This is an edited version of a Full Story podcast from the series, The Tale I Dine Out On.
The year was 1979 and I remember it quite fondly. I was a proud resident of south-east Queensland, the Redcliffe Peninsula. I turned 15 and my father got me a part-time job at Coles, which was very funny. They had a ramp that led up to a variety department. They really should have had an escalator because the ramp was incredibly steep. But they obviously thought christ, Redcliffe, we’re not putting an escalator in there. The bastards don’t even know how to use doors properly.
So you’d be stacking shelves and every once in a while someone would lose their footing coming down the ramp, and you’d just stop and listen to someone falling and screaming. But the temporary nature of my employment was proven to me when I didn’t get a dynamo label name tag. I just got an empty plastic one that I pinned and I had to texta my name, and it got rubbed off, so I could put all sorts of names on the tag. I did a double shift one morning, and in the morning I was FDR, and the afternoon shift I was JFK. So that’s the sort of year 1979 was. It was a fuck off, fun year.
But the funniest thing that happened was also the most terrifying. It was during the May holidays. My hair was down to my shoulders. I was sent home from school with a letter from one of the sports masters informing my parents that this boy “needs his haircut in the appropriate style and length. So he won’t be coming back to this school until it is cut. And we think that this term break is the suitable period for it to be done”.
My mother used to give us home haircuts all the time but she was too busy to do it. She gave me $10 to go down to Redcliffe, to Caminos Arcade, and to Ashley’s barber shop down there to get short back and sides. Now, that would have been fine. That would have probably been about six bucks back then. She left me $4 for a hamburger and a thick shake or something like that. I went in there and I was surprised to see that Ashley’s barber shop turned into Ashley’s unisex hair salon and that there was an apprentice. Now, this apprentice was a girl I recognised.
She didn’t go to the school I went to but I only knew her from this place, which loomed large in my memory, called the Redcliffe Rollerdrome, which was the roller dome right on the banks of Moreton Bay, right on the water. It was like a concrete sphere that had a roof and chook wire walls where you would hang on to. And this is where I first saw this woman, well … she wasn’t a woman, she was probably about two years older than me. And her name was Wendy Sykes.
They’d have music to accompany you going round and round and round skating on this sort of concrete surface. But I’m skidding along with novice skaters one Saturday morning and there was a kid, a large lad called Dougal. He was behind me and he was eating a devon sandwich from rainbow coloured greaseproof paper, which sounds like some sort of performance artist political statement. But that was just the way Dougal was cut back in those days.
All of a sudden this announcement came over. It was “speed skaters, speed skaters, only speed skaters, speed skaters only”. And Deep Purple came on with Black Night and it was, like, terrifying. We shouldn’t have been out there. And we were out in the middle, me and Dougal. And I remember Dougal grabbing my shoulder as all these guys were whizzing past, going at a furious pace, Black Night blaring and all these guys swinging, swearing at each other, nostrils flaring, and Dougal grabbing my shoulder, squashing his devon sandwich covered in rainbow greaseproof paper going, “Fuck a duck, fuck a duck, we’re going to die”.
We managed to weave our way through the speed skaters and get to the side, then we turned our heads back to look at the speed skaters, and this girl, this really beautiful girl had decided to get up and join the men’s only speed skaters, and she could skate. She was in front and she was going faster and faster and faster. And I remember they took off Black Night by Deep Purple and they put on Abba’s I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do. And you’re hanging on the chook wire wall, looking at this gorgeous human being smiling as she sped past. I Do. I Do. I Do. I love you. One of my school friends told me, that girl is Wendy Sykes, pointing to her like she was some sort of Marvel superhero.
So, three years later I walk into Ashley’s unisex hair salon for a short back and sides, and I see Wendy Sykes, who’s an apprentice hairdresser, and she’s even more beautiful. And she smiles at me and I stare and she says, “Hello”. And she sat me in the chair. And she looked at me and she said, “Would you like a perm?” As she proceeded, I didn’t know what a perm was, I just knew that I was in love with her. And it went on for about 90 minutes, me getting a perm. And I just thought to myself, I’m in so much trouble.
I had foils. She was doing it as a hairdressing exercise. And then when it all came off and my hair just exploded in this sort of auburn beach ball on top of my head. She said, “There you go”. It was the worst hairstyle. It was a tight perm. You know, those things that explode. It wasn’t like a 1980s one. It was just like, you know, Boogie Nights gone fucking mad. It’s just like, Oh, my God. I had a head full of pimples and I knew I was in trouble. The cost of it was like $27.50. So I went to the guy, I said, “Listen, can I give you $10 and I’ll come back with the rest?” He said, “You better come back by three o’clock, by close of business”. I’m walking out thinking, Oh my God, I’m going to get killed here. I was stunned.
So I’m walking along Humpybong Creek back home thinking, what am I going to say to my mum? I’ve got to ask for money and I just know I look ridiculous. So I walk back in home and Mum was in the front part where the kitchen was and she was doing something on the stove and she turned around. She screams, “Oh, Jesus Christ!” And my father, who heard this, ran in from the back yard and came running in and he had sort of football shorts on, a striped T-shirt, work boots and a Makita work hat and a machete. And he ran and he said, “What is it? Ris? What is it?”
My mother just pointed at me, this tall woman with a shock of white hair. And my father looked at me, pointed his machete at me and screamed and went, “Aaaah. Christ alive boy, when I was your age, I was jumping out of planes, killing Germans and for what?” I just stared back at him and it was, quite frankly, terrifying. We had two dogs. They came running in. They were jumping up, barking, and my mother staring, my father blaring, me panting in a state of shock.
The following week was terrible. I remember I had to go cut wood for my father to make up for the perm difference. But my sister Corby stitched me up saying, “Your acne, your pimples will get better if you wear a hairnet”. So I wore it, I had this fucking thing on top of my scalp and my father just went ballistic. He couldn’t quite understand what was going on. He’d seen me come down in my pyjamas and my hair net band aided to my temples, and he’d seethe and my mother would just say, “No, stop it, Colin”.
It was that sort of fun place to grow up, which was also sort of hectically insane. But my Wendy Sykes perm of love came to grief when I played a game of club rugby. I was playing third grade and I was a second rower and I ran on with my hair. And there was this television show that had recently ended called Welcome Back, Kotter, and they had a character in there called Horshack who was this hapless droob who had a perm. Anyway I got caught on the bottom of a ruck. And I heard someone from the opposition say, “Let’s get Horshack!” And I think my teammates joined in too.
My perm got pulled every point to the compass. I got up and I thought, is my scalp bleeding? It was a terrible experience. I walked off and I stayed in the showers. And there was a bloke there, a Fijian fella who was playing for the team in the seniors second grade, he looked at me and he said, “William, that hairstyle is not for you”. And I nodded. And I went to this barbershop in Woody Point. I got it all shaved off. Just clip it back. At best, I looked like a recently released inmate of Boggo Road. At worst, I looked like I was a collaborator with the Germans at the end of the second world war.
I walked in home and my mother was in the kitchen. She looked up, and screams “Oh, Jesus Christ!” And my father came running down the stairs from his study. He said, “What’s he got now? What’s he done now?” And he turned around. He had a book in his hand and I always remember it. It was a James Clavell book called King Rat. And he held it out – like, he didn’t have a machete or a knife – and he just pointed this paperback at me. He looked at me and he holstered his book and said, “That is a man’s haircut, son”. And I nearly cried.
And that is the perm of love story from Wendy Sykes from 1979. It was a great year. That was the Everest of years, I think.
