(Near) Murder on Australia's Tent-Boxer Express

Did I ever tell you about how I almost died out there in the dreaded Australian Outback?

I wasn't set upon by any natural-born killer — no saltwater crocodile, or “saltie.” 

No venomous Australian Inland Taipan, one of the world’s deadliest snakes.

No crawly Funnel-web spider, or even the Outback’s executioner-like sun.

Nope, it was a seething tent-boxer.

He was half-Aboriginal and half-white-Australian, an ex-convict with a lean no-nonsense frame, a man who made his statements with his fists, one of which was suddenly, inexplicably clenched right in my face.

If he’d swung, it would have been murder; pure and simple.

His nickname was Fugzi and he liked to get in people’s grilles. He’d stick his finger inside your proverbial wound, root it around, and bleed you out. 

This fact made him a damned good tent-boxer, but it also made him pretty lousy company around your evening campfire.

To say Fugzi was a bully would be a criminal understatement. 

He had a habit of manhandling women, for which he did countless tours in the slammer. He’d lost his front teeth in a motorcycle mishap and, just for kicks, liked to pull his lower lip clear up over his nose, in shocking freak-show fashion.

Funny, huh?

Put it this way: You would not want to have this man as your penitentiary cellmate.

My Dance with Death came in the middle of the night just outside the frontier town of Alice Springs, located in the guts of the virtually-unpeopled Northern Territory.

I was researching a magazine story about a troupe of itinerant Australian tent fighters who toured county fairs and rodeos for adventure and profit.

They set up their circus tent amid the midway rides and challenged local cowboys, ranch hands and other proud ruffians to have a go on the mat underneath the Big Top.

If the challenger survived for three rounds, he won money. Meanwhile, his pals paid to see him take his swings — and his body blows.

The troupe leader was a fastidious man named Michael Karaitiana, a former pro boxer whose grandfather had founded the nation’s first tent-boxing show back in the 1920s.

Michael was hard-core strong.

He could sledgehammer in a tent stake with one hand.

You did not mess with him. 

A century later, the sport his grandfather promoted isn’t what it used to be — thanks to television and laws against senseless brutality.

So Michael does not have his pick of fighters to ride in his caravan like old Roy Bell did.

Instead, he must take who he can get, men with gaping personality flaws, prison records and anger issues.

Men like Fugzi.

The troupe had spent several long days traveling 2,000 miles, along kangaroo-bounding, two-lane roads, from New South Wales to the country’s famed Red Center, for the first of several tent-boxing gigs.

We rolled into the county fairgrounds past 2 a.m., Michael driving an old converted bus, another boxer following with a truck loaded down with tent and boxing equipment.

Everybody was exhausted but the boss barked the orders to break down the truck so we could pull out our tents and swags, that very-Australian swatch of burlap that zipped up to protect a sleeper from snakes and other unmentionable creatures that slithered along the ground.

I am not the most coordinated of fellas and I felt a little cowed by these blokes who could lift steel bars over their heads without flinching. 

I was more writer than roadie, simply out of my league, a point that was driven home by Michael himself.

The boys were cajoling me to have a go in the ring. 

(Not on your life.)

But my decision was sealed when one night around the campfire, Michael invented my stage name.

The Yank Pansy.

Yep, you read that right.

At least I knew where I stood with these Aussie fellas. 

As we unpacked the truck, our heads hurting, our bodies calling out for sleep, I tried to pull a piece of equipment from the vehicle’s undercarriage, a move tantamount to yanking an umbrella in the wrong direction.

The thing would not budge.

That’s when Fugzi got in my face, thus beginning our war of cultures.

All of these men, you see, were extremely profane, but their gritty lexicon of profanity differs from ours here in the U.S.

And here is the delicate part of this story. 

In Australia, blue-collar men of Fugzi’s ilk use an expression we would never use here at home, one so toxic that I will not even write it here. 

Instead, I will use its (barely) socially-acceptable shorthand.

The C-word.

Before writing this piece, I did an informal survey about whether that word should ever see the light of print in this blog space. 

The responses varied widely, from an English professor who said “Not on your life!” to a female reporter who gave her blessing, reasoning that woman had taken back the word and, occasionally even used it themselves to describe one another.

But I am not a woman (merely a pansy), so I will substitute a less-offensive body part.

Um, let’s see, how about ankle?

Yep, ankle it is.

But I digress.

There was Fugzi, his scouring, toothless face inches from mine.

“John, you ankle,” he hissed. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

It went downhill from there.

I turned and walked away in a mindless fit of anger. 

That’s when I used a word that, unlike “ankle,” has become part of the vocabulary of white wannabe hipsters like me, a term that I understand was borrowed from the blues and African American street life.

And so, I said it.

“OK, motherfucker, do it yourself then!”

Oh, the things I did not and still do not know.

In Australia, it turns out, this phrase is as verboten as ankle is here.

Down Under, the word is taken literally.

And you do not want to say that to a man who could crush your skull with one hand tied behind his back.

“What did you say, mate?”

I was tired and angry and I wasn’t thinking. 

I was acting on pure adrenaline.

Maybe if Fugzi knocked me out I could finally get some sleep.

I moved in even closer.

“Go ahead,” I sneered. “Hit me!”

I could see his face muscles tense. We had a small audience and Fugzi was not the kind of man to back down to anyone, especially a so-called pansy from the States.

Just then, Michael moved in between us. 

I know he didn’t want my blood on his hands and he needed Fugzi to strap on his boxing gloves that coming evening.

The tense bubble of a likely-confrontation burst, and Fugzi stormed away. 

Then he returned seconds later with his heavy burlap swag in his ams.

He threw it at me, almost knocking me over, and roared off in his truck.

I felt like a temperamental old fool; I had cost Michael his best boxer.

The next morning, I called Fugzi on his cell phone to apologize.

It was my bad, I said. I had no idea that the word I’d used carried such an offensive gut punch, even to a tough-as-nails bloke like Fugzi, who obviously loved his mother.

He’d cooled off by then, and accepted my apology.

“I’ll come by later,” he said, “and we can have a laugh.”

Fugzi rejoined the troupe, where I heard the ankle word many times thereafter.

“Get up, John, ya ankle,” was Michael’s reveille call to roust me from my swag.

He referred to me and his boxers as “good ankles,” saying that together we formed the “good ankle club.”

I was finally considered one of the boys, and I liked that.

Fugzi still got in my grille after that, and I avoided him. 

But I also saw how much he loved his young daughter, who traveled with the band, and I hoped this was a step forward for Fugzi to solve his woman-battering problem.

Yet I had my own issue to confront:

I had developed a nasty habit of angering big strapping Australian men with the power to snap me in two.

A few weeks later, in the Northern Territory town of Katherine, I ran into trouble with a white Australian security guard. Man, this bloke was huge, with a thick neck and heaving muscled shoulders. 

But he said something that pissed me off.

He wanted to see my security pass to re-enter the fairgrounds. 

I didn’t have one.

“C’mere,” he barked dismissively.

By then, I’d seen how dismissively the white fellas across the Outback treated Aboriginals, whom everyone called black fellas. 

I didn’t like it.

Now I heard the same tone being applied to me.

“You can’t treat me the same way you treat the black fellas,” I challenged.

Oh, that set him off all right.

“You’re gonna plate the race card, are ya mate?” he said.

And then he was upon me.

No punches were thrown, but he grabbed my arm and shook me like a Raggedly Andy doll. A day later, half my body was black-and-blue.

Our anger quickly dissipated and we both called a truce. 

And, luckily, I still live to tell both tales.

Months later, after I had written the first draft of the magazine story, my editor suggested that it needed work.

I sent Michael an update on my progress.

“So far, the edit is going fairly slowly. My editor loves the material. He loves your story. He just doesn’t like the way I told it in my first draft,” I wrote. “So, as he said, we are breaking down the machine on the garage floor and building it up again. It’s hard work for me, because I’m not used to this much rewrite. But it’s making me see the material in a new way.”

I figured that, as a lifelong mechanic, Michael would appreciate the analogy.

And he did.

“I understand what you’re saying. That’s a good way of putting it — the garage floor.” he replied. “Maybe you need a refresher to get the blood pumping, like when you called Fugzi a motherfucker and he was gonna knock you out. Remember that moment when you need a bit of strength to go on. Haaaaa, haaaaa. You won me that day, John. You didn’t take a backward step and fronted right up to him.”

And here’s the part I cherish most:

Acceptance from this rough-and-tumble man.

“That’s why you’re a good ankle, mate.”

I’m thinking of having those words engraved on my tombstone.

“Here lies John Glionna. He was a good ankle.”

Not bad for a Yank Pansy.