TIMESICK part 3

                                                                                                                                                                                   TIMESICK Part 3                                                                    ‎                                                              28 ‎July ‎2012                                                                                                                                            Chapter 5                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       He was coming out of the front door of Thorn Court in Parnell Rd.                                                 Standing on the old wooden porch he could make out the pastey face and fleece coloured short-back-and-sides of the defective Ric Graham. It was  grinning back at him from a late model Holden Belmont across the street at the traffic lights, close to where Al and Pete's would be in the eighties. That was when he remembered the two tabs of orange acid he had in his pocket. This was not convenient. Over the preceding weeks it had gotten to the point that if they wanted to enjoy a relaxed afternoon around the spoon with two or three friends, they would have to gather up the necessaries and a little repellent for the sandflies and adjourn to a sheltered little nook they had discovered in the nearby Domain. All the defective had to do was to take a small detour and he would be there in the carpark of Thorn Court with him.                                                                                                                  

Obviously the acid would have to be eaten, that was alright, the dose wouldn't be a problem. He'd eaten larger amounts of LSD before but he was a little concerned about combining it with large amounts of heroin. A weak trip can make opium extra dreamy and vivid but combining a strong trip with a big taste of smack can be disturbing. It's as though your body is being pulled one way while your mind is being pulled the other.The words of his friend came back to him again...."smack and acid can be a bad combination. It seems to get some people very confused. Last time Sandrah did it she wound up in Oakley......Oakley.....Oakley!!"                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Well, it was too late to worry about that now. As he licked the tin foil it tingled and felt like a battery terminal on his tongue. He screwed it up and flicked it somewhere out of view but before it even touched the ground the lights changed and the Belmont with the bully-faced detective surged away noisily towards Newmarket making that wierd hissy exhaust sound that new cars sometimes have.                                                                                                                                               He felt like a vampire as he skulked back inside out of the late morning sun. Pune's flat was tidy and well lived in with framed prints on the walls and a large number of books on makeshift shelves. The living room was arranged around two enormous home made speaker cabinets. Between them sat various state-of-the-art components for the hi-fi and a huge wall of vinyl. There was a predominance of purple batik. The vinyl was mainly jazz and classical from memory. Lots of Miles.                                                                                                                                                                                                      Pune Solomon used to play bass for Ray Colombus and the Invaders. He could talk up a storm but he wasn't the kind of guy who talked about himself much and there were some things I found out about from mutual friends before Pune ever mentioned them to me. I'd never seen or heard him play an instrument and I was inclined to think that the Ray Columbus gig was one of those things people do sometimes after learning an instrument to make friends and influence people. Then I heard a little anecdote from Al, a mutual friend who was living with Pune for a while in Wellington. Al said he thought he was at home alone studying one afternoon when he heard a couple of people come in through the unlocked front door and sit down in the living room downstairs. It was a bit quiet so he thought he should go downstairs and see what was going on. As he approached the living room one of the strangers picked up a guitar and proceeded to completely mangle Dylan's "Just Like a Woman". As Al went back upstairs he was surprised to see Pune erupting from his room. Unable to sit idly by while Dylan was being so horribly butchered, he suddenly appeared in the living room and snatched the guitar from the visitor person's hand and proceeded to play the Dylan classic note for note and with perfect intonation and touch. Without a word he handed the guitar back to the visitor and disappeared into his room again.                                                                  
                                                                                                                                                              One wet windy night when Leslie and I were living at Emerson St in Berhampore, there was a knock at the door and when I opened it there was Pune looking a little more wild-eyed and fanatical than usual. After a bit of a chat and a smoke he noticed Andy's Rickenbacher bass standing in the corner. While I plugged him in he looked through my records and pulled out Abbey Road. He wanted something to play along to. I put the record on and sat down. It was like hearing the bass on some of those tracks for the first time. If you were in another room it sounded like the album with the bass turned up louder than usual. Pune seemed to pour each one of his notes into McArtney's so that it filled them out and coloured them in. It was like hearing McArtney for the first time but it was Pune showing him to me. Once he was satisfied that he still had the gift he seemed to lose interest. I couldn't understand then how anybody with that kind of talent could live without putting it to regular use. I can now. It doesn't matter how talented you are if you don't feel the creative impulse. It's the same thing that prompted Hendrix to burn his guitar on the Isle of Wight. Ability and raw talent pale into insignificance beside the creative impulse itself. Facility always lags behind the mind's ability to improvise.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Actually, I could fill a pile of books with the amazing, contradictory, annoying and wonderful people I've met up and down the river. Sort of a junky's "Good Keen Man". I wouldn't try to justify them to anybody, our stupid so-called society is all the poorer for its unwillingness to accept their contribution. People who should have known better would back away and talk to each other behind their hands when some of my less together friends showed up. Sometimes it would take a while for them to figure it out. I'm not going to introduce somebody with a character assassiation."This is a friend of mine, he's going to want to move in to your place 'for a couple of nights' and make oddly disturbing toll calls when there's nobody around." I'd be robbing people of the opportunity of sharing their lives with and learning from another human being. I take people as I find them and I expect others will want to do the same. If they don't that's their look out. These days when you turn your back on a mad person you're liable to to be condemning them to a fate worse than death.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Considering the well known propaganda against halucinogens in general and the fear it could induce, I think we handled the occasional acid casualty with humanity and good humour in those early days. I mean we, the community of friends, not we, society in general. Society in general does nothing but equivocate and abdicate responsibility. Over the years I've been without safe accommodation on numerous occasions and without the long list of people who hepled me while I got slowly and unsteadily up to my feet my life might have been a great deal more miserable. I'll always be grateful for people like Ves and Annabel who gave up their privacy and their hard earned cash to put me up for months when I first arrived in Wellington. In fact I have relied on the kindness of friends and strangers for most of my adult life.                                                
                                                                                                                                                               He closed his eyes to listened to what his body was up to. There was a warm languid ease in his muscles, a pleasant gentle ache when he moved like the slightest feeling he was about to faint and his throat had a relaxed feeling that meant he would start to snore if he nodded off.  All desired opioid characteristics present and correct, then. Except......there was something else as well.  Something like an uncertain fluttering in his stomach that would have been all right on its own but it seemed to his intermittently prescient mind that it was merely an indicator of something potentially much more unpleasant. Something about the circumstances he found himself in had imprinted a cycle of anticipation and relaxation on the progress of his trip. He didn't like to take acid without the proper mental preparation. Usually he would put it in a safe place until he woke up one morning and felt like he was already tripping. He'd get an electric tingling on his tongue like licking a battery and that's when he'd  eat them. You had to put a whole day aside for the experience itself and at least a week to digest it. The interruption of daily life could be an unwelcome intrusion into your state of mind. Hilarious scenes of several grown men standing around outside the local shop too scared to go in and confront the meat puppets behind the kaleidoscope of chocolate and cigarettes.                                                                                                                                                                                         Gradually the cycle of hope and fear tightened into a short 15-20 second loop. It was completely preoccupying. If he had been able to think about something else it most likely would not have happened. For 8-10 seconds he would be optimystic in general with a feeling that the day would turn out well and and then for an equal length of time everything would turn chill and seem to darken and take on a sneaky, sinister look. Cars would look particularly sneaky. Everything seemed alive so that even the furniture could look happy or scary. It went backwards and forwards like this for hours. It was like some horrorshow form of mental torture that might have deeply disturbed the natural balance of his mind but some part of his mind was observing it all, watching himself go through it. He knew from experience that if a wierd mental state was drug induced it would wear off when the drugs did. Of course, with acid, the converse was also true. People were known to have been lost for months or even years.                                                  
                                                                                                                                                                  It was not generally understood then that a small percentage of the population have a latent potential for schizophrenic or psychotic reactions to some of the halucinogenic substances people have access to.  Personally, I've long been of the opinion that there are people with a genetic predisposition towards a range of mental disorder often classified as  schizophrenia. The fear mongers, of course believe that the brain is altered permanently by drugs, not realising that the brain is altered by everything. It's caused neuro-plasticity.The same people who imagine that human neurochemistry somehow differentiates between licit and illicit substances seem to have gone against their inborn suburban instincts to allow their children to be pumped full of meth-amphetamine. People will believe anything these days rather than think for themselves. Thinking things through can lead to such confronting conclusions.                                                                                                                                                                                                   I've been around people with diagnosed disorders of this type while tripping, so I've experienced first hand the close connection between what is often termed schizophrenia and the state of mind induced by acid, mescalin or psylocibin. We met this guy while we were tripping and he was such a space cadet. He seemed like a lot of fun.....until we realised something wasn't quite right but we couldn't put our finger on it. We didn't know quite what it was and then he started 'zapping demons'. He claimed to be the only one who could see them and I guess that part was true enough. It was as though he was tripping permanently and while other people were tripping around him he could almost communicate with them. It must have happened to him quite a lot because his desperation was visceral. I went from liking the guy to feeling like I just had to get away from him before I lost it, all in the space of two or three hours. When you get that "Is it him or is it me?" feeling really strongly you can be fairly certain it's him.                                                                                                                                                                                       While the little loop from heaven to hell went round and around and back again his friend Big Lou was getting worried. He hadn't spoken more than two syllables in as many hours and that was never a good sign. Lou tried to engage with him in a little witty conversation, something to lighten the mood. Perhaps if they went outside, Lou thought, and he gently herded his friend out into the depressing little backyard square of grass and concrete.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          He He felt like a condemned man being led to a last breakfast he had no appetite for. While they were out there under the clothes line a dog, a medium sized black and white border collie, came around the corner, looked at him, smiled widely and went running up to him. At that moment the cycle in his head went into the negative and the dog stopped, spun around, put his tail between his legs and ran off back around the corner. The loop turned again and the dog came running back. After a bit more of the same the dog lost interest and stopped trying to make friends with the changeable human. Lou, who was wise for his years and who has seen many things said, ".......Oh! I see", and looked at me warmly in a voice that said 'You poor bugger'.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                It was dusk and he was still going backwards and forwards. He hadn't stopped oscillating between the same two phase states but some part of him was beginning to relax. He stood by the front door watching the lights of the cars going past along Parnell Rd outside. The glass was heavily dimpled and they looked like little spinning tops of red, yellow and white light. Perhaps it was his own innate sanity or perhaps it was something he picked up from Lou's tone but slowly the vicious cycle began to recede into the familiar noise of his thoughts and experience.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     By By the time it was dark I was almost myself again. Sarah and I had been invited out to dinner so I headed home to Brighton Rd to get ready. I was looking forward to a pleasant evening with David and Sandrah. I always used to want to see David when I was tripping. He was there when I had my first complete death trip. I mean, I'd had previous experience of thinking I was going to die but David was there when I actually did die for the first time. The look on his face seemed to say that he knew what was happening and after that night I would pester him with profundities and deep philosophical questions. David was intelligent and kind enough not to ever exploit the awkward position I placed him in. He never fell into the trap of explaining anything to me but rather he turned my own questions around in such a zen and subtle fashion I could sometimes see the answers contained within them. Some of the things he said still puzzle me. I once asked him what he thought about Christianity and he said it was "okay", it was "like tobacco".                                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
 
David lived at Owens Rd in MtEden in a small rented mansion. On the way over on Sarah's bike I went the wrong way down a one way street. I was still feeling a little like a hypnotised chicken after my day of being involuntarily loopy. We arrived without incident to find David and Sandrah in fine mood. Bubbles came out of their mouths as they giggled around the house. Decadence and the conspicuous consumption of a kind of affordable luxury were our common fascination. We smoked Schimmelpfenig cigars and pot which we called 'grass' in those days. We listened to "MacDonald and Giles" and Donovan's "Open Road" and appropriately over dinner, "Beggars Banquet". French reds and German whites were our usual taste and I think I remember David opening a Chateau Margaux from one of the less expesive years. After dinner we went outside and there was a volcano in the back yard!

Sarah and I rode home on her little Suzuki 50. The night was cool and fresh and the stars were out. It was one of those rare moments in my life when everything seemed right with the world. We turned into Valley Road, across Khyber Pass and Carlton-Gore Rd where I would live for a little while in the late eighties at number 52. We turned right and into the Domain at the next lights just before the hospital. Pools of mist lay in the hollows around the duckpond while the lower city was deep in fog. The Greek temple looked down on us from the crest of its partially man-made hill. Rumours circulated that it sat on a nest of storerooms and tunnels containing many of the secrets and treasures of the Dominion. Long before they made movies about it we imagined getting into the museum at night. The Auckland 8 used to say it was no use asking the doorkeeper. They said he was a two-faced bugger by the name of 'Janice', which is a funny name for a bloke. They reckoned the best thing to do was to show up with a flagon of draught beer, knock three times on the little caretaker's door and in a loud, clear voice to say, "Hieronymous, open up mate, we've got the half-gee". There was a carefully reasoned logic behind this. Apart from the lure of alcohol it was an unwritten law, that, once opened, a half-gallon jar of the local ale must be consumed before it goes flat. Hieronymous never did come to the little door. Perhaps he was still new to the area and unaware of this aspect of our traditional culture.                                                                                                                                                                                    As the old Greek temple disappeared behind the trees, we turned left into Parnell Rd and past Thorn Court again. The big old house was all in darkness now. We passed the beautiful old wooden building that was once the Anglican cathedral for the Auckland diocesce. Sarah and I used to go in and sit down sometimes, just to enjoy the beauty of the building's interior and the quiet peace it contained. The enormous brick monolith across Parnell Rd. was still unfinished. Corrugated iron covers one side of it. I'm starting to shiver a bit as we wait for the lights to change. Sarah wraps herself around me a little more tightly. Empty fruit and vegetable boxes are piled up outside the green-grocer's on the corner of Birdwood Crescent.

The lights change and we turn right past the old bamboo hedge on the corner and the pharmacy opposite it where we used to take our methadone scripts. In those days before clinics we used to see Dr.Roche at his rooms opposite the pharmacy in Parnell Rd. I was his 26th patient. When the drug "problem" got big enough to cause community concern, they decided to do much the same thing about it as Dr Roche was trying to do but with a small minded fear of doing things properly that government bodies and boards of control often employ when they're not sure of their footing. When they announced that a clinic was opening I could see that resistance was futile and I became patient number 0015. The first time I saw a counsellor there she had an Olivetti calendar on her wall featuring some of the works of Egon Schiele. I immediately fell completely in love with them and I asked if I could have the calendar when she had finished with it. My counsellor agreed but I think she probably thought she was offering me an incentive to stick with the programme. She needn't have worried. I still have some of those prints and I've managed to stay on the methadone programme for most of the last forty years.                                                                                                                                                               We turned right again down Brighton Rd. and about half way down the air suddenly turned damp and cold. It didn't really matter because in seconds we were home at number sixty-five. There were people still up and the remains of a fire in the hearth in the living room. I of course headed straight for my stash. I boiled some water and disappeared into the old outhouse that really was covered with blue morning glory. The days were ticking past more quickly now. They weren't to last much longer. I quickly find a vein and let the elephant loose. My head slumps forward as if it's suddenly heavier than it was. It feels a lot better than it looks. Time fades away.......
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

TIMESICK
Part 2                                                                  Am I awake or asleep? Have I died or taken too much acid?  I'm looking down on a little clutch of wooden houses clinging naked and treeless to the black bitumen stripe that runs over the hill and past the cemetary on its way to the city.                                                                                                                                                                         I remember being on the back of Doug Wilson's motorcycle with him once. We were riding along Waterfront Drive and the combination of Doug's army surplus jacket, the Naval station across the harbour at Devonport and the occasional old cannon lying aroung here and there conspired with the noise of the city and the acid we'd all taken earlier to produce a very realistic World War II invasion scene. When Doug had to swerve a little to avoid getting his tyres caught in the railway tracks that criss-cross the road in places along there, I could clearly see the large shell crater he was avoiding.                                                                                                                Was that a voice? He tries to open his eyes. In the dimness of the room there was a dark figure. Was it the visit he'd been half expecting from the drug pigs? He tried to ignore it and go back to sleep but the mystery pig was clomping around looking at things as though he was in a public gallery. Couldn't he just have one day that didn't start with people coming in before he could get up again in the afternoon? It wasn't going to be a good day. They waited until the others were out and he was alone snoring in his bed. When he was awake they said "Either you face charges for the spoon we found the other night or you sign yourself into Oakley." Fuck that place! He wasn't happy at all. He leapt out of bed. "Okay, do me for the spoon then!" but the drug pig wasn't having it.                                                                                                                                                    In 1970 or '71 an article appeared in Craccum, the Auckland University magazine by one Rod Bicknell with whom I once shared the misfortune of working in a Parnell woolshed.  In it he insisted, and he would certainly have been qualified to know, that before there was a drug squad in Auckland there were no imported opiates except what the Chinese bought in for themselves and what was imported legally by the likes of Kempthorne and Prosser. (I used to have one of their presentation cigarette lighters but I lost it in Sydney somewhere. It had "From the Auckland Drug Company" enamelled on it). In the old days they used to pinch a solid vehicle like a Mk1 Zephyr and the smallest of them would climb into the boot. They'd back it through the Chemist's front window and the guy in the boot would hop out, grab the DD cabinet and climb back in. The "safe" used to be a wooden box with a padlock on it. They would split anything good between themselves and sometimes they'd sell the rest. Things like opium tincture and camphorated opium tincture (called paregoric in the U.S.) usually went cheap.              Sarah got back from the shops to find him trying to squirm away from two big plain clothes bozos on the front porch. Sarah tried to calm the situation by telling him it won't be so bad. You try going cold turkey in a dormitory hall full of masturbating loonies and see how you like it.                                                                           It was late afternoon. He was still in the clothes he'd stuck on when he got up to have his last taste that morning. He realised he hadn't eaten all day. Sarah went out to get something and came back with fruit. Plums, apricots and cherries. Ric Graham is still saying he wants him to sign himself in but when he fails to play footsy with them it's off to the magistrates court. Two doctors and a judge are located so that he can be committed under the Alcohol and Drug Act. The doctors asked him one question each. When did he first "inject himself" and when did he last "inject himself". Very clever these police doctors. Obviously one "jab" with "the needle" causes immediate addiction. Nobody can escape its "terrible pull" and so "the last shot", as the junkie calls it, will indicate the time they have left before "the awful cravings" begin.                                  
                                                                                                                                                               The judge wasn't a bad old boy but his "hands were tied" and soon he was in the back seat of a grey Holden Belmont. Two uniforms in the front were eating pies and talking. The crude brutality of their oinkish banter was too much for him. He was locked in with their gravy breath, their B.O. and their bad driving. He started feeling woozy. He was going to ask if they could pull over for a minute but the words wouldn't come out. Just a loud belch. Then, as the bluebottle in front of him turned around to see what "the junkie" was doing a long streak of bright pink vomit enveloped his neck and shoulders. It wasn't done deliberately so he had to wear it but you can bet that was one cop who wasn't going to volunteer for junkie duty abain in a hurry. It looked great as well. Bright pink on navy blue and grey.                                                                           On the whole, opiate addiction looks a lot worse than it is. Have you ever seen an alcoholic in the terminal stages of that disease? It's a great deal uglier. Bits of them get stuck to their clothing and come off when they try to get cleaned up. They bellow and curse and reel around, turning on anyone who tries to help them. Human behaviour can get very strange. Addiction is like a dressing on a painful wound. When it first goes on it's a relief. It's clean and dry and it keeps the dirt out. It smells fresh and antiseptic but after a while it starts to get wet and then it keeps the air out and the damaged tissue stops healing. Anaerobic bacteria starts to settle in. Living with a dressing on for much too long you know it has to come off but you procrastinate. Finally you decide to face the pain of removing it. With a little forethought you could have saved yourself the trouble.                                                                                                                     Narcotics can feed the ego behind the rest of the mind's back. One day they're all getting along famously and the next thing the ego is hysterical and its pulled a knife on the id and it's shouting "Call me a show-off! That's the most ridiculous......"                          
                                                                                                                                                                Chapter 3              
                                                                                                                                                                        I'm in a field. Everything is brown. It looks like a '70's movie about the early '50's. The whole place is bumper to bumper with mostly late '40's and early '50's Ford's and Chev's.  Mainly pre-war designs but all in original condition. Is it a movie set or a vintage car show? I can hear Eric Clapton playing something from his Delanie and Bonnie era. The men all wear suits and hats and their shoes are shiny-clean. They look like Phil Spector or Ray Wise. The women all resemble Tinkerbell. Spoilt, pouty and bored with the effect they have on men. They're sick of being so drooled over. They're jealous of themselves because there's nobody they want as much as men seem to want them. The men all keep to themselves. Standing around on the trodden down grass talking to eachother and looking at the cars. Whenever any of them becomes impassioned or feels anything strongly they attract a little knot of a crowd. People are hanging out for any kind of motivation.                                                                                                     Gene Pitney sings "Black is Black" on the dash radio. It sounds warm and valvey despite the hard, shiny production and the thinnish nasal voice. Is it a drive-in? Are we at a Hank Williams gig. It all comes close but it doesn't really add up. Suddenly I have to hear Buddy Holly's "Slippin' and Slidin'". When you've heard that one track at sufficient volume you've heard Rock and Roll. Marc Bolan took his whole career from it. The Beatles got theirs from Chuck Berry mainly but you could argue that while John and Paul had it they did more with his material than Chuck did.                                                                                             It was the time of the stick. It was a magical dangerous time and it began with  a deliberate wrongdoing. He knew it was wrong. Why did he even look under there? You don't look under people's mattresses but it was so light and it came back so easily. The moment he saw it he knew he had to have it. It was such a compellingly beautiful object. It didn't deserve to be hidden away like someone's guilty secret.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           It was an old fashioned walking cane like you see in old movies. It looked just like an oversized magic wand. It had a soft round silver knob for holding onto at one end and a ball-tipped brass ferrule at the other. Running down the black wooden shaft Chinese "grass" figures had been inlaid in silver. These were fashioned from pieces of silver ribbon pushed edgeways into the wood so that all the elements that made up the characters appeared to be outlined in silver rather than "inked in" with it. He copied the figures out and tried to get them translated by a friend of a friend at the university but the dialect was thought to too obscure and he never did find their meaning.                                                                                                                                                                                                     The aborigines talk about a mischevous spirit creature in the form of a stick. It's called a mihi-mihi or something like that. He knew it was wrong but he also knew that nobody was perfect and he didn't think less of himself for doing it. It was as though the stick was talking to his unconscious mind, saying "Go ahead. Pick me up. Feel my weight in your hands. Feel how well balanced I am. You're not a bad person. They wouldn't have hidden me if they were supposed to have me. Go on, take me. Go easy on yourself for a change." He was young and sometimes he wished there was no right and wrong so he wouldn't have to carry the responsibility of his choices.                                                                                                                
                                                                                                                                                                  For as long as he carried the stick he was able to get his own way. He could use it as  a crutch or a weapon but getting his own way wasn't doing him any good. Gradually it got to be more about this than anything else. Of course he didn't see this at the time. All he saw was an object that actually seemed to posess some kind of magic. It's funny but for someone who had big dreams and a talent for living extravagantly, he didn't really think about money or posessions much. He was much more interested in confidence. The stick gave him confidence to spare and for him confidence amounted to happiness because he never felt stuck or trapped. He would always be able to deal with whatever happened to him. It was all very amusing and quite harmless for a while but he noticed there was a darkness growing around him and he'd started to brick up his conscience.                                                                                                                                                                                    It was a bright sunny winter's day in Wellington and Chuck Berry was playing at the Winter Show building. It was 1973 and they were living at "Rerun Sunset". Adam painted a setting sun with rays and clouds and "Rerun Sunset" in red and orange letters on the outside wall of the house by the front door. Walking down Russell Terrace to the concert he found a plastic Luger water-pistol lying on the footpath. He filled it with water and took it to the concert with him. Chuck was dressed like a sixties street preacher and played a big red Gibson 335 like he was "ringin' a bell".                                                                                                                                                                              He was tripping. They all were. They were colouring in patterns in the old wallpaper with felt pens when there was a knock at the door. Two uniformed policemen appeared and asked who'd made the 111 call. No. It wasn't them. People looking at each other with eyebrows raised. They were just about ready to accept it had all been some kind of mistake when Canack came down the stairs saying "What seems to be the trouble, officer?" They were guessing that Canack had made the call because the day before he'd been overheard trying to call Grace Slick at Grunt Records in California. When the cops asked him why he'd called 111 Canack's answer was classically paranoid. He said he thought that "something terrible was going to happen". The two uniformed guys looked at eachother as they turned to leave and discreetly rolled their eyes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            He was in the living room dancing to Roxy Music's "Virginia Plain". He was twirling the stick like they do in a marching band and using it as a guitar. The others were sitting around looking restless. "Let's all go over to the park and get some fresh air". He didn't want to go outside. He hardly ever did. He stood in the kitchen looking out the window. There was a hammering sound coming from out there somewhere and for a moment he imagined that it was Jesus being nailed to the cross. He shrugged and ignored it and followed the others out the front door and up the street to the park. As he went something was pulling tighter and tighter in his chest.                                                                                                                                                                              They reached the big playing field. Although there were six or seven people in their little group they were all spread out and lost in their own thoughts. As he strolled along he was lifting the stick above his head and thwacking it into the soft earth. It felt good and he still had Roxy Music's rhythms circling in his mind. He had the stick above his head when Adam cried out in a loud voice "Oh! No!" His hand came down and the stick was launched. At the same moment it hit the ground and lodged there  a sickening crack was heard and a sharp pain went through him from just under his left arm across and down to his right hip. The stick was split from the top on one side all the way down to the bottom on the other side. The silver inlay had all come apart and it was plain to him that it was irrepairable. He just knew that whatever it was it was over now and he thought he was going to throw up. He laid the broken pieces gently in the gutter while none of the others were looking. They tried to tell him it could be repaired but when someone went back to look he was glad to hear that the pieces had gone. For about a month afterwards he felt as though he was recovering from a shock. He had nothing to say to anyone. It was many weeks before he felt even a small rise in confidence.                                                                                                        They weren't exactly hippies and they didn't look like surfers so they must have been  a little strange to passing traffic. It was a warm day in December 1971. Butch was wearing an old black leather bike jacket with a large '52' on the back. He'd pierced his nose and ears with safety pins and joined them up with chains. He was one of the Eight and he would go on to be the "barman" at all their Little Huia sessions.  He and Butch both had acid crushes on two girls who were schoolfriends and they were going down, uninvited to visit them in Mt.Maunganui. It was Christmas Eve and the general sense of commercial anticipation seemed to blend happily with their own lysergic optimism. They had about $10 between them and nowhere to stay, so when they got there they walked around and around all night. In the morning at about ten they found themselves knocking on the door of the beach house occupied by the girls and their parents.                                                                                                                                  
                                                                                                                                                            What had they been thinking? One thing the two travellers had in common was parental rejection and yet here they were hitch-hiking around the countyside being rejected by other peoples parents. They probably wouldn't have admitted it then but seeing those familiar worried faces was actually a bit of a relief. Neither of them was able to shake the feelings of inferiority that came with the inevitable pointed questions and "You understand. After all it is Christmas"  If two young men journeyed a hundred miles to see my daughter, I think I'd at least offer them a cup of tea.                                                                                                                               After talking to the girls for a little while they wandered back towards the main beach. Past the family-sized spreads of Christmas fare that were being set out on the grass and sand. They each had a tab of acid they'd been saving for the day so they took them and they bought a pie and a fruit pie each for their lunch. They washed them down with a tin of apple and orange juice. It went pretty much downhill after that. Not that it had far to fall.                                                                                                                               They walked until the street lights came on and the stars came out. They had sleeping bags but nowhere to put them. They were beginning to consider sleeping in the open when they came upon a little park with swings and a sandpit. The sandpit was in the form of a concrete boat with a galvanised iron mast and a cabin just the right size for two weary sailors. It hadn't been the best of days but as soon as their heads went down they felt better and fell quickly into a deep, sandy sleep.                                                                                                              In his dream he imagined sailing the little concrete boat up and down his life, which was spread out along the banks of a great slow river. Things he had owned and treasured were strewn along the sandy banks or overgrown with all kinds of exotic vegetation. Outside the day was beginning to stir again and his dream started to break up into nonsense. He was digging in the sand when he felt something hard. Coins, gold and silver coins. He was busily filling his pockets and thinking it was too good to be true when he heard the squelchy, analog synth sound of baby crocodiles coming out of the earth.                     Time was ebbing back and forth like a tide. They slept on in the little boat as it bobbed up and down like a seagull on the waves. It was Christmas Eve again and their hopes had not yet been dashed on the approaching reef of festivities. They still yearned in their hearts for the healing of touch and the mothers that were lost to them. Why was he relieved when they saw those worried faces and were told "After all, it is Christmas"? Why do we always think that everyone else has what we ourselves lack? Why do we have so much trouble believing ourselves while we accept what others tell us as easily as if we were children?                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                                                  As a small child I hated having to go to sleep at night. It seemed like such a flagrant waste of time. The night was so big and dark and the thought of life careening down through it with no grown-ups to supervise was a little unsettling. Anything might happen. That's why I always had to sleep on my right side, facing the louvres, in case the sandman should try to get in. I could hear him coming for me at night while I lay in my bed. I could hear his steps getting closer and louder as my little boy's heart beat faster and louder into the kapok. Sometimes I used to forget to be scared and  listen for the sound of his feet squeaking in fresh sand but I only ever heard his sandy footsteps with their steady almost tentative tread.                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                               It's funny the way events can turn things around imperceptibly with time. He almost preferred his own company now. Except for that urge, common to everyone, to share life's little passing joys and interests. The boat bobbed on. All up and down the river children dozed fifully in their beds. The air was heavy with their dreams and the scent of artificial pine. Presents have been found and wrapped and left in the traditional places. Biscuit crumbs have been carefully dropped around and under tables and reindeer hoofprints left in lawns. Mothers are near to exhaustion but nobody seems to notice or appreciate them.                                                                                         He was sitting at the dining room table with his mother and grandmother. They'd finished their dinner and the grown-ups were listening to the six o'clock news on the radio before they did the dishes. It's early winter and it's dusk outside. He stares at the living room windows. In the twilight the view outside blends with the reflection of the room inside. There is a subtle shift in the quality of the light and the whole building seems to shudder as if it was an ocean liner reversing its engines. He knew it was about to happen again and he turned in his chair to get a better view. His mother apparently thought nothing of him sitting and staring vacantly into space for the duration of the ABC news. However long that was in 1957.                                    
                                                                                                                                                     Whenever it happened a feeling of magic came over him and he wanted nothing more than to feel like that for the rest of his life.    `                                                                                                                                                             Slowly, beginning from the edge of the left hand side, the first of the images began to appear. The venetian blinds and curtains were still undrawn and he was staring directly at the darkening glass. Slowly they passed from left to right and once again he had the sense of something immense. It was as if some great ship was silently passing by outside. What he saw took the form of a series of still scenes from J.M.Barrie's novel for children of all ages, "Peter Pan". They looked like the coloured cartoons he would see at the movies in two or three years time but these were three dimensional and motionless. Like holographic dioramas. He was always too lost in the enjoyment of the moment to remember all of the images but there was one that came near the end that he remembered. Perhaps because each time he saw it he realised the experience was almost over and he was dissappointed. He always wanted so much for it to keep on going. This underlying feature of his psychological topography would come back to haunt him in a variety of ways further down the river. He found himself thinking that way about everything. His acid excursions, happiness and romantic love would all follow this same arc. They would all arrive at some ultimately satisfying condition and stay there. Of course nothing ever did work out that way or if it did he wasn't equipped at the time to appreciate it.                                                                                                                 The image he remembered was of Wendy tied to the mast while Peter and Hook fought with swords. Tinkerbell looked on apprehensively, frightened for Peter who, while able to fly had a much shorter sword than Hook's. The crocodile ticked on below in the murky waters of the lagoon .                                                                                      As they dreamed their way up and down the river he sometimes thought that  Neverland provided a way of seeing the world. The prim and propers, the authority figures of the world, were the grown-ups but mainly Mr.Darling who ends up in the dog box. The tribal nations of the world were "the redskins". The "pirates", that's obvious, were the corporate raiders and polluters for whom the clock is always ticking while the hipsters, greens and alterna-types were the lost boys. I guess Wendy and Tinkerbell are the women of the world. The mother figure and the selfish fairy. It seems a naive view but then Peter and the Lost Boys had no real idea of what their opposite gender was. Something about the magic of Neverland is highly contagious and he couldn't travel through or even look at pictures of coastlines in limestone carst country without imagining Hook's ship anchored quietly in a little cove just out of view.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       He was moved to mountains and he almost cried. If someone offered him a piece of the last tuna on earth he would probably eat it as sashimi lightly salted in his own copious tears. Evil flowers were tattooed all around his unfolding skin. The long contented years of his future were pulling him through a difficult past. It wasn't so much optimism as an innate prescience that told him, if he just kept true to himself, to his own ideas and tastes, he would pull through in the end.                                                                                                          He woke the next morning to a living nightmare and immediately begged to be put to sleep. He wouldn't have said anything if he'd known what a half-assed job they'd do of it. The next two or three days were a blur of agony and bad drugs. The side effects meant he was unable to read or see things clearly that were in his immediate vicinity. He started to swallow his tongue and they gave him Cogentin to counter it. Strange conversations disturbed and confused him. Unfamiliar smells wafted through him and he felt disgusted. Ridiculous. Exposed. Completely and utterly without the protection that physical well-being normally affords him.                                                                                                                                                                                  On my first day out of bed I was standing waiting to file out for breakfast when some poor guy in the line started whimpering. It sounded as though he was about to face the most terrifying thing on earth. I turned around to see who it was. Years later I worked with him at the same woolshed Rod and Billy worked at. Wrightson's in Parnell. He fell forward with both arms held rigidly by his side and landed flat on his face. Nobody batted an eyelid. He was still lying there making a piteous sobbing sound as we filed out of Ward 8 and into the dining room. Another one of the enormous rooms that seemed to be everywhere there.                                                                                                                                      
                                                                                                                                                                Indoor sport was practically compulsory with dodge ball being the firm favourite of  whoever's job it was to choose. Not a very healthy experience mentally, though. There were patients who refused to enter the circle, backing away slowly shaking their head from side to side and pleading for mercy. Even Fergie, the acknowledged kingpin of the place wasn't fond of it. They said that if Fergie asked you for a cigarette, you'd better just give it to him. He was just admitted for a nervous breakdown but being a big strapping coalminer from the West Coast they put him down for the tolerance trials they were doing with largactil. Fergie subsequently fell asleep in the sun and because largactil interferes with the skin's ability to repel ultraviolet light, his face melted and ran down on one side. Whether the story was true or not he had no idea but it was certainly feasible. When the nurses went on strike once they called in the army to run the place.                                                                      

                                                                                                                                                                             As he sat down he noticed that Rod and Billy had somehow managed to get a bigger better breakfast than everyone else. Later he would discover that, being two of the only sane people in the place they had life there completely sewn up. Extra breakfast, lunch and dinner. Their own room with a TV and record player. Girlfriends that went to doctors for them and then visited them on weekends. Billy said he whacked up a whole week's script and he "didn't even puke".   The deal was you could stay there as long as you liked, getting stoned and enjoying the facilities or you could get clean and get out in less than three months. Not that he was locked in after the first week or so anyway. All he had to do was excuse himself from lunch before he left in the morning and he could stay out until dinner time. A friend of his would leave a small motorcycle in the carpark and he'd spend the day in town. One night he returned to find he'd been locked out and had to hammer on the fire escape door to be let back in. The irony was not lost on either of them as the male nurse let him in, smiling.                                                                                                                                 While I was in Oakley at the end of 1972 the Health Department was beginning to consider new methods for the treatment of drug addiction. It wasn't long after this that the Cathedral Clinic started up with the assistance of the Anglican church. Methadone replacement and maintenance was to be the new model. Instead of three months I was sent on my way after five weeks. I still felt pretty shitty though, so I headed north and away from temptation for a while to recuperate. I took a few tabs of acid with me for when I was feeling better.                                                                                                                                                             I had friends amongst what used to be called the Jerusalem crowd who hung out with James K.Baxter and spent time at his "commune" in Wanganui. They were living in a place called Reef Point about four or five miles walk from Ahipara at the foot of Ninety-Mile Beach. I didn't start out 'til late in the morning so it was dusk when I finally arrived at the closest point to my destination that an ordinary vehicle could navigate safely. After that it was simply a matter of following the line of wet sand around a long series of beaches and rocky points.  It was dark and I was starting to  entertain the sort of doubts that would never occur to me on a sunny day in familiar surroundings.                                                      After walking for an hour or so I thought I could see my destination up ahead. In the lee of some low sandstone cliffs to my left I could see a small white building with light showing in the windows. When I got closer I realised it was a caravan. I decided to knock on the door and make sure I was on the right path. They were very nice. They told me I was on the right path but I still had another two miles to walk. "Just follow the wet sand and you won't be able to miss it." I remember I kept hearing a seagull's cry up ahead of me each time I started to feel a bit discouraged. For some reason it seemed to bouy me along. I walked on for a while longer. I was thinking about getting into my sleeping bag and having a bit of a rest when up ahead of me and to the left I heard the sound of people moving around. I could hear the sound of bare feet on a wooden floor. Children were running up and down and I could hear maori voices. It sounded like a big old wooden house with an extended maori family living in it. I couldn't actually see the house but I could tell it was close. It must have been just over the brow of one of the small hills that cling to the line of the sand along there. Once I'd made out the sounds of human habitation I relaxed a little. If I didn't find my friends' place I could always go up to the house on the hill and ask for further directions. I shifted the weight of my pack to the other shoulder and trudged on through the soft, dry sand looking for the wet strip where walking was easier. The moon was nearly full so I had no difficulty seeing where I was going. The ocean seethed restlessly under its pressure and glistened as it ran up and down the beach, trying to entice me to join it in play. It must have been an hour or so later that doubt returned as I began to think I'd somehow lost my way. I must have walked far enough by now. As I sat down for a minute to think I was sure I could smell smoke. I got up and found a little hillock to stand on. My seagull friend let out a last long goodbye as I finally caught sight of a small row of rough wooden cottages strung out along the edge of the soil covering and looking resolutely out to sea. The dim yellow light in the little windows and smoke rising from the chimney of the nearest cottage told me I had at last reached my destination and it wasn't long before I was surrounded by familiar faces and offers of food, hot drinks and a place to sleep. Reef Point was a home to some of the people who had lived at Jerusalem near Wanganui with James K.Baxter. While peolple called it a commune, in my opinion it was so in name only. As was often the case in those naive and optimistic days a few people did all the giving while the rest took whatever was going. "Five finger discount" was justified as a means of wealth distribution. Unfortunately, the victims of these appropriations were often just as needy. About a week or so later I was talking to my friend Kay Smith and she related some very strange things that had happened to her during her stay there over the preceding months. She told me she had seen a middle aged naked maori guy with elaborately tattooed buttocks standing on the rocks of the reef and looking out toward the horizon. He turned and saw Kay and looked directly at her before diving noiselessly into the sea. She waited there, expecting him to surface for some time but it didn't happen. She started getting a bit concerned but when she recalled what she had seen earlier it felt dreamlike in comparison to the events that surrounded it. Kay showed me the rock where he had been standing and she told me that quite a few people in the area had seen things happening that they couldn't explain. Thatwas when she told me that there was supposed to be a place where the spirits of the maori dead stop to pray on their way to Spirits Bay at the very top of the North Island. It dawned on me then that since arriving at Reef Point, I had twice been backwards and forwards in the daylight past the place where I heard the house on the hill on the night I arrived there. Although I'd been expecting to see it and even climbed up a small stream where I thought it would be, there was no house there to be found.