Chapter 2

On reading Geoff Cochranes Tin Nimbus

The gay psychologist quoting The Divine Right of Kings and the lexicographer, his lifes dream of the Great New Zealand Dictionary,

both entrenched alcoholics, both the originals Dostoyevsky might have claimed, although both stark losers by the worlds brute standards.

Yes, I was there too, that late Saturday night after THE DUKE, riding the Kelburn cable-car up under the shadowy, Gothic pile of Victoria

University, where furtive as hedgehogs, we found a hand-hold to jemmy open an illegal window, fossick the disused office for carton stacked upon

carton, each one packed with indexed filing cards, meticulous references, NZ arcana, forgotten dialects, fables rare as moose from Southland,

obscure derivations, etc., incalculable musings of an idealist and dreamer (this he showed us) here lay the singular industry of a reverential scholar,

abandoned yet thirty years on, The Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English first appeared, penned by an academic of that selfsame city.

We are the last of the witnesses Geoff, like the derelicts who took the sun sitting behind the Public Library, or sheltered in Pigeon Park, days long

gone (along with THE DUKE and THE GRAND HOTEL) a city newly syllabled, yet the light remains, much the same milky white and pale as stone.

Hotel Diligencias

In Veracruz dusk troubles with a scent of gardenias after the last tramcar passes by, and the rocking chairs begin their small breeze-making on the balconied terraces between the family photographs and little statues.

The dancing couples revolve at an angle in the great brewery mirrors marked:

Cerveza Moetezuma

before the globes lighting the plaza die out at 9:30 pm sharp.

But this was Villahermosa.

Lightning burns like mescal in the throat of night.

The whisky priest skulks about the mountain roads where you are headed, at Chiapas or Las Casas, charging so many pesos per baptism in the illegal night.

With or without him thrive the false saints & miracles in these remote regions, pure homage to superstition.

O comfort of Poverty! O lie of Pleasure!

You recalled the hot seaport, your departure planned on the Ruiz Cano that dangerous barge which took you out over the Gulf of Mexico

away from the anger hidden in laughter, from the pistilleros lounging by the Presidencia.

You the too curious gringo left behind you the coasting steamers & pink squared plazas to forget the taste of warm beer in dreary cantinas.

You headed for the high ground of Tabasco & the country of ruined churches. Back at the beginning

of those lawless roads lie the dingy houses smearing out onto silver sandhills.

Wardrobe Drinkers

is what they are in Austinmer. Yuppies from the North Shore, $300,000 homes on the beach front, sending the RSL broke & the greenies blocking development for a few birds up an estuary. Could be worse, given the Japs on the Gold Coast going off like mobile phones. The miners & cottages are long gone & so is full employment. In 1941 as a telegraph delivery boy I made 13 shillings 10 a week. Across the Harbour Bridge to the North Shore on a regulation red bike. Sunday was the day for casualty messages, the dead & wounded delivered all over Sydney except Vine street, Darlington, where Darcy the Crim lived & the most dangerous place in town. I came to Austinmer 30 years ago before the Wardrobe Drinkers in the days of the miners & cottages. Take those grain & coal carriers upwards of 250,000 tonnes with a 12 man crew, anchored stern to wind, off Hill 60 out of Port Kembla navigated by satellite direct to Japan. You want the best view? Sublime Pt. Lookout, right down the coast, the Pacific ironed flat far as the eye can see, a sky expanded metal-red nightly.

Girl. Gold. Boat

out of Port Moresby. The obese Oxford villain tumbles overboard speared by the fuzzy-wuzzies. Our hero, Captain Singleton, finally

puts his shirt back on and tilts his cap to the sunset. He places one arm around his sweetheart and the other at the helm. The sea falls into

suburbs of light, a topiary of Islands could be mist. He is American and at home in the world as he moves forward on the celluloid tides.

He came out of sickness country (sic) he came out of the Holy Land.

Domestic Pack Shots

1. The Gays Next Door

shrieking like hyenas in their sexual mirth to the disco bang of Madonna making her mint in the sacrilegious from the sacred. For some, perhaps, a continuous custom to hang together whatever sense of family may be had once the wild oats have passed into the photograph album: circa: June, in some tumbled month, the garden hose spurting champagne and the neighbour, suspect as an affair, out of shot.

2. Working Hot

Joe Hammer makes his move on screen and the girl cries out for Mamma. A family of sperm packs up and moves house. The removal of limbs. The images dim to an impotent mauve and the stage act begins. Shes only working warm, consistent as a vibrator. She hopes one day to make big bucks; the conference room, that is, before she hits twenty. The one spotlight fixes on the portico between her thighs. The audience soughs in the dark. Strippers dont have no union, strippers dont. O Karen, your smile, cool as a cucumber.

3. Hooking For Jesus

Let us sing the rosellas who buckle under branches for the paper-bark blossom, and the far distant shadows on slate-roofs. Let us herald the Children of God, the Family of Love, progeny of the Jesus Freaks founded in Oakland, California back in the 70s. And this child, who believes Bethlehem resides in her fourteen year old womb. Hers is the pioneering spirit caught in a spectral watercolour. There she leans, under the guiding star of a single streetlight, while bluestone clouds move away over St Kilda into yellow, polite paddocks.

4. The Priest Across The Lane

in the presbytery is maxed out from the exo-bike, beads of sweat drip off his fingertips. He is purged of the last house-boy from the jungle parish in Papua New Guinea, ten years previous. He pounds at the peck-deck in his lounge room wishing the garden hand were an opera singer. Several repeats of the pole-twists and his bowels grunt like a sermon. A final glass of claret drops him to his knees ashen faced. His big bath steams plump now, full as the Jordan river. The one bedroom light burns on the lemon bush which holds its globes of fruit like a juggler stopped mid-trick.

Chelmsford Street, Newtown, Sydney

5. Corruption Is Glorified Mateship

Its Bastille Day in Sydney. The weird man in the moon falls to the night basket. Stars roll out another lottery and unemployment raises dust over the land. Tout est perdu fors lhonneur. Among thieves. Running with images I whirl out the rainbow. Spring flutters as the National flag to salute the pilot whales herding one more disastrous landing. Waves roll head-to-head round the plate of The Great South Land. Which way to Wynyard, calls the currawong. Helicopters line up like magi over Bankstown. When you look up, that old full moon makes you feel like a cowpoke, dont it?

6. Inner City Camping Blues

under a dusty-hulled moon out of an empty Hollywood lot placed there in the out-take of twilight. The bus families have arrived in convoy. Stolidly parked nearby in protest at two suburban parks up for auction in a depressed market. A couple of pitched tents and an Information Stand of press clippings. Kids play in a refuse pit between tossed aside railway sleepers. Slung about the Council Chambers fairy lights all a twinkle since the last bi-election a year back; not much in this, not even a picnic.

Tarts & Takeaways

is what hes into, he said & thats fine by me (William street in winter and pissing down is the pits) standing around in doorways waiting for some totally wasted guy excuse me! its a trick is what it is to slap his dumb meat between my thighs. Hey, Im Jasmine though I dont feel like one. Mostly bored. On each hip Ive got this tattoo, says Allan kind of smudgy & out of focus because its real old. The main man. A jerk off really in someone elses life. A lifer. Summers shit, more noise and especially groups. For hours or however long it takes & I do Spanish & French, but Im better at French. Sometimes not much happens. Idle as a lizard pointing brickwork on hot buildings, someone said. I read in this magazine once, (I meet all sorts) and this guy says, nor can I say I love you but a gentle calligraphy informs your brow. What a whacker! I know shit from clay, he just reckoned he could get away with saying nothing. Dickhead! Guys are like that with money like its some fucking secret.

Who Killed Brett Whiteley

Actually, it was Lloyd Rees killed off Brett Whiteley who couldnt live the promise of old age, the calm terror of it. Thats what Rees meant in his letter to Brett: carry the torch forward and something about being a warrior for Art. Brett, in fact, was skittled by a high powered mix of narcissism & clown. Forget what he had to, or couldnt leave behind & anything to do with High Seriousness. He got caught up in latitudes of sex where the Olgas loomed round as buttocks. Brett became his own myth when he died, and effectively slammed the door on the 60s. Maybe some other seascape, like Thera, suggestive of broken altars; looking down into the cratered harbour he might have seen beneath the lapis lazuli waters, an ivory scimitar held in the gaze of Portunus, perfectly preserved, snapped in two.

Sugarbag Carpenter

Them days all you needed was a blunt saw & an axe thrown in a

sack. If you could drive a 3" nail through a pound of butter

you got the job and thats a fact ask Bob the Builder

who shook the hand of Banjo Patterson though no-one believes him.

Theres not one finial or mullion round Boomi that hasnt

his name on it; he was there with the ox & swivel chain.

When he couldnt make a deaner he went bumper shooting in the 30s

way back before the Great War the first of the street kids in Ultimo,

and his father (hell tell you) saw electricity come to Tamworth in 1888.

From Tilba Tilba to Bondi, the last of the Sugarbag Carpenters.

Aunty Eve

who always kept the Aspidistras flying high up in her Georgian house on the windy Terrace from marble urns

had lipstick bomber pilot red & nails the colour of flame.

It was often elevenses in her lounge with Gordons served on a silver platter and THE GRAND HOTEL, DUNEDIN 1932 engraved

on the rim. Another stim dear? from the mahogany sideboard repository to dozens of weighty 78 jazz records in brown paper jackets stacked like so many ossified flapjacks.

Oh she had the most beautiful hands (in her day) they said, used for commercials in the Womens Weekly & Booths the Chemists.

Who could forget her gravel voice & make up mannequin thick

not remember her gin-sweet breath warm upon the neck? And how some Yank billeted during WW2 (here) ducky! thought she was a real living doll.

Oh such beautiful hands she had & the crystal light streaming forth from those great bay windows

onto the iron railings below.

Harold Lloyd

is stridently hanging on for dear life from the Big Clock hand reading 12:30 twenty floors up in NYC dangling a gibbet jig on the ledge beneath his girl with the bob cut screaming soundlessly as he catapults past the big businessman whose fist is foreclosed like a bank on their undying love which against all odds is saved as he grabs at the flagpole angled stark as an erection from the side of the building on the way through the office window only to upset the cooler and startle the typing pool then back down the zigzag emergency exit skittling the fire-bucket to snatch the fire-hose & bungy jump down the side of the skyscraper while the keystone cops are toppling in omnibuses furiously toward the wrong address at odds with the clanging fire brigade a cavalry charge amongst a confusion of ladders & outsize helmets pointing the way into the fray continuously as down drops Harold free falling as only a spider can to be pulled up short one foot from the side walk under the canopied foyer entrance as darling thing hurtles into the stripy canvas awning where Harold catches her in his stiff upheld arms to the astonished joy of the hotel porter

Conrad & Wells & Co.

Great to have met Joseph Conrad or for that matter, HG Wells, who said, Lets go upstairs and do nice things with our bodies, and who did just that to take a tilt at the waitress. I saw them once, Conrad & Wells, in a photograph, standing together. A courtyard setting beside a few bamboo chairs. The hour was mild in a black & white afternoon. Trees, too, green galleons shipping oars in Autumn. Conrad had, perhaps, cast off the last line of a novel: the indigo lump upon the horizon is an Island: behind it the sun spilling its treasure trove: the rent sailcloth of a sea-squall. Anyway, he could still smell the coast wobble from the deck of the Tartane, her weight to the wind. Wells, maybe, was thinking on socialism & science, and in some melancholic way of the waitress, she all ascent. By what conversations did they measure each other, these two voyagers who possessed that sense of the bigness of the world? For Wells, an electrical spark that arced across the white page, and for Conrad, each word creaking on the blocks, the woman pale before the moon, her eyes black as tornadoes at sea.

Hoppalong Cassidy

nearly topples as the Jaffas rumble down the aisle escarpment which in no way disturbs Bully Boy in the back seat corner of the matinee session on a Saturday afternoon flick with it might be Bus Stop Bev with one leg hooked in surrender over the front seat that youd think shes getting shod or something judging by the whinnying which could be some sort of scuffle but then Hoppy regains the ground & the white Arabian stallion muscling to middle screen his ten-gallon hat gum stuck atop his head & his pearl handled six shooters bristling at each hip as he thunders round the dusty back lot who has just saved the stage coach with the backward spinning wheels out of last weeks cliffhanging disaster when over it went packed with the good townsfolk but it didnt all saved by the man in the black velvet with the silver studs & turkey gobble voice much to the hand pumping appreciation of the circuit judge too old to take the high jump & this real paternal dude takes it in his stride is off next week in search of the Lost Dutchmans Gold Mine as legend has it but not for long while Bully Boy will be back sweaty as a farrier with Lemonade Lil to catch what he can with Hoppy sure is a friend indeed when a friends in need

Bob Orr

I called back down the unawakened dawn of the Tasman sea and along the East Coast from the pre-dawn light of my sleep, I called out Bob Orr soft as the punch of a howitzer to the Hokianga harbour & still further over the Waikatos billiard-table green paddocks. I hailed Bob to the Great Barrier Island & Orr to the Little Barrier, but no answer came chasing after. I sought you down the Harbour Heads & Hauraki Gulf then all about the Waitemata. I found a Thunderhead big as a container-load of sorrows & nowhere hard by were you toiling. Bob Orr I called from Meola Reef to the outlandish fishing-tackle cranes along the docks; to Jellicoe wharf, Bledisloe wharf, Marsden wharf, Captain Cook wharf to the Admiralty Steps hoping I would find you gazing out upon the glaucous slick of trawlers, or catch you guiding a snub- nosed tug under the Western Viaduct. Bob Orr I called down the unending roadsteads to Motutapu & Rakino Islands, back behind the wave screen at Okahu Bay to Freemans and St Marys Bay. And as I called into the Schooner Tavern & sought the drear interior of the Wynyard Tavern & the sailors talk told me you had fitted and trimmed your craft against every dire prediction to set sail on that other sea, Bob, the one that has no name & no horizon & is drowning you.

Dave Spencer

lived his life like barbed-wire is what an old girlfriend said, man of the river. But then, life finished you off bit-by-bit though couldnt pluck out your dingo-bright eyes. Lets face it, you were pretty much an arse-hole to those who knew you. Most of us just bash the trees without seeing the kangaroos. You saw living mostly for what it is, a part-time job with bugger all security; the occasional softness of a woman, maybe, and of course grog by the bucketful. What was it you saw at the last, Dave, when passing through the ripped canvas of a thunderstorm, lightning flashing down the Hawkesbury, a good belt of rain after?

You Dont Remember Dying

least, thats what the Old Londoner told me who didnt learn to relax till well past fifty, seated alongside his two mates: a Norwegian: Youre not the same person now as you were ten years ago. And the Irishman: I like the music its the noise I cant stand. Each one, orphaned & aphoristic, deep into his sixties. NZ born and much younger, I offered: Youre not the same person tomorrow as you were today. And then, To your arrival in Melbourne, they singly toasted. (Great-grandfather, MacCormack, arrived here in 1851 & 26 years later, in 1877, set sail for Dunedin aboard the Ringarooma). So our tale of the two cities unfolded: Sydney is get what you can. Melbourne, what have you got to offer & are we really interested. The afternoon floated by as did the trams with dry, asthmatic rush in this mellow town of bungalows & brass.

Graham Clifford

After THE DUKE HOTELs demolition, (opp. Perretts Corner) one last joke: one DB beer bottle ringed by ten green cabbages

as roseate or wreath for an empty lot. Close by, the mad bucketing fountain of Cuba Mall played on. Meanwhile, at his Manners street

studio above the music shop, Graham Clifford, renowned for his Figaro, ululated profoundly through the scales. A window framed

trolley-bus poles that, tacking, flared bluely along the wire. The maestros voice floated over harbour & city, capital & far-flung country,

far from Covent Garden. A 1930s London partied on amongst black & white photographs plastered to the wall above a battered Steinway.

On Brooklyn hills toi toi waved war plumes to the southerly gusts with unceasing applause. Through a hundred, sunblown wintry afternoons

he coached opera singers, actors, newsreaders, plucked notes off the yellow stained keys: he guided, rolled golden vowels, before them.

Bruno Lawrence

Bruno, do you remember the Me and Gus stories, way before Barry Crump got keen, when a cow cocky was a bastard you met on gravelly roads? Recall the nights playing community halls, and days making a few records, only to break a few more? Ricky Mays Jazz Combo, Max Merritt & The Meteors,

Quincy Conserve, plus, the all-stars-road-show Blerta1, travelling Aotearoa, through khaki paddocks, down thistle blown highways in that diesel bus t seasonal rhythms you doubtless gathered, drummer extraordinaire, on your final journeying off Cape Reinga, the spirit freed to ride the rain you backed

the loner to the last, death the bottom line to stave off cancer. Bruno, you did that thing. R & B, jazzman, film star (didnt Jack Nicholson say get on over to Hollywood?) but you preferred back blocks, sought small towns, river shingle, the hollows of the land, and a home around Waimarama in the Hawkes Bay.

A shifting romantic, hoon & hangman, a real joker you played yourself sans bullshit in a heap of movies; The Wild Man, Ute, you leapt from life to art without a hitch; A Bridge To Nowhere, The Quiet Earth, how you loved women, warmth by the bus load, produced that classic my 12 inch, record of the blues.

1 Bruno Lawrences Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition.

II

The Still Watches

I

Autumn tinsel floats gold on July leaves and up goes the memory flare. The carbon rod of winter burns low and the dark is a mammoth locked within ice. Watch the simultaneous reels of the seasons spinning before your eyes. A plane passes, and upsets the late sun to a shadow-print upon the wall. With barely a movement we come from the bleaker months to where the picture pans briefly, dissolves upon the softer ores of spring. Ah, but the Captains of Industry are wheeling! A building boom amongst the trees after the first few casual blossoms had fallen along suburban driveways. Observe the birds investing in the green shares of September. This side of the documentary we view in armchair safety, Our Planet: a well heeled cloud pads across the moons surface, under the vast drift-net of the night tuna boats swing light probes about the arresting waters another country claims. David Attenborough journeys through deserts to break the ancient limestone tablets, and proclaim that fossils are the visual memory of stone.

We observe in awe the Environmental Mysteries and ask, is the suns bald glare through the Glory Hole truly the pointing finger of God? Laurence Olivier puts on his final mask, looking deathly, Tell my friends that I miss them, and then fades from the ramparts. I name two from the camp of Good Attitude, builders of the beauty of this planet the givers, not takers who direct our gaze upward from the burning footlights of the closing century, toward the language of our Common Future.

II

The seeing wears away the seer: twelve years further on Voyager 2 putts out through the pinball solar system, past Neptune and beyond the reach of time. Another day in the round and the cliche of uneventful incident has not yet arrived. The balloon that is so majestic on the plump air tumbles as heavy as a plumb-bob onto the countryside, trailing its fifty seconds of life huddled to impact. The cattle scattered, the sky did not change but released names into the wispy afternoon. Then all is as it was before the tragic flight, except the calm that betokens fear. And clouds rich as coalmines gathered from the chutes of mountainsides, over the belts of grainfield to boost the corporate climates, and to market each end of the world gyrally.

A blotting paper sky, the soft tear of thunder, then lightning. Who would demand of the wise a word to steer by? Nostradamus throws his hands in the air after the event: Mark well my words, I told you so. Backward we look upon his bag of tricks, and with each new calamity a surreal rabbit lifts before your eyes. Ribbed streets! Pneumatic heartbeat! Prophecy is the Art of Boredom for one who cannot stand his own company from one moment to the next. He pulls the hat trick, feigns the future, argues the task of his breath wearily on its way. Some ravel dreams to cats cradles in whose uninhabited solitude, slowly as a yawn, wish to pull forth the superstrings. Call it a living, this space between meetings. Those encirclements that bind us together temporally.

The distant applause of rain and the weekend screaming of a girl. The screech of a trains brake as if a fire were being extinguished. The exiles brain is a frozen, grey sea-storm; from wave to wave he stares down the barrel of the moon. It is morning and the sun spreads over Nicaragua slow as the slitting of a throat. Consider Ernesto Cardinal as he rises from his bed, how he stacks his images practical as planks. Ay, the roses blood dark as diesel!

VI

He will come urgent as a food riot. Beware the man who sheds tears of mercury. His cough alone will thin out the ozone. He grips oceans with the black fingers of trawlers. His voice is a slow leakage in the Third World Night. Beware the Waste-Broker. He comes to paint your wellsprings ivory black and chrome yellow. You will know him by his industrial oath: $40 a drum! yes, only $40 a drum! Senegal, Nigeria, West Africa, the sun dangerous as a forty-gallon drum. Drums stacked on rotting pallets in the back yard of tropical forests. Drums swollen like the bellies of starved children with toxic waste.