Christos Tsiolkas was born in Melbourne in 1965. He is the author of the novel, Loaded (Random House, 1994), and in collaboration with Sasha Soldatow, of the book Jump Cuts (Random House, 1996). In 1998 he was co-author, with Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Greeves and Ireni Vela of the play, Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? (Melbourne Workers Theatre). He also has written short stories, essays and criticism for a range of publications, as well as working in film, video and drama.
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The Jesus Man
ePub ISBN 9781742745053
Published by
Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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First published 1999
Copyright © Christos Tsiolkas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Tsiolkas, Christos, 1965-
The Jesus man.
ISBN 0 091 83942 4.
I. Title.
A.823.3
Design by Yolande Gray
for Shane Laing, in faith
for Jessica Migotto, in trust
and for Wayne van der Stelt, in gratitude and in love
Acknowledgements
A book is not just an object. It doesn’t just belong to the writer. What is written is all my responsibility but it being written depends on the labour and support of others. So thanks to the friends around me—to George Papaellinas, Sasha Soldatow, Megan Nicholson, Spiro Economopolous, Jeana Vithoulkas, Miriam Iuricich, Helen Tamme, Cathy Woodfield, John Harrison and Dawn Jackson. And always, thanks to Alan ‘Sol’ Sultan. This all has only been made possible by the faith of my family. Thank you George and Georgia Tsiolkas, John, Catherine, Vicky, Pete, Bill and Eva. Thanks to Thea Diamanta, and in memory of Theo Illias Triantafyllou. As well, gratitude for the assistance and enthusiasm of Julia Stiles, Fiona Inglis and Linda Funnell. And especially, Jane Palfreyman. Gracias amigo! Thanks also to Paul Dougdale and Heather Brooks for helping with the printing—and for making Canberra inviting.
This book is also a hope for the future. For Geordie Moran Dalzell, for Caitlin, Illias and Zoe, for Kate and Michael. For Carl Reed, for Jack Harrison and Zachariah Stathis.
I want to extend a big thanks to the Maritime Union of Australia for giving me optimism. In a time when everything and everyone is announcing that greed has won, the MUA showed that no, it’s winning, but it ain’t over yet.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Copyright
Imprint Page
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Section One
Dominic Stefano
Section Two
Thomas Stefano
1. Blonde Mary
2. The Stepford Husband
3. Chinese girls are not sluts
4. Chocolate City
5. Fitzroy vs Collingwood at Victoria Park
6. Hiroshima Day, 1989
7. Grand Final
8. What do you do?
9. Freedom ’90
10. The Great Schism
11. Radiation
12. Conversations about drugs, war and food
13. War
Intermissions
Fremantle, 1947
Greece, 1991
Section Three
Luigi Stefano
1. The last record shop
2. Boys + girls
3. Thesis: Taxi Driver
4. The last goodbye
5. Antipolitics
Section Four
Epilogues
1. From the journal of Sean Sanders 1968-1997
2. Freedom ’97
I am an atheist but I once did experience the shock of a vision. I was with my brother Dominic, his wife Eva, and their children; we were walking the gloomy and empty beaches at the southern most tip of the Australian coast. Even though it was summer, a sharp wind had foamed the sea. As we emerged from scrub and onto the beach, we saw a line of crows, a horizontal dotting along the shoreline; they were pecking into the sand. The first bird we approached was tearing into a dark object, and it refused to move as our shadows fell across it. Then my niece Lisa spotted what it was pecking.
—Get away, you dirty bird.
She let go of my hand and ran towards the creatures. She stopped abruptly.
A heart, large; too big to be human. All along the shore the crows were feeding on blood and innards, liver and stomach and lung. Each crow kept a respectful solitaire. They ate alone, a few metres away from each other. The terror I experienced is indescribable. All I can say of it is that I had stumbled across the mad order of nature: it was screaming out the riddle of God. When we looked out to the chopping sea, a dark mirror of oil caught our attention. The oil slick rode with the waves, rippling and shaking, but it retained its ovular form. Caught in the middle were large grey birds, those still alive were squealing weakly. I’ve never again—thankfully, never since that day—experienced such sound: the hopeless feeble lamentations, the will betrayed by exhaustion.
Why did we feel fear? It was the insane symmetry, the mathematical symmetry of what I saw—the neat column of birds feeding on blood and flesh. I can understand why the crow appears again and again in folk superstition as the herald of death. I saw them hungry for meat, famished, their zeal murderous.
This book is about a family, my family, which has been followed by the crow for generations. This is a myth and, like all myths, atheists and skeptics will scorn it. I’m not sure that I myself can claim a faith in what I am about to tell you.
On the beach Dominic rushed towards his child, scooped her in his large strong arms, held her, Shush Litsa, Shush. And he kicked at the crows. They circled above. Let’s turn back, he said, his only thought his children. But part of me wanted to stay, I wanted to face this terror, examine it, wanted to comprehend it. Dominic has a particular strength that I wish were mine, this ability to turn away. He hates the crow, whatever that might mean, and he turns away from it. He has a faith that I don’t have. We walked in a single file back away from the ocean, Dom holding Lisa, Eva with the baby, and me the last in line. I turned back and saw that the crows had returned to their feast. I heard the whimpering of the dying birds caught in their greasy prison.
Later, around the fire, the children asleep in the tents, I started questioning Dominic about the crow. What did it mean? Why had it followed us all our lives? He was exasperated by my questions. Eva was smoking a joint, in and out of the conversation.
—It’s a myth, Louie, he told me. Understand? It’s part of our family, who we are. Hasn’t it always been with us?
—But myths aren’t true, I insisted.
He laughed and stoked the fire.
—That’s university talking, he goaded me, you just want to question everything.
—So myths are true?
—Some are. He was stroking Eva’s knee. She was smiling at me.
—What do you think, Eva?
We both looked at her.
—I don’t know, she answered, offering me the joint. This is about your family, what I think doesn’t matter.
—But you’re family, insisted Dominic, what are we if not a family?
—I’m your wife, Dom, she answered softly. She got up and wiped her pants clean of dirt and twigs. I’m going to bed, she said, and kissed us both goodnight. I watched my brother kiss his wife, he closed his eyes as their lips touched, and I was jealous. Such a strong man, my brother, the way he had rushed towards Lisa on the beach. I know, I know that he must have shared my terror, shared my loathing of those birds. But he acted, for his daughter. I reached out and touched him, softly, on his knee.
—What?
—Nothing.
He ruffled my hair.
—Louie, Louie, he sang, and began rolling another joint. Don’t worry about what doesn’t make sense, what you can’t understand. Just worry about what is real, what you can touch, what you can feel.
—Our family are a bit obsessed with myths, aren’t they? I was doodling, with a stick, in the dirt. He didn’t answer, I had made him sad.
—The crow is nothing, Lou, all right? You don’t need the crow to understand our family. He sat up, handed me the joint, and when he spoke again his voice was firm, the older brother’s voice. I’m going to the tent. Make sure the fire’s out when you pack it in, right?
I nodded. I was alone. I looked into the slowly dwindling fire and could hear the light snores of the children, the shifting of the adult bodies. A family at sleep. I looked into the fire and thought about family.
It was Dominic who taught me how to clean underneath my foreskin. I don’t know who taught him, he never said. Dad just never thought of it. He was cut and so he probably had no idea of the hygiene required for uncircumcised cocks. That the three of us boys kept our foreskins was Mum’s idea, a decision she made straight after Dominic’s birth, against the protestations of the doctor and the mild questioning of my father. I wonder whether she thought that somehow this would connect us boys to her land and to her history: our cocks were matriarchal and Greek, not patriarchal and Australian.
I was twelve and Dominic was about to get married. We had visited a store in Prahran that hired out suits and tuxedoes. I was to be the youngest groomsman. I was growing impatient—I hate clothes shopping! Mum kept fiddling with the tuxedo trouser leg, slipping in pins and recalculating measurements. Our brother Tommy had stepped outside, in his tux, middle of the day in High Street, smoking a cigarette.
—It’ll be all right, I groaned.
—It looks fine, agreed Dom.
—Too short.
We couldn’t sway her. Dominic knelt down beside her and checked. It’s fine, he repeated. Reluctantly she stood up.
Later, back home, Dominic entered the bedroom I shared with Tommy. Tom was on his bed, reading Mad magazine. Dom ordered him out.
—Get fucked.
My oldest brother never once took an order from Tommy.
—Out, he warned.
Tommy, bitching, left the room.
—What is it? Everything for the last month had been the wedding. Dom was tense. He sat on my bed and refused to look at me.
—Louie, you know about cleaning yourself?
There’s no way to hide from a question like that. Looking back now I realise that, at twelve years of age, I was a shy and nervous kid. Easily humiliated. Dom was gentle, but loud waves of blood smashed against my ears. What he said to me sounded muffled, came from a long way away.
—Listen, you know how to pull back the skin on your dick? It was the first time he looked at me. I nodded. It was a lie.
—Good, well when you shower just pull back the skin and give yourself a wash. He took a deep breath, relieved it was over, and came over and hugged me. I was burning. He left me alone. He didn’t say why he had decided to bring the subject up now—he didn’t need to. I knew. It was when he was kneeling before me, it was then he must have sniffed my crotch. The accumulated scum. And I realised, an aching humiliation, that Mum had smelt it as well.
That night two things happened. I showered and slowly pulled back my foreskin. It was tight and it hurt, hurt badly; it stung. But I pulled it back and started to lather up, spent five fucking minutes rubbing my cock raw till there wasn’t a fleck of dried old scum on it. And the second thing? Later, in bed, Tommy still watching TV in the lounge, I tried masturbating by tugging for the first time. Before, what I did was to roll my cock between my palms. It felt different, it didn’t feel as good, but it felt the right thing to do. This was how Dom did it, how boys were meant to do it.
Tommy and I never really talked about such things. It was a code set up between us from when we were very young. I don’t think Dom and Tommy spoke about that kind of stuff either. They weren’t close. It was like there was me, the baby, there was Dom, the oldest and a man, and somewhere in between was Tommy. He was happiest watching TV, sitting close to the screen, the rest of the family behind him, not in view.
Of course, I remember the television as well, that it was always on. But some of my earliest memories—very early memories, those memories that reach back beyond when time became concrete, before time became clocked—are of being a small child and listening to the adults tell stories, their words competing with the TV. And I still remember one evening vividly, sitting on my father’s lap. Mum and Yiota were telling stories about life back in Greece. They were talking about the priests. Mum always said that you could trust the Church, never the priest. Her Aunt Yianoula had had an affair for years with Father Vassili. This night Yiota was telling us about the priest in her village. He was more into boys than girls and was having it off with a boy who minded the goats up in the mountain. One day the priest’s wife was returning from collecting firewood and she saw her husband, bent over, his robe discarded, being fucked by the shepherd boy. She screamed and started giving chase to both of them. Yiota says the men tore down the hill and ran into the valley where Yiota, still a girl, was helping her mother collect wild greens. She recalled that Father Yianni flew past, disrobed, only a white undershirt covering his torso. And you know what, chuckled Yiota, the big crucifix around his neck was swinging in time with his dick as he was running.
I remember the whole family collapsed into hysteria as Yiota told her tale. My father was laughing so much I can still remember his tears falling on my face as I looked up at him. Mama, Dom, Tommy, Spiro and Yiota, me and Dad, all of us were laughing.
I want to offer a history of my family. I can do that by fixing the dates—births and marriages, divorces and deaths. I can tell you the shared stories, the facts that have been sanctioned and passed down. But remember, please, this is also my story, in my own words. I’ll try and be honest, tell you what I know. But it is an interpretation; and I have to go back to beginnings and in the beginning I wasn’t there. So it may be that some of what I say is bullshit, is speculation, lies and fabrications passed on. Myth. But in wishing to describe a family it would be ludicrous to deny it its myths. Memory and myth, like fiction, tend towards the cataclysm, the catharsis, the tragic and the painful. Before I begin there is one thing I must insist on, that you must understand: we also shared laughter.
SECTION ONE
Dominic Stefano
Ghosts are not the resurrection but the insurrection of the dead.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Dominic watched the clock, the slow creep towards the end of the lesson. He looked at the dark black sheen of Lynette’s hair in front of him. With one hand he scratched letters into the desk, with the other he softly rubbed his crotch, thinking of Lynette, listening to the murmuring of the teacher, words descending without meaning or sense, a
ware only of the rhythm. Lynette’s arse was big, squeezed into tight jeans. Dominic scratched the word fuck into the desk.
I should have wagged. He was bored by the regime and the monotony of school, the numbing repetition of knowledge. A map of Australia behind him, a picture of Queen Elizabeth, her face made ghostly by dust. A snakeskin, from an excursion in the country, was wrapped around the frame. Dominic took his hand off his crotch, yawned and again glanced at the clock. The hands tortured him with their exquisite laggard pace.
There was a sudden commotion in the corridor. A sobbing, then a knocking at the door. Mr Clifford entered, ignoring the students and walking straight up to the surprised Miss Ahrn. He whispered in her ear. The door was open and some students giggled, noticing that in the corridor thin Miss Lunerman was crying.
—Someone’s died, whispered Lynette to the stolid Olga sitting beside her. Wonder who it is.
Dominic watched Miss Ahrn. She had gripped the desk, her eyes stared wide. Mr Clifford put his arm around her. She shook it off. Clearing her throat, then with an unsteady voice, she asked for attention. Her adolescent audience sat up, obedient. Even Dominic, feigning his usual boredom, was eager to hear what she had to say.
—Class, we’re dismissing early. It has just been announced on the radio. Miss Ahrn paused, she gripped the desk tighter. The bastards have sacked the Prime Minister.
The class broke into furore. Shouting, yelling. What happened? How? When? The pandemonium rang through the portable, shaking the air, joining the erupting thunder from throughout the school. Miss Ahrn and Mr Clifford watched silently.
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