*

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.

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.

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

Clemenceau and I have seemingly mastered the art of outlasting the party. Just as it was in Year 12 and the first year of uni, when Ryan Neagle and I would uniformly be the last two standing, at half-past seven or some ungodly hour, zombie-pale and swaying slightly but steady, drinking some concoction of bourbon and soft drink (in his case because he liked it; in mine because there was nothing else left) and watching the sun come up over a devastated post-apocalyptic suburban backyard, while a dozen of our contemporaries slept face-down on the hard slate floors of somebody’s parents’ Eltham residence, or chewing the tacky carpet of someone’s first scungy inner-northern sharehouse. Seemingly that was our role – last men out, then first up at around ten a.m. and encouraging the others to start drinking again. Later, the first year in the Davies St Massif, we had a rule that if anybody sleeping at any time of day or night was woken up by being prodded with a drink, he or she had to consume that drink immediately. It was a good incentive not to pass out first, and also a good way to begin shaking off a hangover the next day. When you realised someone was thunking you in the forehead with a cold Coopers Pale at around 11 a.m., it was really more godsend than hardship to down that sucker and prepare for the day at hand.

As you get deeper into a run of consecutive nights like this (and God knows I’ve had a few), the mounting sleep deprivation forms a solid partnership with the shredded myelin coatings around your nerves, and the nights become increasingly dislocated. After our La Plata misadventures, I spend an entire night and the next day with Alex, not drinking as much but just talking right through. Then tonight when Clemenceau emails me that night at quarter to one, just as I’m about to go to bed, inviting me to a party at Carmen’s house on the other side of town, it doesn’t seem remotely strange to accept. On the contrary, walking down the middle of a Palermo street, high on my headphones and that weird buzz that comes with lack of sleep, I couldn’t feel more alive and ready to take on a strange social environment.

At Clemenceau’s house we realise we have nothing to drink. “We’ll just have to go and get some beers from the bar at the corner,” he says resignedly. The bar is always open but costs about ten times as much as anywhere else. We get ready to leave. Six minutes later the doorbell rings. “I have your ten litres of beer,” says a delivery guy. We look at each other. We ask a couple of questions. He triple-checks. It’s definitely for this address, he says. We take the beers and sit through several long moments of bemused silence. Sometimes the universe does seem to look out for you.

It’s two-forty-five by the time we leave, and half past three by the time we get to the party. It still seems to be swinging. This is a painting party, I’m told – all the walls are covered in sheets of white paper, and the people are buzzing to and fro with paper plates full of colour, slathering at will. It’s also a very French party – the air is full of that strange contradictory language that sounds like a sexy drunk slurring into a beer with a cognac depth-charge at the bottom. They can all speak Spanish, but don’t, so my hard-won ascension to a level of ambient understanding is immediately cancelled out. They are dancing to the same terrible music as any other party I’ve ever been to. In fact the French are better able to ironically enjoy cheesy 80s pop because they don’t truly understand how bad the lyrics are. In one corner playing percussion instruments are four identical and very familiar guys, the kind of guys who you would expect to find playing percussion instruments in the corner. They each have the same little ponytail-knot pulled up at the nape of the neck, the regulation scruffy facial hair, the same wooden beads around their wrists. You could find any one of them, or a carbon-copy, pouncing on a djembe at a Northcote house party, slapping away at the cowhide in between telling us how they discovered afro-salsa rhythms at a capoeira school in Brazil and spent some time in an ashram in Dharamsala.  I realise that the French are not cooler than us. The youth of any relatively Westernised country are almost exactly the same, just gingerbread-men cut-out copies of each other with slight variations in icing.

There is a full bucket of sangria that is by now being largely neglected. I take this as a personal challenge. The bucket does not back down and neither do I. The hostess makes a better fist of being French than most of her guests. She glides barefoot through the party, speaks only in perfect Spanish and wears an extravagant Carmen-style red dress that made me give her the pseudonym. She paints with extravagant gestures, she laughs readily, she spins and twirls on the dancefloor with the hem of her skirt flying. She is the kind of woman who makes out with George Clooney, after all.

Some hours pass. The crowd thins out. Eventually Carmen sits down on the couch. “Look,” she says, and shows me the soles of her feet, now a thick and solid black with all the grime from the thoroughly partied floor. By this stage the sangria bucket and I both look decidedly worse for wear. So I say nothing, lay down some painting paper, kneel in front of her, and start washing her feet with wine. She merely nods as though she was expecting this all along. I work thoroughly, not speaking, making sure each patch of skin is cleared. Somehow it seems important to get this done right. A few people give us odd looks. “It’s ok,” I tell them, “I’m Jesus. I’m just conflating two of the parables.”

Clemenceau, a heavy smoker in the French style, has not had a cigarette in three weeks. He’s quit, he says. This is quite an achievement. Now he appears with one in his mouth, unlit. “Fuck it, I’m going to smoke this,” he says. I grab it out of his mouth and accidentally poke him in the eye at the same time. When he objects I tell him that even Jesus was pragmatist enough to have hurt him if it was in his best interests. “Give me the cigarette,” he says.

“No,” I say. “If you’re going to smoke it then I’ll smoke it instead.”
“You hate cigarettes.”
“Yes, but I’m taking upon myself the sins of the world.”

By the time I wipe the last of the wine away, the foot massage action of the washing process has sent Carmen to sleep. In the middle of the dirt and debris, new paintings covering the walls, she is a flash of crimson flared across the couch, snoring lightly. The last of the party has already drifted away to homes and beds. We cover her with blankets, and wrap a coat around her newly-cleaned feet. “The feet, the feet are very important,” Clemenceau tells me in slurred French tones. We let ourselves out, clicking the door quietly behind us.

It’s only in the courtyard of Clemenceau’s house that I realise I never actually smoked the cigarette. But with that special kind of drunken determination I feel like I have to see this through. “I’m going to smoke this now,” I tell him. “I’m going to bed,” he spits. He does. I light it off the stove and retreat back under the courtyard tree. Perhaps only non-smokers can truly enjoy a cigarette, because I get that rush to the head just as I did out in the boundary trees by the foreshore at school when I was fifteen. Everything seems to come down to a new state of calm. My mouth tastes like I’ve been eating the remains out of a crematorium, soapy ash, but the two sensations kind of balance each other out, disgust vying with the deep-breath feel of the nicotine. The air is thick with pale blue light, and that old idea that the earth was underwater doesn’t seem so far away. Leaning on the wall, looking up, the dark lines of branches score the softening sky into curves and quadrants, and through it all comes a long slow ticking sound, like the world is winding down to nothing, or gearing up for something else.

Washington, Clemenceau and I make a formidable team. Washington is from Colorado and was captain of the wrestling team, with all the experience of college excess behind him. He says he’s woken up in jail or detox six times. We have long since decided that he is the founder and preeminent academic of the Washington School of Good Decisions. Clemenceau is the Frenchiest Frenchman you ever did see, especially while drunk: the disgusted visage, the constant gesticulation, the world-weary tone. I represent the Davies St Massif, a property that once filled up an entire room of our house with inflated goon bags. Between the three of us, three of the world’s great drinking cultures are put together at last. We’re really only missing a Russian.

So last night. (I’m going to switch to present tense to put you in the thick of the action.) We decide to go to La Plata, a city an hour away from BA, the three of us and Clemenceau’s French friend Carmen. My friend Gustavo has a restaurant in La Plata, and tonight is the grand opening party. Gustavo was the pastry chef on the ship to Antarctica. He speaks no English and I was one of about two people of the 150 on board who spoke Spanish. So we ended up hanging out and shooting the breeze quite a bit, him leaning on the lower deck rail, shivering in his chef’s whites as he sucked back a cigarette. (I never did understand why so many chefs do something that kills their taste buds.)

The restaurant is small, low key, set well back off the street so it’s quiet and private. The food comes around in little pieces on trays – tasty, but modestly sized. The wine comes around more frequently and in full glasses. You can probably extrapolate how this equation balances out. In a very short time everyone is very jolly indeed. The four of us chat with some Argentine guys at the bar. Gonzalo is the centre of their group, engaging and irrepressible. He thoroughly approves of our travelling regimen. “I haven’t had a job for a year and a half!” he says delightedly. “Soy un vago profesional.” (“I’m a professional bum.”)

I seem to specialise in befriending little kids at the moment. Hooning around the restaurant is a six-year-old named Francisco. I take aim at him with an empty wine bottle and fire off a few rounds. He ducks and weaves around the tables. I lob a cork grenade at him outside on the patio. He hurls it back.. This game apparently has no possibility of growing old for him. It continues and continues. Gonzalo joins in. Fran runs up after foraging for a lost cork. He has found three, and is very pleased with himself. “Creo que no podes encontrar quarto corchos,” challenges Gonzalo. (“I bet you can’t find four corks.”) Fran zooms off and is back in about twenty seconds with a fourth. “I bet you can’t find six,” says Gonzalo. This time it takes a couple of minutes.

And so the stakes are raised, even as the scene at the bar grows more chaotic. Clemenceau pours a glass of wine down my leg to make a point. I can’t remember what it was. “Seis corrrrrrrrchos!” yells Fran, beaming a grin as wide as the moon. His trilled rrrrs (the most foreign thing about this language to a native English speaker) are so exaggerated with excitement that even the Argentines  begin to notice them. “Corrrrrrrrrrrrrrrchos!” trills back Gonzalo. Soon it seems like half the restaurant is yelling “corrrrrrrrrrrcho!” to the ceiling and the sky, tongues drilling against their palates. There are bottles of wine on all the tables now, and they circulate freely. My Spanish is shit-hot tonight. My three compadres all speak better than me, but tonight I can understand every word the Argentines say, and can reciprocate. I’m cracking jokes right left and centre, and they’re understanding me. It’s a beautiful feeling when you hit this sort of groove. Something that’s been bugging me all night finally becomes clear. “Parece como George Clooney!” I suddenly say about one of the guys. (“He looks like George Clooney.”) I’d been struggling to place the resemblance for hours. The Argentines erupt in agreement. “Jorge Clooney!” they say, “Jorge Clooney!” George Clooney looks quite pleased. “This is a good person to resemble,” he says. Then I remember a guy in a pizza shop a few days ago telling us that Washington looked like Wayne Rooney. “Y Wayne Rooney,” I say. They erupt again. “Wayne Rrrrooney! Clooney y Rrrooney! Clooney y Rrrooney!”

Fran pops up in the middle of us like a persistent meerkat. “Quinze corrrrrrrrrchos!” he cries triumphantly. “No te creo,” we say. “No te creo!” (“I don’t believe you.”) We make him line them all up like soldiers on the tabletop, struggling to make them stand on their puffy wine-soaked heads. My head is starting to feel similar. He is true to his word. There are indeed fifteen. By the time he is led away home by his parents, his little pocket is distended with his final prize of seventeen hard-won corks. If he is anything like me he will hoard them in a tin until about the age of twenty, when he will finally bring himself to throw them away.

Then there is wine. A lot more wine. Then we are leaving. There are embraces in the street. Gonzalo tells me we’re going to “the Pav”, which confuses me for a long while until I figure out that this is Argentine pronunciation of “pub”. There has been a fine fuzz over everything up until this point, but this is when shit starts to get real hazy. I vaguely remember being in a car. I don’t remember who with. I don’t remember going into The Pub. My night starts to segment itself, a stack of Polaroids fallen from someone else’s pocket at a bus stop in Dunedin and scattering away down the street in the strong New Zealand wind. Some I can see, some take several hours to flip end-over-end and land face up. Some are lost down stormwater drains forever. We all float down here.

Snap. Click. Here’s Gonzalo crowing something indecipherable at the rafters. Snap. Click. Here’s Washington pounding another drink. Snap. Click. Here’s me in the middle of a writhing dancefloor. I hate dancefloors. I am having a really good time. Here’s me with my hands in the air. Here’s me getting hugged by a guy in a cowboy hat. Here’s me falling over onto my back and then rolling straight back up onto my feet again in what I was sure at the time was a seamless dance manoeuvre. Here’s Clemenceau – he has left his jacket in some room that is now off-limits and is arguing passionately with a bouncer. Here’s Carmen, making out with George Clooney. Here I am, talking loudly in somebody’s ear about what the Clooney and Rooney television program could involve. Now all these people have those cans of aerosol foam and are spraying them around. Here’s me getting copped in the face. Now I have one. I don’t know how that happened. Here’s me unloading a forty-five second stream at Washington from about four yards away across the crowd (double entendre of the day). He stands and splutters and gapes like a fish until the can runs out, with no fucking idea what the hell has hit him and from where. Here’s me looking around and god, suddenly it’s like a scene from a party film, the whole place filled with golden light while foam floats through the air and down over the seething mass of people. It could be some sort of epiphany or final seeing of the light.

And just as suddenly it’s gone. The aperture snaps to a pinhole. The next Polaroid is dark, the three of us stumbling through a quiet street and arguing over where to go and how to find taxis. There are no taxis. Clemenceau is angry and spitting at the world. I don’t know where we are or how we got there. I deduce that we decided to abandon Carmen to George Clooney. I decide that given he is George Clooney, this is what nature intended. At least we still have Rooney. Snap. Click. Now I’m trying to climb a set of traffic lights. I don’t know why. I don’t remember starting. All I know is I’m halfway up. I yell at Washington to give me a boost. I’m able to clamber up. From there the curving neck of the pole reaches out over the street until ending in a horizontal and a streetlight. I brace myself to shimmy out to the end of it, slung beneath it by my arms and legs. There is no way I can do this in my current state without landing on my back in the street five metres below. I’m going to try anyway. I need some voice of reason to intercede. Washington yells out “If you make it there and back I’ll give you ten pesos!” God bless friends. At that moment a taxi pulls up out of nowhere. “Come on, get in the fucking car!” says Clemenceau, and I have to climb down. A higher power has interceded. I remember none of this until the following night in the shower when I wonder why my shins are so chewed up, and then all of it pounds back into my head like vomiting in reverse

Now we’re at the bus station. It is an undisclosed time. Still dark, but there are commuters. Maybe six-thirty. There are tickets. There is a bus. We are on it. Wait. Washington isn’t. Clemenceau runs to the front but the bus is pulling away. The driver won’t stop. We have now lost Clooney and Rooney. There is nothing we can do. We sleep a remorseless sleep and only wake at the BA terminal, well after we should have got off. I do, at least. Clemenceau will not be moved. I am no state to deal with this. I get off and tell the driver there’s someone asleep in the back. Two drivers half-drag him off. I keep him upright and move him toward the subway.

We’re on the platform going in the wrong direction. To cross involves a labyrinth of stairs, underpasses, and commuter traffic. But of course, Clemenceau suggests, why don’t we just ride it to the end and back again? It has to come back. The path of least resistance wins out. We ride it to the last stop. Past the last stop. Down into a deserted tunnel where no sign of life flickers. The lights shut off. He is almost asleep. I am not. I am concentrating on not vomiting. Just as I’m starting to wonder if this train has been decommissioned and we’ll have to start a new life down here with the mutants and the rats, we start back the other way. The train fills up. A reassuring train announcer voice fills my head. “You are not going to vomit on the subway,” it says. “That is one of things you are not going to do. Vomiting on the subway is not one of those things. There are many things you could do, and they do not include vomiting on the subway. No they do not.”

I don’t. I get Clemenceau home and make it to mine. Incredibly, despite having stopped drinking when we left the restaurant six hours ago, I have become increasingly drunk ever since. Only now has it levelled out. This is some great pre-emptive management by my internal workings. I am impressed. It’s only after sleep that I remember we lost Washington in La Plata. Washington is nowhere to be found. He’s not online. His mobile is off. ‘Nope,’ his housemate says the next day. ‘Haven’t seen him.’ Two days on, just as I’m worrying that I’ll have to be the one to have that talk with his parents, we track him down. Washington, it seems, has been having adventures of his own.

When we lose him in La Plata Washington has gone to a different bus line, to a different part of BA. He wonders where we are for a while but the bus comes, so he takes it. When he gets to Plaza Miserere in BA the sun is shining. He doesn’t feel so great. He thinks maybe this looks like a nice spot for a little nap. So he passes out in the sun. He stirs an undisclosed amount of time later to someone shaking him awake. A concerned looking Argentine man tells him not to worry. He hands him some food, a bottle of water, and a five-peso note. “Take it,” the man insists. “Porque?” slurs Washington. “Porque Dios existe. Buscalo,” says the man. (“Because God exists. Search for Him.”) The man walks off. Washington looks down. His jeans have been torn in a fall, and at some stage along the way he appears to have lost his shirt. He is sleeping on the ground in one of BA’s principal plazas. He begins to see the guy’s point.

So he tries to take the subway home, but goes down the wrong line. When he finally gets back to the hub station to change lines, he passes a bar in the subway terminal.  Now, we know that Washington is the founder of the Washington School of Good Decisions. And he doesn’t feel so good. So he decides to stop in for a quick beer. As previously discussed, the beer in BA only comes in litres. While I am in bed, mercifully asleep because no doubt I would feel like death were I awake, Washington is finishing his fourth litre and heading out of the bar. The plaza, he thinks to himself, was so nice before that he might just stop off for another quick snooze before subjecting himself to the public transit system on his way home. In his current state this idea seems quite the appealing option. (He is, after all, the founder of the Washington School of Good Decisions.) For a second instance today, some unknown period of time later, he is shaken awake. This time it’s by two police officers. “Where are you from?” they ask him. “The United States,” he says. They look confused. “I live here,” he tells them. They look at each other. “Now would be a good time to get on the bus and go home,” says one of them. The founder of the Washington School of Good Decisions decides that now would be a good time to agree with the officers of the law.

It’s only once he gets to the bus stop that he realises he has no coins in his pockets. On further inspection he has no wallet. No phone. No debit card. He has been completely cleaned out. Various Argentines have since suggested that for those sleeping in Plaza Miserere, this is a not entirely unexpected outcome. The only dim silver lining is that the kind folks who visited him while he slept so soundly have unaccountably left him his cigarettes. And so the late afternoon sunlight finds a suffering and confused founder of the Washington School of Good Decisions, squinting into the glare, sparking up a Camel and starting the long walk home.

*

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.

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

I can just imagine this. The Russian captain up on the bridge, racking up huge lines on the instrument consoles, or the back of an atlas of nautical charts. Motioning us in with a broad grin. “Komm! Ve are doink yexcellent spyeed!” Cranking out 180 bpm industrial tech over the PA system. The first officer picking random locations on the chart to head for because they have funny names. The radio officer on the mic, having a long double-time D&M with a confused Chilean coastguard station about his childhood and how his relationship with his parents just, y’know, had like a really strong affect on him and that. Spotting objects on the radar panel that turn out to be misplaced rocks of meth. The cooks brewing up pots of 1-4B and Ribena in the galley. Doing pills on the bridge wings, talking to the passing albatross. I just feel like we really have some kind of connection, know what I mean? Like, we can’t even really talk properly, cos he’s a bird and everything, but we’re like, the same kind of spirit, and he’s watching over me.

Then, looking over the main map of the ship’s features, I start to notice a whole lot of other fun entries dotted around the ship. Read this list and then tell me there aren’t some serious munter parties happening on board the Akademik Sergey Vavilov.

To keep the kids occupied.

Hello boys.

Silly Russians got the words the wrong way round.

Always important to have options when you’re organising illegal raves.

Hang on, no-one told me Rabbi was on this ship…

Well, it’s good to have reminders.

.

.

Yep, you saw it here first. Looks like we finally found somewhere to put Mark Phillipoussis.

.

.

The funky bus. This public bus dared to be different.

.

.

To quote a great man, when is two dogs dry-humping NOT funny?

.

.

When is drawing moustaches on passed-out Americans who you hardly know not funny?

____________________________________________________________

Actually Mr Fox and I got comprehensively sprung for this when I drunkenly left my camera on a nearby table. The crime was committed at about 8 in the morning. Dan busted into our room at midday.

Dan: Ok, which one of you was it?

Me: Ungh? What are you talking about?

Dan: Who drew on my face?

Fox: We didn’t draw on your face.

Dan: You didn’t?

Fox: No!

[long pause]

Dan: That’s a real nice camera you got.

[pause]

Dan: How many pesos would you give me for it?

Me: Oh shit.

m

.

The girl nearby is dancing solely with her breasts, which from a technical standpoint alone is quite a sight to see. She looks like an Argentine version of Ferris’ sister Joanie, some feisty 80s chick who would punch you out before delivering a sassy one-liner around a wad of gum, all while wearing brightly-coloured leggings and bobby socks. But this is what Argentina does. Argentina holds nothing back. It gives you leopard print and knee-high boots and curly porno moustaches. It gives you Maradona mullets that never went away. It gives you an ever-present crush of humanity bent on a good time. For $4.50 you can get yourself soundly drunk. You make the investment and join the fray. The only way to tackle leopard-print and porno mos is face-first. Away in the corner is a congregating bunch of shirtless dreadlock dudes, bent knees taking them deep into a psy-trance grind, the whole scene heavily reminiscent of a movie called The Quest for Fire that was playing in the hostel. Apparently guys with dreadlocks feel like less of a bland derivative cliché if they all hang out together. There’s no way to resist the waves of human heat. You taste your own sweat from your lips, mixed with the condensation steaming off everybody else. The air inside is just an extension of the greenhouse night outside. Don’t think about how you smell. Don’t think about how you’re ruining your only vaguely clean set of clothes. Don’t think about the trail of garments left by you across the breadth of this continent like some sort of demented op-shop-enthusiast Hansel with a personal teleporter and a poor sense of basic linearity. Tilt your head back, close your eyes, and forget who you are.

On the way home, you fend off the beggars and the sock-sellers and the vague sense of threat. The streets are dark and strewn and breathing, like a tar-scarred strip of lung. The cop cars in this city keep their lights on, so you always know where they aren’t. A week of cocaine and a minute of bus fumes make you sneeze hard enough to take the skin off a camel. Your shirt settles into a dank chill against your skin. The street-strewn rubbish dances with your shoes. There is no-one out there for you, but there is no-one out to get you either.

“Hey gringo! Do you know the road to El Dorado?”

Here is an in-joke that only three people will get. I don’t know if any of those people read this page. I would explain the joke, but it would only fail to be funny for everybody else. Any person who can guess the origins of the joke with complete accuracy (the word ‘guess’ excludes the aforementioned three or others with prior knowledge) will win a free boat ride for three.

NB: This link has nothing at all to do with the joke. I just really like that song. The joke is solely photo-related.