Chapter 16 Fratellanza
FRATELLANZA
ZEKE
The footy trip to Lancelin is the best weekend of my entire life. Bar none.
Mason gives me a lift up in his Ram truck.
He puts on a playlist of bogan pub rock by The Chats, which sets the vibe for the whole weekend.
We rock up second at the Beach Shack, after Jack and Brick in Jack’s black SS ute, Phantom.
Mason and I bags a room together – there are two bunks, so Mason takes one top bunk and I take the other.
From the moment we get there, everyone’s in the best mood.
I’m used to seeing everyone dirty at footy training, but today we’re all freshly showered in thongs and footy shorts and sprays of Lynx.
Blocks of beer are carried into the house on tanned shoulders.
Bags of ice tinkle into Eskies. Keychain bottle-openers pop stubby lids; cans crack and fizz.
Someone’s Spotify is hooked up to a Bluetooth speaker playing ‘Sweet Release’ by Hockey Dad.
Everyone’s grinning, clapping hands in bro-handshakes, fistbumping, chill as fuck.
There’s this loose party vibe in the air, rising up out of everyone’s pores.
You can almost smell it, like how the air gets damp and earthy when it rains. Boys’ trip petrichor.
We spend the arvo getting rapidly shitfaced on the mezzanine deck of the house, overlooking the sun setting over the Indian Ocean.
We’re all playing Pontoon and talking shit.
Jack and Rogan hook up the Airbnb’s flatscreen TV on the outside wall so we can watch the AFL’s Pride Game.
It’s the Eagles versus the Swans; everyone’s going for the Eagles and I realise, in all my footy tipping and now playing, I’ve never actually picked a team to go for.
My father liked the Dockers, so I decide to barrack for the Eagles.
Brick tells me about various players. When he tries to give me the low-down on Kade Hammersmith, I can’t help myself.
‘Oh yeah, I know Hammer – we went to school together,’ I tell the table.
Suddenly, I’m the coolest guy in the house: I have zero degrees of separation with a player everyone either loves or hates but nobody can deny is a champion.
Fergus asks if I ever got a glimpse of Hammer in the showers at school.
I say no, but I hope nobody asks again when I’m drunker, or I might spill the beans. I would hate to do that to Hammer.
At quarter-time, talk deviates from footy to men, which is why I love this team.
‘Hammer looks feral with a shaved head,’ Tommo reckons. ‘Like he’s a skinhead or a brawler.’
‘He was more fuckable with that blond surfy look,’ Fergus says.
‘You only watch footy to check out players, don’t ya, Pervy Potato Man?’ Tommo asks.
‘Guilty,’ Fergus says, deep-throating six Pringles at once.
‘Hammer’s either gone alt-right fag basher, or he’s secretly a poof having a full-on crisis,’ Dom suggests. ‘It’s always the most homophobic guys who are closeted, and gay crisis mode is either bleached hair or a shaved head. Just sayin’ …’
I sip my beer and keep my mouth shut.
‘I would,’ Fergus says, sucking Pringle salt off his finger longingly. ‘Even looking all Romper Stomper, I’d let him Hammer me.’
Someone launches an Esky lid at him for the bad pun. It clocks his stubby of Great Northern and makes it froth up and spill onto his boardies. Deserved.
‘I still don’t think it’s offensive to not want a Pride Game,’ Jack says, folding his arms, Disturbed demon tattoo bulging. ‘I’m out and proud but don’t wanna be defined by my sexuality. I hate that we have to all agree or get shunned.’
There’s a general murmur around the table, except Fergus, who goes, ‘Oh my God, I can’t talk about this Pride shit anymore. Can we all move on already?’
‘It’s literally on TV,’ I point out, as the Fox Footy hosts introduce a new panellist.
‘Oh fuck off, of course it’s him,’ Jack says.
Xander Sullivan is the invited panellist, talking about Hammer’s comments. He mentions the Perth Centurions Football Club by name and we all cheer and get rowdy.
Xander parrots all the talking points and the hosts thank him for his time.
Mason sums things up. ‘I agree with most of what he says, so why do I not like him?’
We watch the rest of the game. The Eagles get flogged without their key forward.
Who, apparently, is in a pensive mood, and I’m guessing drunk: out of nowhere, after seven years of silence between us, Hammer starts sending me DMs on Insta.
When he suggests driving all the way to Lancelin to see me, I fob him off. If he came here, he’d get himself into a bind with these guys, one way or another. Plus, better for us to reconnect when I’m not shitfaced – which is what I become as the night progresses.
Once the game’s over, Jack and Tommo chuck some snags on the barbie while the rest of us play beer pong.
Brick cranks the speakers up. Mason volleys the ping-pong ball right into my full plastic cup of Emu Export and everyone chants ‘scull muthafucka’ at me, so I knock back the whole thing. The boys cheer.
‘Fuck yeah!’ Tommo shouts as the bluesy opening riff of the song ‘Eagle Rock’ by Daddy Cool blasts over the speakers.
Tommo yanks his footy shorts down, letting them plummet to his ankles and showing off some threadbare Alpha undies from Kmart. He’s got a fat arse, which makes me feel better about my own.
The rest of the boys follow suit, footy shorts and jeans dropping to ankles everywhere.
Growing up, I’ve seen guys do this at parties when this specific song came on, but I never understood what it was about. I figure now is my time to learn the secret I was never initiated into. ‘Why do youse drop your pants to this song?’ I ask Rogan, the token straight guy.
‘Huh. I dunno, to be honest,’ Rogan says. ‘Firetruck? Why do we drop our dacks to this song?’
Mason shrugs. ‘I dunno. Nobody knows where it came from.’
‘You don’t need to know why: just do it,’ Brick says.
Here I was feeling left out, and there was never any big secret. None of the guys know, they just do it.
I yank my footy shorts to my ankles and do the Eagle Rock in my jocks.
There are few things worse than having a klaxon raised to your ear drum to wake you from a hangover coma, but that’s exactly what Brick does to us all at seven thirty the next morning.
Everything’s blurry. I’m sick. Sore. Tired.
‘I’m hungover,’ I groan.
‘Everyone’s hungover,’ Brick retorts, yanking the curtains open to gently pan-sear my corneas with sunlight. ‘Too bad. We drink as a team. We train as a team.’
Fergus, Mason and Tommo are groaning in the other beds, too.
We slowly piece together fragments of the previous night.
We did funnels. We did shoeys. At some point I passed my bottle of poppers around the table and guys were just taking casual hits while we played poker and a game of Uno that seedily devolved into Strip Uno.
And apparently, I fucked Fergus.
Which I have no recollection of.
‘You and Fergus were so ratshit pawing at each other you didn’t even know me and Tommo were in the room,’ Mason advises me, smirking.
‘Same room?’ Tommo blurts out, amping up his voice like he’s traumatised. ‘I was in the same bunk while they rooted on top. The bed frame was shaking. I was waiting for Zeke’s jizz to rain down on me. You fucked me by proxy, man.’
I feel so stupid to have gone so out of control in front of the team.
I make apologetic eye contact with Fergus, who gives me a gentle nod and says, ‘No complaints from me, mate. I had a good time.’
I’m saved the necessity of working out if I had a good time or not by Brick returning and rounding us up for training.
We pull our uniforms and boots on and head down to the footy oval.
Hungover training is both hilarious and terrible.
Tommo sprints behind some trees at one point after our usual handball drill and yaks in the bushes. My guts are still iffy and I’m almost tempted to join him.
A wild kangaroo appears from nowhere during our kicking drill and accidentally kicks one of our footies onto the road. Fergus shrieks at the roo like a banshee and tries to square up to it and we all crack up.
During our match sim at the end, Brick throws me in defence and Jack rains goals on me like I’m not even there. I start to feel like a failure.
The next time Tommo clears the footy forward, something hijacks my legs. I race up to Jack and launch myself into the air, my shoulder colliding with his and my hand just managing to tap the footy away from him.
‘Ouch – sorry,’ I mutter to Jack, rubbing my shoulder. It really hurt – like a punch.
Unexpectedly, Jack smiles at me. ‘First time I’ve seen you go at a contest with some fire in ya belly,’ he says. ‘Well done, mate.’
We head down to the Lancelin Tavern for a pub feed among the skull-and-crossbones LLFC Pirates banners of the local footy club, then walk back to the Beach Shack for what Brick promises are ‘team-building activities’.
At first, I wonder if it’s like a hazing or initiation.
It starts with Brick and Jack making all six of us – ‘recruits’, they call us – do a timed drill.
It involves sculling a whole stubby of beer, then going for a sprint lap around the block, then returning to scull a shoey, and finally do push-ups until we fail.
If this was designed to make us chunder, it succeeds. Tommo yaks again, and after my arms give out on me on my thirtieth push-up, I do, too.
Embarrassingly, I smashed two chocolate mousses at the pub after my parmy, so the vomit comes up brown and creamy and lumpy, leading Fergus to say, ‘Ewww, fudgy!’
And that’s how I get named Fudgy for the rest of the trip.
The rest of the team-building gets a bit more serious.
We split into groups of four – I’m with Brick, Mason and Fergus – and compete at various challenges.
Building the tallest tower out of spaghetti and marshmallows.
Holding up buckets of water with our feet and having to communicate like a team to take all our socks off without spilling the water.
As dusk hits, we do an activity Brick introduces as ‘The Timeline Activity’.
It’s so we can get to know our brothers in the team.
We choose three significant years in our lives and write down on a Post-it note a major event (positive or negative) for each year.
Then we stand up one by one, pin our sticky notes to the timeline Brick’s drawn on butcher’s paper on the wall, explain our choices to our teammates, and finish with a shot of Fireball.
Nothing could have prepared me for the Timeline Activity.
Brick demonstrates it. He chooses 2007, when he fell out with Jack; 2010, when he dislocated his shoulder and ended his basketball career forever; and 2023, when he and Jack got together as a couple and came out.
Brick speaks frankly: no fear, no shame, right to the brutal honesty of those moments. He nearly cries. The rest of us are struck by his vulnerability. When he finishes and does his shot of whiskey, we all get around him, clapping him on the back and cheering him.
Brick’s vulnerability sets the tone. Our coach has granted permission for the rest of us to be as honest. The boys get up one by one.
We hear from Jack how he once nearly killed himself on the Nullarbor Plain.
Tommo had to stand up to his parents when they didn’t vote yes to the same-sex marriage plebiscite and ridiculed his French husband, Frédéric.
Dom has ADHD, which has seen him ruin every relationship he’s ever been in, and he is now on medication.
Rogan crashed a quad bike through a barbed-wire fence as a kid, which mangled his face; he’s been scorned for his scarred appearance ever since, which is why he likes playing with us even though he’s straight: there’s no bullies here.
Fergus got punched on the street outside Connections once simply for wearing a mesh tank top.
Mason shares how his best mate Jared died on their leavers trip and it devastated him.
When I get up, the last to speak, I’m scared this will be graduation all over again. I’ll be the only one who tells his story and winds up with crickets at the end: nobody clapping or booming me up, no bro-hugs, just cold, dead silence.
The years I choose are:
2018, when I came out and ran away with Charlie.
2021, when I moved to Perth for uni and started my new life here.
And this year, when I lost my job and my house, but found a footy team.
When I finish, I knock back the shot of Fireball, the heat and bite of the alcohol purging my throat of shame.
As I slam the shot glass down, the boys get around me, clapping me on the back like they did with everyone else. My hair is mussed; someone slaps me on the arse; the call goes around the team that we should all do a shot together, and so we do.
‘Proud of you, Fudgy,’ Jack says, ruffling my hair.
The team is built.
We head outside to play a game of Circle of Death and get pissed.
I am drunk enough to feel euphoric, and sober enough to know this is how life is supposed to be.
You are meant to be surrounded by people who accept you.
If you don’t get it from your family, you have to find it somewhere else.
Every man is born deserving a pat on the back that says, You’re one of us, mate.
In a place I never could have predicted, in a football team, I’ve found my birthright.