So I wasn’t sure whether to consider the theory proved or disproved back in late November when I met Washington and Level Five, two Colorado boys with a respective dash of Arizona and North Carolina. On the one hand, they were excellent company and first-rate chaps, and I don’t have a bad word to say about either one. On the other, there were indeed only two of them. Who knows what would have happened were more involved. But then, we met some solo Americans who still managed to be pretty loathsome on their own, and who the Coloradans detested as much as anyone else. And I think it’s only fair to point out that plenty of Australians who I meet travelling make me want to implode with shame for the mere fact that I might be associated with them, and that their dickishness is exponentially proportional to the size of the group. The same can be said for many demographics of British travellers. Maybe it’s just a language thing, but the Europeans seem a bit more inclined to lower the volume and raise the tone.

Actually I’m not sure where I stand on this inclination to identify particular characteristics as belonging to an entire nation of people. It’s attractive and convenient, but encourages a lazy acceptance of mythology. Anyone who wants to claim that irreverent knockabout larrikinism is part of ‘the Australian national character’ should talk to some of the joyless cunts who ran my high school, or who dish out parking tickets in deserted streets at midnight on a Wednesday, or who justify the practice in council board meetings as “essential to public safety and traffic management.” Dealing with these people is like gargling talcum powder.

Doug Stanhope has a fantastic bit on this subject. “There’s no such thing as ‘We’re Americans.’ That’s just a bunch of bullshit to get you rooting for the home team. You’re not an American, you’re a guy. Until the Mongols come over the hills swinging machetes, trying to take our fire-hazard underground comedy club away from us, then we all buddy up as one. But those days are over, there’s no-one trying to take over America. We weren’t on the verge of speaking Iraqi. As far as ‘America’ goes – there’s two countries in the world: Dick, and Not a Dick. The border goes all the way around. Did you ever go to another country and meet another American when you didn’t expect to? You always talk to them, just for the trivia. ‘Hey, you’re from America? I’m from America! Where you from?’  And it’s never more than three sentences before you realise, if I was in America, I wouldn’t talk to this douchebag if my hair was on fire and he held a monopoly on liquid. I’m an American? What does that mean? I’m no more an American than I’m an Aires or an uncle. It’s just something you called me when I showed up.”

But this is something of a digression. The point is, I never really told you about meeting Washington or Level Five. Nor did I tell you about Hawkeye. It was a weirdly frantic time, shit was flying everywhere, and I didn’t write down all the stories. I met all three at the tail-end of my trip with Mr Fox and The Doctor, in a backpackers – those places that are so often a morass of unmitigated awfulness, but occasionally vomit up a diamond or three. We all partied with a bunch of other people for a few days. Then, for all we knew at the time, we went our separate ways.

Hawkeye was a hard-out fast-talking tomboy from Melbourne, the kind of girl who brings to mind words like ‘ballsy’ and ‘feisty’ – words that could be considered patronising but in my lexicon relate solely to awesomeness. A no-bullshit kind of girl. While I certainly find some girly-girls and ladylike women very appealing in a range of ways, I also really enjoy hanging out with the other kind, the kind of girls who will spit and swear and match you drink for drink. It’s well established that men behave differently in all-male groups. You can feel the change in atmosphere – the licence to be as crass and relaxed and uncivilised as you like. The licence to leave your style and charm in the boot of the car. I wouldn’t want to live like that, and it’s not necessarily any closer to my genuine self than any other persona I could assume, but it’s definitely fun for a time. Tomboys, then, are ideal, because they break up the gender monotony without making you feel like you need to behave. With non-tomboys present, even if you’re not trying to impress them, you still feel constrained – “You can’t speak like that in front of a lady, Mr Epsworth.” You don’t want to appear like a complete Neanderthal, so you tone it down. Of course there are crossovers and lapses and inconsistencies, and they don’t always end in disaster – I once somehow got taken home by a very sweet Jewish girl despite my opening line being, “Wow, this whisky is like being raped in the face by a pig.” If there’s a category in the Australia Day honour roll for first-class saves, I think I deserve a pretty shiny gong for that one.

The story continues. Those of you who’ve read this blog for a while will know that when I left Australia it also meant the end of a long and intense relationship. Leaving was necessary but difficult, like jamming the arrowhead through the other side of your leg while biting down on a leather strap and swilling moonshine out of a rustic ceramic jug. For the first month and a half I felt relatively good, I was on the road with The Foxtor and doing all kinds of stuff. Then those two gents went home. I moved from the hostel into a place on my own in a strange city. Back home, my grandmother died, and it was really difficult that I couldn’t help with anything or join in the send-off. And a couple of weeks after that, I got The Email from my ex. You know, the completely gratuitous thought-you-should-know-I-have-a-new-boyfriend email. I didn’t read past the first line, but that was enough to get the gist. Of course the news was no surprise, it had to come at some point. But it burned my fucking heart out all the same.

As luck would have it, though, my solitary confinement had ended a day or two earlier. Hawkeye had been passing back through town after some further travels and had needed a place to crash. She was in the room at the time and could clearly read my face over the laptop screen. ‘What happened?’ she asked. I told her. She grabbed the half bottle of wine leftover from last night and poured a huge glass. ‘Put this inside you,’ she said.

Clearly the woman was part doctor, part shaman, part prophetic genius. You all know how that kind of kick-in-the-guts news feels. The first half hour or so of numbness, and a vague dread of the imminent emotional shitstorm that is even now brewing thick and dirty on the horizon like a foul intestinal maelstrom after a night of heavy drinking and dubious late-night food choices. The knowledge that any minute now you’re just going to have to open the toilet door, bite down hard on its edge, and hold on for the duration while that Alaysia chicken kebab rides you like a Shetland pony. The inevitability of ending up pallid and shaking, collapsed like a pile of dirty laundry on a public toilet floor. But Hawkeye’s quick thinking at least put a bit of a cushion between me and the tiles. I should perhaps specify that the first glass of wine was prescribed at just past 10 a.m. The second came a few minutes later. The day unfolded from there.

In an effort to get ourselves out of the house, we went on a mission around town to gather my lost belongings. In my Foxtor travels I had managed to leave clothes at three different hostels and a repair shop in disparate locales. We visited them all, in between drink stops. By the late afternoon when we were done, she reminded me that Washington and Level Five were still in town, living in an apartment in Centro, and that tonight was Washington’s birthday. The four of us teamed up for an epic supermarket run. Umpteen litres of beer, a bottle of tequila, a bottle of dark rum, a bottle of Fernet. (For those who don’t know, it’s a 45% whack of thick black liquid evil.) The rum was my call –for whatever reason, when it comes to heavily destructive drinking, it always seems like a winning option. I took care of most of that on my own, but everyone else still managed to put themselves in a world of hurt. The tequila was mixed with lemonade in teacups and slammed against the floorboards to make it fizz to the point where the taste disappeared. Once we ran out of Coke the Fernet went down in straight shots (my earlier description of bad whisky would not be entirely out of place here, either). The Coloradans understood my plight. We were a team, on a mission.

Now at this point in the story comes the moment that really made me rethink my lazy attitude toward Americans. It is late o’clock. Somehow I have ended up in the stairwell. With all the fierce clarity that being drunk as shit and momentarily alone can bring, the full reality of the situation comes swooping in to smack me upside the head. The reality rather than the theoretical idea of something really being over, after years of loving and hoping and despairing and hurting and trying again with everything you’ve got. It hits me and I break, slumping down onto a step. And then Level Five is there, this guy who at this point I barely know bar a couple of casual drinking sessions, and who owes me nothing. And he puts his arm around me, and I fold into the aforementioned laundry heap, and he holds me while I fucking bawl my guts out into the front of his shirt. Actually holds me, like I was eight years old with skinned knees and not a semi-giant a foot taller than him. And he barely says a word, just says it’s alright, go for it, get it all out. And we stay like that for I don’t know how long, a long time, half an hour, more maybe, and I howl and subside and howl again, and he holds on, until I’m empty and shaky and wordless and spent, and the entire front of his shirt is wet from my crying, and he doesn’t mind the slightest bit. And then he talks me through it, tells me that I’m going to feel like shit for a long time but that it’s ok. That this is part of my experience. That I have to embrace that hurt, and own it, and make it mine. And unlike almost the entirety of a lifetime’s worth of well-meaning advice, what he says makes sense, and I carry it with me from that point on.

Later, five or six a.m., Hawkeye and I got home. The universe was not with me. I forgot the bag with all the clothes we’d collected, and it drove away in the backseat of the taxi. Then I realised I’d also lost the keys, and had to break into the apartment complex via a neighbouring property, a bunch of barbed wire, an angry dog, and about three layers of walls, including jumping a passageway to grab hold of a railing, hauling myself up onto the roof of my place, and breaking in through the skylight. I thought I’d pulled it off pretty smoothly, until I started writing drunk emails home and realised I was bleeding into the keyboard from both hands. Only then did I remember that one of the walls I’d climbed was studded with broken glass.

Thus we got through the first night. But the next little while was also very rough. So Hawkeye stuck with me for the next ten days or so, and she pretty much saved my life with her irreverence and her irrepressibility and her astonishing powers of chemical consumption. She had her own shit to deal with too, so we holed up in the house through the Buenos Aires thunderstorms and cranked The Lonely Island and blasted our way through. Since then it’s been like a Wall Street graph, with peaks and troughs of varying magnitude, but that first bit was definitely the lowest low. Eventually she went on her way, Level Five went home, and Washington and I teamed up to bring you the epic two-man stupidity of our more recent adventures. But when Hawkeye passed back through BA for one day a couple of months later, on her way back home, she stopped by and gave me a poem, an perfect 20-line summary of that awful wonderful fucked-up time, that is one of the best presents I’ve ever received. And so I wrote her this reply, taking my cues from what she gave to me. And if you guys click here you can listen to it (or right-click to download). Hope you enjoy.

Free Boat Ride for Three.

********************************

Now that you’re gone
the weird lump on my back
that I could never reach to squeeze
just gets bigger
and bigger.

*

********************************

On the second day of las inundaciones
rain still strung in ribbons from the trees
Palermo girls step out with matching shades of umbrella
black and mauve, beige/cerise, pastel blue
and pastel blue
high-stepping between the puddles as though
the Pied Piper of Hamlin
didn’t want a bit of rat on his stiletto-booted heels.

On the second day of las inundaciones
sloshing home in the shin-high stream
both eyes gummed shut with hangover
head like a wet dog and
a pounding inside like it wants to be let out
I am sure that Palermo girls
would spit on me in matching pastel shades
if it wouldn’t ruin their look.

*

********************************

*

The End of Days
for Red

We stood that day and watched it rolling in,
knowing our ending will be telegraphed.
Surely any good apocalypse will call ahead
to make up for its rudeness. This wasn’t one,
but a solid imitation, stomping grey and angry
up the sky like jackboots up a boulevard.

There were lots of things in the air that day:
the whine of electricity, and a ragged sort of joy,
Underworld twisting through the gems of glowing grass,
the swell of well-known voices and the tang of wet brown glass,
the crackle on the skin of thunder, danger, static,
a world shot through with high-tension wires.
We sprayed our laughs around like rifle rounds from child soldiers,
wild eyes rolling, the kind of people you’d find
chewing on the carpet at the Corner Hotel,
trying to catch a buzz from twenty years of beer and fungus.
Spread out on the rooftop like chops on a griddle,
and waiting for the Four Horsemen sky to season us.
There were lots of things in the air that day;
the end of the world was just one of them.
And it felt like if it came to that, to barricades
and hordes of beasts and weapons of unholy fire
that we had formed a solid crew to face it.

Acid always gives a sense of portent,
but there was no overstating the great wedge of storm
arriving like a Vogon ship, hanging in the sky
in exactly the way that a brick doesn’t.
And yet it wouldn’t hit. Its outer edge
was a civic planner’s thunderous wet dream
set-square straight in puritan geometry –
so five blocks west were suburbs mashed flat,
kissed by rain the way a butterfly
kisses a windscreen on the Autobahn,
while all the east reflected your left eye in clear blue.
And right above, the line between the two,
as we sat dry and tried to stomach the dichotomy.
It ran its edge along us like a sickle down a thumb,
slicing fine as a papercut, but never spilled a drop.

Five survivors of one ragtag squadron,
we were halfway between flying and falling,
with all the fierce courage of precipitation,
the same unswerving sense of destiny,
waiting for the last drop from a bottle that never came,
waiting for the hammer of inevitable rain,
though neither of them ever landed with us.
Laughing till our muscles formed a picket line in protest,
and not for the first time, launching projectiles
into the dead brown of the park next door.
That part of the cortex tasked with social responsibility
is always first against the wall when revolution comes to town.
Leaning our heads back on the brown ceramic
to watch the sky with eyes as deeply glazed,
or standing proud on the house’s prow, wind in our hair,
doomed soldiers watching the tides of darkness gather on the plains below.

This is when arms are so important.
The ones that hold us on the worst of nights don’t get forgotten;
those that grace our shoulders on these best of days the same.
Both of yours are both of these, so multiply out endlessly.
We didn’t swap too many words.
The ones we love aren’t often told,
while those we tell are those that give the kickings,
so we didn’t jinx it. But you knew it without thinking,
just as I know how to tap the brake to pull my car up smooth.

Just as I know that the end wouldn’t bother us.
Death ain’t the spectre of your terror-dreams;
he’s mortality’s school principal, the universal killjoy,
a vice cop with a better set of threads.
Ignore him like a pimple on your arse.
The apocalypse will come; and me and you both hope it’s something good.
Much better to go out in a new frock spectacular
than a track-panted Tuesday night alone.
I only hope that, when the dress rehearsals are done
and the final day’s fifth gear really starts to whine
I’ll look around to find you with me,
standing on the house’s prow,
wind in our hair like di Caprio fanboys,
waiting for the storm to come in.

********************************

Thursday. One day after
the most hopeful day
in the history of presidents
and I still feel
that whether I shoot myself or not
might come down to a spilled coffee
or a parking space.

Thursday. And the space between evenings
and mornings is dead air.
Mornings collapse into afternoons,
afternoons bring me drinks
in anything that’s clean

until the sun sets
and my eyes
can’t pick up light anymore.
The hard truth of you,
a curled fist slipped into my ribs
and left clenching.

Three days without words,
touch remains out of reach
and there is no stepladder down from this.
There is no hardhat or handrail
and the safety inspectors are long since dead
from misfortunes of their own.

Saturday is unsure of itself, and overcompensates.
Sunday is trying to be quietly sick without us noticing.
Monday never called, or wrote,
or chipped in for the cab.

And by Tuesday,
with heat bringing everything inside us
to the surface of our skins,
there’s the hope in my dilated veins
that the faintest touch of my elbow to yours
across a table for a few unnoticed seconds
will be enough to see me through the night.

.

********************************

Reasons to love Buenos Aires.

Because they have a street named Pringles. Avenida Pringles. “I’ve a need o’ Pringles.” Well you should buy some.

Because you’re encouraged to jump onto moving trains.

Because Buddha is a brand of insecticide.

Because they have the kind of women who’ve condensed the dense dark eyes and thighs of centuries of sex, to the point where your pants begin to slowly smoke.

Because every city bus is an adventure ride, and every taxi is a TIE fighter, and you know how many of those got mashed in Star Wars.

Because you are expendable.

Because the words you cannot say are falling, one by one.

Because the movement of the street is in the blood behind your eyes, and your back teeth click together.

Because you realise halfway through you’ve ripped off Simon Cox, but you’re pretty sure Perth doesn’t have the internet.

Because the guy on the subway is selling tape measures, and the kid in the restaurant is selling socks, and you want to ask them “What’s your strike rate?” And “Can I see your business plan?”

Because you can’t buy beers smaller than your forearm.

Because when your bad Spanish meets the bad Spanish of the Chinese grocery clerk, Queen Isabella rotates in her grave like a Sydney Road kebab.

Because your phrasebook is useful, for rolling roaches.

Because your friends are dead and you have burned the ship they sailed in.

Because pornography is sold on the street, where it belongs.

Because there is a shop named Crack Pizza. One supposes it must be moreish. (Not like Morgan Freeman in Robin Hood, that’s a different kind of Moorish. Although he’s not actually Moorish, and doesn’t look Moorish. But he is kind of moreish, because I also liked him in The Shawshank Redemption. And Nurse Betty. And pretty much any movie where he plays God. In the literal, acting role sort of sense, not the transplanting-a-winged-ape-to-the-back-of-a-critically-injured-city-cop-to-create-a-crime-fighting-machine sort of sense.)

Because the funky bus is not afraid to be different.

Because you know you’re hardcore when you’re crossing the street while Argentines won’t.

Because if you get a local girl into bed, for the next few hours you can say whatever you want.

Because every house has a rooftop terrace where you can drink beer while the day fades. The beers are cold and fresh and a dollar a litre. It would take parachuting Nazi stormtroopers to make something wrong with this equation.

Because the roof winds open with a crankhandle, and the crankhandle is not a euphemism.

Because the best way to make a house less lonely is invite the sky in.

Because here, unlike Bolivia, you have some chance of passing solids.

Because to date there have been no winged monkeys fused with city cops.

Because molestar means to annoy, and the train announcer apologises daily.

Because labio means lip, so every kiss is an act of oral pleasure.

Because the dog on the next roof isn’t barking today.

Because the creaking of your chair is a kind of dialogue, in either language.

Because you miss her with a fierce burn, and understand what love is, and understand that distance never meant a thing.

Because this beer is empty.

Because there are four more in the fridge.

Because a bottle of mayonnaise and a jar of olives somehow made a meal.

Because when you go to sleep after this poem, you will have no choice but to be alone.

Jimmy Cuzco and the Sacred Valleys

There is no hand that will hold you like this place.
Its lights are the copper eyes of the dead
and you know you’ll take a trail of smoke with you when you go.
Marching up over the hills are fire ants with colonial dreams.
And downwards there are bars,
dark corners tasting of your own salt
and the beers lined up like cathedrals.

No-one has earned this –
not by becoming soil
nor relocating history brick by brick.
A town where even your excesses are holy,
walking home as the first bells start to ring.
The pinhole street is empty save the dogs,
its cobbles and your feet caught in broken conversation.
The steps are fast with canine parodies of joy
and from church to church is a beam of prayer
so strong you’d snap to x-ray if you touched it.
God made your mouth. He knows how many fillings you have.
No fan of dentistry
the gaps left up to him don’t fill so smooth.