Petrol

  I had a service to do.  A Mazda 626.  The newest cars in the Mazda line. The first of the rear wheel drives. The car itself was in for its ten thousand kay service - an easy job by any means.  Plugs, points clean, check the brakes, the auto trans, oil and filter change, ensure there are no squeaks and rattles. The usual.  Save for a fuel leak somewhere which we quickly ascertained to be the fuel tank's central seal.  It would entail a replacement.  For some ungodly reason, our Stores department just happened to have one in stock, so under went the jack, up came the rear end, in went the jack stands, off came the rear tyres and I set to work.

  By loosening the retainer strap bolts a little, I could hear that there was still a substantial amount of fuel in the tank.  Ordinarily, I could undo the main fuel and breather lines and let the contents out with a slow bleed but the customer wanted the car back that same afternoon so I stuck an old bit of hose down the filler pipe, grabbed a clean, empty drum and started sucking.  After a few attempts the vapours started to make me feel light headed, so I sat on one of the tyres by the rear brakes and continued sucking until I could get a solid flow.

  Unfortunately - or fortunately, if interpreted in a certain light - the fuel was a little more resistant to my efforts than I'd expected.

  I watched my hands shimmer and fade in and out. I felt the morning breeze on my prickling skin, more gentle and urgent than the caress of any lover. The sunlight started to make small sounds. I breathed deeply between sucks until finally the fuel started to pour into the small drum. But by then the damage was done...

  I was a teenaged girl. I knew this somehow because of a pain deep in my tummy.  The coming of a period, I felt. Or perhaps hunger. A rural place.  Unidentifiable, as was the tongue I was speaking.  As was the language of those around me. Shabby, practical and ageless clothing.  European probably. Laughter and colour and dirt in every pore from my strong forearms down to my fingertips.  The smell of cut wheat from fields nearby. A large house off in the distance. Save for the hard, skin-shredding labour we were toiling through, I could never have imagined a place to be so surrendered to dreamy languor. My heart pounding, I started to cough as I laughed. A chemical cough. Nondescript faces, old before their time, laughing at me, with me. I turned my head slightly and there was green on a nearby hill. -

  "Mal?  Are you okay?"

  It was Viv. the company's old accountant. A no-nonsense soul but I loved his self-deprecating, wry wit.

  "You okay, mate?"

  "I'm fine.  I think I siphoned the stuff wrong."

  A barely audible laugh. "Just take your time, mate. You look pale.  Breathe deep.  We've all done it."

  "Is he alright?" This from the foreman a couple of bays down - head buried deep in the guts of a rotting Capella, fat arse stuck up over the front guard.

  "He's taken to putting down a tipple prior to lunch", Viv smiled at no one in particular as he walked back down the path to the front office.

  And immediately I was sucked back into the vortex.  One second I'm sitting in a workshop stinking of fuel and rubber and brake dust and engine oil and the next I'm a soldier.  Again all details a blur of terrifying sights, inhuman sounds and terrible smells. It could have been the Kaiser, it could have been Genghis Khan, Alexander of Macedon or Navarre at Dien Bien Phu, for all I knew.  All I could say with any certainty was that I was a soldier. And I was terrified. I could feel a small spurt of urine trickle into my uniform. And there was screaming off in the near distance. I knew this with suprahuman assuredness. A certainty that transcended all history and every known logic. I held no weapon and this  worried me. I scrabbled about for something, anything, and could find nothing.  I wanted to scream. Or die a quick death. Right then, in that moment, either would have helped immensely. Because I had been here forever.

  Something hard struck me and I flew painlessly above myself. Further and further from that blazing field of death. Through the chilling wind and onwards. Looking down even as the clouds swallowed the vista I wanted with every fiber of my being to forget. Rapidly out into the perfect cold of space until even the planet was nothing but a memory of a pin head.

  And somewhere out there, in some uncharted eyrie of the infinite, a pattern began to emerge.

  Triangle upon triangle. Each a living cameo trapped in every colour and hue known to the eye and some colours besides. Every sex and every age.  Every conceivable tongue and every way of life. Some images cut short, as if from an early death and some playing out within its triangular confines for time beyond my attention span. Every backdrop and landscape. Every cruelty and I'm confident now, every kindness.

  Somewhere an engine roared to life bringing me back to this shaking husk sitting on a tyre siphoning petrol in a workshop in Top Ryde.

  But I was  gone again.  I wanted to be gone again.  In that moment I wanted to be gone so badly I could have killed or died.  An abyss of sickness, the likes of which I'd never experienced and likely will never experience again.

  And now I'm a boy.  Again, the completeness of my knowledge because I was fearless and running across sand.  Scared of nothing and therefore so utterly alien to the real life I had just left behind. A storm was not too far off in the high sky and a handful of people in the distance were making celebratory and positive noises about its coming. Everything was astir and I could taste the coming water in my mouth and smell it keenly in my nose. And I was running carefree and faultless towards it. And as the first large drop splatted on my face -

  "What are you doing, goober?"  It was Wocko, the senior apprentice.

  It took me some moments to answer as the boundless pyramid of existence gently placed the me that I had been firmly back in the here and now - pale sweating skin, halting breath and uncontrollable shaking hands.

  "...I'm alright."

  "Need a hand?

  "I'm alright."

  I sat a while longer to make sure that I wasn't suddenly going to be whisked off, sucked up into another lifetime. And as the trembling subsided, I saw that the tank was now empty.  I loosened the remaining bolts but the tank was heavier than it looked.  It slipped in my petrol-soaked hands and it was only after I had put it to one side, that I noticed that a sharp burr had sliced the joint in my thumb to the bone. Still I continued to work, unpacking the new tank and removing the travel seals, unconcerned about this slightly grisly development.

  "What's that on the ground?!", Wocko again.

  " 'N dunno."

 "Is that blood?  Jesus, Connell.  It's pissing out.  What the fuck happened?"

  "The tank slipped?"

  "Greggy, where's the First Aid stuff?  Connell's cut his hand open."

  "Give us a look." The disinterested foreman.  "Well, that's a fine one.  Take him 'round to the Doc's next door.  Looks like stitches. Keep holding your hand up.  That's it."

...

  I'm looking at the small scar from that week of bleeding. Barely discernible now. But it's there yet. And I remember the small piss stain in my overalls that morning.

  I'm not spiritual (although I do think the day is coming when we need to reinvigorate that word with substance rather than the gentrified and empty meme it has become). I'm not an irresponsible advocate for petrol sniffing.  Like everyone else I've done my share of drugs.  Boasted about more substance and alcohol abuse than I've really experienced and in this respect I'm completely normal. But even though I've been straight for much longer than I care to remember, that singular experience was one I never could recreate through any means - chemically enhanced or otherwise.  And nor did I nor would I really try.

  Once in a lifetime...

It's Alright Ma (I'm only bleeding).

That whole acting at work schtick.

You're all working, I take it. Or you've all held down jobs...
Did you ever have to sit through the orientation process?  Maybe a video or a Powerpoint presentation on how to deal with your optimal working self.  Did it include any footage or slides on 'acting' out your roles?  Preparing, like a professional actor for your day behind the counter, the screen, the stall, the used cars, the podium or lectern?

Think, then, on this.

It's crap, isn't it?  It's rubbish.

You pysch yourself for Monday morning.  You do some deep breaths.  Maybe get in a jog or some gym or even weights at home before you head out into the working week traffic.

And you're... Just there again.  No significant role change. Neither good, bad, bit-part, lead, comic, straight or otherwise.  You're just you.  And you look down at your feet at some point and it may occur to you that minutes or hours ago those feet were planted in your kitchen, outside the shower stall, naked in the bedroom,.  Perhaps you do the same with your hands. They were helping you eat not so long ago in a place far more conducive to eating.  They were scrubbing off the night dust.  They were feeling the warmth of your lover.  They were embracing a child.

And now they're working.

It's not much of an act is it?  By this, I don't mean that the performance itself isn't sterling. I'm merely saying that if this is acting, why the fuck do we hold fast to celebritydom?

The fact remains that any actor worth their salt gets a lot of time to prepare for a role.  Often months. Often years, if the paycheque allows. And then, after a run of weeks or months, the role is gone, unless reprised or serialised or syndicated.  And they move on to the next one. Often with a lot of time to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

We don't get to move on.  Not in such a dramatic and exhilerating fashion, leastwise.

At the end of today's performance, we'll wake up again in our own Trumanesque worlds, with our own Trumanesque doubts or blithe ignorance. And we'll repeat and rinse ad nauseum.

We aren't actors.  These aren't acts.  When the slides or video footage rolls, turn your head away.

Breathe deep.  Make the most of it. And live, as we do, in the hope that one day, we too will enjoy time to prepare more thoroughly for the lives we want to lead. Perhaps even get time out to genuinely enjoy the snoozer moments. The sunlight.  The rain.  The vista.  The relaxed gatherings. The coming of Spring.  The middle of Autumn...

And as you close your eyes and turn away, tell the What Colour Is My Parachute crowd to go to hell.

Alright. I've gotta get back to work now.

A song before I leave then,...

The Good Thing.

New tracks up on Reverb Nation.

Hey All,

  I hate to spruik. I really do. But when I'm not writing shit up here or taking pretty pics of nature to throw up on Facebook, I record my songs.  I started playing because I didn't like what I heard on the radio way back when.  I frequently still don't.  Hence I make up my own rubbish instead of just complaining about everyone else's.

  Anyway, over the past few months I've been recording some new tracks; New Man's Eyes, Sheen and as of last night, Crane.

  I hope you get along to the site and give them a spin. I like 'em.  I hope you do too.

Cheers,

mal

Malcolm Ian Connell - Reverb Nation.

 

Dreamscope and me.

And now for something completely yaddayaddayadda...

  I love taking photos and I love the new buzz about Google's Deep Dreams.  The online app Dreamscope (Google it) makes it simple to convert pics into some seriously righteous headfucks.

Here are some of my rather poor efforts so far. Some photos I took myself.  Others are heroes of yore brazenly lifted directly from the 'net.

Alice Cooper. Age: Nuclear.

Dali and friend.

A glasshouse in the winter of its life.

Talking Heads.

A Magpie apres le deluge etc.

Jayne Mansfield and friends.

A spider flower out in the yard.

A truck I saw in central NSW.

Rubbish from the neighbour's front yard.

Zappa on a good hair day.

And of course, the usual eater egg song to round things out.

People take pictures...

Roquefixade.

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...
  

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.