The Mork Norton Foundation began on the 3RD of August 2000. I had just been given a pair of red shoes which resembled Cold War Bowling Boots and I vomited all over them.

      The next victim was the frying pan. Not much of a vomit apparatus really; chunks splashed violently on the linoleum floor and were devoured by a swarm of loving ants.

      When the barbie began on Sunday afternoon Johno noticed our old burnt out vacuum cleaner lying next to the mauled war boots and proceeded to use the hollow pipe as a cricket bat, hitting the burnt snaggers over the fence into the neighbour’s orchard. Amongst all that vomit and destruction of once functional items, a flash of brilliance held firm in my swirling head: The Mork Norton Foundation.

      Mork Norton was a kid in the 6th grade of Catsqueally Primary School. He had every damn Smurf in the collection, even Gargamel and his cat Azrael. The day he arrived at The Catsqueally Primary School netball courts, spilling the entire contents of his official Smurf Collector’s case onto the bitchumin, I was suddenly deserted in the sandpit with a rusty old Dukes of Hazard car and a Transformer that didn’t quite fold into a Concorde.

      Everybody started singing his praises; Mork Norton the science genius, Mork Norton’s swimming pool’s so cool. I waited for him after school at the end of an alleyway and beat the stuffing out of him. The next day his dad showed up. I was called up to the Headmaster’s office and caned in front of the school at a special assembly. That didn’t stop me. I threw spitballs at the back of his head until I pushed him too far and he choked me so bad I blacked out.

      Things changed after that. I became fearful of geeks and their ability to vent rage. I spent my afternoons roaming the bush, cutting down trees, throwing stones at stones balanced on railway tracks, pulling the ticks from bobtails, feeding them tomatoes and keeping them in little shoeboxes beneath my bed. I built zippy guns made from a length of PVC pipe with the finger of a rubber glove fastened to the end.

      Bees, birds, bottles, flowers, trees; I placed a rock into the pipe and pulled back the elasticized finger. Blasted, blasted! Killed without mercy-the boy with a gun; too many Jack Palance movies.

      I made the mistake of shooting a ball bearing at Mr. Rogliche’s 1975 hotted up Munaro as I lay hiding under a Geralton Wax in the school car park and Rogliche came looking for me. Word got out about my pipe gun with a rubber glove finger attached to the end and all of a sudden kids were out in the bush with their own modified versions.

      Jason Bell’s father built him a double barreled zippy with an easy rock loader-a hole bored out a few inches from the glove finger-so he didn’t have to waste time reaching to the end of the pipe. The Chapman brothers used special drill bits and sunk lightweight sights halfway down their pipes with copper screws, so they could narrow in on things and take better aim. Kids started shooting at each other. Julian Shilling’s younger brother got shot in the back of the leg and a stone lodged partly beneath the skin. One of the Chapman brothers shot me in the hand as I was taking mail from my letter box.

      War was declared: The Eggy Martos…vs…The Mono Warriors. 

      The Eggy Martos were my clan; a rag-assed bunch of freaks, cowards, sissies, weeds, pencil necks, illegitimate sons, squirrel catchers, dog teasers, skirt lifters, tantrum throwers, clag glue eaters, wallpaper vandals, mold growers, shark tooth collectors, Billy Ocean lovers, water bomb sneaks, shopping cart riders, frog butcherers, magnifying glass wielders, cry babies, double-jointed asthmatic throwbacks, freckle-faced albino bed wetters… kids who were really good at jigsaw puzzles. We took anyone; cousins from different suburbs down for the weekend, grown men who lived with their mothers, a fat Russian kid named Snell who electrocuted his dog in the bath. That’s what The Eggy Martos were all about; everything rotten, everything putrid-a bunch of sneaky weasels who stole people’s letters and shat on their doorsteps. I ruled the Eggy Martos; blasting horseshoes that hung from fence posts and modified the latest weaponry, shouting: “Down with the Monos! Up with the Eggys!”   

      Then there were the Mono Warriors-the cool kids; the strong handsome healthy kids. The Mono Warriors… what a lame-ass name, I remember thinking the first time I heard it. It came from the sand company which knocked down trees a few kilometers into the bush and clawed giant holes in the earth.

      The Chapman brothers were a worry. Their father was a roughneck Born Again Christian with a penchant for Drum Tobacco and Aussie Rules Football. He brought the Chapman brothers up mean and righteous; all the worst things a man can turn out to be.  They held me down on an ant’s nest for throwing an orange at their uncle’s poodle. They confiscated Jason Bell’s marble sack for unfair conduct on The Catsqueally Primary school netball courts. Then just like bad caricatures from Jug Head cartoons, they started hanging out with Mork Norton, frolicking in his below-ground swimming pool.

      As soon as the school siren blasted at three-fifteen every afternoon, we cut loose from the playground like rabid mongooses, sprinted across the netball courts and funneled into the streets.

      Then the incident; 42 degrees in the shade; me, Jason Bell and Tristan hiding under a fallen log, looking up at orange fungi as the Mono Warriors passed over and kept going towards the train tracks. The plan was to ambush; a perfect Napoleon pincer; Eggy Martos on both sides, Eggy Martos up front, but who could have suspected invisible Eggy assassins from behind? Who could have suspected double-barrel zippies with easy rock loaders springing up under their noses?

      I never meant to give Mork a glass eye. I never meant to put that smelly old green pipe up to his face and shoot him point blank. Mum sent me away to boarding school after the incident and sold our house to pay compensation to Mork’s family. I became introverted and buckled down to my studies. Sometimes I would see Mork in my dreams; glinting blue eye looking up from The Catsqueally netball courts, magnifying glass in hand, singeing Pappa Smurf’s beard. Other times we were buddies; fishing at the pier until Mork’s glass eye fell into the river and tears rained from the empty socket. Those were the worst dreams… the dreams we were actually friends.

      I became dux of Social Studies and History in high school but only just received my bachelor’s in Early Childhood Studies. I opened a vegetarian café downtown in Fremantle during the America’s Cup and sold cheap souvenirs like boomerangs and platypus dolls. The Americans and the Japanese lapped them up, tempting me to close down the vegetarian café and embark upon a souvenir shop. For the first six months of 83, I was pulling in a couple of grand a week. I bought a state of the art ice cream van and drove it along the river on weekends, selling the latest cones and flavours, playing Green Sleeves and Cockles and Mussels until some idiot got sick. Some miserable little daddy’s boy with a flyweight stomach went and got himself chronic food poisoning. The cops confiscated my van and I had to pay fifty grand because the guy had Crohn’s disease. Then wouldn’t you know it… the bottom dropped out of the souvenir business and I was left with five thousand fluffy koalas, fourty five full-sized Australian flags, nine boxes of badly made Denis Conner hand puppets with boxing gloves, and a warehouse full of useless shit that no one wanted to buy.

      I got pretty down for a while. I moved into a share house with a couple of skeggy artist types named Johno and Malcom. We started doing street performance on a tricycle, juggling flaming batons at the front of the local fish market. Life started to look good again until I got into a scuffle with a young cop for not having a busker’s license. I spent the next two months working as a kitchen hand in a minimum security prison with pottery classes.

      Yeh, yeh, laugh about it. The weirdest things happen to everyday folks. Just because someone tells you a funny story doesn’t mean it’s not true. That’s why I started The Mork Norton Foundation.

*

      I walked down the driveway like any other day in paradise and within half an hour, I’d made my eleventh sale.

      “Oh the poor man,” said Edna, as she opened the box to her shiny new vacuum cleaner and watched the young man swaggering down her drive. “The things people have to go through! The things some poor people have to endure.”

Brenton Rossow is a soft grey millipede sleeping on the nose of your shoe.