I'd been ambling my way up through the Pyrenees with the vague intention of running with the bulls at Pamplona. I was well up in the mountains in the early morning light when a young guy in a souped up Peugeot stopped and picked me up on a precariously winding road with sheer drops along one side. And even though it couldn't have been much after eight in the morning, he was already stoned. The smell of really fragrant hashish lingered in the car.
He asked me where I was bound for in broken English and I told him that I needed to initiate myself into the world of men via getting stupidly drunk and traumatising and torturing animals that I'd never seen and would never care for again. I was, in effect, playing the tourist. He laughed maniacally as the stoned so often do and went on to explain that he was a DJ at a local radio station. He made slight overtures about getting me in to play a song or two but we mooted the idea for one reason or another. Instead we got talking about the music we knew and loved and I mentioned Midnight Oil (this is the mid eighties, remember). His whole body exploded with frantic animality. He couldn't keep his hands on the steering wheel, which caused me some small anxieties, and he gave up any attempt at speaking English. And since my French was absolutely pitiable as it still is, I couldn't determine whether he wanted to kill us both by going over the cliff or whether I'd triggered some functional form of epilepsy.
Finally the squealing and the jazz hands and the laughter settled down and he asked me if I had any of their stuff or could I play it at the station. I wasn't at all sure of my skills back then so I played it safe by producing my worn out cassette of 10 to 1 that I'd taped off vinyl back in England and he grabbed it out of my hands. From what I could make out, he'd been following the Oils since Koala Sprint and had been giving Power and the Passion a lot of airplay. Alas, to deaf ears in that far flung corner of rural France. He must have cranked the volume to maximum as he pulled a crumpled jay from breast pocket and lit it. I was the messiah for those terrifying kilometres. All efforts at conversation ceased and he flung the little car through corner after corner, entranced in the monstrous sound and at one with his personal universe.
It was some time after that that I realised he was taking me the wrong way and by the time I hopped out of that quivering vehicle, I realised I was closer to Toulouse than to Andorra.
In exchange for the cassette, he gave me a block of Afghan that - without word of a lie - could have covered the Venus mount on my palm. And no matter how eloquently I tried to explain that I couldn't take it since the border guards in Spain don't take kindly to this sort of product, especially given that it was only marginally smaller than, say, a Matchbox car, he wouldn't dream of reneging on such an honourable and equitable trade.
So here I was - drug laden and marginally annoyed on the outskirts of Toulouse. With the July heat well up by now, I took off my shirt, wrapped it around my waist, picked up the backpack and guitar and started walking towards the mountains again.
And then the adventure began.
By and by a car stopped to pick me up. A guy in his late twenties who asked me in near-accentless English where I was heading. I could only mumble something like, "Well, you may not believe this but...". He said he wasn't heading up to the border but he lived in a town not far from Foix and would give me a lift as far as that idyllic little place. From the moment I hopped in, I liked this guy. He started talking about his time in the States doing pretty much what I was doing. Just drifting from place to place in search of no great thing in particular. He'd loved living in New York for a year but felt compelled to head out on the byroads to see what else made that country tick. After three years he wearied of the road and came back to Toulouse where he got a job with Airbus as an electrical engineer.
He told me that he thought I was tricking, what with the shirtlessness and all and that's why he stopped. But once he heard my accent, he told me he'd met enough Australians to know that we were inclined to do crazy things such as walk through miles of farmland semi-naked just because we can. An amazingly easy human being. Wise and funny and not without his darkness - he was in an abusive relationship with a dancer at the Toulouse Metro. A real, wonderful, fractured human being like the rest of us. He told stories not unlike my own but with a mature writer's charm for weaving spells with tales of more roads and places not yet explored by me. And I listened, grateful for the good company, the sunshine, the rolling land but most of all grateful that I hadn't died in a crumpled burning wreck at the bottom of a cliff with Peter Garrett's polemic of Maralinga on an echoing, supranatural loop.
I spoke of life in Australia, of being a mechanic and of wanting to be a great musician one day. We spoke excitedly about Dylan's lyrics, Hesse's pastorals and meditations on Buddhism, of the cruel and stupid life in Thatcher's England, of the Cold War and cruise missiles, of protests and rock stars, of geology and astronomy. I must admit I felt a certain sorrow as we approached Foix but Dominic turned to me and said, "Frank is touring with the dance troupe at the moment so my place at Roquefixade is pretty much empty, if you want a place to hang out for a couple of weeks."
I jumped at the chance.
Roquefixade couldn't have more than a couple of hundred people living in it. Basically a few ancient houses nestled at the foot of a mountain set in verdant farmland and foothills. A nothing place with woods and creeks and even wild bears around the way, if that was to be believed. A place devoid of even a local store and an anticlimax to any story.
But every night, after Dominic came home from work laden with local Pyrenees cheese and the famous Toulouse bread as well as gin and vodka purchased in town, we would walk up the old goat track to the ruined castle overlooking the town. The castle was almost a thousand years old and for some reason, the way we went took us over a meter-wide precipice that dropped about seventy metres. It was an easy leap when we went up to drink our vodka and gin and smoke that block of hashish. But coming back - stoned, drunk, in the dark - was an altogether different business. Still, the gods must have been on our side because I'm still here. We'd just rest against the stone walls in the cool night air staring up at the glittering dome above us and laughing as if we were the oldest of friends. Singing bad harmonies on sixties pop songs. Discussing the merits of Syd Barrett vs Pink Floyd. Working through what the whole Punk and Mod resurgence scenes were all about. Heated but friendly back and forths as to whether there was a god or life after death. Life. The Universe. And our place or lack of a place in it.
Throughout the days, I'd go off walking through the woods and saying hello to the few people I met. No one thought it odd that a young man should be staying with an openly gay man in a very small farming community. A place well ahead of the curve in every respect in terms of sheer heart. No condescension, no sidewards glances, no innuendo. Mind, this may all have been borne by the fact that only one or two people there spoke anything other than a thick agrarian dialect of the area.
One weekend, Dominic opened up the garage downstairs to reveal a Citroen 2CV that he'd stripped down to a mere chassis - not hard to do, as he explained, given that the whole body was simply held on by Phillips head screws. We spent the rest of the weekend doing some four wheel erosion along the creeks and through some of the animal tracks. We even thoughtfully created a few so that the local wildlife wouldn't have to work so hard in our wake. At one point we hit something at the bottom of a creek bed that made the Citroen roll onto its side in the middle of the stream. No harm done, other than being soaked through but I marveled at how durable and light that sucker was. We practically carried it back out of the creek.
On another occasion, Dominic lent me a fishing rod to try my hand at catching trout up in the streams. He took me to a farm that supplied grubs and in a display of kinship so often found outside cities the world over, both Dom and the farmer studied every nuance of my face as I plunged my arm up to the elbow into a fish tank full of writhing maggots bred for just such an occasion. To ensure I passed the test with flying colours, I did it a couple of times - more for their approbation than for any need of bait. I've never been a good fisherman. In fact, I don't think I caught a damned thing on the two or three occasions I tried it up there.
The other event that will always stay with me was 'going veggie shopping', Dom wanted to get some veggies and eggs in. I assumed that we were driving to Foix - a mere half hour away - but he said he bought pretty much all his groceries from the local farms around the way. On route to the place, he cautioned me with dramatic gravitas not to freak out at what I was going to see. Just be cool and it would be okay. This, of course, made me freak out wildly. At least on the inside.
We pulled up at the end of a long driveway, in front of a ramshackle house built by generations that must have gone back many hundreds of years. The farmer's wife came out, all smiles and hugs and grabbed Dom in a vice-like grip that looked bone breaking from where I stood. These people really knew how to hug. The farmer emerged, every bit the surly counterpart, with a large crate brim full of vegetables and fresh, shit encrusted eggs. Large clumps of fennel, onions, garlic cloves and stalks, peas and string beans, pale golden green pumpkin and much more besides. I caught the gist of the conversation. Local talk. Friend talk. Somebody was thinking of selling up. How could they ever think of doing such a thing? Someone had bought a new tractor but wasn't too happy with it. There was noise about a co-operative being formed but it wouldn't come to much. Local talk. Friend talk.
A noise down past a cattle paddock and the parents waved. Six or seven young men started making their way towards us through the cows. I caught Dom's cautioning look and assumed that this was the 'now' moment. The men weren't overly agile and all walked with an unmistakable shamble as they closed the gate and came directly towards us with questioning open looks. They all bore features of in-breeding with one of them showing severe signs of Down Syndrome. Each of them carried a large Opinel knife - what the rest of the world would call a Bowie knife . And I was a stranger. And strangers were an unknown element. What I assumed were the two eldest sons took the knives from their belts and stabbed them into the large, nearly destroyed trestle table that they clearly used for target practice when they weren't eating off it. One turned and asked his Ma if I was English. Dominic shook his head hastily.
The knife went deep and as the son twisted and wriggled it from the thick wood, he looked me in the eye.
"...Ça va?"
I couldn't stop the catch in my throat. "Oui! Bien, merci! Et vous?" Which was the full extent of my French. Everyone went silent for what seemed a slow, painful lifetime. The son looked at the parents and Dominic and said something rapidfire and everyone - the sons, the mother, the father and Dominic - burst into the loudest laughter.
"He said you can't speak the tongue for shit.", Dominic said good-naturedly.
After that, of course, the home-made poison came out and after that I don't remember a thing other than the vertiginous, hurdy-gurdy drive home and the four day hangover.
And I never did get to run with those bulls.
Wish you were here...
