A year on, Jake.

We were doing just under ninety miles an hour down Beecroft Road.
I remember because I was looking at the speedo, at your stupid smile, at the smartarse in the Mercedes dogfighting us through a run of three orange lights, then back at the speedo. Consistently hovering around ninety.
You could never stand losing and I was ever the gutless bastard.
But I wasn't scared of the dying.
I was only scared of dying on somewhere as unworthy as Beecroft Road.
I had grand and morbid designs. Going off a cliff outside Ventimiglia or disappearing on the outskirts of Roquefixade. At a pinch, stone cold sober and without a deity in sight somewhere and nowhere on the Nullarbor. At least that would have been the way I would have liked to have gone, brandishing a tattered copy of Dos Passos' USA in one hand and a Rickenbacker 360 in the other. And just vanishing.
But no. You were determined to make it here and now under a blue dome devoid of any clouds to give perspective.
On Beecroft fucking Road.
We beat the yuppie fuck,of course.
And we didn't get pinched.
But that stupid forced laugh you always gave, playing victor over a battle you were never sure you should have won. Never quite convinced even of how you had won it.
Afterwards we all hooked up at the local and everyone said, "Where the fuck did you two get to?"
They wouldn't have believed me if I said I'd just glimpsed hell. And suburban heaven.

Remember me.

"You are the only censor..."

(I realised I hadn't posted for some time but being as lazy as I am, I couldn't think of anything new.  Here's an old Facebook word-squiggle that I posted a year or so ago...)

I burst through the door to the tiny flat.  Since I only had visiting rights to see my Mum every third weekend, bursting through the door was both the meta- and the pre-language of those fear and laughter soaked years.

The view from the balcony took in the Friday night snarl of Devlin Street and the westering sun falling immense and slow beyond the ridge of the black and purple valley of West Ryde.  Before the incurable virus of developers.  Before the apartment blocks came.

Peter had run away from the Old Man two years earlier just prior to his fourteenth birthday.

With a deft manner, he stole up behind me and put me in a headlock - entirely devoid of malice - that only big brothers the world over seem to know how to achieve with any degree of mastery. Dragged me, wriggling and fumbling, into the room that had belonged to our eldest, John, for a time.  But John was back in jail now or off roustabouting with a circus somewhere, dusty and far away.  

And since one of our strongest family assizes was that of finders keepers, Peter had wasted no time in putting up Easy Rider and Willy and the Poor Boys posters and claiming the small bedroom for his own. I was still rubbing my neck with a drama and affected injured pride belying my full seven years when Peter clamped a large set of headphones over my ears, gently placed needle to vinyl and a heavily flanged voice informed me that I was the only censor.  If i did not like what I heard, I had a choice.  I could turn the voice off.

And Alice Cooper proceeded to write home to mother.

That afternoon sun set as countless others have done.

But I remember that one clearest.

Lay down and die, goodbye.

Of teachers, of mothers, of fathers, of monsters.

There may yet be truth in the fact that when we remember something, we're actually only remembering the last time we remembered that event.
I'm not sure who's alive and who's dead now but as the years move on, I can no longer be certain that it happened.  Yet it did.
My teacher in fourth class was a wizened old Lithuanian man who was respected, if not revered, by at least two generations of my siblings before me. He called me Professor Malco. More than likely because I was a smartarse know-it-all a lot of the time. And though his moniker for me implied some small exaltation, he wasn't above giving me four or even six with the cane because he thought I was talking out of turn. Which was almost never true.
One day Teacher X had no sooner walked into the filled classroom than he said without his usual gold-toothed smile, "Professor Malco, would you please follow me?". Our classroom was in the same ancient brick building as the Principal's office - a matter of a few yards, really - but the cloud of uncertainty that hung in the air like death itself made it one of the longest walks of my life. Had I so monstrously done wrong?  Broken or stolen one too many toys?  It was bad enough that the year before I'd had to forfeit a spelling bee prize because the day I was to accept the prize was also the day I was to get the cuts - "six in all" as he liked to call 'em - from Deserthead; the most feared teacher in the whole school because of his soldierly grip when he shook your shoulders and his lead weighted canes. All of this left me with but one choice.  Wag school. And so a precedent was set.
But I digress.
Teacher X ushered me into the Principal's office and to my surprise, I saw my mother standing there, together with my old third class, second class and first class teachers. With so much erudition in that small office, there wasn't a lot of standing room. I had no idea what this was all for. I remember how good it looked outside beyond the window where some kids were weaving cane baskets in the sunlight beneath the large Tannoy poles.
"Mac, the Principal and these teachers want to ask you a few questions and you don't have to say anything you don't want to."  I nodded. Mum worked up around the corner at the local Funny Farm as it was locally known.  She'd been a Domestic there for a few years.  And would remain so for the next two decades.
The Principal began. "Your dad wants to take you off to Perth to live.  Is that true?" I bit my lower lip and nodded. "And you don't want to go?"
I didn't know what to say.
"Malcolm?".
"My friends are here and Mum is here. And Pete and Helen and everyone is here."
"You told Teacher X that your dad had taken you to the police.  Why did he do that?  Were you naughty?".
"I keep walking away to Mum's. But he always finds out and sends the twins to pick me up or gets me along the way."
"And what did the police do?".
"They showed me where the drunk people live at night and told me I'd live there if I didn't stop running away."  There was much slow and deliberate bobbing of heads to all of this.  Keen attention from their faces. I still didn't know what I had done wrong. The Principal felt satisfied with the answers I supplied but the lines on his face only seemed to etch themselves deeper as I spoke.
The Principal nodded to Miss Y, my third class teacher who we all wanted to be hugged by because she was beautiful. And we all wanted to be kissed by her because she smelled nice and was warm all the time.
"Malcolm, would you like to stay here with us?  At this school?"
I nodded slowly, still expecting a trap of some kind.
She continued, "How would you like it if you came to live with me and everyone here except your Mum. Only for a few weeks until your dad went away and the police weren't coming around."
"Why?"
"Because then you could eventually live with your Mum and you wouldn't have your classes disrupted because we could do them with you at home. But you wouldn't be able to tell anyone about it.  Not for a long time. Could you do that, do you think?".
It was then that I saw my Mother's tears. She didn't encourage an answer one way or the other.  She just let the tears slowly build and fall. I looked from face to grave face.
I saw immediately that I would no longer have to wait three weekends of every month just to spend time with Mum and my siblings and friends for forty eight short hours.  I saw a secure place for my pushbike up in Mum's flats, in my mind's eye. I saw days spent with creeks, waterfalls, eels and wolf spiders, skateboards, office blocks and new construction sites with sand piles with buried brick shards.
I saw bus rides into town for five cents and low drifting nimbus clouds of cigarette smoke in front of the Friday night telly as we all shushed each other trying to watch the movie in that tiny flat. I saw everyone laughing in the flat. In all the flats.  Friends from Hungary, Iran, Finland, Belgium, Canada, Texas, England, Germany, Kenya, Norway. I saw all of my friends and all of their parents. I saw records on the carpet and kettle elements in need of minor repair.  I saw days spent in the library playing chasings and annoying people who foolishly wanted to read. I saw fish and chips and drinking milk from the carton. I saw flattened cardboard boxes and steep grass hills behind the car dealership on Saturday afternoons.
I saw paradise.
But something started in my head.  A place of indistinction where words and pictures swarm but never resolve. A place below the waterline of day to day life. Insect thoughts. And the swarm grew even though I was not outwardly panicked. Funneling out of some dark recess in sharp slivers that prevented me from forming even the simplest of  sentences. Until finally a handful of words rose up.
"What would he do to her? More?"
I saw so many beautiful things in those long moments. So many things rightfully mine for the taking. And I saw him.  And words such as Magistrate and Desk Sergeant and images of the local pub where they all drank.
And I looked at each of the faces in the Principal's tiny office and I shook my head almost imperceptibly.
No longer being able to stop the wrack that was breaking over me.
Mother

I keep thinking of that photo of Grant.

I get fixated on things that burst with importance one moment only to be of no consequence an hour, a day, a week or lifetime later...
I've spent days - weeks and months, in fact -  idly thinking of a picture of Ulysses Grant.  One of his last. Crowned by a slightly worn top hat, with a scarf wrapped 'round his throat hiding the scars of the unsuccessful operations for the disease that would soon enough kill him.
What a life. An indifferent soldier at Westpoint up on the Hudson. A poor entrepreneur, reduced to selling tinder on the streets of St Louis by his early thirties.  By all accounts a strange and shambolic man. A failure in the eyes of everyone except his long suffering wife Julia. An occasional dauber in oils and charcoals. Quite fine at it too. Proud, in fact, only of his occasional painting and horsemanship.
And then the war broke out and he slowly set about putting down the rebellion. Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Shiloh of course. Savagely fighting Longstreet, who many years before had been best man at his wedding. Heartbreaking success after success until the desperate, brilliant Lee brought him to a standstill outside Petersburg where hubris got the better of Grant for which his army paid a terrible cost in that protracted south/left flank slide. A strange and shocking conflict.
He did all of this often very drunk.
"Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.", Sherman was to say at the height (or rather one of the Union nadirs) of the war.
And Grant sits on that porch, looking up from the newspaper.  All of this past, I imagine, playing like a thread-worn home movie over again and again in his head.
And later, how he became a two term President after the war. Posterity according his Administration small praises but for the corruption, cronyism and whiskey-for-all approach. But some good... Some good... So he might have thought in that photo.
And after the Presidency, a world tour - feted by kings and queens the world over. A fine home in Manhattan bought for him by friends upon his return. But seemingly all for nought as yet again bad investment left him and his family destitute by his early sixties.
And there he is, reading the scandal sheets between bouts of memoir writing. His whole life played out somewhere beneath that damned knitted beanie and the top hat.
But it doesn't end there, does it?  The memoirs restored the family fortune for generations to come.
I look at the photo and I think sometimes life is a mood. An illness or disorder. Cyclothymia. And people are thrown up and down on the waves of its caprice - ever bashing their heads on the ceiling of beauty, ever being dashed upon the rock and sand of heartache and uncertainty.
Masters and mistresses of nothing.
Swan, swan, hummingbird.

Dial Connecticut

Going through a stack of old backup CDs and rifling through lyrics from christ knows when.  This one must have been mid-90s. I got hung up on the name of the state for some reason. I may yet get around to recording some music for it, just to annoy myself and everyone around me.
"Dial Connecticut.
Lay me down and hope to keep
Some small madness in my sleep
For to guide these days of victory
Knock me out and pour me fire
In a cheap shot at desire
And a way to make more flyer points.
Kick the crap out of the dream
Watch your hopes melt like ice cream
In a puddle called reality
Winding all the way and back
Over seas and rocks of crack
To the land of full lipped smiles.
In a heartbeat you abrade
Everything that you once saved
By the gun beneath the bar
Slap the pussy magnets down
Exiled to another town
Till you turn into the minotaur.
Type the bat piss on the screen
Where it clearly looks obscene
Call your parents ‘round to read it all.
You have broken all your clothes
You’ve got nowhere else to go
And you’re eating off the sidewalk.
Wield your tiny plastic sword
Fill the stab wounds with your words
As you waltz upon the funeral pyre
Rate the incest of your thoughts
Give out everything you’ve bought
To the old rockstar’s retirement home.
If it isn’t you it’s me
Check your bank account for free
With the drug-free village racketeer.
All the sets are white and pure
But you’re standing there unsure
If you’ll ever see the sun again.
Tell your loved one’s you’re insane
They can help you take the blame
When you bring home your first million.
Live the gilt-edged, glad-wrapped life
Take your neighbour for a wife
And we’ll see how well it suits our needs.
Scratch that nineteen year old itch
While you lay there getting rich
And remember who your friends are
When you’re down beside the pool
Filled with alcohol and fuel
Keep the matches near for safety’s sake.
Over dialogue and dance
This recycled, tired romance
All the travel agents want your fame.
Soft of voice and heart of mould
Swimming endless rooms of gold
With the hired assassins at the door.
Old Bugattis in the garage
As you take on the barrage
Of the flatt’ry & photographers.
With this new song in your head.
There’s a library left unread
In a house built by contented slaves.
You don’t need to run no more
While you’re stretched out on the floor
As your loved ones dial Connecticut."

April 25th, 2015.

Anyone who read my little Facebook blurb the other day on Georg - the former Hitler Youth member, must surely see that I have a complex view of who and what we are. As living, historical entities. As nations. As tribes and as individuals.
I tend to exercise my passive aggression each year around this time by maintaining the beer palace mantra of 'Lest we forget? We already fucking have!". I promise not to trot that one out today for the sake of retaining at least a few friendships.
I grew up steeped in the vestiges of war - from the exalted and sublime to the laughingly tragic. Together with a number of friends, my whole youth was geared towards joining the army after I left school, so that I might not only follow in the footsteps of the family heroes but more importantly remove the tarnish of my own kin who were not so very self-sacrificing. All of this, however, was not to be. It was on that fateful day at the army medical I learned something hitherto unknown to me or anyone else in my family which was, I was born profoundly deaf in my right ear. My world collapsed in those moments on Castlereagh Street.
My father was acknowledged by the the people of Leichhardt and the wider community as a coward and opportunist (albeit a very charismatic one, it appears) throughout WW2. His brothers, by contrast, were volunteers in the 9th which served so famously at Tobruk and elsewhere. My mother's brother was a coast watcher who was later captured by the Japanese army in New Guinea and subjected to horrific and inhuman depredation. Yet another uncle would put away more dexamphetamine as a navigator on PBY Catalinas out of Rathmines and forward bases, than any drug pig I've known on Civvy Street. Bear in mind that they were all no older than the age of twenty three by war's end. Jesus fuck, I was still trying to get laid and wasted at twenty three. Weren't you?
So... This day... It was Winston's idea and to all intents and purposes it should have worked. It was bold, it was a potential war-shortener. You know what? I want to digress for a minute. I hear people call it the Battle of Gallipoli. It was a fucking campaign. It wasn't over in a day. It was over eight fucking months in a hell that not even the devil's own could have devised. Eight months.
Why am I writing this? I suppose I want to know - need to know - what it is we must not forget? Were Ypres and Passchendaele more significant to the fundament of being the nation we are today? I believe the answer is yes. And I believe that I could win that argument hand's down.
Gallipoli was as much bloodloss and heartache for every British boy as son of Australia who fought for those scant miles too. It seems to me that the only thing that we must not forget is that Australian should hate the British. And the British should hate their own. And nobody should take combat orders from anyone who hasn't fired a shot in the last three decades which was so often the case on that shoreline. But if hate is the salient legacy, then I'm in favour of forgetting. Our involvement with seemingly every conflict after Korea (50-53) belies all good intent that had gone before and makes a mockery of those hallowed words that burn beneath the flame that should never go out.
Is this my advocacy for war? Don't be fucking daft. All sentient things war. I don't like it. You don't like it. But all living things war. I have unbound and open respect for friends who have served and serve yet in the ADF. I think they didn't 'join to kill'. Not most of the peers my age anyway. Perhaps they too did it for the most unfathomable yet meaningful of reasons. Is all this sour grapes from a failed wannabe solider? No. Almost all my ex-mil friends immediately became hippies, waxheads and tree-huggers of one kind or another. I got there first without the terror of the parade grounds tedium. Win.
Do I think we can rise above our base natures? For the most part, yes. Something infinitely better, more vibrant and alive - and life affirming, holding more and deeper promise invariably comes out of working together with the swords to ploughshares approach. Something that transcends flags and borders, commercialised memories and worn-down memes.
Uncle Bob, I'd raise a glass to your ghost. But you gave the bottle away. And so did I. So let the bullshit stop here.
For the rest of you, thanks for coming to amateur hour.

History.

He had the gentlest smile. And the saddest eyes.
Between mouthfuls of food in a picture-postcard cafe somewhere off the Konig Boudewijnlaan in a picture-postcard forgotten corner of the world he told me he had been a butcher since he was a boy.
His pride and joys were his Mercedes Benz and his son.
I was eating some kind of salad and pomme frites with mayonnaise from a large paper cone and he was relishing every mouthful of a cutlet. I hadn't had a bath in days. Maybe weeks. And he spoke English with a soft but unmistakable German accent.
The sky that day was kind. To us and everyone else in western Belgium and the waitress sat with us, fascinated by our respective stories. He turned on the charm in a way I've seldom seen even to this day. He could have had her on a plate as he regaled us with tales of life in Germany through the wild sixties and the austerity days that felt like lifetimes following the second world war.
And now, here he was, thinning hair and deep lines of a man who had seen much of life. He was impressed by my accentless German and my cheap rendition of Heine's Die Lorelei. I apologised for only ever having learned the first two verses but both he and the waitress were delighted beyond knowing. And we laughed into the afternoon.
Back then, in that place, the drink drive laws were very different and we must have knocked off two bottles of fine wine, to say nothing of the beers before the meal. My guitar was missing two strings so that ruled out a singalong and serenade of Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand. But the laughter was enough. The food, the laughter, her flashing hazel eyes, his soft voice. These things were enough for me.
The waitress (what was her name?!) was called back inside when the holidaying families started rolling in. But Georg and I took all the time in the world, saying nothing with profound and lasting ease.
By and by, Georg rose from the rough-hewn wooden bench and with a notable Teutonic grace belying the flood of alcohol we'd just put away, walked in and paid the bill.
Back in the quiet car we were wending our way north through the heart of Antwerp when he looked at me in a way that frankly weirded me out, then smiled straight ahead at the road in front of him.
"Is it a strange thing for a man to say to someone he has not long known that it has been a pleasure travelling with him, if only for a short while?"
"I guess not." The guitar fell to one side in the back seat with a muffled, hollow sound.
The traffic wasn't too bad but I could tell he was erring on the side of caution in case the city cops were about with their clumsy breath testers.
"I was in the Hitler Youth. Did I mention this?"
I looked at him.
"Yes. I was thirteen or a little bit older and they gave me a Mauser gun and put me together with a few other boys and old men I'd never known. It's funny because the town I grew up in was not very large but I always remember thinking, "Who are you people? I have never seen you before." But I never fired a single shot in anger. The Americans came not very long after and that was my illustrious life as a soldier come to an end. You are how old?"
"Twenty one. You should have given that woman your phone number." This made him laugh loudly. He laughed the length of a city block.
"And what would I have done with her at my age?"
I couldn't answer for him but from a twenty one year old's perspective, I was thinking the list would be endless.
"I will have to leave you up here at the start of the Bredabahn, my young friend. Where did you say you were heading?"
"Groningen."
"Yes. Up in Friesland. With some luck you will get a lift pretty much the full length. It's not that far." And added with a wink. "Even when one says it's just a country away, in kilometers, it doesn't work out so very far."
Then that long sideways look again.
"My son was around twenty one when he died. You look so much like him. You must forgive me. He died serving his conscription. Hit by a car on the base where he was stationed. Ah, here we are! You take care, Malcolm. Thank you for the finest day I've enjoyed in years."
"You too Georg. And the thanks are very much mine." I caught one last look at his sad and soulful face as I reached for the guitar.

Fortress