Tickets, Please
I normally validate. No, really, I do. But it’s only two stops and I don’t have my wallet and it’s about to start pissing down again so I think, what the hell, let’s run the gauntlet. At the very next stop the tram is swarming with inspectors. Seven of them!
I can only guess that two of them are old-timers showing the others how it’s done. I mean, why would there be seven? All seemingly headed, slowly, crablike, towards me. I look round. There’s no door behind me. Of course there isn’t. This isn’t a film. I can’t just slip out like David Niven in The Pink Panther, leaving behind a monogrammed white glove to confound and enrage them. Instead I stand rooted to the spot while, shuffling and rustling in their bulky department-issue rainwear, they surround me like sodden, listless vampire bats. I produce a battered, shamefully unvalidated ticket from my pocket and proffer it, feebly. They don’t need to look at it. They can tell from my face. The leader, an exact lookalike for Milton in Office Space, wearily unhinges a notebook and says, almost yawning, ‘All right. Where did you get on?’
‘One stop before you,’ I half whisper, in the hope that none of the other commuters can hear what’s going on. But they can, and there is much sniggering and at least one waggish allusion to Thank God You’re Here that, thankfully, sails over the antennae of the swarm.
‘One stop before us?’
It’s true, but no-one’s buying it. Now even the inspectors are on the snigger.
‘Do you have a reason for travelling without a valid ticket, sir?’ Milton wrings as much irony out of the ‘sir’ as his moustache will allow.
‘No, I uh…I really can’t….why are there so many of you?’
He shifts uneasily. It’s as though I’ve broached a touchy subject.
‘I want you to write your name and address in this notebook…’
‘And your date of birth,’ interjects one of the others, a small Indian woman who looks to have put the expansive Milton’s raincoat on by mistake.
‘…and then I’ll ask you to read them back to me.’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier for me to show you some ID?’ I ask, forgetting for the moment that I don’t have my wallet with me. The Indian woman looks at Milton as if to say, ‘He’s right, you know. Why are we persisting with the notebook thing? Surely, even if they write down something fake, the mere fact that they’ve only just written it down means that they’ll probably be able to recite it back?’
Milton exhales a long sigh and with little conviction hands me the notebook. But before I can finish he takes it back and says, ‘Do you have any ID?’
‘No,’ I say, and for a moment it looks like he’s about to explode. The interns, if that’s what they are, are swaying uncomfortably as we trundle toward the Interchange.
‘You don’t have a wallet? A driver’s licence?’
Now that he says it, I agree it does sound as unlikely as the getting-on-one-stop-before thing. I’m certainly not going to ask the person who made the Thank God You’re Here joke to confirm my name (and he’d probably say I’m Frank Woodley, just to turn the screws), so I just shake my head unconvincingly. Milton’s face reddens further and he looks like he might just conduct a full-body search.
‘Do you have a number we can call to confirm the information you’ve given us?’
Again I answer honestly. ‘No,’ I say. I know only my home number and there’s nobody there. Milton tries it anyway and gets the machine. For the first time in months I find myself wishing I still had the old Rex Hunt message on there. ‘The girl’s happy. She’s got no money.’ That would have made all this worthwhile. After failing to get through to the TAC (heartening to see it’s not just me), Milton thrusts his phone deep into his pocket and plays his final card.
‘All right, here’s what’s going to happen. You’ll accompany us off the tram at the Interchange and we’ll call the police.’
The Indian woman opens her eyes wide, like he’s gone too far, but for Milton there’s no turning back now.
‘Then we’ll wait while they come to conduct an official interview.’
If this speech is intended to shock me into producing some ID he’s wasting his time. I have nothing to show but a B-format paperback of The Sportswriter by Richard Ford, which doesn’t even have my name written in the front. And if it did, I guess it could have been specially prepared with a bogus name. The old literary fiction scam, they call it. To everyone’s evident disappointment, I fail to call what may or may not be a bluff. There’s an awkward minute-and-a-half while we wait for the lights to change. I spot two fellow readers trying their hardest not to meet my eyes. One, a large unhappy looking woman is rather predictably tackling Eat, Pray, Love, while the other, a barrel-shaped Korean girl is mowing through a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, which, on closer inspection, proves to be a photocopied bootleg, trimmed to paperback size and stapled like a pamphlet.
We finally judder to a stop, and I squeeze my way through the much-amused crowd and disembark, showily trailing my seven-man entourage along the Interchange. In order to not look like I’m being arrested, I try to imply subtly that I’m in charge here, like I’m Starsky leading some uniformed officers of lesser rank to the scene of a drug deal. But no one’s buying this either.
‘Thank God You’re Here!’ shouts someone from the sardine-packed number 67 as it rumbles by. The Indian woman catches up to me and says, ‘You still haven’t given us your date of birth’, like that’s the key that will unlock the whole thing. I stop and write it into Milton’s notebook. But it’s too late; he’s already called the police. I look around. Gridlocked oceans of traffic surround us on all sides and the skies are about to open. By the time they get here, these cops are going to be well shat off.
***
For twenty-five endless minutes the eight of us stand huddled and shivering in the tin shelter. No one has anything to say. The only sound is the rain lambasting the roof, and, every couple of minutes, another peak-hour tram rolling past and reminding us all that we really should be watching Gossip Girl. I return to my book, and even though I can’t focus on the words and end up reading the same paragraph about fifty times, this somehow serves to infuriate Milton further. He spends the entire wait tracing my address over and over in his notebook, gouging the words into the page. By the time the cops arrive he’s surrounded my date of birth with ornate, Gothic doodles, and it is this he presents to the officer in charge. After a moment’s confusion, the cop, clearly unhappy to have been called out on such a pissy task, deciphers my elaborately corniced surname and phones it in. The second officer, a grinning younger woman, asks me what the book is. When I show her, she winces painfully. The Frank Bascombe story has that effect on a lot of people. I picture her sitting in a patrol car during an all-night stakeout, struggling through Independence Day and stopping every few pages to swear at the reviews on the back.
The first cop returns and, to Milton’s relief, has confirmed my identity with the TAC. Mercifully my name hasn’t registered, but he does say, ‘You use this tram a lot, don’t you? I’ve seen you round here quite a bit.’ In fact I’m hardly ever here, but I’m not about to ask if he’s seen me dressed as a Viking on Channel Ten. While he informs me that my details will be protected by the Privacy Act, I can’t help but notice that this assurance of discretion is being delivered in the most public possible arena; before tram after passing tram, bursting wall-eyed oglers, all wondering why it’s taken nine officers to bring down a single nerd armed only with a Vintage Classics.
Finally I have to say something.
‘Do you think we’ve put enough men on this case?’ I ask the first cop, but he is resolutely unamused. The female officer, as though I have made an appalling faux pas, leans down and explains, ‘They have to travel in large groups. Otherwise kids give them too hard a time.’
I look across at Milton afresh, and wonder what horrors he’s had to endure. How many times has he had his moustache tweaked and his notebook stolen? A case like mine must be a blessed relief, the half-hour wait in the shelter a brief but relaxing vacation from the cast of Summer Heights High. He gruffly hands over a brochure detailing my rights and underlining my criminality, and in return I try to imply with my expression that I know what it’s like; that I’ve seen his worst nightmare myself and lived to tell the tale.
***
A few months ago, late on a Friday night, I caught the last Number 6 into the city. Save for the driver, a small bearded troll, there was no one on board. For reading I had only a discarded mX and a fresh piece of graffiti urging me, in no uncertain terms, to get fucked. At the corner of High Street and Glenferrie, the doors jolted open and five young white men clambered noisily aboard and arrayed themselves across the seats behind me. They were clearly rich kids playing at being gangstas, but as a group they could easily have kicked the shit out of me if necessary, so I decided to focus intently on a fascinating article about Lleyton Hewitt and Bec Cartwright’s house, ‘Beckingham Palace’. For the next several blocks I didn’t even dare to look up. I could hear them scrabbling about our end – the non-driver end – of the creakingly bendy tram, loudly exchanging sure-fire ways to ‘get a headjob’, the names of girls at their school who will ‘definitely give you a headjob’, and joke after joke about, well, you can guess. The only non-headjob-related remarks were faltering attempts at that ‘for shizzle’ bullshit that even I thought had passed its use-by date. All this was accompanied by a frenzied squeaking, which I slowly came to recognise as the sound of textas defacing a shiny surface. Occasionally the one appointed sentry would stroll past, keeping an eye on both me and the driver, while the squeaking and talk of headjobs would move to another part of the cabin.
At the corner of Chapel Street, this well-rehearsed vandalistic spree came to a sudden end, the tram expelling the ‘gang’ into the swirl of Prahran nightclub-bound boganistas, for a night that would presumably end in headjobs for everybody. Only when the doors clamped shut did I allow myself a peek at their handiwork. Over a mere ten or so blocks they had covered every available surface of the cabin with tags and graffiti. Someone calling himself ‘Sulfa’ had left his mark in black texta on walls, seats, even the ceilings; everything except the small area where I had been seated. As I stood up, a nerd-shaped silhouette of non-vandalised seat and wall was left cast behind me. Apart from that one still-pristine section, the five young men had laid obscene waste to nearly half the tram. And I’m pretty sure that none of them bothered to validate.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Click here to see an extended version of his video shops report from ‘The 7PM Project’.
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