the ex-pat: Introduction. The New Millennium & Chapter 1: A BRIEF STINT IN BRISBANE, FEB 2000.

ΧΧΧΙΙ.

“There was a Door to which I found no Key: There was a Veil past which I could not see: Some little Talk awhile of Me and Thee There seemed and then no more of Thee and me” — (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam).

The difference between an image and a vision is that an image is produced by the world, reflected from the eye of the artist, and then set down. A vision emanates from that dark living chasm in the mind, and opens a spectrum of colours which unfold and multiply, just as the frequency of the vibration of the light varies by increasing or decreasing, and by t5he decree of Ananke rather than one’s individual Will — to the extent that such a thing can even be said to exist, and and so it acts lawfully, irresistibly, ineffably, ineluctably, and the vision sprouts its very own features that had no origin in the mind of the so-called Visionary — who is really more of a witness or journalist, or botanist, whom, like Joseph Banks, dips his pen with a steady hand into the glass-well full of Indian Ink, and replicates the physical attributes of the corpses of insects, birds or flowers, that have been pierced through their stems, wings and abdomens in order to provide a perfectly transfixed model for him to reproduce, just as some smelter in your mind pierces would-be fleeting visions with mental nails, until they either crystalize, and a poem is created, or else they are lost to Oblivion, that demented hedge-maze filled with old men and women search in vain for their identity, like one of Pan’s Lost Boys searching for his marbles.

Some demon has tainted our minds and their grasp on Identity and Time, and poured the hissing contents of a jug of corrosive acid, neutralizing any structures or even patterns we might have made to tell the world something about who we were, until, in its waves that return set after set eternally licking at our originality, until all is null and void.

Jacaranda in Newfarm

CHAPTER 1: A BRIEF STINT IN BRISBANE: FEBRUARY 2000.

It was the year of our Lord 2000, when many thought that the vengeful hand of Armageddon would reap just punishment on our miscreant species, either in the form of Y2K or something more classical, but sadly New Year 2000 came and went, and brought with it no earth-shattering (or cleansing) disaster, despite the fact that that’s what everyone secretly wanted!

It’s like one of those mysteries of Faith, like the Immaculate Conception, and the Trinitarian Monotheism, only in this case the paradox resides in that one greatest mystery of all, and the door to which we find no key —

Death!

Death is the same answer to the world’s 2 most opposite questions, being...

“What is our greatest fear?”

and —

“Wherein lies our most secret hope for salvation?”

Yet the Year 2000 provided no knew key at all. We wanted sweet oblivion, like a mind-shattering orgasm, but it didn’t happen. I didn’t even get pissed on New Years Eve. I just sat there holding hands with my girlfriend, and watched 12 o’clock come and go, as with a melancholy sigh I stared at the little waves rolling in to the shore. They hadn’t changed a bit. In fact they even seemed to take on an exaggerated regularity, just to kick me in the nuts. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”, says the song, but most people, in my experience, are annihilated through a process of erosion. The world ends for someone every day, and Yeats had it closer than Neil Young when he said it ends “…not with a bang, but with a whimper”. I was determined that I would avoid the process of erosion. I tried to identify the cause-of-death for most people as I saw it. I came up with one answer- love. Love was the succubus which ate away at my freedom of spirit, and I sat there holding hands with my girlfriend, feeling more resentment for her than the nuclear bomb.

I had left my girlfriend in Cairns. I was broke and needed to go to Taipei for this teaching job. I had never taught before, but the money looked good and I was desperate for any kind of change. I didn’t know why I wanted to go specifically. I guess it was something to do with the rock ‘n roll ethos of wanting to “keep rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ rollin’”. I loathed routine! Every time I felt things beginning to get comfortable I trembled with fear for my freedom. I wasn’t so stupid as to can my girlfriend before I left though. I was cynical enough to know that I might end up alone and miserable and that it was much better to be in a mildly discontented state of mediocre dissatisfaction than hopelessly lonely, and so I had arranged that she would come and meet me in Taipei after three months. I knew I’d probably miss her by then, even if it was just the comfort of familiarity.

My girlfriend’s name was Sandra Dee. She loved me without reserve, and from the moment that we met had given herself to the utter exclusion of all others, liking nothing more than to just watch over me in my sleep, like a guardian angel. This I took to be as natural as the sunrise, and thus became inured to its importance. An arrogant lordling, I pranced around like an upstart, preening myself and nourishing my pride with the blood of her worship, until, gradually, she began to die. At least the child of love flew, as it, through years of attrition, had felt itself fade away like a chimera, but, eternally true, waited ‘till the death-knock to leave forever, and unmask the fraud that, I had become. My girlfriend’s name, I say, was Sandra Dee. Or at least it was before she left me, but at the time that this story begins she was still firmly under my evil spell. Of course, when the end came I deserved it, but we should talk about that later. This is just the beginning, and so picture me if you will, as the model boyfriend, awash in wedded bliss. If you can picture this, then maybe I can interest you in a used car, or one of these Rolex watches.

My romance with Sandra Dee had been very traditional. She was an 18 yo virgin when we met. She was beautiful and had sweet-smelling hair and long legs, and it was on about our third date that she let me pull her knickers down, and her eyes rolled up and she trembled in anticipation, waiting for me to touch her there…

“What! He touched you WHERE?”

… I was half pissed at that first de-frocking and breathed in her fear and desire, like a vampire with a big smile, moving slowly to prolong it all, knowing how immortal such a moment is…no-one can say that I missed the great moments.

But the time that this story begins is six years hence from that mellifluous snapshot, and those same years which I may record elsewhere, though some of their contents may here surface, are as a catalogue of vice. I had spent the last 12 months in Byron Bay surfing and jerking off, and I figured that I could jerk-off just as easily anywhere and learn a few things while I was at it. That’s why I chose Taiwan. Also I reasoned that Chinese is a useful language. I left my poor girl in Cairns and flew to Brisbane- that’s where my flight left from.

Brisbane is a lot of things to a lot of different people, and if Blake could see a world in a grain of sand, imagine how many of them he could see in this city. For me Brisbane was defined by a couple of mates, but mainly by its women, and the ones that I knew were all flaming lesbians. It was the lesbian-capital of Australia, and they were all gorgeous looking and intelligent. Watching them was like watching Pinocchio trying to become a real boy- they were so serious about it all. They were accomplished members of the community too- all concert musicians, academics, cafe owners, and multi-lingual software analysts with political persuasions, topical opinions, and fashionable apartments in New Farm or West End. They were champagne socialists and soft core grunge-heads. Of course there were the butch, angry, resentful misfits floating around as well, but they didn’t interest me, and so they faded into the background. Brisbane, when the Jacarandas are in bloom, is like a long green dress with big, silvery-blue sequins, worn, of course, by a femme lesbian.

All around the clean beauty of this fine young city are draw-bridges. Under these bridges you can see the old, green-ferries zigzagging their way up and down the stream, and the new, blue ‘Citycats’, which bounce across the water like Frisbees. Brisbane has its share of skeletons and stories. There’s a bald hill between Fortitude Valley and the city which was supposed to be the site of a cathedral, but the old, Arch-Bishop absconded with the 20 million. There’s a wing of the University of Queensland which was donated by the guilty last wish of a murderer who had axed someone to death, stolen his fortune, and become rich, and, having become one of the city’s leading citizens, only confessed his action on his deathbed, and made the gesture to the city as an act of contrition. West End used to be a sacred place for aboriginals, and they’ve been given back a spot called Musgrave Park. The area is quite a little hotchpotch of freak stories. There is, for example, a monument in Edmonston street called Stefan’s Needle (Dick), which the mysterious/notorious hairdresser Stefan bought himself after the expo in the 80s, and it’s right next door to the house where David Malouf grew up as a child.

Brisbane was the location of the lesbian vampire killers, who, after having hailed down a taxi, seduced the driver into the park and then stabbed him and cut his head off, before drinking his blood. After they were apprehended, they were brought in chains before the only psychiatrist diabolical enough to assess them- none other than my mate Maximus. It would have been quite a sight, these young lesbian vampires in the presence of their lord and master Lucifer. They would have hissed and whimpered as he ordered the two stocky male nurses to inject them with some jungle juice with a brand name ending in ‘…eine’, and drag them off to a padded cave.

Brisbane sees itself as the Seattle of Australia — generous, laid-back, and serious in the naive way that people are serious when they still think they can make a difference. All of this is quite an achievement in the wake of the nepotism and corruption of the period leading up to and beyond the Bjelke-Peterson/Russ Hinz era, which defined Brisbane and all of Queensland for fifty years as the Mobile of Australia, rather than the Seattle. Looking at the city directly across the river from the cliff at Kangaroo Point, it’s like Camelot- with the silver river snaking around it like a cummerbund-moat, and the botanical gardens and QUT like a band of green moss inside the silver, and then silver again as the skyscrapers point like stalactites to the cloudless Queensland sky.

The day I arrived Toad picked me, and “Poop-poop!” we trundled off to his place for a “quiet one” promising each-other and ourselves that we wouldn’t overdo it. Actually it always starts out the same- we look at each other like a man looking into a mirror and seeing the Devil, and then we frown and tisk-tsk, saying to the other “Now don’t try to lead me down the path of wickedness my droogie, for thou art by nature and anon a tempter”. So we started off slow and civilized. A walk down to Southbank, and up and down the big bend where the Kodak pool is, that marks the section between the Story Bridge and the Jolly Bridge- this is the path we used to run together every day when we lived here with Maximus….those were the days. Back then the boys were doctoring around at this and that hospital in Brisbane, and I was putting together a book of poems that I and a group of rapscallions in Cairns had written and been funded to produce. I was a devout boy then, forever practicing Tai-Chi on the lawn, and meditating for hours on end. Not a cigarette to be found near my lips, and a vegetarian to boot.

Then the boys would come home and we would run up Southbank. To look at us we would be best described respectively as- a poser, a prancer, and a shuffler. When we got home and showered Maximus would produce two bottles of 15 dollar wine — which is pretty good quality in Australia — and Toad would begin his opening statements with an assertion like this…”Bobby Fischer is the Beethoven of chess, and yet he is superstitious. It was he, I think, who hired a number of psychics to sit at a tournament and project bad vibes at his opponent”, or “God existed before Shakespeare, but Macbeth didn’t.” That was a typical beginning to a typical evening in those times, and they were, to quote Bryan Adams (which I don’t do very often) “the best days of my life”. What we all had in common was a love of beauty and grace; we all loved and adored women. Maximus viewed most of them with a degree of suspicion however, and the thing that pissed him off the most was when he’d be thrust into a situation where he would be forced to talk to a “spunk”, and she would disdain to get into a conversation with him because he wasn’t her ‘type’ — he hated that and used to fume and rave about how “fucked” some of them are. He used to talk about men in our society in terms of the theory of ‘A’ gorillas and ‘B’ gorillas. It goes something like this: “The ‘A’ gorilla owns all the women, from amongst whom he chooses any (and as many) partners as he wants. The ‘B’ gorilla is, to a lesser extent, in the same position. Now it must be borne in mind that, even whilst the ‘A’ gorilla is busily engaged with a female, all the females still belong to him, but are just waiting to be summonsed.” “Now there is also another kind of gorilla”, amongst which class Maximus and I belong — he because of his withered ness, and I because of my socio-economic undesirability — we belong to the third category- “the Sneaky Fucker. Now the Sneaky Fucker possesses no women whatsoever, but is forced to sneak in while the “A’ and ‘B’ gorillas are busy, get what he can, and then get out- hence the name.” Maximus identified so strongly with his character as the Sneaky Fucker, that when he told girls he was a doctor they just wouldn’t believe him. He just had the aura of the about-to-be-rejected, or perhaps it was just an absence of the arrogance that was always so manifest in the characters of Toad and myself. Toad on the other hand was an ‘A’ gorilla, and this might explain his attitude, which is one more to be expected from an ‘A’ gorilla than a couple of sneaky fuckers like Maximus and I. For him the dilemma was not getting any, but choosing someone worthy of the A list.

Toad is quirky in the way that certain literary mad-scientists (of whom there are few and so perhaps this needs some explanation) are quirky- a way which is utterly inscrutable. He doesn’t have a tic or a twitch. I’ve known people who have uncontrollable tics. One mate, since his girl dumped him, plays with one or the other ear, frantically pulling and rubbing at it, like he’s trying to erase some indelible spot like Macbeth. Another one seems to be constantly shooing a fly out of his face or a hair out of his eyes or something. Even Maximus attacks his ear when he gets annoyed, jamming his thumb in it and flicking it out like someone trying to strike a wet match. Toad on the other hand was unpredictable in his quirks, and I guess they can’t really be called tics because they weren’t repetitive self-attacking physical actions, but rather unpredictable and strong emotional reactions to seemingly unimportant details. Let me explain….Toad observes things that “normal people” would scarcely give their time to. He’s meticulous and finicky over things which appear to me to be incidental. An example is, if we ever went out somewhere and I had a lot of junk in my trouser pockets it would drive him nuts. He would express passion about a person’s décor, or the placing of a certain chair in a room, not (don’t get me wrong) like it were a matter of grave importance, but as though it were just obvious- the stuff of common sense, and that whoever overlooked this before must have been sleepwalking. The great thing was that I could never predict what his reaction to any given question would be. I thought I knew him! What did I know? It amused me endlessly to pose him questions about inanities, knowing that I would get an instant and impassioned answer in the affirmative or negative, though I could never predict which it would be. I might say “What do you think of that picture on the wall”, or “What about that girl’s dress”, or “…this book”, or “…his career”, and he would snap off an answer while the echo of the question was still in my mind- “Are you serious it’s shit”, or “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen”. What was best is that these unrehearsed and off-the-cuff responses were always delivered as though they were the product of long deliberation, and I knew that he’d thought about this or something similar before, or, if not, that he felt that he’d reached a point where all life’s contingencies had become clear as glass, requiring only the brief attention of his all-discerning eye- “So what do you think Toad about Soandso’s receiving suchandsuch an award?”, (I think it was Mike Willisee) and in a second- “Life time achievement for what? His best interviews were sensationalist and shallow; he’s got a trophy bride because he hasn’t grown up yet, and he has no discernable opinion on anything despite over the years having inadvertently supported, at different times and simultaneously, both polar opposites of our political spectrum, and without furthering the cause of either.”…..”So that’s a big ‘thumbs down’ then” I say, “Abso-fuckin-lutely”, he concludes with a “Humph!”

We finished our walk around South Bank, after having stopped for a look in the State Gallery, at what was (until I went to the Louvre) my favorite sculpture in the world, and at some of Australia’s best paintings. 3-Cups, my feminist children’s writer-bitch (don’t ask me if she writes for feminist children), finished work and came to meet us at Toad Hall, and we all went down to New Farm Park, an elbow of green land dotted with old brown brick blocks of flats, and new shiny ones, and many colored deco ones from the 50s or the 60s. It rests on a tight bend in the river and culminates in old rose gardens where you can sit and see musicians in the rotunda, or watch the ferries going by. Toad had to shoot off for a night shift of anal probes and he told me he’d come to see me off at the airport the next day, leaving me in the loving hands of 3-Cups.

So off he went to work, and she and I went back to her apartment for some of adult fun. After our little catch-up celebration (we see each other about two weeks a year now, but back then it was a lot more often), we had arranged to go and meet my funny friend- Coconut, who was picking up the ‘Taranasaurus’ tomorrow, and we were all going to go for a drinky-poo in the valley. I was excited to show Coconut the Valley, with all it’s night life- “Ric’s bar” and “Fat Boy’s”, “The Wickham”, and the “Empire”.

As we drove down there the 7/11 lights flashed, dull through habit, and lairy through their plastic guards; the whores on Harcourt street dry cleaners’ corner were watching each other’s arses and wishing that the cops weren’t as malicious as they are stupid…although I’m sure they didn’t think in those terms….they probably thought “How can such dumb bastards be so mean?”, and the cops were probably thinking “How can such young girls be so fucked up?”. In any case they needed each other for identity and because they had a common enemy at the time. There was a killer getting around with a taste for painted white whores with bad timing- another one of the so-called quiet town’s impressive productions. Why is it that psychos seem to go for whores and prophets? Was John Lennon swinging a handbag when he bought it? Was Gandhi wearing stilettos under his Caftan….or are all whores angels? Is it because whores and prophets offer love indiscriminately that they get cut down?

3-Cups thought Coconut and I made a funny pair, and soon got to see a couple of shenanigans. Coconut wanted to make my last night a special one and so he disappeared into the toilet at R__’s and when he emerged again he told me there was a surprise waiting in there for me. Well I knew what it was, but with Coconut’s surprises the million dollar question is always “Where it is?”, so I walked toward the lavatory out the back past the pool table and the pinball machine, and into the toilet. Now I could smell something but there was nothing to be seen in any of the usual places, i.e.- on the toilet seat or stuck to the wall. So after scratching my head a bit and dry reaching a couple of times, I finally looked behind the door, and there it was, standing on its head and looking as vigilant as a security guard, on top of a door-stop which was, strangely, at eye level (and about a half an inch from my face when I finally spotted it). Actually it sort of crept up on me, and made the surprise much more rewarding because I’ve never found one at eye-height before. This isn’t to say that we haven’t let them go at altitudes before, but there is something personal and human about all things which find themselves at about 5–6 feet off the ground. It was more sentimentally pleasing to me however than funny, and I came back out and, instead of laughing I just gave him a hug of appreciation.

We were standing by the pool table, playing a round-robin with 3-Cups, who’s not bad for a girl (oh my god that’s the most non-pc call yet). Coconut was suddenly inspired with an idea to fill his hand with lighter gas and then set the lighter on fire. It went up pretty good and he dropped it on the floor where it was cooking away. The best thing was that the manager was walking by at the time and saw everything, but Coconut didn’t know ’cause he was behind him, so he’s giggling away like an idiot when the guy’s face turns red and he yells “HEY!!!” Coconut starts trying to smash the lighter with the butt of his queue, and me and 3 Cups are laughing our asses off at him when he hits it square and it explodes with a big bang. The guy calls Coconut a “Fucking moron!” and pushes him so that he nearly falls over, by which time we’re all in stitches on the floor.

There’s a lot that’s sadistic in mine and Coconut’s antics, but please reader be aware that we are animal lovers and environmentalists (except for that time when we threw half a dozen computer monitors off the lookout, which must have caused a bit of pollution, but you should have seen them smash. For some it might have been a statement against modernization, but for us it was purely aesthetic)- for example, you’ll never read about us pulling the wings off flies, or running over a cat’s head with a lawn mower at twenty paces, but we will tear the jaw out of a coral trout if it’s stupid enough to end up on our hook, which I think is fair enough if we eat the bastard!

The next day my little 3 Cups and I waved goodbye to the ineffable ‘Nut, as he drove off into the sunset in the ‘rana, and we off to the pub for lunch. My last meal in Brisbane was classic! After royally rooting 3 Cups in her car, in the car park behind the famous ‘Breaky Creek Hotel’, we wiped the sweat from our brows and downed a couple of hard-earned beers (from the wood) and a couple of steak and kidney pies, and then played the pokies. This pub has by far and away the best steaks in the world — “and any cunt in Brisbane will fight any cunt who wants to argue about the fact! Not only that, but they’ll fight any cunt who tries to stop them from fighting any cunt!”

After that we went to the airport, and the loveable Toad came along to soil his handkerchief a bit and make me feel loved. He left first, and 3 Cups and I bade each other a tearful goodbye. I knew she loved me, and I was the luckiest boy in the whole world, but what was I doing in Australia? Pulling my pud basically. It was time to do something. My first stop was to be in K.L.