OUR FIRST DATE - WHICH I FUCKED UP MAGNIFICENTLY

This is the first chapter in my fourth book. If you like my work, you may easily acquire my books at the following link

https://www.shocknawe.com.au/

Yes, I ship all over the world. Yes, there are naughty words in the books. Yes, you will be appalled. Hopefully, you’ll also be amused. And I get to eat food. This starving author bullshit is no joke.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN…

Every great love story has a beginning. And this is ours. I offer this up so you’ll have some kind of context to put the rest of this book, SH!T MY WIFE SAYS - THE DIALOGUE OF A MARRIAGE, in.

This story first appeared in my third book, The Wisdom Of The Road Gods, and it was very well-received because I did not end up in gaol. As a consequence, I felt my readers would like me to spin-off a series of short exchanges between my wife and myself which I would post on my social pages for shits and giggles.

I’m not sure how many people got the shits with these brief insights into our relationship, but I felt they got a lot of giggles.

“You should write a book about this stuff!” many of them demanded.

So, I did, and here it is, and off we go…

Our courtship was…well, unusual, in so many ways.

Lynette’s only experience with motorcycles was being doubled once or twice around Mosman on some mad teenager’s RD250 when she was barely legal. When she met me, she was working in a bank and she’d only seen people like me on TV whenever the police called for us to be herded into compounds and shot for posing an unacceptable risk to the social order of Australia.

For my part, I think it was the fact she wore short skirts, smelled like a French fantasy and had eyes that melted my brain, that sealed the deal.

I had firmly resolved to make our first date special. And I succeeded spectacularly…

THE FIRST DATE

It was a glorious summer night in Sydney, and I was King of the World and Master of the Universe. At any moment, my rat-fuck Shovelhead Harley-Davidson could explode, shower me in hot oil and ruin everything, but as far as I could tell that evening, it was just bringing the thunder. The bike was running like a Swiss watch, its lumpy idle almost metronomic in regularity with the odd Shovel burp-miss thrown in now and again – just to make sure I never got too complacent about our relationship.

And since all was currently peachy under my handlebars, I felt I could successfully wrestle a grizzly bear should one appear at a set of lights.

I had just picked up Lynette from her flat in Lane Cove, and we were headed into town so I could give her not so much a taste, but a solid, three-course meal of what this outlaw motorcycle business was all about.

I figured what I was serving was irresistible. A big, criminally loud Shovelhead with 24-inch ape-hangers sitting on six-inch risers, fat, baffle-free shotgun pipes barking harsh staccato explosions at the night, a grim black paint-job with a little chrome here and there to give me something to polish now and again, shitty tyres, good oil (mostly still inside the engine), and a sticker on the battery cover that said: “Touch My Bike And Die”. Oh, and a bitch-pad of exquisite cruelty. Now, I’m pretty sure you can’t call those tiny lumps of sponge-and-vinyl where your pillion sits “bitch-pads” in these enlightened #metoo times. But we called them that back then, and I’m only being authentic to the era.

So the bike was on-message. I could only hope to match it.

But I didn’t want to overdo me in case she thought I was up myself. So I figured some clean jeans, a Harley-Davidson wife-beater, my club colours, a studded belt, all my rings and chains, and the tattoos on my arms and chest should do the trick. In the interests of peace and harmony, I left my hunting knife at home. I’d checked myself out a few times in shop windows on my way to her flat, and figured this was about as irresistible as irresistible got.

I had met Lynette a few weeks previously when one of the prospects brought her and her girlfriend along to the El Rancho Hotel in North Ryde.

Her girlfriend was known to some of the blokes from various card-games, and as such, was of no interest to me.

Lynette, on the other hand, captivated me.

In a world where all the girls wore jeans and boots, she was in a tiny, super-tight skirt and killer heels. She was perfectly made-up, her smile radiant, her hair devastatingly blonde, and when she shook my hand, I felt like kissing hers. Instead, I told her she could go and buy me a drink if she wanted to sit at my table. Her eyes flashed brief fire, then she smiled and went to the bar.

“I love her,” I said to Marcus as we both watched her slink away. “I will kill people in her name.”

Marcus nodded. “She sure can walk in heels,” he said.

“Stop looking, cunt. You’ll be the first to die.”

A few drinks later, after I returned her shout because I was not a totally uncultured swine, Lynette felt like dancing.

Now I dance like a thousand motherfuckers. I really do.

But when you’re in an outlaw club, dancing does not happen in public. When outlaws dance, they dance in the privacy of their clubhouses and it’s usually with their wives or girlfriends, or maybe a stripper, and it’s not really a spectator sport. Sometimes, we would kind-of-dance with our brothers. We’d throw our arms on each other’s shoulders and join Bon, or Barnsey, or George Thorogood, for a full-throated verse or two while stomping our feet like Bronze Age tribesmen after a good hunt.

So while I very much wanted to dance with Lynette, it was just not going to happen in the pub. I would remain, grim, staunch, menacing, and panty-droppingly cool, leaning on the tall table at the edge of the dance-floor, and she could dance.

And great shuddering Mother of Jesus could she dance.

It was mesmerising.

“Stop looking, cunts,” I muttered to Marcus and two or three other members who had gathered to watch her.

“Sorry,” said Marcus. “It’s just…”

“I know, I know.”

“Fucken hell…” Vinnie muttered.

“Go check the bikes,” I said. “All of you.”

“I might stay,” Marcus said, as a large bloke in a footy jumper bopped up to Lynette and started dancing with her.

She turned her back on him and flashed me a smile. He boogied his way in front of her.

“Want I should fix this?” Marcus asked.

“Oh fuck no,” I said, putting down my beer. “This is all mine to fix.”

So I went over to where Lynette and her unwanted dance partner were doing their respective things, tapped him on the shoulder, and punched him in the throat.

He fell down, some glasses broke, some people made some shocked noises, but the music didn’t stop, and when the footy jumper levered himself to his feet, I punched him again.

“Leave her alone,” I grunted, smiled at Lynette who was quite frankly looking a little horrified, and went back to my drink.

She kept on dancing, and I only had to belt two more disco kings before the blokes in the pub came to understand that this girl was to dance by herself.

About midnight, she gave me her phone number, pecked me on the cheek, and caught a cab home. I stood staring after the cab with her perfume frying my brain.

The next day I asked her out to dinner. I had every intention of taking her to flash restaurant and being treated like trash by the waiters because I didn’t know what wine went with what food, and that cheese is not ordered before a meal.

“Can’t we go for a ride instead?” she asked.

“That would be my favourite thing to do,” I replied. “I prefer riding to eating. But no dancing, OK?”

“I thought you liked the way I dance?”

She had me there.

And on the way into town, with her legs wrapped around me and her perfume once again Kryptoniting my senses at every set of lights, she had me there too.

As we sat at the lights on George Street, waiting to turn left and head up to Kings Cross, another thunderous Harley pulled up next to us.

“I thought that was fucken you!” Skinhead, a member of the Mobshitters MC, yelled over the artillery barrage of our exhausts. He too had a girl on the back – all legs and heels and hair, just like mine.

And now there were two Kings of the World and Masters of the Universe sharing the same set of traffic lights. People stared, but since we were the very avatars of insouciant outlaw cool and it was expected of them. Our girls were hot, our bikes were loud, our mien was haughty, and our intentions were entirely unpredictable. Except the drag-racing bit.

That was entirely predictable.

I told Lynette to hang on, felt her grip me tighter with her thighs and arms, her face nuzzled into my back, and as soon as the lights went green and Skinhead and I had eased around the corner onto Park Street, we opened all the taps.

Now I gotta be honest. Harleys don’t go all that fast compared to Japanese and Italian weapons. But they sure sound like they do.

And it’s all relative. When you’re flat-stick racing through traffic on a thundering, ill-handling, poorly-braked Shovelhead with your arms stretched out before you at head-height, wearing only a leather vest, and your new girlfriend is all bare-legs, bra-top, and a paper-thin but very sexy jacket, shit doesn’t get much more exciting.

These days, Harleys are viewed as old men’s motorcycles. They are mainly ridden by aged blokes with fat wives who like to dress up like they think outlaws dress. Some kind of existential crisis drives them to play pretend in this way.

I have always held the view the time to buy a Harley is when you’re young, strong, a little unhinged, and your girlfriend is hot enough to set fireworks off. That’s what sells Harleys, and that’s what sold me.

And that night, as Skinhead and I hammered our way down William Street towards the Cross, threading the needle through lines of cars, dodging death by swerving and aiming and anticipating, and screaming in our heads, the girls hunched behind us like petrified koalas, my life was incandescent with righteousness.

Innumerable nails were hammered into the coffin of that most vile chimera – motorcycling respectability – as Skinhead and I weaved our bikes down William Street and hauled up at a set of lights just before the Boulevarde Hotel.

He lane-split to the front of the traffic in the far-right lane, and I lane-split to the front in the middle lane. We exchanged meaningful looks. No-one had won our impromptu race yet. The uphill part of William Street remained and if the Road Gods smiled and turned all the lights green we would be able to hit close to one-hundred-and-sixty kilometres per hour in our run up to the famous Coca-Cola sign. We both revved our bikes in anticipation and stared at the lights, waiting for them to go green.

I sensed more than saw the car a little behind and to my left idle up beside me. But I turned my head when his window went down and the driver said: “Hey, dickhead.”

My first thought was it’s a cop in an unmarked car. But then I saw the girl in a sparkly cocktail dress laughing in the seat beside him. This was no cop.

“How tough are you?” he said.

Well, that’s what I thought he said. It’s hard to hear people speaking to you when your bike sounds like the bombing of Stalingrad and you’re preparing to drag-race your mate. But I heard very clearly what he said next because he’d stuck his head out the window to make sure I did.

“You fucken cunts are soft as shit without all your mates,” he informed me. “Fucken fags.”

This was a problem. Or several problems, actually.

If I’d heard him, then Lynette had also heard him.

I was about to have a drag-race, so Skinhead did not hear him, but he wasn’t paying attention anyway since he was staring at the lights waiting for them to change so he could dump the clutch on his Super Glide and beat me up the hill.

I was holding my clutch in, so my left hand could not be deployed as a stinging back-hander. And getting my Shovelhead into neutral after I had just been lashing it like a Turkish prisoner was not on the cards.

“Have a go, ya cunt!” he then barked, smashing his fist on the side of his car, a very nice and new Commodore, from memory.

As much as I wanted to have a go, I couldn’t. My bike would have lurched gracelessly and stalled, and then there was the whole process of putting the side-stand down, getting off, making sure Lynette got off, and so on.

So instead of having a go, I throated up a rich chunk of gelatinous phlegm and spat in his face.

And then a lot of terrible things happened very quickly.

As my warm boogery spit made its way down his face, his expression went from smirking sass to appalled disgust. To my horror, he started to turn his steering wheel quickly to the right.

He’s going to drive into me, I thought, and flicked my eyes at the lights, which that second flashed amber, which meant the lights facing me would flash green very shortly. I heard Skinhead twist his throttle, raising revs in preparation for dumping the clutch, so I dumped mine first and shot through the still-red lights which went green as I was halfway through the intersection. Behind me I could vaguely hear Skinhead feeding his bike all the petrol it could swallow and I remember thinking he must have been cussing me out for a cheating, light-jumping bastard.

I rocketed across the intersection and immediately pulled the bike in nose-first in front of a parked car, hopped the kerb, and stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Lynette asked, looking quite alarmed. Her beautiful big eyes were quite a deal bigger when she took her sunnies off.

I took off my helmet and handed it to her.

“Get off and go and stand over there,” I said pointing behind her where a line of people waited to get into the Boulevarde Hotel’s top-floor disco.

I didn’t see she if she complied, because I was watching the bloke in the car lock his brakes and come screaming to a sideways stop on William Street. Behind him cars were beeping their horns, but he didn’t care. He came bouncing out of the car followed by his sparkly girlfriend.

He was wearing one of those long duster coats the singer, Johnny Farnham, had made fashionable as he clawed his way back to the top of the Australian charts, and it swirled magnificently as he stepped onto the footpath. The sleeves on the coat were pre-rolled and he certainly looked like he meant business. He was about my size, so not small, and I remember thinking he might have a knife or a gun hidden under that nouveau-country swag. He’d have to, surely? His actions made no sense otherwise. Here I was, in full outlaw battle-rattle – which is like having a big sign over your head flashing “FUCK OFF, IDIOT!” – and yet this bloke seemed intent on disregarding this. To my mind he was either a bona fide martial arts hunter-killer, or he was armed for bear.

Damn good thing I’d been prepped and happy to fight a slavering grizzly that evening, huh? We were clearly a match made in heaven.

He stopped two metres away, a smirk plastered on his face and his hands balled into fists. Yeah, this was so going down.

“You got a knife?” he asked, somewhat bizarrely. Was this to be a knife-fight if I said yes?

I just shook my head. It is best to be truthful in these situations, lest your bluff is called.

His smirk got smirkier. He closed the distance between us and then hugged me, like I imagine he imagined a fighting bear would do.

And then he shook me gently from side to side. It was actually more of a rocking motion.

It also didn’t make any sense to me. I was expecting a whirlwind of fury and violence. Instead, it kinda felt like he wanted to dance and maybe cup my buttocks a bit.

I furrowed my brow and braced my legs apart in case his rather gentle rocking was a prelude to some kind of judo bullshit which would see me suplexed onto the footpath. But he just kept on rocking. And he wasn’t hugging me all that hard, and that was when it all went down the toilet for him.

I reached forward, grabbed the sides of his Farnham coat and pulled hard upwards. This broke his hug and sat his arms above his head in a knot of sleeves. Then I head-butted him in the face. I reckon my thick Serb forehead got him just where the bottom of his nose joined his upper lip. I felt the crack of cartilage joining Jesus in Heaven, so I did it again. And then I let go of him and he crumpled to the ground in a flap of coat and quite a deal of blood.

“Blarghlguk,” he said, his eyes rolling wildly in his split face, which looked a bit like a watermelon that had been dropped on the floor.

I could hear girls screaming and horns tooting, but they seemed far away.

And then something went click in my head, and I dropped down on top of the flapping-coat man whose arms were still trapped above his head, put a knee either side of his torso, and everyone’s night immediately got exponentially more colourful.

I’m not sure how many times I punched him, but it was quite a few. There was a brief pause to the proceedings when his girlfriend jumped on my back and tried clawing at my eyes, but I just shrugged her off onto the footpath where she resumed screaming and weeping. Weirdly, I remember her smelling nice, but not as nice as Lynette.

I couldn’t see where Lynette was, but I wasn’t really looking. My entire focus was on punching the bloke who’d tried to drive his car into us. I was furious, which is not the best frame of mind to be fighting in. But then I wasn’t fighting. I was administering punishment.

“Mate, mate, please. He’s had enough,” came a voice from behind me. The switch in my head went the other way and I stopped pounding.

Two big bouncers had come around to the front of where I was kneeling astride the dancing bear in the Farnham coat. Their hands were raised, palms outward, in the universal sign of non-aggression.

“Mate, please, mate,” one of them stammered. “He’s done.”

I stood up. My hands were wet. My face felt damp. I was puffing like a train, my chest heaving as I sucked in Sydney’s warm night air. I looked down at what had happened, and the bouncer was right. Old mate was certainly done. It was a good thing the bouncers intervened. A few more punches and he would have been quite over-done, which would not have been a good outcome.

Behind the bouncers I saw Lynette. She was clutching her tiny shoulder bag and my helmet, her eyes like saucers, and she was trembling.

“Get the fuck out of my way,” I growled.

The two bouncers immediately stepped back, their hands still up.

I took four steps towards Lynette, while behind me the bouncers and the screeching girlfriend immediately dropped to the ground around the bloke I’d just uglied up.

“You OK?” I asked her.

She nodded, still trembling.

“Are…are you?” she stammered.

I stared at my hands. It looked like I’d been washing them in buckets of blood. I could see small flecks of flesh caught in the rings I was wearing, and my arms were red most of the way to my elbows.

“I’m fine,” I grated. “Get on the bike. We have to go. Now.”

Five seconds later, I was flying up William Street to the Coca-Cola sign. Skinhead was long gone. Caught in the imperative of our race, he’d probably powered on, thinking he was winning because you can’t see shit out of a hard-revving Harley’s mirrors.

I turned left onto the main street of the Cross and rode as fast as I could through the crawling, gawking traffic.

The road kinked left at the fountain and the traffic eased and a few short minutes later I pulled into the Shell servo at Woolloomooloo.

“You need petrol?” Lynette asked.

“No,” I grinned, holding up my war-arms. “I need a tap.”

“Make sure you do your face too,” she said. “I’m not kissing you goodnight otherwise.”

A little scrubbing and rubbing later and I was ready to be kissed goodnight.

Lynette was ready for a drink. She was still very shaken up, and asked if I could buy her a double Scotch.

“I can’t stop shaking,” she told me.

In the distance, I could hear sirens. We were not all that far from William Street, and I was in no doubt who those sirens were screaming for. I did briefly think they might have been chasing Skinhead, who was maybe still racing me somewhere near Vaucluse by now, but figured it was probably me.

I rode to the nearby Tilbury Hotel, parked the bike, and we went inside. I ordered two double Johnnie Walker Reds – nothing but the best for my new girlfriend – and we sat at a small table near the door.

Lynette knocked hers back in one hit and asked for another. I fell further in love with her. But just as I was about to go to the bar, a massive brawl broke out in the pub. A bunch of beefy Islanders were going at it, tables, chairs, and fists the size of hams were flying, glasses were breaking, and the publican was calling someone on the phone.

“Are you some kind of shit-magnet?” Lynette demanded as I shepherded her protectively out the door.

“Me?” I blinked.

“Yes, you.”

“Fuck no,” I lied, as the faint sounds of enthusiastic battle raged in the pub behind us. “This is a very unusual evening for both of us.”

Our wonderful little moment was interrupted by the sound of approaching sirens.

“We should go,” Lynette said, putting on her helmet.

“You’re really getting the hang of this outlaw stuff, huh?”

The smile she gave me was heart-stopping.

And it still works on me to this day.

So that’s how we met and what happened on our first date. The following years have seen us reach a point in our lives that seems to approximate the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine practice by the USA and the Soviet Union. Except our is entirely based on a love so utterly incandescent it hurts me to think about it, or how I could possibly exist without her.

I have told her time and again that without her I would be living a cardboard box under a freeway overpass. She would certainly be better off without me, though she shrugs that off whenever I tell her. But it’s true.

As you shall see…