug.
‘Well, do it,’ Balga snarled, curling his lip. ‘And make it as fine as wine.’
‘Yeah, as rough as Grappa,’ the barber rejoined and set to work.
Balga emerged from his ministrations to find that he indeed had a haircut that might have come from an American movie. He stared at his new self in the mirror. Now he knew he had to have those clothes. He just had to!
When he arrived back at the garage, his boss stared at him and told him to be back on time from then on or be docked a day’s pay. The man left. Balga stared after him. He went to the cash drawer and opened it. He counted the money. There was enough, but the boss would know instantly that cash was missing. What to do? It was then that a bloke came in for his car. It had had a new radiator installed and he paid enough for Balga to get his threads. The customer didn’t even wait for a receipt and that sealed the matter. The boy could say that the man hadn’t paid and his boss would believe it for a week at least.
Shops closed at five so he had to wait until his next lunch break to get the cloth. The older bloke beckoned him in mockingly. ‘And what might I not do you for this time,’ the man said breaking into his mind.
Balga, curled his lip and snarled, ‘So you remember me?’
‘Yeah, how could I forget those awful clothes,’ the young bloke with the perfect Tony Curtis hairstyle broke in.
‘And today I’m here for the lot,’ Balga grinned, staring him down.
Money brought a respect of a kind. The older man hung about while the young bloke carried the clothes to him.
This time Balga avoided the green threads, deciding on blue. He stared at the rack of shoes. ‘T’ose blue suede shoes?’
‘Like in the song,’ the old bloke said gesturing the young guy to bring them.
“Now what sort of jacket do I need?’’
‘That powder blue sports jacket. Long drape and the material, soft like a baby’s bum.’
The old man held it up. ‘Look at that drape. Try it on, it’ll give you shoulders.’
It did give him a shape. Wide shoulders tapering down to a narrow waist and hips. It was mostly coat but Balga knew he looked swell. He admired himself in the full length mirror beside the counter and then said: ‘T’at’ll be fine. Now for the pants, trousers, eh?’
‘Ah, slacks, dark blue of course. Look at these, tunnel belt loops, pleats, loose at the crutch, but flowing down to the cuffs. Ten inches! Any smaller than that and you would have to cut off your feet to get them on; but then you couldn’t wear those cool blue suedes, could you?’
‘No, I couldn’t,’ Balga said with a smile, enjoying being served. He let the old bloke stack up a line of accessories: clocked bobby socks, a thin leather belt, a couple of narrow ties and even underwear.’
That took care of all his cash; but the feeling was worth it. He rushed home with the big bag, dumped it and rushed back to work. His boss had checked the cash drawer. He told him off for letting the bloke have the radiator. The words went in one ear and out the other. Balga hung in there until the day was over. He rushed back to his room to try on his new clobber.
He posed in front of the wardrobe mirror. He practiced walking up and down or rather bouncing up and down. His suede shoes had thick crepe soles so that he bounced from step to step rather than walked. It was a great feeling. Balga bounced out of his room, down the stairs and along the street noticing how the squares were eying him. He liked that.
The lad learnt how to glide silently along so that at times he came up behind a man or woman. Suddenly the person became aware of his presence and darted a quick frightened look over his or her shoulder before speeding up or slowing down to get away from him. Now he began feeling like a “Bodgie” and the knife in his sock added to his edge. As if he belonged he swung into The Royale, nodded at Ted the Ted and went immediately to the booth where Audrey and Leslie were sitting bent over spiders listlessly sucking up the melted ice cream in the soda. They looked down in the dumps.
He plonked his self down across from them and tried: ‘Dig me you two.’
Both looked at him with serious sad eyes and his joy evaporated.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
‘It’s Eddy,’ Audrey replied, ‘the bloody cops picked him up on Sunday.
‘Why? What did he do?’
‘Bloody nothing, that’s what?’
‘Nat’ing?’
‘Yeah,’ Leslie said, ‘they booked him for being without visible means of support; but they. know that we support him and we certainly aren’t invisible.’
‘No too visible,’ Audrey put in, ‘that’s why they got him. Couldn’t get him for anything else, you know.’
‘Yeah, they use that vagrancy thing when they aren’t sure that something else will stick.’
‘Or if they don’t use that, they have the consorting act to get whoever they want to. Square dicks are like that. Keep you always under their thumb and if you get out from under they use their fist to hammer you down.’
‘How long will he get,’ Balga asked.
‘Well, three months at the least; six months at the most. It’s this town, they don’t like people like us,’ she replied.
‘T’ey pretty square,’ Balga added using one of his new words. ‘So what happens now to you two, he queried.
‘He’ll go before the beak tomorrow,’ Audrey said, ‘and be sentenced. He’ll plead guilty, what else can he do?’
‘Yeah, yeah and a double yeah,’ Leslie added. ‘Shitty town, shitty deal, now we are stuck here...’
‘And the beak is sure to say, you can bet on it that we’ll hear him say,’ Audrey mocked: “There’s no reason for a young man like you to be without a job. I advise you to get one after you are released and to help you make up your mind I am giving you six months.”’
‘Yeah, squares are great with the preaching,’ Leslie snarled and then gave a sudden hard suck at her spider. It sent the liquid gurgling down her throat.
‘If you are going there tomorrow, want me to go along?’
‘You’re just a kid. They mightn’t even let you in.’
‘What’ll you do wit’out Fast Eddy?’ Balga asked.
‘He’s Steady Eddy now, man. No fast moves left except hold onto our cash. You not looking for a job, man,’ Audrey replied.
Both laughed.
‘Well, they know us now too. We’ll leave this burg as quick as we can scram,’ Leslie sneered. ‘Every corner opens out into a square with a d waiting to pounce on you.’
‘A “d”?’ he queried.
‘A dick, a detective! Yeah, Steady Eddy has this scene to do. We don’t. His being outa commission means we can get outa here. How many outas does that make,’ Audrey kidded again with a smile that Balga really dug. She was a real gone doll all right, as a Private Eye might say in one of his stories.
‘Does t’at mean that you won’t be coming here again,’ he asked.
‘Oh we’ll hang here until we go,’ she replied. ‘We’re Widgies after all and this is the only joint a chick can go in this burg without having to evade the hard word. Squares, they think they can get it for nothing, not bloody likely.’
Balga asked them what they were drinking and then went to the counter to get a couple of refills for them. Ted the Ted who had been winking at him for some time, now scowled for some reason. He lifted the corner of his mouth in a sort of George Raft expression to say: ‘Yesterday this square came in and man was he all corners. Now today this cat glides in as if he was born on the street and he’s wearing threads that only the worst can afford. I got a song for you, man,’ he added as he began to make up the drinks, left them and went to the juke box, the god, he called it.
It’s easy to be good;
Hard to be bad;
Stay outa trouble
And you will see
How happy you can be.
So I’m glad
I’m not a juvenile delinquent.