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A Drinkwalk April 10, 2013

The signs on the bus stands in Adelaide, and the ads on the radio, are all extremely concerned with the danger of drinkwalkers, the pedestrian equivalent of drinkdrivers.  In the spirit of bushwalking (as they call tramping in Australia), I might think of it a different way.

I arrived in the home my friends stay in, a great ocher wooden building, which a man had built with his own hands a long time ago, when he was as old as my friend’s partner is now, and I was barely alive.  There’s a hammock on the front porch.  Inside a pale blond woman who would usually swathe her wrinkles in some sort of cosmetics, a short-haired and pinker woman with a cigarette, and a ruddy white-haired man who greets me, and whom I acknowledge but walk by with my twenty kilo backpack to set it down.  He comes in later, tells me I’m fast, a great mind, like my friend’s partner (note the classic omission), and he’s slow, and apologizes for this.  His words are slow, his french accent improbably strong.  He says he just wants a few minutes to talk to me alone, without the other people.  All he wants is for me to apologize for not stopping to chat on my way in, and maybe to relax a little.  It takes a while for me to realize this.  I’ve never been in a house owned and run by a drunk.

The second night, I’m trying to jam with our shorter-haired flatmate. Her rhythm is difficult for me to follow, but I try hard to get the swing of it, before wandering out to grab some stir fry.  Our homeowner suggests I try to play something, and I make the best of ‘Romance Anonimo’ with an acoustic he’s jacked in, and an amp he’s turned up. I hand the guitar off to him, and he wanders in to our flatmate to play with her. He sort of follows her rhythm, keeps to her chord changes, anyway. You can hear from the violence with which he attacks the strings in his crescendos, from how hard he bends, that he’s not about the nylon strings he’s playing. When he wanders in, I ask him if he plays steel.

He does. He starts to show my friend’s partner a chord progression. Am – G. Am – G. He has fun with it. I eat a little stir fry. I drink a few sips of wine. Three run-throughs of the romance aside, I haven’t touched a guitar for a season, haven’t really tried in far longer. But, music calls to you. It’s not just the inexplicable and well-attested urge to buy guitars, it’s the urge to play them, to feel the rhythm, to surprise it. They say you can fit about six things in working memory, and maybe that’s down to three when I’m trying to keep up a chord progression. It’s a bit like the tower of hanoi, trying to piece together a new idea, something I haven’t played before, when there isn’t room in my head to lay all the pieces out and put them together leisurely. And yet, at some point, all the remaining moves are sort of obvious. I imagine it like a miniature ship, slowly and carefuly assembled and folded, just so that at some moment, it can slip into its bottle, and snap open. And then, after that moment of magic, it’s just a ship in a bottle, a neat two bar riff, something I’ve seen and heard a million times.

He gets going, I pick up the acoustic. I ask him if he’s going to keep playing chords. He starts showing my friend’s partner a longer one. Am – G – Em – FG. It’s a little complicated for someone who’s never played guitar before, but he starts getting into it. Maybe he misses this, too. It takes forever for me to learn the progression, as it always does, but it’s so simple that eventually even I get the hang of it. We jam. Sometimes I get a few arpeggios in. Play different inversions. I take a few stabs at a bass line, with little success. But, it’s beautiful just to get lost in the flow again. At some point, I’m done, I’ve said what I have to say, and I let it go. I have to eat my stir fry before it gets cold again.

Later, he starts in again. It’s hard to string together his words sometimes. Accents, french, kiwi, pile up. Vague statements about value mix with loaded flattery, stutter, eventually reemerge. He says if he was me, he’d tell himself to piss off. I tell him that he must not have very good manners as a guest.

I feel a very muted fear because I’m a grown man and this man has no real power over me.  Because he hasn’t drunk that much, because he doesn’t get worse than passive-aggressive. Because I’ll be gone in a few days. But, within this small realm of muted dread he creates, his rule is absolute. I never quite exactly know what he’ll do next, and it unnerves me. No one says anything to him about his behavior, and it discomforts me. It is his house, and I am in this sense in his debt, and this wrong-foots me. There is only waiting for the next night to see what happens.

The next night, early, before dinner, I sit with him and his wife as they drink beer together, and hear their stories, how they came to live in a hand-built cabin on a hill by the Onetangi forest on a small viticultural island in the Hauraki Gulf. He says she wants him to make something of himself, keeps expecting him to go out and do and not just say. He says things that aren’t coherent. Perhaps that she feels trapped. She suggests again that she’s sort of paying for previous decisions. That she followed her dreams here and look where that’s gotten her. I leave for dinner.

Two things happen that night. One is that he berates my friend’s partner for washing dishes in his face, while he’s eating milkless mac-and-cheese. He tells him vehemently that they wouldn’t do that in France. Then again, he laughs, we’re not in France, right?

But the other, ah, we have laid six wine glasses on the table. My friends have good wine, for they are occasionally paid with the final fruit of their labors.  We pour four glasses. We pour a glass for the lady of the house. I will not forget that there is a silence. She asks us to pour her husband a glass.

Ursula LeGuin says that it is a novelist’s impossible task to take that which cannot be expressed in words, and express it in words. I am not and cannot be a novelist on either count. The moment is sublime.