Detours

by Tim Rogers

  I thought being a dad meant drinking the less popular soft drinks like sarsparilla, eating the ice-cream flavours that no-one else digs like rum and raisin, and being able to construct a basic tuna pasta, but I’ve started to think a huge part of it is about taking responsibility. Do you remember a few years back when we were talking about what we fear? I think it was around the time you got really upset because Mama was talking to a highway policeman after he’d pulled Mama over for some minor infraction. You said you were afraid of police because one night back at the old house, there’d been a man ranting and raving at the front door and the police had to come. I never understood if it was the police or the man that scared you, honey. I do understand that they can both be creepy.

  And that’s where this gets tough, my love. Sweetheart, the man at the door was me. There was so much I didn’t, and still don’t, understand about me and yer mum. Many times I acted stupidly, childishly.

  I’m not going to treat you like a little kid any more. You’re not a little kid, and I don’t want you to be. Sure, you were as cute as a button and used to throw yer porridge at me – and remember the salmon food-poisoning night when we sprayed your bedroom together from the depths of our guts? Phhoooo-weeeee!!!! But I love you more than nachos and I’m loving watching the young lady you’re becoming, for all the goods and bads. Let’s have some fun when we’re in NY together, honey. And let’s talk when you want.

  I’m sorry, baby. I guess I never wanted to ever look bad in your eyes. Instead I made you fear someone you couldn’t see, which is unforgivable. Being away from you all year is my penance. People get mad and they get hurt and they get angry because they haven’t the guts to accept all of that. I’ve made mistakes and I’ll make them again. It’s my first time around the sun.

  I’m the man at the door, honey. I’m sorry.

  The wine went straight to my eyelids. When I could drag them open, I noticed a gentleman across the aisle to my right taking photos of his tray table. Maybe taking photographs of tray tables is a regular thing for him, the way Charlie Watts of The Rolling Stones does a painting of every hotel room he stays in. Maybe this is how he tolerates travel. How wonderful our little eccentricities are.

  My hands had dried and so too my shirt.

  As the plane dipped its nose on the approach to Berlin, it hit a pocket of air that caused it to drop a few hundred feet, and a lusty mouthful of wine leaped from my plastic cup as if in greater fear than me. Cartoonishly, the straw-coloured liquid became a fork-tongued leviathan in mid air and landed on the sleeve of the Teutonic sphinx beside me. Once the plane had recovered, he responded as if I’d asked if his balls were waxed. I apologised in German, Italian and Spanish, clambering for the phrase ‘dry cleaning’ in each, but as his fury reached biblical levels I became belligerent. ‘Bloody hell, at least it wasn’t red wine, man.’ Then, as he made exaggerated attempts to dry his sleeve with paper napkins, I paused. Maybe he is a recovering alcoholic with only one shirt for his trip? Maybe he is meeting his kids and doesn’t want to stink of piss?

  I turned back to the notebook with its cynical cover.

  Sweetheart, together let’s always try empathy. And err on the side of kindness. You just never know what someone is going through.

  Bagatelles III

  I am on a panel at a sex advice evening chaired by writer and broadcaster Jess McGuire, who charms me completely. When she tells me she is a wedding celebrant I feel a pang, as I now know two wonderful people who are celebrants and to decide between them would be difficult – should the occasion arise. I tell her so when two months later we both speak at an event celebrating Roald Dahl. She performs a piece and her German accent when reading the part of a matron is superb, which comes as no surprise.

  On the walk home after a gig in London, The Hurricane and I invent songs about botulism and other food poisonings, in the style of Morrissey. ‘You shouldn’t have touched the korma / it should have been served warmer / now you’re flat on yer back while clutching a sack / wretching like a Kabuki performer.’ And my personal favourite: ‘I have the runs / it isn’t fair / and the dry heaves are so criminally vulgar.’

  In the lounge at JFK I am sitting near an attractive older couple, both in cashmere cardigans. I want to ask if they would like me to get them a drink as I’m going to the bar, but resist. When the lady asks the gentleman the way to the bathroom, he gestures in my direction and says, ‘Straight up there, past the fruit.’ It takes all my strength to resist gesturing in mock horror and declaring ‘Sir, how dare you . . . I will ask you to call me a ho-mo-sex-ual’ in the voice of Blanche DuBois.

  Rusty, Davey and I go to a department store in Bilbao after sound check to buy socks and underwear. It must be that stage of the tour. The DJ who plays after our set that night spins such good records – mostly late seventies punk – that we dance and celebrate, and I leave my new clean underclothes behind when we tumble out of the club in the early hours of the morning.

  Looking over the East River while waiting for my daughter to finish her Spanish classes at the International School, three teenage kids – two girls and a boy – are lolling around the stairs. I don’t look at them after the initial glance, but every time they say ‘fuck’ my chest retracts like it’s been punched.

  Meeting my daughter’s extended family in Madrid, her Abuela Lola tells me about her husband Fabian’s health while holding my hand. We drink iced coffee. Tio Alex joins in, and the conversation around the table quickly turns to my daughter, her schooling in New York and her vacation in Spain the previous year. Lola pats my hand and her eyes glint with just a hint of moisture.

  At the Union Hotel in Nhill, The Hurricane and I are playing pool in the back room. A group of six guys of wildly different ages and heights walk towards us, one with a camera. After the guy with the camera says, ‘Scuse me, mate,’ I straighten up from preparing to have a shot and say, ‘Yep sure, bud, no probs,’ thinking they want a photo. ‘Ahh, can you get outta the way of the darts board? We’re having the club portrait done.’ The Hurricane contorts, trying not to laugh as loudly as she wants to. And should.

  I begin to assist the tall, very thin man in the Garden Centre in Milton as he reaches for the large terracotta pot my mum wants to buy for her burgeoning garden. I grab the top lip of the pot, which is well over a metre tall, and the man does too, then hurriedly warns, ‘Tim, get yer hand back, get yer hand out, mate.’ After I do, he tips the pot towards me and shows me the wasp’s nest my hand was almost touching. My first thought was how many gigs I’d have to cancel while the stings healed.

  At Lord’s, I get a rush of panic in the media centre, which is only twenty metres above the ground – the slanted glass at the front facing the oval causes a little vertigo. An Australian gentleman, maybe twenty years older than me, turns and asks, ‘Did you open the bowling for Hawksbury in the eighties?’ I most definitely did not, but I get such a rush of pride at the mistaken identity that my vertigo drains out of me like a spilt carton of cream.

  In a Bunnings in South Melbourne, I stroll the aisles looking for a way to fix my bed when I notice two things: I am the only man in the massive store not wearing shorts, and the music being pumped through the speakers is a manipulative macho playlist. ‘Better Man’ by Robbie Williams, then ‘Working Class Man’ by Uncle Jimmy, then ‘Working for the Weekend’ by Loverboy and so on. I resent music being used to encourage my handyman skills so I leave. Without even buying a sausage in bread, which always smells delicious.

  My first game for the South Yarra C-Grade cricket club is washed out, but we go to the club rooms of the opposing club, the Gunbower Galahs. Some of us have a beer while the barbie is fired up, and four different groups form as talk ensues. I’m unable to make out each conversation, but, as my friend Gideon answers a question with ‘Yes, I did meet Viv Richards – twice,’ all other conversations cease and the room’s attention is his.

  Davey and I are returning from a funeral late at night and pass a guy spray-painting his
tag on a fence surrounding a rehab clinic just a hundred metres from my apartment. I confront him about defacing someone else’s property. He protests that he was a former patient and hated the joint. I don’t sympathise and grab the cans of paint at his feet and throw them as far as I can down the street. There is no further conflict, though when I head out for a walk the next morning, on either side of the street outside the clinic is emblazoned in bright white paint: HEY TIM YOU ARE A FUCKSTICK. I decide my days as a vigilante are numbered.

  I’m asked to make up the numbers for the Gunbower United Cricket Club when they play Burnley. During my third over, the mob on the sidelines for Burnley start shouting out Oasis lyrics in what I think is an attempt at sledging. I walk in the direction of where they are, stop about a few metres away and say in my ponciest voice, ‘I believe my haircut is more reminiscent of Sky Saxon of The Seeds, don’t you think?’ That shuts them up for a bit.

  Davey and I strip down nude in our London hotel room. Our purpose is to knock on Andy’s door to borrow his laptop to watch a DVD on the British band Slade. It’s early in the morning and we don’t expect anyone to be roaming the corridors. We stride like matadors down to Andy’s room and knock exuberantly. He opens the door a little, sees us in our glory, and shuts the door again, refusing to respond to any further banging on the door – or pleading.

  Hopeful

  You want some calm, you want some quiet

  But it ain’t gonna come tonight

  A thirst for knowledge a hunger for sleep

  But a fear to ever go that deep.

  I cross the bridge over the Yarra that separates Melbourne city from the south with my head bowed. It’s the week before Christmas and the approaching traffic of shoes and skateboards and strollers is thicker than usual. I do not look at faces. There is something about this time of year that saps my generosity of spirit and I’d rather no-one knew. My attention is, however, drawn to a young man slumped against the bridge wall, his look of defeat highlighted by the oversized, gauche ‘Merry Christmas’ banner that occupies six metres next to him. He is bearded and his lank, light brown hair falls across his face, not quite hiding his eyes which even several metres away I can see are glacially blue. He is so handsome I distrust his sign, which begins ‘Homeless, Hungry’, and judge him to be a backpacker manipulating the season, preying on people’s charity. That is, until he opens his mouth in what starts like a yawn but becomes an agonised howl. His is not the mouth of a Scandinavian traveller masquerading, but a young man in serious damage. What teeth he has left are angry little stumps. He can’t be more than twenty-five. His shirt and pants resemble a well-used chamois left in the sun to dry.

  My hands fish in my pockets for some change and, like a hunting dog sensing the movement of something in the bushes, his eyes move straight to me. I find keys and a few picks but no coins, no notes. As I make a visual gesture of ‘I’ll get you on the way back’ – a complex set of hand signals, but universal and unmistakable – his imploring look turns to a mistrusting, bitter smile. ‘Yeah, sure, buddy,’ it says. Loudly.

  Two hours later I finish some work in the office and run some errands, including the bank.

  He is still there on the bridge, his body now curled tight, a strategy either to avoid the full brutality of the December sun or, so I think, to ease the pangs in his stomach. Families stop to look at him as if he were street performance art. I dig out what feels like about four bucks, four fifty, from my pocket and as I near him his head turns in my direction. ‘Best o’ luck, mate,’ I say, and hand the coins to his now outstretched hand.

  ‘I like your style, mate. I like the jacket, man. Style,’ he says in a country drawl, but still clear through his ruined mouth.

  ‘Well, man, with a face like mine I gotta try, y’know?’

  ‘Ahhh yer right, mate. Thanks, man.’

  As he smiles, a rush of emotion hits me. I can see a little boy who has been mistreated, who was ‘pretty’ and adored by adults who could not resist their monstrous passions. I only notice then that there’s a third word written neatly with black Texta on his brown cardboard placard. There was ‘Homeless’, ‘Hungry’, then, ‘Hopeful’. All the way home, the whole eighty-three minutes, I regret not handing over the twenty, now damp with perspiration.

  A Spill in Aisle Two

  To be alone is to be foolish, to be alone is curiously noble

  To be alone ain’t to be lonely, to be alone keeps you mobile

  Don’t be surprised when you come back from your pre-dinner ablutions

  If I haven’t found a reason to be alone, it’s the only solution

  When you’re sad

  The night begins

  And you get some chances again.

  Unusually, last night’s featured dream didn’t star my daughter, or feature a drop from extraordinary heights, or a psychedelic phantasm.

  In last night’s dream I was working in a supermarket. The aisles were wide and the linoleum floors were so well polished that the reflected light from the overhead LED lighting was as aggressively hypnotic as bleached teeth on an elderly tanned gentleman. The huge room was largely featureless to accentuate the rows and rows of products, save for the perfunctory aisle signage. All was very familiar to me. I must have been working there a while. The faint buzz of the lighting was as comforting as the sound of a stream outside a country window.

  In my dream I lived close by, in a small, featureless apartment that was almost in the supermarket’s shadow, but the proximity pleased me, and knowing that I could get to work with a one-minute stroll was perfect. I was my current age of forty-seven, and all the sneers from the other workers – all teenagers with a dispassion for the job that verged on the resentful – I recognised disdain for the job as their loss and not mine. I adored the order and discipline required to be a good shelf-stacker, and the patience needed to be a personable customer assistant. I preferred the day shifts. Moving among the public, but not of them. Waiting as they compared prices and read ingredients. Noting the fads – such as the rabid interest in coconut water and wondering how its magic restorative powers could have been ignored for centuries – and failures – iSnack2.0 really is a bullshit brand name.

  Once I returned home I had baked beans on toast and a cup of tea, read a little Peter Ackroyd, and then was back there the next day – short-sleeved shirt ironed, name tag polished – stacking an inordinate range of low-fat yoghurts with cool precision in one of the dairy displays, while ignoring the taunts of teenagers calling me ‘loser’. The truth is I’m often described as ‘punchy’ and I don’t respond well to taunting, but Dreamy Tim was not bothered at all. All his attention was focused on stacking, not only to brand but also according to fat content and a new colour coding system he was sure would dazzle his superiors and earn him praise at the afternoon tea break. His International Roast coffee would taste of accomplishment, and the milk arrowroot biscuit of professional ascent.

  I wake up with a smile. For twenty-six years my main job has been playing in a rock’n’roll band. The dream of hundreds of thousands of supermarket workers all over the goddamn world. Yet I dream of stacking shelves in a supermarket. I think I know why. I am about to send some songs to a small coterie of musicians and arrangers whom I’m asking to help on a recording that is lyrically dense and musically fragile. I’ll be working with producer Jimi Maroudas, whom I’ve worked with before and who in the recording studio has the manner of a small town GP – patient and dutiful. His presence should make the process a pleasant one, but still I’m racked with doubt. His words are chosen with great care and delivered similarly, whether explaining a recording method I barely comprehend or giving an opinion about my cavalier attitude towards scansion. He’s also a family man who regularly asks after my daughter and is inclusive with his own two kids and his wife. All of which makes his recent critique of my new songs so much harder to take.

  Back in 1996, a gentleman from Warner Brothers records took me out for an expensive lunch at Musso and Frank
’s in Los Angeles. The decor was classic Hollywood glamour, the waiters were resplendent in red suit jackets. He requested I order whatever I want. I ordered a dry martini. I knew somethin’ was up. After some awkward small talk about the changing face of hospitality, he got to his point. ‘Tim, we love your songwriting but, ah, it’s a little too, uh, wordy. Would you consider taking every second word out?’ The relationship with Warners didn’t last long.

  Editing is not a skill I’m drawn to. I equate it with honest self-examination after three nights on a blow bender. For Jimi, the lyrics for a few of the new songs appear to have been written on an aforementioned bender and he has urged me to clear the smokescreen of words and get to the bloody point. I’m concurrently attempting to write a book, which feels this morning as far beyond my abilities as childbirth. So I mooch and moan, revisit notebooks and napkins, make coffee and roll cigarettes, and rearrange the A4 pages, and finally make a firm decision. I’m going to spring clean the apartment.

  ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get cleaning’ is one of The Hurricane’s epithets. It becomes an incantation until it evolves musically and I am unwittingly singing along to a Billy Ocean song from 1986 as I restack LPs and contemplate alphabetising the CDs.