Phone Conversation With My Mother

Cast of characters:

Richie – stepfather

Jasper - dog

Narrator – mother

 “Richie opened a can of water chestnuts 18 months past their used by date and fed some to Jasper and put the rest in his fried rice and when I told him later that you could get botchalism from eating spoiled canned goods and said ‘oh it’ll probably be alright as long as the can wasn’t bulging’ he said ‘the can was bulging’. And so then I said ‘well botchalism has about an 80 to 90 percent fatality rate’ and he got quite upset – not about himself but about Jasper, he was saying ‘Oh if Jasper dies of botchalism I’d have to die too – and I’d want to be buried in the same coffin with him, in the same grave.’”

Richie Cracks a Funny

Oh, my god, MY STEP-FATHER MAILED ME A WOODEN SPOON.

I have never, in our 25-odd year relationship, had a conversation with him about football, least of all about the Raiders, and EVEN HE HAS GOT WIND OF HOW FUCKED UP THEY ARE. My god.

This is bad. This means that word of their abject awfulness has crept beyond the mainstream and penetrated the cracks and crevices of polite society. Like mildew! Or thrush!

I know it’s only round 15 and I know the Eels have some catching up and clawing back to do but he is probably right about the spoon. Richie really doesn’t engage with popular culture at all. He has no tolerance for movies, or music, or even television aside from early evening viewing on the ABC. One time I was watching The Biggest Loser in his presence and he became very excited by the big mansion they were living in  – that rude white edifice – and bet me twenty dollars that it was Rose Porteous’ pile. I said no, I said I was fairly certain the show was filmed in Sydney and not on the banks of the Swan River in Perth; I said silence, fool, but he insisted, and the bet was lodged. He’s out of touch, in other words, and of an often uniquely illogical bent.

But perhaps not this time. Perhaps Richie is ahead of the pack this time.

In any case, it’s a beautiful spoon, an artisan affair, all off-kilter and irregular. I will use it to administer beatings to my assorted cats, and any future children; step, birth or other.

After I arrived home from overseas last month our very first exchange involved Richie telling me that he had fixed the interior light in my car and that I must be very careful to keep it on the ‘off’ setting so as it didn’t activate itself every time the door is opened and drain the battery. He bought this final point home repeatedly, with a quiet potency. This is actually exactly the conversation you want to have after two turbulent flights and the nerve-shattering trauma of an overstayed visa incident at Kathmandu airport. It is very grounding. Truly. There is nothing like a conversation about car maintenance while you struggle with overstuffed luggage, in a train station parking lot, after midnight, to really bring home the fact that you are suddenly far, far away from the sweeping majesty of the Himalayas. As it happened it was really pretty much the perfect home coming. I’d had a fucking gut-full of those stinking mountains.

Later on, in the early hours of that same morning, as I was preparing for the long drive to my home, he appeared with a baggie of Australian Defence Force supply rations – tubes of condensed milk, and jam, and bars of chocolate all tersely wrapped in khaki green, Soviet-style packaging -  and said “You like this stuff don’t you? It all tastes like shit but it’ll keep you going on your drive” as if I was striking out into the rolling vastness of the Antarctic instead of, you know, driving down the Hume…  

As a footnote; that stuff really did taste like shit, and, because I have cheap and trashy tastes I really did like it. But more than that, I liked the sweet absurdity behind the giving of it. After all, it’s not every day that you are plied with military rations to ensure your gastro-intestinal satisfaction while in charge of two-tonnes of speeding metal atop one of Australia’s most heavily used highways. I can’t help thinking now that it should be.             

Dad

My estranged father moved from Bermagui to Canberra. Or: from coastal hamlet to capitalist wasteland.  He used to spend his weekends hallucinating inside sweat lodges. By unhappy association my brother and I did too.

Our family was fractured, fraught.  There were strictly enforced drop-off and pick-up systems in place, there were insecure new step-parents trying to establish dominance, there was terrible tension, tightly clenched jaws and always an awful sense of things unsaid, of hostilities unspoken, of rupture.  

My chest always felt tight; clenched, like it had a huge hand around it, like it was being squeezed inside the fist of a huge, idle ogre.  

Amid all this upheaval I think my father may have made some subtle appeals to our childlike desires to please to get us into those sweat-lodges.

They would spend days building them – hacking down wattle saplings and digging holes and heating rocks and draping tarps and smearing themselves with ochre, and the only sensation I can recall during this lead-up is one of deep, fatalistic foreboding.

Inside they were crowded and dark and terrifying. We were urged to withstand the searing heat and distinct sensation of suffocation for as long as possible.

The child who could stay in longest was often given something afterwards as reward, perhaps a packet of Rizlas, or a fossilised piece of dog-shit, or a shriveled length of umbilical cord of uncertain origins.

To this day I have quite a bit of trouble with confined and close spaces. If there’s heat involved I become additionally distressed. Wild of eye and wanting to tear strips of flesh from my face and neck, that kind of thing.

Along with the heat and the steam and the suffocating terror that we were forced to suppress the sweat-lodges were filled with naked and hallucinating hippies. This included my father. I have residual issues here too, with naked and hallucinating hippies in general, and with my father more specifically*.  

Moral of story: none.

*Not really in regards to the sweat-lodges per se. It was the Far South Coast in the late eighties, they were Sanyasins, Osho** was big back then, whatever.

**Osho was the holy man, the Bhagwan, the head of the Orange People. Naturally he had a very long beard. Osho is probably most famous for the large collection of Rolls Royce cars he amassed, reported to be 93 at final count. This didn’t sit well with some. Some Sanyasins saw the cars as unrivalled tools for obtaining publicity, others as a good business investment or as a kind of spiritual test, others as an expression of Osho’s scorn for middle-class aspirations and yet others as an indication of the love of his disciples. Someone called James S. Gordon opines that what Osho loved most about the Rolls Royces, apart from their comfort, was “the anger and envy that his possession of so many – so absurdly, unnecessarily, outrageously many – of them aroused.” Well, yeh. I can see that.  

It was a worldwide movement. I had no concept of it back then. When I was nineteen and living in a caravan park in North Queensland I read an entire book written by Osho without knowing who he was, without knowing that he was the fucking Bhagwan, the man whose death in 1990 had all those hippy Orange People wailing and flailing and chanting back when I was small and confused and clenched.   

Osho discouraged marrying and having children. since he saw families as inherently prone to dysfunction and destructiveness. He encouraged sterilisation and abortion.

Fuck You Dad

Thinking about going to a cat show today. You know, participating in what is known as “real life”. This in itself is an uninviting concept, but, CATS. Fuck yeh, CATS! And cat shows are supposed to attract extremely odd and idiosyncratic individuals. Fuck yeh, WEIRDOS!

People occasionally make obnoxious comments of the ‘crazy cat lady’ variety. I don’t mind. I don’t think I’m quite there yet but I do aspire to achieve certified, crazy cat lady status in the future. There was one time I did mind though, and it was a couple of months ago, during a conversation with my father, who I have been estranged from for more than fifteen years. Sixteen, seventeen, something like that. He’s okay, I guess, but he’s one of those men who shows no courage when it counts. At the end of 2010, when I saw him after all that time, he was just this small stranger standing on my doorstep who I was taller than. He was moving to Canberra at the exact time that I was preparing to leave Canberra. I had several dozen reasons to be leaving already but that one was a solid late entry because seeing him totally unsettled me, all he did was cry and ask me irritating questions about my mental health. Like had I ever considered suicide? We spoke on the phone a few times since then and the last time we did he asked me if I still had four cats and when I said yeh he started, like, cackling, weirdly, for a long time, like he was laying an egg, it was terrible. When he’d stopped and composed himself he said into the stony stretched silence something like” wow, you really are a crazy cat lady aren’t you”. I wish I could have said what I wanted to at the time, I wish I could have suggested that perhaps the reason I find cats preferable to people may have something to do with him turning out to be a turncoat and a terrible father who fucked with my soft bird-bone early-adolescent head and sent sadness and suspicion to settle into my hardening bones.

I didn’t say that though, and, as is the way when you don’t say what you should have said and needed to say, I taste metal in my throat when I think about it now.

Anyway, whatever the reasons, I have an ever-intensifying infatuation with cats and just imagine the fun of moving among other, more motivated enthusiasts who not only find cats to be creatures of unparalleled excellence but believe they necessitate rigorous exhibition.

“They get stretched out so they can be judged on their structure, but if they bite the judge it’s a big disgrace.”  That’s the line that attracted me in the article announcing the show. Also, the special mention that one of the judges was coming “all the way from Minneapolis, United States.”

-I’ve compiled a list of things that could have made this story better – Camaros, corsetry, hills carpeted with flowers, David Koresh, seafood extender, being sprayed by a skunk……… But, you know, then I remembered that Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were all huge fans of the cat, Bukowski in particular made constant references in his later-in-life letters to the way his bunch of adopted strays lifted his soup-stain suicide moods just by the way they crossed a rug or sat in sunshine and slept. Nothing can get better than that.