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.
