by Nick Earls
‘Just a nap,’ I tell him as my feet meet the concrete and my knees go bendy.
‘No worries,’ he says. ‘Maybe you’ll have sea legs.’ And he laughs.
‘Back soon,’ I hear Keanu say to the driver as the door shuts behind us. And then he stops and I’m sure he’s about to say dude but he says, ‘With fish.’
‘You walk in the middle,’ Thommo tells me. ‘That way there’s always someone between you and the water.’
And I know good advice when I hear it, and the planks of the pier give me some kind of lines to follow too, even though they’re also kind of mesmerising, so I handle it better than I thought I might.
‘Fucking jet lag,’ I hear myself say. ‘I just got back from Toronto, you know.’
Thommo takes us to a boat that seems so big I can’t see the end of it in the dark and for a second the idea of hosing it down afterwards makes me pretty glum. They sit me in a soft squishy seat and within minutes we’re out on the water, and that’s when I remember the other thing I didn’t like about boating. Motion isn’t good for me. Boat motion worse than limo motion. Far worse.
And now even the cold air on my face isn’t enough and the sloppy green waves from inside are clashing with the dark green waves from outside in a way that’s very bad physics.
‘I’m going to be lying down now,’ I tell them, wondering a little about the formality of it, and the tense.
Thommo starts baiting hooks and singing a sea shanty and he gives Keanu the wheel and tells him, ‘Just point her for the heads, mate.’
Keanu cranks up the revs, adjusts his beanie to a nautical angle and says, ‘Man, look at those lights.’
And I’m lying at his feet in a place that might, if I recall correctly, be called the bilges. Lying there listening to the engine buzz its way up through the hull and into my head. Lying there, thinking that it’s seventeen years since my first green-drink experience, and I’m getting that nasty bitter kind of green rising at the back of my throat again.
My phone rings and Keanu says, ‘Here, let me get that for you,’ as polite as a bus boy, and he unclips it from my belt and answers it. ‘It’s a guy called Frank,’ he shouts down to me, ‘he’s just caught another fish, or something.’
And Thommo sings random bits of The Cars’ ‘Candy Oh’, begins a thundering piss over the side and down into the waters of Sydney Harbour, and I feel my face sweat, the reverse peristalsis about to begin.
And, yes, there is vomiting. In the boat, over the side of it, Thommo gripping my collar, Keanu doing his best to negotiate the swell delicately. Vomiting and more vomiting. And lying down and sitting up and a cup or two of plasticky tasting water and more waves, and a struggle, a struggle with something. Cheering.
I wake in early daylight, still in the bilges, a loose pile of green jelly not far from my head. A rod I’ve never seen before fixed in my hand, gripped as though if I let go I could fall off something. Next to me, a fish of fascinating proportions. Maybe a mullet. As if I’d know.
‘Hey tiger,’ Thommo says as I lift myself to my knees and wipe the green dribbly slick from my chin. ‘You did good. Wait till you get back home with that bugger.’
And Keanu says, ‘Man. You and that fish. It was like . . . Hemingway, or something.’
RUNNING ON EMPTY—2012
Things did not go well in Baltimore. Not in the way things don’t go well in The Wire, but in the way they do in most lives. No gunfire, nothing dramatic. They start with a negotiated amount of hope, but work themselves into a decrescendo even while you’re watching and trying to talk the room somewhere better.
I am on my way to New York, and to Frank Green. He is waiting for me in his suite at the Hotel D with Otter, his personal trainer, masseur and now manservant. Frank has added a loading to Otter’s salary that allows him to call him that, and has had business cards printed. Otter has a name his parents gave him too. It’s Neil McGlone, but he’s apparently been Otter since the body hair kicked in at the age of twelve. So, Otter’s name at least is not Frank’s doing.
Frank Green can afford people in a way that is far from attractive. He can’t buy back time though, and Frank staring down the barrel of fifty feels like the opening sequence to all those Bond movies when the rifled gun draws a bead on the silhouetted agent. Frank needs to run a marathon before his fiftieth birthday. ‘Need’ is his word, and New York is the marathon.
Frank is the co-inventor of the Green-Tarnowski Ring, an arthroscopically implantable device that replaces torn knee-joint menisci. ‘Mate, it’s like the real thing, but better,’ he once said to me. ‘Better ’cause I don’t make shit out of the real thing.’ It’s manufactured from some kind of polymer, and custom-sculpted for each knee following scans. Frank explained it to me when it was at the prototype stage but, after years of his hare-brained schemes, the words merged into a background hum and I started thinking of dinner, or the novel I wasn’t reading, or unanswered emails.
An article in the business pages not so long ago killed the last residue of the hum and, before I could stop myself, I’d worked out that he’s made more than thirteen million out of it so far.
By all accounts—Frank and Wikipedia anyway—Roman Tarnowski continues to lead a low-key life in Gdansk, but low was never Frank’s key. Frank as a millionaire could only live like a billionaire. Donald Trump but without the idiosyncratic hair. Frank has more than ten thousand followers on Twitter, and sports stars tweeting up a storm on his behalf. The footballers call him ‘Bro’ and a bunch of female hockey players once got together for a photo and called themselves the GTR Girls. It’s on his consulting room wall. One of them even named her son Roman, partly after Tarnowksi and partly because she’s a third-generation addict of Days of Our Lives. Frank’s still waiting for any of them to name their offspring after him.
Meanwhile, hovering in such close proximity to professional sport and with genuine star performers for Twitter buddies, he’s forgotten that his sporting career peaked with the egg-and-spoon race at his eighth birthday party, and he now sees himself as a contender. But when did Frank ever fail to see himself as that?
On Amtrak the wifi is free and fast, so there’s a skype call to home scheduled. In the corner of the screen I sit like an ugly old grey postage stamp of my former self. Like someone brought in from the street with a low-level crime to confess. I’m a morning-after shot, but the night before should have amounted to much more.
Wendy has kept the girls up past eight so that we can talk. Charlotte keeps reaching for the keyboard, Chelsea keeps reaching for her nostril. One or both of them calls out ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ from time to time, as if they’ve just noticed me, or as if the Gollum on screen has surprised them by speaking in my voice. Wendy keeps directing them to the camera, which Chelsea eventually touches, leaving behind something solid enough to block most of the picture.
‘Are you at least sleeping?’ Wendy says when I give her a ten-second summary of Baltimore. ‘There’s not a lot of that around here.’
‘I was up at five to get to the train.’ I notice her elbow moving. It’s all I can see. ‘So, no.’
‘You should get some sleep. Tonight I mean. Don’t let Frank . . .’
With that the screen pixellates and shudders. Her arm grows three more elbows and then they’re all gone. The connection’s dropped out. I keep clicking and clicking, trying to get through, but after five minutes I know the window’s closed at home and Wendy’s into the protracted bedtime routine.
Don’t let Frank. I’ve had thirty years of hearing that on and off, and it’s rarely been misplaced.
Frank took a three-bedroom suite at the Hotel D because he could, and because he believes they send better water to the taps in the expensive rooms. Frank thinks rich people live in a parallel universe that can look quite like ours if you don’t know better. His preference when travelling is to fly first class himself and let his kids run amok in economy, but this time his eldest daughter is about to sit year twelve exams, so the family ar
e home and the suite is an indulgence for its own sake.
He sent me pictures of it. The curtains hang in plump gold folds held back by gold ropes, and one corner of the lounge room has a white baby grand piano. There’s a jacuzzi for five. I told him a sheikh had probably died in there, overtaxed by a bevy of hookers while on sabbatical from the harsh constraints of life at home.
‘That’s my rule now,’ he said in the email back. ‘Only stay in places where Middle Eastern billionaires have been rogered to death by hookers. You can have the second-best bedroom. That’s where some junior prince gave it to the bus boy till his eyes popped out.’
Frank is, to use the kindest available language of a long-ago Arts student girlfriend of mine, unreconstructed. When she put the word to him, he said, ‘And what’s wrong with that? I’m not the prototype, baby. I’m the finished article. There’s no reconstructing required.’
Next thing I know, I’m waking up stiff in my seat at Penn Station.
I take the 1 train to West 79th and come up on the wrong side of the street. It’s Broadway, with all the yellow cabs and the clamour. No city is more remade in film than New York, even though the New York we end up seeing has more than likely been remade in Toronto or somewhere else.
I once met a producer who told me he used five minutes of stock exteriors and shot every other part of his New York movie in and around a disused aircraft hanger in New Jersey. Maybe they’re all like that. It could be a disused aircraft hanger in Albania if it wasn’t for the airfares.
New York has been destroyed sixty-three times in film since 1933. The most recent year not to see a new feature film showcasing the destruction of New York was 2003.
But the real thing is indestructible and I’ve been here six times and still feel like a trespasser who hasn’t built up enough cool. Not even nerd cool. Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer had that and I was nineteen when I saw it in him. He could get most things wrong and turn certainties into gaping unanswered questions, and yet still never doubt his entitlement to claim New York.
Frank has heard me for years—heard me forever—on the subject of New York, and to him it’s forty-two kilometres, twenty-six miles, a finish line, a need to exert his continuing claim to his lapsed and feckless youth.
When I think of youth now, I know I’m watching it from a distance. I would do that, I think, with or without having committed it to film quite so often. Wendy says it gives me my best chance to make attractive twenty-year-old girls take their tops off, though that only happened once and I have Roger Ebert’s word that it wasn’t gratuitous. That short, Red Letter Day, was entered in but not nominated for the Academy Awards. I travelled to four festivals with the twenty-year-old girl and was never in the room then when her top came off. I’m an uncle figure to her still, not even a big brother.
She’s in LA, and I’m sad enough to want the world to notice every time she pings me on Facebook. Which is twice now. She’s auditioning, and she just might make it. Any time I see her CV, Red Letter Day is a line or two further down and soon it will drop off the end.
I took another look at youth with Heart Line. Youth in the past, since youth in the present perplexes me and I can’t see myself changing that until I need to, when Chelsea and Charlotte are about to face it.
It could be said that the feature I want to make is no more than a variation on the same theme, though it began as a neighbour’s story from the war years, when Macarthur was in Brisbane. Noel left school at lunchtime one day for a medical appointment on Wickham Terrace—he walked there, since his school was nearby and at fourteen his parents had decided he was old enough to go alone—and he found Betty Grable eating a sandwich at the Old Windmill, with Macarthur’s wife and a military escort.
Her first line to him was, ‘Ain’t you ever seen a sandwich before?’ but she said it with a smile. He couldn’t guess how long he’d been gawking, since he’d often seen her this close in the movies and she’d never seen him. She’d broken the fourth wall, though Noel didn’t know it at the time.
The group was waiting for a guide, who never turned up. Noel was early for his appointment, since it had always been drummed into him that early was far better than late. He’d studied the history of the Old Windmill at primary school, so he offered to pass on what he knew.
He called her Miss Grable, so she called him Mister Clancy. When he made a joke because it crossed his mind and he figured he had nothing to lose, she laughed. And every lunchtime that week, Betty Grable turned up at the same spot in Macarthur’s car and Noel lied about having a follow-up medical appointment so that he could meet her.
She swore him to secrecy, and he couldn’t have imagined a better secret. She told him she was between pictures with Victor Mature, and the President had asked her to lift the boys’ spirits. No one outside the military was to know about the trip until she was safely back home.
On the Friday she said, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, for parts unspecified. Look after yourself, young man.’ As Noel tells it, she paused then and drew back on her cigarette before adding, ‘If it all goes wrong, tell me you’ll head south.’
It was the winter of 1942 and the Japanese were getting closer to Port Moresby. The next Monday Noel went back to the park, sifting through leaves until he found a cigarette butt with Betty Grable’s exact lipstick on it, and he kept it forever in an old cough-lozenge tin.
That’s the closing frame of ‘Lunch with Betty Grable’, a shot of the actual tin in Noel’s own old hand. Or it will be, if the film gets made. There are people to meet in New York about that.
Frank sent me a text with the room number, telling me to go straight there. The hotel has a doorman with a cap and epaulettes that have the look of an admiral’s costume from a musical. I make my way across the lobby with my hand in my pocket, searching for a key card I don’t yet have, just to avoid explaining myself. The carpet is thick and the wheels of my suitcase are silent on it. The lobby seems to pride itself on its silence.
It’s Otter who opens the door to the suite. He has a leather cap on and, with his black handlebar moustache, my first thought is it’s a Village People pastiche. Before I can ask if Frank’s the motorbike cop lead singer, he appears from one of the bedrooms. If the Village People had a whippet in the line-up, Frank would be it. Actually, he’s leaner than a whippet or, if not leaner, perhaps his leanness is more emphasised. He looks like a whippet staring through a window at a sandwich.
Not that Frank’s entitled to sandwiches. Otter has him on six meals a day, and meal two is underway. It’s a smoothie made with bok choy, choy sum, rice milk and protein powder. Once it’s in the glass, it looks like a pond the council would want to check for mosquito larvae.
Frank drinks a mouthful and the peristaltic wave bumps his Adam’s apple forward like a boat. He has trimmed down to become an anatomy lesson of his former self.
‘I’m ready,’ he says, his grin full of lawn clippings. ‘I’m going to ace it.’
He takes a photo of his glass of pond scum and posts it on Twitter.
His race number—five digits, in the mid-thirty thousands—is sitting on a pile of paperwork on a table that looks as if it was looted from Versailles. The table lamp has a muted olde-gold lampshade and a pair of whimsical porcelain lovers as its base. She’s looking coyly over her shoulder at him, he’s lounging as if reciting verse. Or trying to conceal the pain of a gallstone.
The curtains—the ones from the picture—look even heavier in real life, with more brocade and plumper rope ties. Each curtain looks like it would amount to approximately my bodyweight in chintz. The dining table seats six and each of its metalwork legs is an arc of opposed c-scrolls—a shape that means the diner has no intuitive sense of where the leg might be, and its hard edges could take a piece out of a shin. The white baby grand is almost invisible against all the gilt and the curly curly furniture.
Just as I’m thinking that the room is one big rococo vomit, Frank says, ‘Cool place, hey?’
‘You know me,’ I
tell him. ‘I always leaned towards chinoiserie.’ Once again I can’t crap on his misfired exuberance, but nor can I stop myself sniping at it as I pass.
‘You should check out Otter’s room.’ He points to a nearby door. ‘It’s all pagodas and shit. Totally willow pattern.’ Thirty years of sniping and I’ve yet to hit the mark.
Frank’s already at the door before I can stop him, and flinging it open to reveal a folding screen with an island pagoda and bridges, a bedside table with a black-and-gold faux-lacquerware jug and a pair of leather chaps on the bed, next to a codpiece and something that looks like a tail. With straps.
‘You need to finish your smoothie,’ Otter says. ‘It’s time for your poultices.’
Right on cue, a microwave pings in the kitchen. Frank pulls down his shorts.
‘Do you have to make that response look so pavlovian?’ I’ve taken a step back before I realise the shorts are as far as he’s taking it.
‘You should see what I do when the kettle boils.’ He jiggles his eyebrows up and down. We did Pavlov together in a lazy Psych elective in ’81.
Otter fetches a fold-up massage table from his room and locks its legs into place. Franks dives onto it and dunks his face into the hole in a way that suggests he’s well practised at it. Otter fetches a pair of steaming poultices from the kitchen on a plate. I feel as if I’m trespassing on a ritual.
There’s a salty smell, with a citrus tang. I was expecting menthol, or something herbal. There were poultices in my childhood before the logic of medicine came along and supplanted folk remedies.
‘Hey is that . . .’ I stop myself, because it can’t be.
Otter slaps the poultices on, one on each cheek.
‘You got it,’ Frank says to the carpet through the face hole. He lifts one arm to give me a thumbs up. ‘Lemon-lime fusion.’
‘You’re using Staminade poultices? Wouldn’t it be better to drink the Staminade and use the smoothie as a poultice?’