She was in Phuket with one of her friends when the tsunami hit. It was their last day. They had been staying in a place close to the beach. The hotel had told them they should take a taxi at ten-thirty to meet their flight. The friend, though, was one of those nervy types, and pushed for them to leave half an hour early. Janis, who was of the slightly disorganised no-rush mentality, would probably have left an hour later were she left to her own devices. But she went along with the plan. As their taxi drove along the foreshore they saw the sea receding way back towards the horizon. People were gathering to watch the puzzling spectacle. Most of you will remember this was the lull just before the drama. Even the driver was intrigued, so they stopped and got out to look with everyone else. After a short while though, the friend got anxious again, and they reluctantly kept going. They made higher ground, and then the waves came in.

Their driver, an elderly Thai man, got a call from his son-in-law saying there was some kind of flood. He went straight to his house, got the family, and took everyone up into the hills. There the girls, neither speaking a word of Thai, were looked after the whole day. The driver’s granddaughter spoke a little English, and they got by. There was no way to get word to anyone, so the girls’ parents and mine were all anxiously watching the news and fearing the worst. The family stayed in the hills until nightfall, then the driver took them back past the ruined town to the airport, where they somehow managed to wrangle two seats on the last plane out to Bangkok before the airport was shut down. It was only there that they could finally call home. That day must have been an agony for the families, and I can’t say how glad I am that I missed it.

They were supremely lucky. And while obviously the extent to which I was affected was laughably minor compared to the devastation visited on so many, I still find the memory distressing. (All this first-person stuff isn’t because I think I’m important, it’s because I can’t give anyone else’s perspective on this.) I remember clearly the plummeting shock of how close a call it really was, which took a few days to sink in. The idea of them standing there watching the waves recede, with all that we now know it signified. It still makes me feel kind of ill. I can’t fathom the idea of losing someone you are deeply in love with, and someone who you think is going to be part of your long-term future. It was the first serious relationship for both of us, and we loved each other with a youthful intensity and a boisterous enthusiasm. There was none of the cynicism or reservation of the present day, several relationships down the line. Had I lost her, and with her something potentially so amazing, I would have carried it for the rest of my life. Then there were the other horrible scenarios, like how would her parents have coped, and how would I have been able to help them through it, given I would be one of their main connections back to their daughter.

Given this background, I’m pretty taken aback when, on the long, long bus ride to Salta in Argentina’s north-west, a film called Tsunami comes up on the TV screens. First fears are quickly confirmed, it is indeed a dramatisation of Boxing Day 2004. And it’s big – an HBO-BBC coproduction, expensive and lengthy, presumably a miniseries in its original form. Good actors: Tim Roth, Toni Collette… but, what the hell?

I don’t know what to feel when the preliminary scenes start coming up on screen. But I’m on a long-distance coach, and there’s no way to escape. Initial misgivings are soon justified. We all know what’s coming, and the set-up is so meticulous, so cynical, that it sets my teeth on edge. We’re presented with a parade of inevitability. Here’s the beautiful hotel. Here’s the lovely idyllic shoreline. Here are the pretty actors. Here’s a nice little bit of character development to get you emotionally invested. Here are the fateful decisions about who goes diving and who doesn’t. Here are lots of shots of sweet little toddlers running around on the beach. Now watch while we smash it all up as graphically as possible. Guttering, choking, drowning. Devastate and destroy. It’s like watching the White House explode in Independence Day, but with the hypocritical veneer of being authentic and serious film.

Given the bad associations, it leaves me a bit shaken. But it’s distressing in more ways than the filmmakers intended. I can’t fathom – why does this film exist? Who decided, six months or a year after the event, that it was a good and desirable and appropriate idea to make this film? And above all, what right do these presumptuous pricks have to this story? It’s like war-porn. We all know what happened. We all know it was horrific. So, do we really need to see that recreated in intimate detail? What purpose does that serve? Is it for our further education and edification? But we already know what happened. It was too recent to have forgotten. The stories were legion and filled the papers for weeks. So then is it just a film? Something to pass the time? Then why pick this story? Consider that concept. You want to tap into that experience, into the terror and death of hundreds of thousands, and the grief and misery of millions, for…your entertainment? If so that’s utterly crass and a disgrace. Apologies to the sensitive, but really it just seems like jacking off over the corpses.

Some films want to tell stories. And some just want to milk every last drop of emotional impact out of real events, convincing you that the impact is due to good filmmaking when it’s really only because the events themselves were so distressing. Art seeks to have some sort of emotional effect, but just because something has an emotional effect doesn’t make it art. Even with a couple of weeks to cool down, it still makes me genuinely angry. Why did such a film actually need to be made? And what of the decision to go, in 2005/06, to some of the locations devastated by the disaster – and then spend millions of dollars on making a movie rather than doing something worthwhile?

Also, while it’s absolutely no surprise, it’s nonetheless pathetic that almost the entire focus of a film on the Asian tsunami is on Westerners.  The wealthy British tourist families of the plush Oasis Resort. (Goodness, one of them is black! How progressive.) The white British embassy staff on their way to the disaster scene. The white Australian aid worker. The white journalist and his Thai sidekick. And this is the model for the whole movie – Asia itself is relegated to the role of sidekick, that and provider of scenery, just the way Western tourists go to drink in Thailand because the bar-girls are easy on the eye and on the wallet. The occasional shots of villages and villagers are as background sets for the white protagonists to play out their stories. Going by this movie, you wouldn’t even know that Thai was occasionally spoken in Thailand.

The one Thai character of any kind of prominence is – wait for it – a waiter from the resort where the important tourist characters were staying. The one Thai who gets even half as much screentime as one of the Westerners, and he has to be presented as a servant, here to carry the drinks and call everyone Sir. He’s firmly kept in that capacity, stuck in his hotel uniform for the entire film. The fact that the film is centred on a tourist resort in the first place is yet another joke. As it is, resorts are all that most Westerners know of Thailand, and serving staff is the only capacity in which they know Thais. Do we really need to perpetuate this? It’s astonishing that the view can be so narrow. Indeed, there’s almost no hint that anything actually happened outside of Thailand itself, despite the fact that three-quarters of the dead were Indonesian, not to mention the devastation of Sri Lanka and deaths as far away as the east coast of Africa. Sure, my personal story was about the tourist centre at Phuket, because that’s the only way that I was connected to the wider tale. But for a film purporting to portray this wider tale, it’s the old story that the deaths of a couple of thousand white tourists mean and always meant a whole lot more than those of 230 000 Asians. Just like Roger East said.

There is a strange final chapter to the story. A couple of hours in to the interminable angsting of the film, the bus starts to slow down. We are on a desert road somewhere in Tucuman province, miles from the last place and miles from the next. Dust lifts up in smoky billows, like a dance of seven veils. Abruptly, as the road’s black tongue lays itself over a slight rise, we can see it: a truck ripped clear in half, its back end flipped over and lying flat in the roadway like a dog on its belly. The cabin is on its side ten metres off the road. Things are in pieces. It’s hard to tell if there’s one vehicle or two. Hundreds of LPG canisters, the cargo, are scattered in all directions, for a hundred metres or more up and down the highway, and scores of metres either side. There is no emergency scene paraphernalia, no barriers or flashing lights, just a couple of silent police cars and one cop pointing us around the chaos. The bus creeps through at walking pace, steering around twisted metal and debris, raising dust from the verge. The many-coloured canisters sprout from the desert earth like strange bulbous fruit, spread among the shrubbery and red dirt like hundreds of thousands on a desert cake.

The first thing I can think of is how eerily the scene is like Zoe Barron’s poem ‘No Sirens’ (listen to it here and see what I mean). The passengers becoming viewers of the drama. But here we have the double absurdity of looking up from the carnage on our screens to the carnage that we’re passing through. A lot of people are so absorbed in the film that they take a while to notice. Then their heads bob up and down like aging helium balloons, partly wanting to see, and partly drawn back to the television. The real-life disaster is in the world outside the windows, paralleling the deliberately and expensively re-created mock disaster inside. Both playing out on squares of glass, viewers looking from one set of reflections to the other. But the kind of real-life disaster that we’re all so keen to avoid soon passes behind us, and everyone is free to relax back into the vicarious enjoyment of someone else’s manufactured, third-hand disaster. The kind of disaster we apparently seek out, if this cinematic offering is to be interpreted correctly. Someone else’s disaster is so much more palatable, in any case, more comfortable, not so hard on the nerves. We should make a note to thank the filmmakers for the enlightening experience.

Burning down the Louvre: Argentina’s beautiful football up in flames (Argentina vs. Germany)

Sneijder finds his feet, uses his head, as Brazil lose theirs (Netherlands vs. Brazil)

Argentina celebrates football as a way of life (This cannibalises a bit at the start from one of my posts on this page, but is still a new article.)

On a different tack my latest Book Show post is also up, which includes a nice mp3 of my friend Julian reading Spanish poetry. Sounds nice, even if you don’t understand it. Find it here.

And in other writing news I’ve had poems accepted for the next issues of Griffith Review, Going Down Swinging, and Divan. So things continue apace at all points on the cultural spectrum.

*

Winter is officially here. I wasn’t supposed to see it, I was supposed to be sweltering on the coast of Salvador by now. But the Battle of Wounded Knee has kept me locked up deep in the Southern Hemisphere. And I have to say – as of today, Buenos Aires has never been so beautiful. The day is perfect, gold and blue. A sky so clear you can almost hear the crack as light passes through it. I don’t know if it’s an illusion, but it always seems like winter sunlight looks different, gentler, and the colour of the sky comes through a in softer shade. The city seems bare – skeletal trees and the hard edges of apartment buildings – but somehow the light gives it all a kinder cast.

I am alone on the high terrace of Palermo House and watching the city fan out before me, recumbent, snoozing in this late-season gift. The warmth is indisputable. I peel back my layers of shirts piece by piece, unstrap and ditch the knee brace, and finally end up in a leant-back lounge chair, jeans rolled up, arms spread wide and open to the world. With a hair-of-the-dog litre of beer warming within reach, even my hangover is a kind of benediction, something that makes me appreciate lying here and doing nothing just that little bit more.

It’s strange how I keep circling back here. I stayed at Palermo House the first night off the plane from Sydney, finding it by accident after the place I’d intended to go to was full. I had wandered the streets with my bag as dark started to come on, more thankful than ever of my travel-incredibly-light policy, up and down Palermo lanes, asking a few questions, and finally finding myself outside this tiny unassuming door with an intercom buzzer. I wasn’t quite sure what to do when it said “Hola?” Should I commence negotiations from the street over this fuzzy channel? “I was wondering if you have a free bed, or do I have to make a reservation?” I said hesitantly in my best stilted phrasebook Spanish. “Come on up,” said the voice in English.

I struggled through the narrow aperture, up a tiny cramped set of stairs, got buzzed through a second set of doors and then…once inside, the place opened up like the Tardis. An enormous hollow concourse with rooms opening off it all along its length. Another set of stairs at the far end, then yet another tiny twisting narrow set folding back on itself to yet another level. It was only after climbing this, red and puffing, that the reception at last made itself known. Just one part of the idiosyncrasy that makes this place so enjoyable.  I got my dorm and watched the street below, standing at the wrought-iron rail of the window feeling raw and new and in awe of it all. Every new thing the city threw up, however slight, was something to notice and digest and try to adjust to. Each shop sign and passing remark, each pedestrian crossing and cracked footpath slab. Like I had abrasions all over my body, and each slight touch of the wind set off another flurry of nerve endings beneath the skin. Later, it was the aforementioned terrace that really made me feel at home. I stood up there that night watching the lights of the city and feeling the buzz of travel and adventure and finding somewhere new. And on the other side of that long jet-lagged sleepless night, I put in my headphones and listened to a friend’s new record while I watched the sun, with its attendant symbolism of rebirth and renewal, hint that this was the start of a brand new phase, and that if the lush gold strokes in which it painted the city were any indication, things just might turn out to be glorious.

I stayed a week or so, and while I stayed in a few places afterwards to try and get to know different neighbourhoods, I somehow always ended up back at Palermo House. The epic cross-continental mission with Mr Fox and The Doctor terminated here – that’s where we met Hawkeye and the Coloradans, and it cemented my fondness for the place. If they handed out medals for trashbaggery then that week would have given us all spinal damage by now from the metric tonnage around our necks. Even the staff remember our group as going especially  hard, which given their industry is an enormous achievement. I was back again just before New Year’s when I was between apartments, and then more recently my place with the crazy old folks was two blocks down the road. By this point I’d become good friends with some of the denizens, so I would stop by just to hang out, and the relationship continued.

Actually it’s pretty amusing to be here now, just near the house I ran away from unannounced a few weeks ago. I wonder if I’ll run into my charming old landlords. Apparently they didn’t take too kindly to the note I left them pointing some of the reasons why they were fucking insane, and a brief helpful rundown of how the rental process generally works in a non-asylum environment. I deduced that this had been their reaction when the Malaysian Pyjama Ghost (who is also their neighbour, you may recall) emailed Clemenceau (who used to rent one of the MPG’s places) to pass on the gossip gleaned from my landlady that I was in fact a male prostitute. Had I been bringing home a lot of men for paid sex this would make some sense, but as it stands this accusation was a little bit left-field. (The gaybar story only happened after I’d moved out.) It sometimes feels like certain stories in my life could only have happened to me. Only I would have gone to Argentina, popped my knee in a gay nightclub accident, and so enraged an old Paraguayan ballerina that she started trying to convince a Malaysian property tycoon that I suck dick for pesos. Admittedly if there were enough pesos involved I would give it some thought, but a suitable offer has yet to be made by the Argentine homosexual community. And frankly I think they already owe me for one medial ligament and one ACL. The lack of which certainly makes it hard to get down on my knees, whatever the hourly rate.

The hostel guys have a better job than street hooking – they basically sit around, talk shit, drink beer, press the buzzer to open the door, and occasionally check someone in. The ones who aren’t working tend to go there anyway to hang out, and sleep there half the time when it’s too late to go home, until eventually their shift rolls around. So they’re always amongst friends, it just so happens that one of them is getting paid. Julian is one of nature’s gentlemen, a shaggy beardy smiley dude who it’s impossible not to like. He basically lives there, and without him the place would fall apart. Lora is a Bulgarian by birth who has lived in Algeria, France and Madrid, so aside from her mother tongue she speaks fluent French, Spanish, and excellent English, and can hold down an interesting conversation in any of the four. It seems every European I meet just compounds my mono-lingual shame. El Turco is the comic relief. He gives the most awesomely surly customer service when he’s tired, which is most of the time. If he’s not up all night in a bar then he’s curled up on the tiny two-seater couch passed out, stumbling blearily over to hit the door buzzer whenever the bell rings. Apparently he holds the record for the most number of people locked out of the hostel for the longest period of time, while he slept blithely on through the dinging and donging that must haunt all of their dreams.

It’s El Turco’s fault that I’m here again today. I stopped by last night for a quiet beer and a hello, checking carefully over my shoulder for mad Paraguayans as I waited on the step. It panned out that way for a little while, but El Turco was getting increasingly deranged. He hadn’t slept during the previous night of bar-hopping, had rolled straight in to his shift at work, and then had hung around until I showed up. By this stage it was nearing midnight. “Let’s go out tonight,” he kept saying, with one of those vague stories people have about a friend and a nightclub and so on. The club in question was again one of the enormous trashy superclubs that line the river under the flightpath from the Aeroparque. I pointed out that I had ruined my knee in one of those places only two weeks earlier, and that a repeat mightn’t be a great idea. I pointed out that it had taken me about fifteen minutes to climb the endless fricking stairs to the top of Palermo House, and I didn’t want to go down again. I pointed out that I still couldn’t really walk, let alone dance. But El Turco is a charming and persistent motherfucker, and eventually he got his way. (Not in the way the Paraguayan ballerina thinks. El Turco doesn’t have that kind of money.)

Now, if you know me, you know I fucking hate nightclubs, especially big trashy commercial ones. Dance parties I can do, but when the object is listening to bad R&B and looking pretty, it’s just not my scene. But I have recently discovered a way to survive those places, and even extract some enjoyment out of them. Ladies and gents, it’s called alcohol. Indeed. Versatile stuff, no? The Blutac of the emotional world. If you are impossibly savagely drunk, you can forget that were you sober this music would have you clawing off your own skin like a wet pink shirt, and that most of the people around you are loathsome specimens of humanity, and that you would C4 the entire premises with approximately as much guilt as you would feel in incinerating a barrel full of cockroaches. The important thing is to do achieve this state before you leave home, so you don’t end up spending x-hundred dollars on tequila shots so expensive that you’re convinced you must have somehow drunk yourself thirty years into the future. If you time the pre-game right, you can ride that wave all the way through the night and be home by the time you really need another drink to settle your shaking fingers. So El Turco and I relentlessly nailed four litres of beer in an hour, then threw ourselves into our tilt at tomorrow morning.

BA nightclubs are weird. Or particularly, the behaviour of men in BA nightclubs is weird. It’s really hard to adjust to how aggressive (they might say ‘forthright’) they are in trying to attract the attention of women. I’m watching this one guy as a girl tries to walk past him in a large doorway. He’s weird-looking, with a bald head and a rubbery face, like a real-time claymation dude. He’s going for it, literally moving a metre to his right and his left to blatantly block this girl’s path whenever she tries to go around him, grabbing her by the arm, leaning in, grinning constantly, trying his best lines, seeming to think that if he just keeps his hands on her waist she’ll soon forget and leave them there. It continues to a point where, if we were in Australia, I would have chanced stepping in and telling him to fuck off. I mean, it’s a fine line between persistence and assault. What’s the protocol? If this is how things are here am I supposed to accept it? The girls seem accustomed to it. But should they be accustomed to it? By the number of guys repeating the routine throughout the night, apparently it is the way things are done. It’s like the kids trying to sell socks on the subway. Every time you see them you think they have no chance in hell, but their very existence indicates that the technique has a certain margin of success.

Not so tonight though – all the girls I see just brush it off. Although Buenos Aires girls seem to brush most people off, most of the time. El Turco is complaining about this exact phenomenon when a girl on the dancefloor turns around and asks me where I’m from. Australia, I say. “Australia?!” she says. She turns around and tells her friends. They explode into shrieking.

“We love Australia!” she tells me.

“Um…why?”

“Australia is great. We love Australia. Whooo!”

This chain of logic leaves me somewhat nonplussed. (Side note. ‘Nonplussed’ means confused or bewildered. It does not mean unfazed or indifferent. You’re thinking of ‘not fussed’. Sounds similar, means something else. Can everyone please stop using it wrongly? Thanks.) So yes. Nonplussed. As in, I feel kind of like you do when a crazy person in the street tries to convince you of something. Like I felt when a dishevelled old lady on a tram fixed me with a beady glare and shouted “My brother married twice! AMP! AMP!” But y’know. In this case I go with it. They love Australia. They are drunk as shit. They surround me in a kind of flesh stockade of lady-dancing. I figure it’s as good a way to pass the time as any. And it does go on for quite some time. “You must feel like a pimp,” says one of them, “with your four women.” I do kind of feel like a pimp. I particularly enjoy the baleful looks from various would-be Latino lovers whose own aggro tactics had failed to pay off, given my own tactics were as complex as standing there and being from Australia.

In the end though, I don’t bother trying to push my pimping to the next level. Since a particularly shameful night when I was seventeen (which I don’t really remember, but have been filled in on piecemeal by an intensely embarrassing number of people over the years since) I haven’t been a fan of the random dancefloor hook-up. (The upside of that night, which I didn’t know until eight years later, is that I threw up on Matt Walford on the long bus-ride home. Yes! Take that, Matt Walford.) To clarify, hooking up with someone you already like while on a dancefloor is fine, it’s just that macking onto some random who you can’t speak to and can’t really see smacks of desperation. The lack of speech is the main thing, given the intensity of club sound systems. I don’t like the idea of hooking up with someone when a transcript of your life’s worth of conversation would be five lines long and all in capitals. I’m in favour of close encounters in their own right, it’s just that stupidity is a massive turn-off. Therefore I need to have sussed out that side of things before I actually have any real interest. Smart girls are sexy, simple as that. Of the girls I’ve been involved with, some have been batshit-crazy, and some have been bitterly unpleasant, and some have been emotional clusterfucks, but almost all of them have had a substantial amount going on upstairs.

So eventually I extricate myself from the Australia admiration society, track down my missing Turkish friend, and we exit into the morning light with a random Haitian named Jean-Pierre. Don’t ask me how that happened. And of course, the way life loops around, we find ourselves back at Palermo House, passing out in a couple of spare bunks, and waking up to my old familiar terrace, a litre or two of Quilmes, and the warm embrace of the midday sun. Which I believe is where you and I found ourselves to begin with, circling into circles into circles. Time to lie back, close our eyes, and stop moving. I still have hopes of making it out of the country, but if I don’t, this doesn’t look like such a terrible option. At this rate we’ll definitely be sunbaking in July.

To disappoint fans of the graphic, the internal rupturing actually consisted of the anterior and medial cruciate ligaments, in the erotic locale of the knee. The story goes like this. It is (supposedly) my last night in BA, more or less. My plan is to take a bus to Mendoza in the morning to meet the Pirates (two of them, anyway, Juancito and The Blue Pirate) who are travelling up that way. After that I’m going to grab a flight to Brazil for warm weather and the World Cup. A few friends have come around to Alex and Ani’s place, where I’m staying, and there’s a bit of a send-off going on.

One of our friends, the fabulous Dami, is pretty much the gayest gay guy I’ve ever met. He is snazzy, natty, queeny, sparkly, dapper, debonair, and just radiates gayness in such intensity that it must permeate surrounding subterranean bedrock in levels that will be measurable with Gayger counters for 100 million years to come. One day in the future the Gayliens will arrive on Earth, and they shall know his velocity. He’s insistent that we all go to a gay club with him, and loudly protests that we never do, to the point where it’s easier just to go along with the plan. We head out to a place called Human, on the superclub strip along the river. I have never seen nightlife like that in Buenos Aires. The big clubs hold literally thousands of people each, and there are a dozen of them along the line of the Rio Plata near the Aeroparque. They don’t even bother opening until about 2 a.m., and don’t really fill up until about 4. Then they run on through until 9, 10, midday, whenever the people decide to go home. It’s an incredible commitment to the party, and I love it. As I’ve mentioned before, back home I often used to be last man swaying, cradling an 8 a.m. drink in the midst of a slew of passed-out bodies. Here, I’m pretty much an early piker.

Getting into the place is a mission, a Chairman Mao Long March through half a mile of car parks and pathways down from the arterial roadway to the occluded riverside location, where the lights and towers of the superclubs rear up out of the trees like the shining cities of a brave new civilisation. It would not give one iota of surprise to see one of them take off and hover away down the River Plate delta to the sea. Then another half mile of queues and barriers and enfilades and confusion and people streaming in all directions. Once inside, the place is a cavern. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a gay club before, so I don’t know what I’m expecting, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary, aside from the Argentine-standard bikini-girl podium dancers being replaced by a couple of beefy dudes with wobbling greased pectorals that inexplicably make me think of David Hasselhoff. There’s no-one in outrageous drag. There seem to be as many girls as guys anyway. No-one makes a desperate dive for my pants. (Ah, that grey area between relief and disappointment.)

The night pans out as nights in giant nightclubs do. At least until the crucial point arrives. Dami decides to lift up Flor, one of our other friends, who is too short to see much over the crowd. I decide, for my own inscrutable reasons, that it’d be a good idea to then lift him up while he’s lifting her. I’m just getting in position to try this out when some drunk dude crashes into Dami. Balance in this situation is a precarious thing. All three of us eat shit in spectacular fashion. I am on the bottom of the pile, on my back. Now, if you picture yourself falling backwards, the usual and safe way to end up is on your back, your feet within the line of your hips, and your knees bent outwards in perpendicular triangles, like a roast chicken, or a girl in the missionary position. While my left leg follows this format, I go down with my right foot well outside the line of my hip, knee pointing straight down, foot at a 90-degree perpendicular to the knee, like a guy rupturing an anterior cruciate ligament.

There are a range of things I have learned from this experience. I have learned that knees are designed to bend forwards and backwards. They are not designed to bend side-to-side. I have learned that if they attempt the latter with the weight of three people pressing down on them with the force of Earth’s gravity plus tequila, this will roughly equate to A Bad Time. I have learned the Spanish terms for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. I have learned that having travel insurance is A Good Idea, especially when you go to hospital on what is both a Sunday and a public holiday. I have learned to walk again, more or less. I have learned that people love a guy in a fetching bright-blue knee brace. I have learned that those things I’ve read on the internet about God hating homosexuality must certainly be true, if you look at how quickly he smote me for entering into a palace of sin. I have learned that nobody turned to a pillar of salt, and if they had, a greasy muscly man would probably have started dancing on top of them. And I have learned that a slightly misleading summary can make a tale seem much more interesting than its component parts deserve. So there you go. I busted my knee trying to pick up a guy and a girl at the same time in a Buenos Aires gay bar. That’s the story. Pass it on.

Now let’s just clarify a couple of things. Yes, this is the World Cup. But it is only the group stages, and Argentina have won both their games so far, including a comfortable 4-1 in their recent outing. Their passage to the knockout rounds is all but assured, it would take a string of absolutely freak results to stop them from here. So this is as close to a dead rubber as World Cup football gets. But if you imagined this would make any difference to the game’s following, you don’t understand Argentina. The opponent is Greece, but this doesn’t matter. The match is irrelevant, but this doesn’t matter either. The point is, Argentina is playing. In the World Cup. And no-one in this country is willing or able to do anything else but watch.

Once you get off the streets, you find out where the missing people are hiding. They’re in shops and homes and offices. They’re in cafes and apartments. Anywhere with a power point has a screen attached to it, and anywhere with a screen has a crowd. There are nineteen people crammed into the locksmith’s, lining the counter. The guy from the fruit stall has abandoned it for the sanctuary of the milk bar – there’s no danger of anyone coming by to steal his produce. Out in provincial backwaters, modest houses of mud brick and tin are adorned with satellite dishes. The bars and restaurants off the main plaza are a sea of light blue and white, flags and shirts and hats and make-up, even though Argentina are wearing their solid dark blue strip today. It must be said that the fans of football teams wearing blue have always been just a little unoriginal. The French are routinely Les Bleus, the Italians the Azzurri.  Uruguay are La Celeste, Argentina La Albiceleste, Nicaragua Los Albiazules. In the English leagues, Chelsea are The Blues, as are Manchester City, Birmingham, Coventry, Chester, Everton, Ipswich Town, Shrewsbury, Southend, Grays Athletic, Linfield, Ballymena and Stranraer. Not to mention Dinamo Zagreb, Apeldoorn, and of course Carlton in the AFL. Eschewing plurals, Kuwait and Serbia go for The Blue, while Israel, Bordeaux, and Göteborg are The Blue and Whites. But still. Nomenclatural originality aside, with its pucker-mouthed Sun of May in the centre, the sky-blue and white of Argentina has always made up one of the most handsome flags in the world, and it looks just as well on their team and on their fans. To see both in full flight is a privilege.

Argentina are attacking from the get-go. Messi lives up to his name of The Flea, burrowing in and out of the Greek defence with his strange hunch-shouldered hustle. Every time he embarks on one of his scything runs toward the box you can feel the crowd tense and the volume start to lift. Veron lets fly a thunderous 35-yard drive that leaves Tsorvas vibrating like Wile E. Coyote. Aguero is fed about five chances on goal but punches each one straight at the keeper. The break is nil-all, but you can feel that it’s only a matter of time. Indeed it is. Tevez isn’t playing today, so Argentina’s second-ugliest player in Demichelis drags his death-metal haircut up from defence to smash home a rebounded corner after a sniff of handball. Messi is still going for it. You get the feeling that Maradona’s coaching decisions are based far more on the emotional than the tactical or the pragmatic. He wants to see attacking. He wants to see goals. He’d spit on a six-man backline. When asked by reporters whether his players look for Messi too often, Maradona says ardently “Messi should have the ball. Messi has fun when he has the ball. And when Messi has fun, it’s entertaining for everybody. To take the ball away from Messi means that football isn’t beautiful anymore. To take the ball away from Messi, it’s like…” He pauses for a moment, regarding the half-eaten apple in his hand. “It’s like taking my apple away from me when I’m hungry.”

But never is Maradona’s hunch philosophy more apparent than in the 80th minute, when the 36-year-old Martín Palermo is subbed onto the field. The hubbub at the ground goes up ten notches. Likewise in the bar. This, you can tell just from the reaction, is something special, another chapter in an extraordinary story. In 1999, after several prolific years for Boca Juniors, Palermo made the national team only to miss three penalties for Argentina in a Copa America match they lost 3-0. Those in power said he would never play for Argentina again. During a stint in Spain in 2002, he climbed into the fans to celebrate a goal, then broke both bones in his left leg when the concrete barrier collapsed on top of him. For a while it seemed his career was over. But he returned to Boca and battled other injuries to finally make a comeback, with the winning goal against arch-rivals River Plate. There is, my friend Pancho explains, just something about Palermo. For all his ups and downs, he’s a lucky player, he brings luck with him. He’s awkward and gangly and doesn’t look dangerous, but he has an extraordinary knack for being in the right place at the right time. He’s a master of the last-minute score, and an incredible fluke-merchant. He scores goals that bounce off his back, his leg, the back of his head when he’s looking the other way. He has a swag of mid-pitch strikes to his name, including an extraordinary 40-yard header from a kick-in. He’s…Palermo.

But no matter his exploits, the national squad’s lack of forgiveness continued. Until after a decade of exile, that is, when one Diego Armando Maradona was put in charge. When Palermo was first called back for the tail-end of 2009’s World Cup qualifiers, people said Maradona was mad. Palermo was past it. Too old. Never good enough to begin with. A proven failure. But he was still the lucky player of Pancho’s imagination, and as Argentina faced the very real possibility of failing to qualify for a World Cup for the first time, locked at 1-1 with a resurgent Peru, it was Palermo who somehow found himself in the right spot in a mess of players and mud and rain. It was Palermo who scrambled home a scruffy goal-mouth winner in the 93rd minute of the final qualifying game, and Palermo who stood at the corner flag, shirt off, arms spread wide, face upturned to the teeming rain in his own personal Shawshank Redemption.

And so here we are, with Palermo, at 36 years of age, about to make his World Cup debut. Veron is also 36, and his selection faced similar criticism. But it doesn’t matter. The simple fact is that Maradona loves Veron. Palermo was an even more left-field choice. But Maradona loves Palermo. And that’s all there is to it. No fitness trials, no computer modelling, no strategy planning. Maradona wants them to play, and so they play.

Still and all. With a strikeforce comprising Messi, Tevez, Milito, Higuain, and Aguero, you get the feeling that this is a gesture by Maradona, a final few minutes of top level football for an old favourite now that Argentina’s passage through is assured. Palermo is a kind of Argentine Harry Kewell, a veteran and fine purveyor of his art whose service and skill deserve a send-off. But the Palermo story couldn’t be any more different to Kewell’s desperately unlucky return (and farewell) to World Cup football. After a few confident passes through midfield, and a couple of good runs forward, he floats wide right as Messi’s blazing shot is parried away from goal, and is there to calmly sidefoot past the Greek keeper into the corner of the netting. Cue delirium from the fans. Cue delirium from his teammates. Cue the greatest look of childlike joy ever seen on the face of a footballer. They are not so much celebrating the goal as celebrating the man, the sense of completion, the story. As Maradona says after the game, “The film of Palermo has no ending.”

This is what makes this team stand out from the dullard professional automatons of Europe. Argentina runs on emotion. Maradona runs on emotion. Thing is, it works for him. Veron has been rolling back the years controlling midfield. Palermo has turned screenwriter yet again. Messi has been given trust and free rein, and has so far turned in one of the most dominant singlehanded displays in memory, with a hand (though not of God) in every Argentine goal in the tournament. When Maradona has faith in his players, based on nothing but affection and instinct, they respond to it. Such is the power and charisma of the man, flawed genius though he so clearly is.

Across the road from the bar is a TV in the window of a sports shop. Its broadcast is coming through about ten seconds earlier than ours, but no-one else has noticed. Every close play is followed a belated series of oohs and aahs from our barmates, when we already know the result. So when Palermo slots home in the 89th, Juan is on his feet shouting ‘Goal!’ way too early and too loud. On our TVs, the ball is still in midfield, with Messi yet to make his run. The table next to us half goes up in celebration at Juan’s word. Confusion reigns across the bar, people expectant, frozen halfway up from their seats, looking around for information. The delay gives him time to start videoing the bar before the belated confirmation comes through on our screens, and the crowd erupts in an incoherent roar. There’s not much more to play. The whistle goes. Palermo comes on screen, and the crowd lights up again like the beaming smile on his face.

The girls at the table next to us ask us to email them the video we took. We dick around with phones and addresses for a while. ‘Ok, we’re going to dance now,’ they say.

‘Where?’ we ask, wondering how many nightclubs are open at five in the afternoon.

‘Down there,’ they say, pointing to the street. And sure enough, as we sit and watch, the crowds start to gather, blue and white streaming in from all directions. By the time we make it downstairs, there must be a couple of thousand people, lumped together into a kind of mobile mosh pit that starts to circle the perimeter of the main plaza. There are trumpets and horns and a never-ending array of drums, and by God these people jump and chant and sing. Periodically the music ramps up to a faster tempo, and the people mash together more closely to bounce in circles like a ska concert, before dispersing a little to continue their laps. Little tiny kids are visible above the crowd, their heads jouncing up and down as they ride on someone’s shoulders. People further away straddle scooters and hammer the horns. People are hanging out of windows over the street, draping Argentine flags from the sills. The procession circles and circles endlessly on. Flags are being waved in all directions. Some guy inexplicably has a large model B-52 aeroplane, complete with independently spinning props, mounted on a broomstick, and is zooming it back and forth. On the steps of the town hall, a scruffy but beaming gentleman spreads out a large blue and white banner that proclaims “Dios es Argentino.” (“God is an Argentine.”)

(For atmosphere’s sake there’s a little video here)

And that isn’t the only striking thing. I once heard in an interview that only ten percent of football fans (as opposed to fifty percent of AFL) are women. Well, whoever came up with that stat obviously never came here. As demographics would suggest, women make up a good half of the dancing crowd, and fill most of the spots in the windows. Every Argentine woman I’ve spoken to knows about the team, the players, the progress, who’s in, who’s out, what their major worries are. At game time the streets aren’t deserted on a gender basis. And however stylish and beautiful, feminine and high-heeled, they’re still here, still accessorised with ribbons of white and blue, with cut-off Albiceleste tube tops, with Messi No. 10 singlets over their designer jeans. They’re still waving flags and jumping and shouting with everyone else. They still do much more than care. They’re still living this moment, drinking it in and feeling the high as much as any testosteronal counterpart. The feeling is amazing. The atmosphere prickles your skin. And what’s more amazing is that Salta is only a small city in the scheme of things. There’s the knowledge that this is happening across the country, in Mendoza, in Bariloche, Calafate, Rio Gallegos, La Plata, Trelew, Resistencia, Cordoba. And of course one granddaddy celebration in Buenos Aires. And just to recap – this is for what was essentially a token group match. It’s impossible to imagine what might happen if they win the thing. And on current form that looks a distinct possibility.

On the way out of the plaza I’m collared by a TV crew to be “our foreign friend” for an interview. Questions in Spanish, answers in Spanish. I’m not sure how well I put my points across, though I do my best. But I think that even in English I would struggle. There are things that are obvious, but hard to explain. There are things that are obvious and don’t need to be explained. And the feeling today in the plaza fits both of these descriptions. It’s simple, and intuitive, and all-encompassing. It’s the raw beauty of sport, and of tribalism: when the andinos and the latinos and the mestizos and the italianos and the rubios and the odd lost gringo can all come down to where the drums beat and the trumpets play, and shout their joy to a darkening winter sky.

His journey home, related to me later by email, was vintage Washington, straight from the School of Good Decisions handbook. He’d taken his taxi at about five in the arvo, after we’d been drinking most of the afternoon. Then there was the Fernet-pragmatism incident. Then, as he recounted it, “I ended up blacking out on the plane. I remember the flight attendant having a warning talk with me, but I don’t really remember what I did. I lost my iPod somehow, and when I got to Houston Texas, security though I had drugs, so they searched me and went through all of my stuff. Do I look like that much of a druggie? Oh and on top of all that, they lost my bag. And I’m still hungover.” I asked for some clarification of exactly how the hell all that transpired. I mean, we’d been drinking, but he definitely wasn’t that drunk. I’ve seen Washington drunk and that wasn’t it. “Well,” he said, “it didn’t help that I got a Fernet-Coca at the airport (I slipped the guy some extra pesos and told him to make it muy fuerte, which he did). Then I drank three bottles of wine on the plane.”

Gold. Just gold. This is the most perfectly fitting finale to his trip, that final apt touch to cap it all off. I mean, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. Back home Washington is a responsible guy, a manager at his work, considered one of the bright young talents of the company. But here, he said, he was on holiday, and he was damn well going to make the most of it. And I salute his full-blooded commitment in riding that sucker right into the ground.

It’s interesting that we ended up such good friends, because I really didn’t predict it. I tend to make very quick assessments of people when I meet them. I know very quickly if we’ll get along really well, and I know instantly if I think they’re a dick. The rest fall somewhere in between – not that I think they suck, they just don’t provoke a reaction either way. I’ll happily be nice enough but essentially indifferent. Washington struck me as a nice guy, fairly typically American, we worked fine in the same space, but we didn’t seem to have that much in common. That assessment came naturally and I didn’t really give it any more thought. But then we ended up in a Seinfeld friends-in-law situation. I became good friends with Hawkeye. She became good friends with Level Five. Washington was Level Five’s best friend. So via the others we spent a fair bit of time together. The party was loud and long and beer-stained, but when the two of them abruptly left at around the same time, there was just me and Washington, looking at each other in an awkward silence across the table.

Now, I know I have a reputation as an arrogant motherfucker. But I actually really like finding out when I’m wrong. So, we didn’t see each other for a couple of months. I went to Antarctica, he went to Chile. But we were both back in BA by February, and we each knew the other was in town. I figured that Washington and I would say we were going to catch up a few times, might actually follow through with it once or twice, and then it would gradually taper off. And it did take Hawkeye’s passing through town on her way home to actually force the issue the first time. But soon after that we caught up again. And again. And gradually, the in-law status faded and our own friendship began to develop.

The differences – the reasons why I hadn’t expected a friendship in the first place – still existed. We disagreed strongly, vocally, occasionally violently, over a whole range of issues. A lot of nights ended in fired-up debate. It was really fascinating to have a friendship that wasn’t exactly easy, or natural, one that maybe wouldn’t have developed if we’d been in a bigger group where we could each have split off toward more like-minded people. And granted, we would both (quite proudly) admit that this friendship was heavily based on a) drinking and b) the stupid shit one can do after drinking. But there were other aspects to it as well. For all the disagreements there were a lot of things on which we were in accord. The conversations got funnier. The list of shared exploits grew longer. Washington could seem incredibly earnest in that particularly American way, but once every couple of days he would drop in some left-field one-liner that completely took me by surprise and made me fall off my chair laughing. So yeah. I learnt some shit. I do make snap judgements. And what I think of someone first-off isn’t always going to be right. It’s good to trust your instincts, but it’s also good to be aware they can be fallible, and to keep an open mind in case they are. So, thanks for the lesson, man. That and the subjunctive tense.

And now, just to prove what a classy and debonair gent my friend was, here is my list (in no particular order) of the best and worst Washington moments, the ones that either left me open-mouthed in disbelief or rolling on the floor. (Try to imagine most of these quotes in a partial slur.)

W: “But California’s real big. It’s got, like north…and south…”
G: “Yeah, there’s a lot of places got those.”
W: “Yeah, but it’s… … …fuck you.”

“Whoah. This is an unbottomly beer.”

“These are the wasted troof.”
Getting philosophical.

W: “I wish I just had, like, tons of money. And I could spend it on whatever and not even think about. I did that once, in that week we went to Vegas.”
G:  “Well at least you tried it. You know what it tastes like.”
W: “Yeah. It tastes expensive.”

W: “Once they find out you have a small dick, you’re still fucking ‘em.”
Washington doesn’t let it get him down.

G: “We gonna smoke here or at the bus stop?”
W: “You can do what you like. I’m gonna smoke two. I smoked a whole packet once, and my face swelled up.”

W: “When you get up tomorrow, you’re gonna look at yourself in the mirror and say [pointing, Lord Kitchener style], ‘Hey. Hey! You’re gonna have a great day.’”

W: “Your problem is you drink too much.”
[Long pause.]
“Jagerbomb?”

G: “You want to hear the best joke ever?”
W: “Women’s rights?”

W: “My life could be written as the worst incredible story known to man. His jeans stained with blood, and his severed finger… well it’s not severed…”

In Argentina the little Chinese-owned supermarkets are routinely called ‘cinos’.
G: “Man, this is like the biggest cino I’ve ever seen.”
W: “Yeah. This is a Wal-cino.”

W: “She’s not like…hideous…”
Wholeheartedly defending some prior choices.

[Pausing and pointing while passing a hotel mirror] “Hey buddy. You need to step up your game.”

The Handlebar
(Fortunately this only stayed around for a couple of days.)

“Hey. Hey! You…are gonna have a great day.”

G: “This wine is weird, man. It smells terrible, but it tastes alright.”
W: [sniffs] “I don’t know if I’m smelling the wine or my moustache.”

G: “You can’t talk, peanut head.”
W: “Why am I peanut head?”
G: “Because you have a head like a peanut.”
W: “How?”
G: “Your head is shaped like a peanut. You have a peanut-shaped head.”
W: “No I don’t.”
G: “Yeah, I’m afraid you do.”
W: [to Clemenceau] “Do I have a peanut head?”
C: “Yes, it’s a bit of a peanut head.”
W: “How do I have a peanut head?”
C: “Hmm, maybe it’s the beard… No, it’s definitely the head.”

W: “What, just cos it’s your birthday, I have to fuck you?”
Washington finds some female friends too demanding.

Washington vs. the Cockroach
We are on the roof terrace of La Casa Teixera on another warm spring night, drinking a couple of litres while the near-darkness and the drone of the autopista overpass sends its lull over us. Washington reaches down by his chair to grab his bottle, raises it to his mouth…and I see it. Sandwiched between his fist and the neck of the bottle is a cockroach, a giant palm-of-the-hand-sized brown shiny Argentine house cockroach. It’s struggling to pull free. Silhouetted against the streetlight, for a brief moment I can see its antennae duelling frantically with his moustache hairs.

He notices around the same time as I do, and pulls back with a guttural roar of disgust, somehow retaining the presence of mind to put the bottle down rather than drop it. “Oh God,” he babbles. “Oh no. A fucking cockroach. I almost ate it.” It must have been trying to steal a sip of his beer, perched on the neck of the bottle. Washington never grabs a beer lightly, so he has mushed most of the roach’s body against the glass. I’ve smashed these things with footwear before. I know how they squish open. I know that his whole hand is now covered in yellow gunk. “Ohhh,” he moans. “I could smell it. That’s how I realised it was there. It stinks so bad.” He creeps away to clean himself up. If you’re wondering whether he wiped off the bottle and finished the beer, you obviously haven’t been paying attention so far. But that’s ok, he needed something to steady him after the shock. He settles back in his chair, shaking his head slightly. “At least I didn’t get him in my mouth. Oh God…I hope his guts aren’t on my moustache.”

All you have to do is click this magical coloured text.

What she didn’t explain was that they didn’t have a fridge upstairs, and so would be popping in several times a day to collect and deposit items in mine (no knocking, just arriving). Nor that they lacked a washing machine, and that she had an obsessive tendency to wash all the towels and linen in the house every three days. So ditto every third day for a multi-hour laundry session. Nor that she also loved doing things like scrubbing floors at insanely frequent intervals, preferably in the early morning about three hours after I’d gone to bed. And hosing down the metal roof of my patio from above on her terrace, so that the house suddenly exploded into thunder drums. Nor that the old guy goes to work at 4.30 each morning, and has a fondness for popping in at that hour for no discernible purpose but to wander about for three or four minutes looking at stuff, and looking at me like I was strange for being awake. Dude, I’m up since last night. You woke up at this hour. Nor why the living room had been deemed off-limits and firmly locked up by the time I arrived, making me feel like some sort of tall hairy Bluebeard’s wife.

Then, anytime I should leave the house, the old lady had the discomfiting habit of dashing into my room and cleaning it up. I would duck down to the shop for fifteen minutes and return to find my bed made, all my clothes whisked out for laundry, and anything that had been on the floor stacked up on a raised surface. This may sound convenient, but at 27 years of age, having someone you barely know washing your underwear and making your bed is just a bit creepy. It’s also hard to manage when you only have three t-shirts and two pairs of socks, but can’t take your eyes off them for five minutes lest they disappear into a two-day laundry cycle. More recently I’ve taken to closing up the room and sneaking out so she thinks I’m still asleep in there. But if I’m home it’s fair game. The other morning she popped in, blathered a couple of unrelated lines, and then started singing me a (lengthy) song in Guarani, the indigenous language of Paraguay. I mean lengthy. When she was finished she shrilled “You don’t speak Guarani, do you! Hahahaha!” No madam, I do not. Intercambio cultural.

They have also taken my appreciation of passive aggression to new levels.

Example 1:
It is early on, my second or third day there. The old guy comes in in the morning. He is massively grinny and smiley and fidgeting and slightly hunching his shoulders in a way that screams ‘incoming passive aggression.’
“Oh, hello,” he says. “You were smoking in here last night?”
“Um…no,” I say. “I don’t smoke.” [NB: Possibly as a reaction to this conversation, this fact has not been entirely true in recent weeks. But at this stage I hadn’t smoked a cigarette since I was 17.]
“Oh! Because I thought I smelled smoke.”
“Nope, don’t think you did. I don’t smoke.”
“Ok, I thought I did.”
“Maybe from next door.”
“Because Victoria and I both really don’t like smoking. We both really don’t like the smell.”
“That’s fine, I don’t like it either. I’ve never been a smoker.”
“Ok…”
He goes about his grinny smiley way. Later that night, he comes in after work. I am standing in the kitchen doorway. He is still grinning, but he doesn’t look directly at me, just peripherally in my general direction, as though if he doesn’t acknowledge me then I won’t notice that he’s there. In the middle of the patio wall is a large mirror. He goes over to it and jams into the frame, in as prominent a position as possible, a large “No Smoking” sign. He nods to himself, grins a little more, grunts with satisfaction, as though he’s just finished putting together a cabinet or laying some new decking. I almost expect him to clap the dust off his hands. Then he wanders out again, still without looking at me. He’s mostly out the door before my brain catches up with what has actually just happened.
“Um…hang on,” I say. “Is that for me? I already told you that I don’t smoke.”
“Oh!” he says, as though surprised to see me there. “No, no. That’s just… for… that’s just for…” He trails off like a wombat track through thick forest, and backs out almost imperceptibly, clicking the door closed behind him.

Example 2:

On the fridge powerpoint is a timer. It switches the fridge off for half the day. They evidently think that this will save them money on their power bill. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it seems that you’d use more power re-cooling the fridge than maintaining a lower temperature. Anyway, not my problem. Except that most of the time, most of the stuff in the fridge isn’t really cold. It’s kind of cool. Cool-ish. I like drinks and things to be actually cold. And when I do something like store a bunch of chicken in there, I don’t feel so confident about their system. My understanding is that things kept at colder temperatures keep for progressively longer periods of time. Where chicken at 4° lasts for a few days, chicken at -4° lasts for a few months. Therefore, I posit to myself, where LPC is the Lasting Power of Chicken and x is the number of hours:

If LPC @ 4° = x, then LPC @ 8° = <x

I like to write things out like this because I am retarded at maths and it makes me feel better, until people who are good at maths come and laugh at me for my pathetic formula construction and I feel like less of a man. So the point is, I turn the timer off so the fridge just runs. Colder is better, and the fridge in the apartment I’m renting is something I feel justified in having some say about. Eventually someone turns the timer on again, but usually by then the chicken dilemma has been resolved in a stomach-related fashion, and I let it slide until the next time. Nobody so much as mentions the existence of a fridge timer to me. Then one day when I go to turn it off, I find the entire off button has been fused into an unmoveable lump with a whole bunch of surgical tape. Still nothing is said.

Example 3:
Early on in my stay I tell them that I can’t really sleep in the small single bed. They bring me another one to put side-by-side with it. This is much better. I am happy with this arrangement. Then a few days ago the bloke and I have a semi-argument about rent. I’ve been there a month and a week, and only paid upfront for a month. So he wants to put the price up for the days afterward (presumably to offset the savage cost of my fridge-tampering). I point out that if you want to put the price up it’s generally customary to discuss this before the days in question have elapsed, so that people can agree on it or not. We bat this around for a while. Finally he tries to guilt-trip me by saying fine, it’s up to me what rate I want to pay… “Como dice tu corazon.” (Whatever your heart says.) He leaves, I go out. When I get back an hour and a half later, the second bed is gone. Vanished. Just the one little bed remains, neatly made up with single sheets. I fold myself into it like a crumpled shirt, and drift off to cramped semi-sleep with the consoling thought that house fires are much more dangerous for the people living upstairs.

It’s also a weirdly nostalgic and evocative time of year for me: every one of my official relationships started (and a couple also ended) in that brief arc between late March and May, so the onset of autumn releases a parade of ghosts to float about and chastise me for all the shit I could have done better. It’s this weird feeling I’ve always had that particular points of each season are the same year to year, the same time. Like this autumn and all past autumns are not snapshots laid side by side, but slide transparencies laid on top of one another, so that the events of each separate season are all happening at the same time and forever. Just like every November I’ve just been kicked out of school and George W. has just stolen the election. Just like every blistering summer morning, when the air is heated to crackling point by 9 a.m., I’m eight years old and walking onto the back bricks of my parents’ house wearing that tropical motif t-shirt with the pastel palm trees. There is only one autumn, and only ever will be. It just gets more crowded. So to all the ghosts, I’m sorry. The list of failings makes lengthy and at times eyebrow-raising reading. But let’s be fair, most of you dealt out some harsh treatment too that really wasn’t deserved. I did my best, and the fuck-ups weren’t through lack of wanting. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed for the next instance, hey?

This point of the season has often found its way into my writing, or tried to. You’ll find it in poems like ‘Doorway’ (in my book if you have it) and a bunch of other half-finished bits, often abandoned because I realise I’m traversing the same ground. I’ll continually find myself trying to relate the precise feeling of Melbourne autumn nights. The way the streets are always wet, so the tar shines black and slippery like lizard skin, the shapes of streetlights and passing brake-lights reflected almost intact in its surface. The streetlights themselves, always orange sodium arcs that make everything beneath them seem surreal. The intense crispness of the air. This grim sad feeling of the year dying, but also this kind of burning vitality if it finds you in the right mood. There is tension in the air. There is crackle. You need to walk briskly to keep warm. Everything is about briskness. The ground will always be wet and earth will squelch under your soles. And somehow through this air, through this crackle, the lights shine more crisply than at any other time of year. The sweeping lines of freeways are hard as lines of shrapnel embedded in the skin. Office windows blast right through your soul. Traffic lights are multi-system laser batteries. If you get distance from the city and then see the CBD skyline in one sweep, the lights are hard blue jewels burning through the darkness, bezels glinting fiercely. It’s as though the lowered temperature of the atmosphere conveys the light more sharply to your eyes, a direct stabbing line between source and receptor. Add to this the cold air needling in your lungs, and the excitement of going to see a girl who replies to ‘Would it be a bad idea to come and see you?’ with ‘I love bad ideas,’ and you walk the streets red-cheeked and grinning, feeling like your hair is on fire.

So in the mild autumn of Buenos Aires, I found this poem by Hugh Tolhurst which made me think of the more dramatic slide into winter back home, the stack of transparencies from previous autumns. The poem is in John Tranter’s online magazine Jacket, which you can find here. It’s truly excellent if you’re into all that literature stuff. Good brain food. Tolhurst is one of my favourite poets, always writing with a sly and often dark sense of humour. When he reads, he always sounds like he’s smiling, like there’s something hidden in each line. There probably is. I have often made a spectacle of myself by laughing loudly through the otherwise studious silence. I’m not sure if I’m being a bad person by reposting this on a personal blog – if you think I am, the original poem is here. Check out Jacket in any case.

Unfailingly
Hugh Tolhurst

And if at first I was ‘Bold, Sir’,
let the weather be my apology
for Melbourne remains a terrific place
to stomp through drizzle in permitting
romantic confusion the exercise of getting lost
in a stretch of city with each street laid out
royally on the square. Your name does not appear
among the Victorian street names running North-South,
but heedless I booted my way around
absentmindedly working a gift, “Two Haiku
for a Tokyo English Teacher,” finding the lines
somewhere above Dudley Street, only for the gift
to amuse the farewell drinkers not the farewelled.
Rubbing people up the wrong way comes naturally
to one of those a Toowomba PhD wants to term ‘emergent poets’
despite my insisting I get out of bed very early…
Oh well, the future gets up early
and mine might rub the right way if I can as it were
win you over to embracing that absurd thing, the love poet
pleading love at first sight in his favourite spaghetti bar
and meaning it with all things disabused gallantly reinstated.
Suddenly Lorne seems more beautiful for your staying there,
and at home watching my twin-television improvisation
(a colour set with speaker dead, a black & white
beneath it burbling from the cupboard), I’m almost
willing on the English medium pacers’ slower balls,
let her do the wrong thing, let her do the wrong thing,
and no not overnight, but quietly, unfailingly.

— For J.P.