‘Truth is a mobile army of metaphors’, Nietzsche

JIM’S JOURNAL

Justine had left her husband a year before and had taken me as a lover. She was 35, ran a small music store and looked like her name sake in The Alexandria Quartet, with olive skin, high cheek bones, green eyes and black hair. There were provisos, conditions and caveats. We were never to be seen in public and she would leave my house before sunrise. There was always the possibility, which she flagged many times, she’d return to her husband. She ached for freedom but guilt lay heavy around her neck.

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The sun hits the head of the third beer of a Saturday afternoon as a country and western band murders Hank Williams in the Ladies Lounge. I’m waiting to show Dave Thoroughbride some of Jim’s old journals. He knew Jim before I did, when they drank in the Biscayne Bay Hotel and played pool with Dr Wu, who sold ketamine in the carpark. They’d go to St Mark’s Church on a Sunday morning and sing. Jim said it helped silence the angry Catholic rattling a cup on the bars in his head.

As a kid, he was put in an all-boys boarding school where self-sufficiency was caned into him. The best corporal punishment money could buy. To avoid three mile runs around the front oval at midnight, he learnt rules were to be seen to be obeyed. In the dormitory, he made his bed with hospital corners with the pillow slip facing away from the door. The blankets were drum taut. At night, as homesickness wrung sobs from the new boys, he listened to The Beatles on a small and contraband radio. Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about, Strawberry Fields forever. The chains fell from his mind and by the time he was 16, with Dux of the school and ribbons in Physics and English under his belt, he dropped out and sprinted down the path of rock and roll, LSD, amphetamines, surfing and sex. His mind was hungry, carnal and imaginative. The visual imagination of a teenage boy patched directly into the Id, beats Sacher-Masoch and De Sade hands down.

After Jose’s death and the end of the affair with Justine, Jim gave me five journals. Each chronicled the two-year affair. He’d quit teaching at university and bought a one-way ticket to Spain, where he’d travel through the Baltic, down the west coast of Turkey and on to the Cyclades Islands. That was 15 years ago. The day he left, 60 boxes of his books arrived on my porch. Jim’s little joke.

There were books on the sea, The Beatles, David Bowie, Existentialism, Cognition in dogs and elephants, Astronomy and Cosmology, the Lancaster Bomber and Spitfire, English History (Celts to 1666), the Scottish nation, Ancient Roman History, Ancient Greek History (The Persian Wars), Indian culture, history and religion, Rumi and the Sufis, Dadaism and Surrealism, the American Poets (1918-1970), Zen, organisational systems, the Apollo Moon missions, the Vietnam war, the writings of JG Ballard, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Ursula Le Gunn, Kurt Vonnegut, Jay Griffiths and more.

On the front page of journal one he’d scribbled, the full area of ignorance has not yet been mapped. We are only exploring the fringes. The first entry was on Cat People.

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Cat People laugh at the misfortune of others and live cushioned by inheritances; an urban petit bourgeoise with a sharp distain for all things mainstream, especially music. They’re encyclopaedic about alternative bands. Discord and angst are music to their pointy ears. No Neil Young and Crazy Horse, no Steely Dan (‘My Old School’!), no reggae, ska or disco. Why? Because Cat People are special. The women think Robert Coover’s, Pricksongs and Descants is an anti-feminist work about men singing to the penises. They live precariously on the razor edge of now. They wear bohemian op-shop chic and get their politics from The Guardian. They rail against injustice on social media and do nothing about it. Most have never met an Aboriginal and are quietly frightened of them. They are not generous with their criticism or money. They hunger for authenticity and fail to recognise it. Cat People are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Pray with me now: If I speak in tongues but have not love, I am a Cat Person, rowling at the moon. If I have pissed love up against a wall, I am a Cat Person, for my skin is thin and I offer no angles to the wind. When I was a child, I spoke and thought as a child. When I became a man, I was taught the ways of Cat People and apprehended their cold, dark minds but love will reign triumphant, forever and a day.

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After his first breakdown, Jose put on 20 kilos. Here comes the rolly polly man, singing songs of love. Radios told him to dig for buried treasure in the backyard, to mimic the sound of crows, to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra like Von Karajan and then kill himself. He spent two months in a low-grade psychiatric institution and when he left, he dropped out of a chemistry degree and focused his considerable intellect on alternative music. Then he met Justine, who had married a drummer from a band called ‘St Etienne Poontang’ which evolved into ‘Prima Off Ya Facie’.

Jose had been in love with Justine for years. They went to the movies and out to dinner but the parting kiss was written by Jane Austin. She liked his soft lips. But beneath his bulging waste coat and XXL black pants, beat a pining heart, which in the dead of night haunted his waking days. His partner of 16 years left him. She rehabilitated child rapists and sex offenders. Young mothers envisioned blowing her brains out with a shotgun. Jose was having an unsatisfactory affair with the wife of a work colleague and he dealt dope and snorted lines of heroin at night to numb a lonely heart.

When he discovered Jim and Justine were seeing each other, he started a brilliant smear campaign. He told her Jim hated female musicians and was a festering host of transmittable sexual diseases. He punched out buskers and forced his female students to engage in coprophiliac sex. You throw enough shit. When Jim threw a party for Jose, he was channelling Shakespeare who wrote, ‘if little faults proceeding on distemper shall not be winked at, how shall we stretch our eye when capital crimes, chewed, swallowed, and digested, appear before us?’ What an idiot.

When Jim cleaned up the junk in Jose’s house after he croaked, he found a draft letter Jose had written to Justine, tucked in the back pages of a notebook.

Dear Justine,

Keep away from Jim. I know you like him but he will hurt you and I won’t let that happen. He has hurt other women. There’s something cruel and distant about him. The Thin White Duke and all that. When I first knew him, he was all smiles and generous to a fault. Now my eyes are open and there is something slimy about his well-timed literary quotes and ridiculous puns. We were friends once but I’ve gone off him like a bucket of prawns in the sun.

I wanted to write a short letter, which is very old fashioned, I know. I’m a walking anachronism. I very much enjoyed going to the movies with you. I found it hard not to resort to teenage boy tricks and put my arm around you. How inappropriate that would be – or would it? You are free now, free from a marriage, free from the dictates of ‘must’ and ‘should’. It must be surprising to find so many men attracted to you. They see what I see but at night, I see more. I must be careful what I write here. I was wondering if you in your bed, with the possums playing in the roof, and the sheet pulled up under your chin, whether you think of me? I’m far too shy to ask you to your face although last week in your music store, I had summed up the courage but bloody Jim walked in and I had to bury my thoughts in a pile of Sparklehorse records. The moment lost.

I had better water the weeds in the garden. I have one question, ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’

Love, Jose xx

THE PARTY

The women laughed at Jose’s jokes and his mealy-mouthed mates poured vodka down his throat. By 2.00 am he was hammered. Against my better judgement, I’d thrown a party to cheer him up. He’d been down for months and made a point of not contacting me. Much of the night he watched Justine dance around in a fetching black dress, showing off her long legs. It was around 3.00am and every one had left when he slurred, “where’s the fuckin drugs?” It sounded like, wheezedafukindugs? I threw a small plastic bag on the table. A potpourri of hash, speed, Valium and god knows what. I went to bed and Jose set sail in to that good night.

About 15 minutes later, I awoke with a start by the squeaky front gate opening. I looked in the lounge and Jose had gone. I threw a rug and a pillow on the couch and went back to bed and awoke about 9.15am with a cracking hangover. Jose was dead on the loungeroom floor like a roadkill wombat with his arms and legs tucked beneath him.

The emergency call centre operator said an ambulance would be there in five minutes. Just enough time to throw the evidence in the kitchen tidy bin and take two Panadol. I walked down stairs, opened the front door and let the paramedics, two plains clothes detectives and two members of the forensic crime squad in.

The paramedics laid Jose on a stretcher and carried him down the stairs. The senior detective introduced himself as David Rodriguez and his offsider, who was standing with the forensic squad, going through the kitchen tidy bin, was detective Ray Fines or something like that.

“Big party last night?” Detective Rodriguez said.

“Yeah, in honour of the guy the ambos carried out”

I gave him the pertinent details which he wrote down in a little black book. Jose had just split up from his girlfriend. He was banging a work colleague’s wife and he was depressed.

“Do you reckon he killed himself?” he asked.

“No idea”

As the ambulance drove off, a neighbour came over and said I was a fucking inconsiderate prick for playing music so loud. She would make an official complaint to the cops.

“You just missed them”

The Coroner’s report took 18 months to arrive. Jose had snorted a shit load of high-grade heroin, which, when combined with the alcohol reading of .22 and his obesity, killed him stone dead. There was a little blood left in his drug stream. He’d got the heroin out of the glovebox.

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After making love Justine turned away, sat up in bed and said to herself soliloquy-like, as if she was front of centre stage, ‘it’s only lust’. The cars chirped up and down Belladonna Street. She stared at the venetian blinds and a thought-crease ran across her forehead, as if trying to solve a difficult problem. I could have been a mass of sense perceptions lying next to her. It was her three-word code which said the affair would never amount to much. No Ten Storey Love Song. No Heart Full of Soul.

And the universe exploded sending matter and gas in all directions, to form, a one-in-ten billion chance, a blue planet, to turn and circle a small star. And it cooled and the oceans formed and from the sun and water and carbon, sugars arose and one day, millions of years ago, a tiny green sapling rose through the soil, the progenitor of the great forests and the trinity of God and Atman and Buddha looked down and spoke in a voice which would ring through the ages, ‘it’s only lust’.

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Dave Throughbride orders a double Jack Daniels and ice and sits down on a wonky bar stool next to me. He’s got a different take on Jim.

Was it Javier Marias who wrote life can’t be narrated – or was it Derrida? I can’t remember. Look mate, you’re trying to tell a story that can’t be told, whether in a journal, a myth, history, biography, novel or funeral eulogy – it doesn’t matter. But when it comes to Jim, his story can be told in one word: arsehole.

I knew him when he was running with a gang of street hoods in Port Adelaide. He liked gangs for the same reason cops and outlaw motor cycles like gangs. It’s a clan. They stick up for each other. They’d hang around the docks and pubs, do break and enters and nick cars in the leafy eastern suburbs and flog ‘em in Sydney. Jim would have been about 17 or 18.

In Myra Hindley Street – this was yonks ago – he kicked a line of Harleys over which fell like dominos. The Banditos were not happy. He had to take a no expenses, unpaid holiday interstate for a month. But here’s the lowdown and you heard it from me first. Remember 20 years ago how he’d just disappear? He was in fucking Belfast working for fucking Sein Fein. Took unpaid leave. He wasn’t stuffing letters in to envelopes either. They put him up in a flat near the university with three other guys. Ballot or the bullet? Jim was bullet. He didn’t give a fuck and when I say he didn’t give a fuck, he didn’t give a fuck. He was ideological. That’s not a word you hear much these days.

When he left the City of Churches and Sex Crimes, he gave the gang thing away. Got himself an education and read a lot of books. Wanker. Jim used to say when half-pissed, that all you have is yourself. You’re a sun with a thousand rays in your belly. The rest is nothing. He stole that from Picasso. If you’re looking for some sort of essence of the man, that’s as close as you’ll get – but don’t forget arsehole.

If he liked you, he’d stick by you no matter what. If you were going through hell, he’d come and describe the architecture. If you ran when the going got tough, he’d turn on you like a rabid dog.

Dave empties the dregs of packet of chicken chips and between chews, throws back the Jack Daniels and waves to the barman for another and points to a poem in one of the journals.

Here, read this shit, he says:

Circe

Around the island again
it’s lamingtons and fine wine 24/7
the clocks are socks
in the land of maybe
Circe’s sweet song;
think of other sailors
their bones at liberty
who wondered too
is it the singer or song?
A month. A year.
Walking the wheels of thought
which lead back to song
but what is wrong?
Your clearer thoughts
snuffle truffles smitten
by a bikini and coy smile
supine on her beach.
She smiles and sings only for you
and me, brave Odysseus
advice: never get off the boat

What did Lawrence Durrell say? A poem is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique. Surely a classical education can be put to better use than describing how fucked up a woman made him feel. How fucked up did he make her feel? If you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything. Know what I mean?

What do you remember about Justine?

Only met her a few of times. Hung out with musos. The black t-shirt scene. Too cool for school, too pissed to kiss. Some of the dumbest fuckwits on Planet Earth. Thought three chords and the truth would make them famous. Justine was beautiful but fucked up in that way many beautiful women are. No sense of humour. You’d tell a joke but her eyes didn’t laugh. Jose was never far away. It must be love, love, love, nothing more, nothing less. Love is the best. You reckon it’s noble to kill yourself for unrequited love? Get the fuck out of here. His death fucked Jim up until he woke up.

Justine didn’t want a lover. Sure, sometimes they’d end up in bed but that got short-sheeted after Jose croaked. No need to make a Taj Mahal out of something as honest as a good fuck. Jim was an amateur actor punching blind in a three-act play he’d written in his head and Jose’s death and Justine’s guilt drove him mad. She wrote him three letters in two years. Three. She was always going to go back to her husband or maybe wind up with a music producer or someone in the Kuiper Belt of garage rock history.

Dave, why do you swear so much?

I feel things strongly.

JUSTINE’S LETTER

Dear Jim,

I’ll never be able to repay all the letters you’ve sent but I’ll try to capture my thoughts, which are butterflies on a Spring day – or are they moths?

You want to know what I’m thinking. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. My mind never points north. The compass spins so erratically I might tell you one thing and it will be true but not 20 minutes later. That’s why I’m mute. I don’t want to sow the seeds of confusion in you, which have taken root in me.

Jose’s death has cast a pall over us. There’s no denying it. It’s an anchor dragging me down. I suppose I was a bit in love with him but it wasn’t like the love we share. I know that sounds like a line from Days of Our Lives but it’s true. Jose used to light up a room. I wake some mornings and think he will call me or we will meet for coffee and then there’s the stab, knowing he has gone.

You threw the party to try cheer him up but people don’t know that. A rumour is as good as the truth, and if the former involves death and drugs, it will travel far.

Eros once bound us hand and foot and I revelled in that. Now, with Jose lying cold in his grave, we are like two wounded animals.

The hour hand moves so slowly these days. If I could stab it with this pen, I would. We need to cheer up, don’t we?

Your love,

Justine

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Dave has gone for a piss. When a marriage is over, it’s not over. The unhappy couple have history and understandings built over the years. There’s no way a new love – for want of a better word – could sway her feelings from her husband. It was obvious, even to me, that she still loved him. Loved to hear him play the drums and sing. Loved the memories they’d created. Many years ago they’d travelled through Mexico, where she picked up some Spanish. They went in to a café outside of Cancun and she told an old waiter with a drooping moustache in Spanish, she was horny and needed pleasing. She meant to say she was hungry and could she have some food as soon as possible. The café erupted in laughter. You can’t erase memories like that. Justine and her husband were the sole inhabitants of a mental and emotional geography they’d created themselves. It couldn’t be co-opted or traduced by another.

Jim pursued her like a gambler pursues money. If she ignored him, he would play another hand. If he lost that, he would raise the bid in the next. It scared her so she invented ‘pause buttons’. When she hit the ‘pause button’, they’d have three or four weeks apart. He railed at these contrivances but they kept her sane.

They were two very different characters: he’d dance across his lounge to ‘Puttin on the Ritz’, dressed in a dog costume, complete with cane and top hat. Justine put a premium on dignity and self-control. She wasn’t demure but neither was she into charades or silliness. She had a strange aloofness, close to haughty. She didn’t fill the emotive space her personality required.

Jim later wrote she was the Princess of the Cat People, calculating and uncommunicative but she was none of those things. She was kind and considerate and for a while, when they first met, there was love. She wasn’t a treasure to be possessed. I ain’t saying you ain’t pretty, all I’m saying, I’m not ready for any person, place or thing to try pull the reins in on me… She was going her own way.

Jim sends me an email once a year. He’s living in Patmos, an island off the coast of Turkey. Bought a little house, high on a hill overlooking the sea. He’s taking tours to the Monastery and the Cave of St John, where he wrote the bonkers Book of Revelations. Fitting in a way. In summer he works as a lifeguard and spends half his time raking plastic off the beach. I wrote and asked if he ever thought about Justine. They parted as enemies. He wrote and included a poem, Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert, with the final two lines in bold.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Then he closed in Greek, which had me scampering for a translation:

σε κανένα μουνί δεν αρέσει η προσγείωση με σκληρό νερό

But no cunt likes a hard water landing.