by Tom Scott
I have some skills as a mimic, but I was always too self-conscious to ever be a professional performer. Even if I wasn’t, my dyslexia shreds lines as fast as I commit them to memory. I can’t sing. I can’t dance. I can’t play a musical instrument. I draw and I write. That’s it. And my writing was close enough in intention if not in tone to John’s precise, perfectly weighted prose for there to be an undeclared competition between us, which I always regretted.
John came to the Australian premiere of my play The Daylight Atheist at the Melbourne Theatre Company on the banks of the Yarra. It would play to packed houses, garner great reviews and actor Richard Piper would win prizes for his performance, but none of this was a given in the dressing room after the first show. Champagne flowed and Australian acting luminaries, including Garry McDonald aka Norman Gunston, one half of Kath and Kim, Geoffrey Rush and Mark Mitchell, famous for ‘Con the Fruiterer’ and who also played David Lange in Fallout (the four-part TVNZ series that I co-wrote with Greg McGee), crowded around Richard and me, showering us with praise. Hanging back shyly was John. When the crowd thinned, he came forward and shook my hand warmly. ‘Well done that man!’ A few days later he sent me a rapturous critique from The Age headlined ‘Laughter hides the hurt’. When my partner Averil and I returned to Melbourne at the end of the run for the final performance, we lunched the next day with Richard Piper and Peter Evans the director. John came as well and he could not have been happier for me. I felt chosen again.
In middle age, our respective testosterone levels dipped. We had less antler to lock and I saw more of John when I came to Melbourne. Observing him decide on a time and place to meet was like watching an old dog approaching a rug on the floor—there was lots of circling and jostling until he was perfectly aligned with the Earth’s magnetic field before settling in for the duration, which could be hours. He gave me a priceless piece of information on Captain Charles Upham VC and Bar for a project I was working on, and generously introduced me to producers who could be of use to me with a trans-Tasman miniseries I was writing. He didn’t rule out being in it. Mind you, this was his modus operandi—he hated disappointing anyone straight off the bat so he would agree to things that were never going to happen, like attending Sir Edmund Hillary’s eightieth birthday party which I helped organise at Government House in Wellington. Fear of flying put paid to a lot of these events, but the possibility that he might turn up was always a thrill in itself.
There is an elegant bookshop in Melbourne called Hill of Content. John took me to it one dusk. Plucking a book off the shelves, he started reading passages out loud. It was The Traveller’s Tool by Sir Les Patterson—the nom-de-plume of John’s great friend and fellow comic genius, Barry Humphries. It was filth and vulgarity elevated to great art. John was a famous Australian by then, a television star and a celebrated author in his own right. We were laughing so loudly and so hysterically we were asked to leave.
It was 1973 all over again.
FORMER NEW ZEALAND PRIME MINISTER Mike Moore, just back from Geneva after a stint as head of the World Trade Organization, congratulated me on my honorary doctorate. I said it was no big deal really. My mate Ed Hillary had been awarded at least half a dozen by American universities—he only had to dash in to use a toilet and they slid one under the cubicle door. Perhaps missing my lame joke, Mike suddenly saw this as a contest. Puffing out his chest he said he’d lost count of how many honorary doctorates he’d received from Europe’s finest universities. I guess if anything is going to put an honorary doctorate into perspective it has to be that.
When I first arrived there as a student in 1966, Massey University was little more than a vast, circular paddock festooned with white pegs marking out the sites of future tower blocks. Most of the teaching was confined to a grand, three-storey, ivy-covered art deco building overlooking a cricket oval bordered by hostels and the beautiful art deco refectory building. With a stream running through it and ringed by native bush and mature English trees, if not Oxford or Cambridge it was a reasonable approximation of Stanford. I could imagine the Manhattan Project being worked on in secret here.
I hadn’t cut the umbilical cord to Feilding yet so I lived at home that first year, which was stressful, as I didn’t have a driver’s licence or own a motor vehicle. I got rides with friends, caught the train or hitch-hiked. Twice I got stranded in Palmerston North and slept on benches in the university grounds. At two in the morning with no coat and a chill mist rising off the stream, Massey’s glorious parklands lost some of their charm.
I had worked out by then that I didn’t have VD, but I was still a virgin. The ’60s were famous for sex, drugs and rock and roll and I was spoiling the average. I hadn’t even kissed a girl. I raged inwardly at my utter hopelessness on this front. The longer I left it, the more impossible it seemed to be.
One Saturday night when, at the very least, I should have been staggering through the square with other first-year students swilling Blackberry Nip from a bottle in a brown paper bag and leaving pools of crimson vomit in my wake, I was instead in Feilding watching The Dean Martin Show with Mum and my younger siblings when our father arrived home more abusive than normal. The other kids wisely melted away. I remained to act as a buffer between him and Mum, which he didn’t take kindly to.
‘You know what your problem is, Egghead?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘You are a homosexual!’
‘That’s a low blow, even for you,’ I stammered, tears welling. ‘I’m not even sexual.’ He didn’t have time to call for the weeping bowl. I had already left the room. Chest heaving, I sobbed as quietly as I could manage in my bedroom. They were the last tears I ever shed in connection with him.
Entering the tiered lecture theatre in the main building was torture if it meant sitting near a pretty girl. I felt myself going crimson, becoming breathless and feeling sick. I would turn on my heel and sit out the lesson in the foyer, frustrated and ashamed of my wretched existence. This shyness with girls, bordering on pathology, was one of the few things I shared with Sir Edmund Hillary. Many years later, working on a documentary for TVNZ, I interviewed George Lowe, Ed’s great mate and climbing companion on many mountaineering adventures, including the 1953 conquest of Everest. George mentioned casually that they were both virgins on Everest and this accounted in part for their ferocious energy. George also told me that while Ed was quite rightly acclaimed for being the first man to step onto the highest point on planet Earth, some ten paces ahead of Tenzing, he himself held an altitude record that went largely unheralded—the highest ever act of masturbation. I never had the courage to ask Ed about any of this, though he spoke openly of his awkwardness with members of the opposite sex. He put it very delicately: ‘I was OK on the fairway, but hopeless on the green.’
I wasn’t even OK on the fairway. I was a hopeless romantic utterly hopeless at romance. In my early forties I washed up in the bar at Bellamy’s in Parliament one night, a recently single and somewhat dishevelled father of three children by two different mothers (it’s complicated), when a tall and tan, young and lovely, elegant woman swept in. It was broadcaster Carol Hirschfeld. To my own surprise, I didn’t turn crimson and make a dash for the door. I bought her a drink and set about making her laugh. And what a laugh it was—smoky and rich like Lauren Bacall’s. She was spoken for, but her beau lived in Auckland. We both had time on our hands and hung out for a couple of months. Sadly, it was all very innocent. When she saw that I was becoming besotted she told me off very crisply, ‘Stop idealising me!’
It wasn’t exactly something new. I fell madly in love with girls sitting two rows in front of me in lecture halls and thought them perfect in every conceivable way purely on the basis of the way curls tumbled down the nape of a neck, light caught their cheekbones, or a top button was undone on a blouse. It meant I spent much of my first term at Massey in a state of low-grade anxiety until I made my first close friend—Tom Quinlan.
In an age of flared denim and buckskin he wore ironed white shirts and ties,
a burgundy jacket, pressed black slacks and shiny shoes. He was good-looking in a weepy Irish tenor way. He could easily have played Father Noel Furlong in Father Ted, the part that launched the career of Graham Norton.
Tom was very clever and supremely calm. He helped me out in chemistry labs when my spilling of hazardous chemicals threatened both our lives. The former mayor of Auckland, Dick Hubbard from Hubbard Foods fame, was the only person clumsier than me—if you come across half a test-tube in your muesli it may well be a remnant from this period.
The Vietnam War was at its height and the apartheid regime in South Africa was ever more brutally suppressing black activists seeking change. Quinny encouraged me in my early efforts at political cartooning. I cringe when I look at them now. I was still learning my craft and had a lot to learn. I submitted some to Masskerade 66. In his acknowledgements the editor, Chip Jones, a diminutive figure who wore ripple-sole brothel-creeper shoes, smoked a pipe, called everyone ‘cock’ and was way beyond cool, paid me this compliment:
Not only an artist with formidable promise, but a figure well acquainted with the pulse of golden wit—originality.
Anderton Senior—he of Feilding Ag boarding-school dormitory after-dark patrol fame—was capping controller the next year and knew a ‘wanker’ when he saw one. In a rare honour for someone in their first year, I was tasked with editing Masskerade 67.
I WAS ON A HIGH all that summer, even standing for twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a refrigerated room surrounded by clanking machines and whirring saws. My job was trimming fat off racks of lamb. I didn’t know how to sharpen my knife and was virtually pushing the fat off using brute strength until a big Māori guy said to me in sing-song fashion, ‘Gizzus a look at ya knife, bro.’ He made a great show of slapping the sharp edge of the blade into the palm of his huge hands, leaving nothing but temporary dents. ‘Phew! Diz knife is bloody dangerous, eh. If it slipped you could give yourself a nasty bruise, eh.’ It was pure Billy T. James ten years before Billy T. emerged from the Māori show-band circuit. This same guy, when he needed to go to the toilet, announced loudly, ‘Won’t be long fellahs, juz going out for a cave in, eh!’
On the other side of me on the line was a guy who had been a top shearer in his day, travelling the world for the Wool Board, giving demonstrations. He told me more outrageous jokes than anyone else before or since. I cycled home furiously in the gathering dusk to scribble down as many as I could remember.
This also was the summer that I met a short, powerfully built, matinee-idol-good-looking guy who was studying law at Auckland University—Brian Dreadon. His father was a hydatids control officer and the family had just moved to Feilding. Dreadon Senior, a lovely man, served in the New Zealand Forces in the ill-fated Greek and Crete campaigns. Pulling on a traditional Greek cap with a tassel, he would stand behind a minuscule bar that he’d built in their living room and offer us any drink we wanted—as long as it was retsina, which tastes of pine resin, and not even nice pine resin.
Brian was a surfer, who owned a yellow Mini. He insisted I get over my hang-ups about water and dragged me to Foxton Beach. Mum would come flying out onto the front verandah as we were departing to screech, ‘Watch out for sharks, darling!’ Brian was also a gifted rugby player—a silky runner with superb balance, a mile-wide sidestep and surprisingly strong in the tackle. (Not that surprising really, he was also a javelin champ.) When he came back to Feilding in his winter breaks I roped him into our social rugby team. Without him we lost on average by about 40 points a game. With him at first-five we were 40 points up by half-time. Best of all from my point of view, he was also a talented artist and drew a number of very fine cartoons for my first Masskerade—which I think I can claim with confidence was the best one ever—that is, until my others rolled off the assembly line over the next three years.
I was so pleased with myself that when Anderton Senior summonsed me to a meeting of the capping committee, I automatically assumed it was to shower me with praise and I preened myself accordingly, preparing a splendid jape and wheeze—an alarm clock set to go off in ten minutes and a phone. When it sounded I would open my bag, take out the phone, chat into it briefly, say, ‘It’s for you …’ and pass it to Anderton. Endless hilarity would ensue and my reputation as a wag would be further enhanced.
Instead, the mood in the committee room was distinctly chilly. I sat at one end of a long table while everyone else glared at me from the other. Anderton, perhaps remembering the bumptious third-former humiliating Fatty McLean in assembly, addressed me in stern, head-prefect tones. I had forgotten what an officious prick he was. Much to my horror, it worked. I started feeling like a third-former again.
According to Anderton, thousands of copies of Masskerade had been distributed illegally at Longburn freezing works. They were considering calling in the police and having me prosecuted for theft. What did I have to say for myself? The story was complete bullshit. No such thing had occurred. While I was catching my breath, the alarm clock went off in my bag. I pulled out the phone, mumbled into it briefly and passed it limply to Anderton. ‘It’s for you …’ I wish I had added, ‘It’s Interpol, they’ve got some new leads!’ but I was still reeling from the grotesque unfairness of it all. It was draw-your-dad-for-Father’s-day revisited. I have learned over the years that New Zealand doesn’t have a tall poppy syndrome; that’s quite wrong. We have a tall lichen syndrome.
WITH QUINNY’S PATIENT TUTORING AND endless encouragement I passed Vet Intermediate and found myself locked into a career path I hadn’t really given enough thought to. At Feilding Ag the teacher giving career advice, a dignified, handsome Sri Lankan man nicknamed ‘Choko’ Da Silva (it was a less enlightened time) gave me a questionnaire in which there was one question I couldn’t complete: If I was sitting in a railway carriage, what would I look at most—my fellow passengers or the view from the window? My answer was both, equally.
‘You must decide,’ implored Choko. I wouldn’t budge. Choko shook his head sadly. ‘Then I am unable to advise you.’
A friend from high school was keen on veterinary science. I liked dogs and tagged along brainlessly. He dropped out, leaving me stranded in vet school.
I disliked almost every second of the place. The one consolation was making friends with astonishingly brilliant people. People undergoing knee-reconstruction surgery today probably don’t appreciate that it was pioneered first in racehorses, then in grid-iron players by Wayne McIlwraith, who was in my class. Wayne introduced me to Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album and got an honorary doctorate from Massey a year after me, ha ha!
Greg Bunker was another genius—who quoted extensively from Tom Stoppard’s only novel Lord Malquist & Mr Moon long before the rest of us had ever heard of the English playwright. In his third year he won the coveted Massey Chunder Bowl, never given lightly. Representing Massey at the Australasian Veterinary Students’ Association conference in Melbourne, Bunker got comprehensively pissed and was being driven on a three-lane motorway with some Aussie vet students when he announced he needed to be sick.
‘Out the window, mate! Stick your head out the window! This is Dad’s car!’ shouted the driver. Bunker started gulping and dry-retching. The driver went into a panic and started shouting.
‘IT’S DAD’S CAR! STICK YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE WINDOW! BE SICK OUT THE WINDOW!’
Another passenger in the back wound down the window for Bunker, blasting him with fresh air, which seemed to help. The car eased out of the fast lane, changed lanes twice more and pulled over onto a grass verge. They shoved Bunker out and slammed the door shut after him. He weaved around for a bit, stood bolt upright as if remembering something of vital importance, then staggered back to the car, stuck his head in the window and projectile vomited into the interior.
A decade later, I listened mouth agape as he recounted how, while working for the UN, he was one of the first Westerners allowed into the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh after Pol Pot was forcibly deposed. He told me strange a
utumn leaves blew down ghostly, silent streets, filling gutters and piling up against walls—banknotes. Both money and human life had no value under the murderous Khmer Rouge, who killed 25 per cent of Cambodia’s population after resetting society to what they called ‘year zero’.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LOVE AND DEATH
VET STUDENTS HAD LECTURES AND labs eight hours a day, five days a week, so I had no choice but to move to Palmerston North in my second year. I went flatting with one of the guys who gave me rides from Feilding to Massey—Johnny Blick. He wanted me to meet his folks. His father was a travelling salesman who drove a car that looked like a Hawker Siddeley until you looked closer. Mr Blick wore a yellow cravat, a check shirt, a tweed hacking jacket with leather patches on the elbows and smoked a pipe. They lived in a modest house in a dead-end street. While ‘Mrs B’, as he called his wife, toiled in the kitchen he leaned a leather—or possibly vinyl—patch on the mantelpiece and pointed with the stem of his pipe to a stack of Man magazines, a soft-porn Aussie publication long since extinct, on the floor.
‘Johnny likes small tits and not much pubic hair. I’m the other way round. Give me big jugs and lots of undergrowth!’ He winked at me, while Johnny opened a copy and pointed proudly at his father’s preferred option—a woman with broad hips wearing what could have been the bottom half of a fur bikini.
‘Mrs B. Wonderful woman, marvellous breasts for her age, very shy when I met her, quite a handful in the sack now. The trick you young chaps need to learn is that a woman must be fully lubricated before you insert your penis. To do that you get your hands wet like this …’ He was about to spit into his pipe-less hand when mercifully Mrs B announced that dinner was served in the alcove. I picked at my food listlessly while they took it in turns to tell a dirty joke each. Maybe Johnny had told them I was the editor of Masskerade. Johnny went first. His petite sister was next, followed by Mrs B. It has to be said, Mr Blick won hands down.