Red Seppo in the Gong - Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

(My brother Mark finally got in on the writing action, unable to resist an argument when one was offered. My letters to my brothers usually consisted of surfing updates touched up with a bit of sloganeering, and all one had to do was question the logic of my politics for a moment and an all-out war was launched. The one between me and Mark was bitter. Doro kept me abreast of Chernobyl as viewed from close up, and was not yet reacting to my pompous attempts to "put it in perspective" for her.

Stuart, FL 5/21/86

Dear Blorge,

You, on the other hand, are being not unlike Edwin Meese, whose committee has decided that reading pornography does too lead to violent crime. See, it's funny about turn of centuries; the turn of the 16th was brilliant with Shakespeare and Moliére close by (although S was just great entertainment, the Mole's "The Misanthrope" was far more perceptive, at bottom, than your newfound beliefs), but the turn of the 19th was retarded, with Marx and Freud about to tell us that money and sex are the cause of greed and hate (I'm sure that Meese motherfucker is a Freudian at heart). Granted, the tone of that is ridiculous, but you deserve a dose of your own medicine.

Of course money does make greed easier than hormones make hate likely but neither of 'em am the cause.

OKAY?

Heidelberg, West Germany 5/22/86

Just found out my bank here (which I thought was safe) has money invested in you-know-where. Will you ever talk to me again? I don't think I will...But what does it matter when the lettuce glows? Every week on the way to Ceramics class I see two big, heavy rabbits peaceably munching the green & white. But these days all I can think is "Who told them to avoid fresh veggies and not have contact with grass?" Guess they have an even more negligent government than us folks. Now their kids'll be as big as elephants and take over the world. A just end if you ask me. It's weird wanting to go to demos against your own nation. This lüv thought brought to you from

Zi 401

Elena was regularly one of the top sellers of Direct Action in the 'Gong branch, mainly because she had a pub run that extended from way up around Coalcliff all the way down to central Wollongong, though the way she oozed charm she probably could have sold a copy to Rupert Murdoch. I became the lucky lad to inherit the run from her, my sense of adventure having lost all control and for better or for worse wanting to see how an American socialist blessed with my particularly ability to induce xenophobia would hold up invading that bastion of tough male working-class culture; the pubs.

Where she had only had to deal with verbal harassment as a woman, Elena warned, I might have to watch out for “a bit more”. The sparsely inhabited northern pubs were never much of a problem, she explained, as we went through a few of them selling. She sold a few to some coal miners, who made up most of the pubs' customers in that region. There were old-timers who had been communists for more than fifty years that bought the paper, people that had worked their lives in the pits and had seen some mighty battles in their day.

As we were heading down to Thirroul – DH Lawrence’s old stomping grounds in 1922 where he wrote Kangaroo at his jokingly named cottage Wyewurk - and into the more crowded pubs, Elena told me that by this time of the evening people had been drinking for a while. “So don’t be surprised if someone takes a swing at you”. That was the something more I had to watch for, and the odds were doubled that it would happen because I was a “bloody Yank septic tank” (and that's what I was called by people who liked me). After showing me the ropes on that run and introducing me to her regular customers - and selling about five times as many copies of DA - Elena left town for Sydney and I had the run on my own. She was attending an intensive set of workshops in Sydney, a sort of school for future Socialist Workers Party leaders, that everyone spoke about in hushed tones as something only the elite comrades got a chance to do.

As I've mentioned, Resistance was a no-commitment kind of activist organization that was meant to be serious but fun. To actually join “the Party” was a much greater commitment obliging you to sell a certain number of copies of Direct Action each week, pay dues, and be a lot more serious about the socialist cause. The Party members were often somewhat pleasant but dreary older dogmatists, like our senior in the Wollongong branch. Occasionally vibrant new blood like Elena took her place in the Party ranks, but her father was a senior member so it was no surprise. Resistance was structured to provide a pipeline of young talent into the Party, but be freewheeling enough to accommodate young radicals who weren’t necessarily interested in being “lifers”. I had been the latter to start with, but had thrown myself into the whole shebang with such unrestrained fervor that at some point I declared I wanted to take the step up to committing to be a Party member. I don’t think I was there quite yet, but by taking on a pub route I was trying to prove myself worthy.

I went on my first solo run with a great deal of trepidation, shaken up by her warnings, but the one unpredictable pub in Thirroul proved to be an exercise in Aussie hospitality. A few guys introduced themselves and insisted upon buying me a beer, though I protested that I didn't drink. I was still indulging some half-hearted “straight edge” phase I’d been going through the past year in college. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t fuck, at least I can still fuckin’ think” as the punk band Minor Threat sang. The first two were by choice. Social awkwardness resulted in the third holding true. After arguing about it a bit and me trying to sell them on the idea that the money would be more well-spent on the paper, I came to realize that my protests were going unheard. If a bloke insisted on shouting you a beer, you didn't refuse him or you'd get into far more trouble than you would otherwise, unless possibly you accepted the beer and told him you were a homosexual aboriginal communist and you thought rugby sucked, but then there's half a chance he'd slap you on the back and tell you he thought you were great anyway, mate, and of course Aussie Rules football was the go.

Once I had buckled under to the pressure and accepted the beer, they told me what a horrible lot the Yanks were, but I was a commie and that wasn't so normal for a Yank so they reckoned I was alright. I was introduced to the bartender and half the regulars in the place, including an old woman that one of them kept telling me had been a famous actress. I guess she’d been one of those Bette Davis types, she looked considerably worse for wear. She didn't seem to be too impressed with me either, and kept muttering “bloody Yank” every time she walked by. I drank down my beer quickly, which surprised them – “drinks like a bloody horse he does” - thinking that I could then continue on my rounds. Not so, not so, when a glass is emptied then pub etiquette stipulates that it be immediately refilled, so that approach was quickly discarded as counterproductive. They had a different idea of what continuing on my rounds meant. I still had to drive to about five more pubs, and if this happened much more...

Eventually after three beers the “mate-ing ritual” drew to a close, and decidedly more lightheaded, I was permitted to go. Receptions were not always so pleasant at other pubs, but it never came close to punches. They ranged from shouts of “piss off commie scum” to “why don't you go live over there” (meaning the Soviet Union) to “why don't you go back to your own bloody country and solve your problems and stop telling us what to do, Christ knows you've got enough of them”. The last comment held a certain amount of logic in it, me having graciously given my country credit for causing half the world's problems. The reason the comment annoyed me was mostly because I no longer had any interest in living in the US, whether its problems were fixed or not. I was gung-ho to fix the problems of my new home. I was steeped in the feeling of being an internationalist and the romance of the brigades of the Spanish Civil War, and saw my home as wherever I landed. The following year I would land in Nicaragua and join a volunteer work brigade to further the affinity for the red and the black.

At the Hotel Illawarra in Wollongong I met a businessman whom everyone called J.B., who bought the paper regularly, assuring me that it was important to “know what the other side was up to”. In addition he would often shout me a few beers and engage me in long political debates, which was probably a calculated move to throw off my selling for the rest of the evening. He eventually lost interest in me, though, and was insulted one night when I refused to shout him. I had to explain to him that my social graces took second place to my economic concerns, and it was only right that since he was a rich businessman and I was a poor communist that he should always be buying.

A friend of his took me under his wing and bought me beers, being more of a happy drunkard than an ideological adversary. On one occasion he bought my last five papers and distributed them throughout the bar. He promised me a job on a fishing boat in northern Queensland if I ever wanted one, and we argued which of our hometowns held the true stake to their official claims as "sailfish capital of the world".

Then there was the episode of Kim. Kalad had been trying to get Kim into bed for awhile, but she had a boyfriend whom she was planning to marry and that complicated everything a bit. I walked into the flat one afternoon and found Kim and Kalad talking in the kitchen, my first impression being “Who is this beautiful woman that Kalad has brought home with him?” When he introduced her, I remembered that he had told me some things about her before. She had been flirtatious but never too clear, so he didn't know what to do. They had a class together at the Uni, and she had just come home with him from it.

We sat around the flat and talked, Kim never giving the impression she had an exceptional desire to do anything but fluff her way through life. When she found out that I went surfing down on the South Coast a lot, she told me that her parents had a summer beach house that I could stay at if I wanted to.

“Just go in through a window or something.”

The only problem was that she didn't really remember where it was or which town it was in, but she was sure it was somewhere in one of the towns near Merry Beach. That didn't help a whole lot so we shrugged and gave up on the idea.

Somehow Kim got us onto the idea of astral traveling. She claimed to have some method to make your mind leave your body and travel somewhere else. Kalad tried it out, and though a cynic, was absolutely convinced that he'd traveled to my home in Florida, which I’d never told him anything about before. When I described it to him, he swore that was where he’d been. I tried and failed to achieve cosmic consciousness, leading me to believe that Kim was not going to be good for him.

Kim offered to take us both out to dinner, which I wasn't about to turn down in my ever-present state of financial insecurity. Walking the streets of Wollongong with the two, though, I began to wonder if I hadn't made a mistake. She was an arrogant Zionist who believed that her beauty made her inherently superior to other people, and she was a never-ending source of bizarre proclamations.

“I mean what do ugly people do, do they have lives at all? All you could do if you were ugly would be sit around and study.”

“Is there anything wrong with marrying someone just because they're rich? I don't see anything wrong with having lots of money.”

“Oh, I just couldn't tolerate the idea of having deformed babies, I wouldn't have babies unless they were perfect.”

And on and on. I was seething inside and wanted to strangle her, but diplomatic instincts overcame me and I just kept trying to remember that she was a friend of Kalad's and I was getting a free dinner out of it. At one point I picked up a heavy two-by-four from a construction site and began carrying it along with me. We made quite a trio walking down the street, those two looking like your average Aussie couple, with their lunatic giant bodyguard in ragged shorts and a flaming red dinner jacket waving a two-by-four back and forth. This behavior may have been because I’d become accustomed to drawing too much attention from gangs of wayward youth when dressed in outrageous attire downtown, and I was taking proactive steps toward appearing like such a psychotic nutter so that no one messed with me.

When we returned to the flat in Coniston, Kalad set her up a bed on the floor of the kitchen, which seemed an odd place to sleep seeing as she could have slept on the floor of Kalad's room or in Edwina's bed. I went to sleep within ten minutes of the lights going out, and vaguely remember her leaving around six the next morning. A bewildered, confused Kalad filled me in on the events of the night. Thirty minutes after the lights went out, she came into his room and asked if she could get into bed with him. The bed in the kitchen had merely been to keep up appearances.

She threw her leg across his, but when he started running his hand up her leg, she brushed it off. Kalad remembered an earlier conversation with her.

“I'm going to marry my boyfriend, and I want to be faithful to him.”

“Do you love him?”

“No.”

“Then why are you going to marry him?”

“He has a lot of money.”

Not exactly sure what she wanted, Kalad decided to retreat. She started caressing him. He tried to kiss her but she turned her head. She ground her leg into his crotch, causing his growing erection to harden instantly. Placing his hand on her leg, she brushed it off again. Then she rolled over so that her back was facing him.

Fine, he thought, rolling over himself, I'll just go to bloody sleep. Before long her hands were snaking across his body once again and massaging his erection. Anytime he moved his hands toward her forbidden areas, though, they were brushed back. This went on and on for hours, turning poor Kalad into a nervous wreck. Finally he gave up completely and decided to pretend he was asleep. Then she got serious.

She tried everything to bring Kalad back up to stiffness but to no avail. In relating the story, Kalad got an embarrassed look on his face and said that it was horrible to say, but she even tried to give him... a blowjob - he finally blurted out. It was the first and last time I ever saw an Aussie male be bashful about describing sex. Her toying antics had taken their toll, though, and nothing she did could bring him back to life. This got her furious at him.

“You're just a homosexual, I bet, you don't like women. I know what you want. You want to be in there sleeping with George. Go ahead, go crawl into bed with him, I know that's what you want to do. I'm just getting in your way, I know that's where you'd be if I wasn't here.”

The whole night had been bad enough already. Kalad didn't know what he had done to deserve this on top of everything else. Bloody woman's right out of her mind, he decided, and fell fast asleep.

Some weeks later I was down surfing on the South Coast and drove my car through some of the beach communities near Merry Beach. I was on the verge of leaving the town of Bawley Point when I passed by a house with the name engraved in wood on the outside: Luttrell. Fancy that, it had to be the one.

I climbed the steps up to the main section of the house - it was on stilts - and found the bathroom window to be the only one open. It wasn't very big, but I managed to wriggle through and almost did a swan dive into the dunny. It was doing this type of thing that inspired the Beatles to write that song, I mused, while doing some acrobatics off the toilet seat to land on my feet. After checking the place out and finding it fit for a large family to immediately inhabit, I walked back outside again and went down to the beach for a surf in the tiny junk waves. I had the standard bit of shark paranoia being out alone in unfamiliar murky water, but still had a good time. Upon returning to the house and drying off, I decided to look into the dinner situation.

They had a huge, well-stocked freezer but since there wasn't any running water I decided to skip the master chef idea and settle for a selection from their extensive variety of canned foods. I was fairly paranoid that some of the neighbors might call the cops, and though I could explain being there, I would have rather not had to. I drew all the curtains and used as little light as possible, and eventually went to sleep in one of the bedrooms, happy that someone was making use of the idle luxury of the Luttrell family.

Swarthmore, PA May 27 1986

Dear George,

Please do not presume o feckless one that my paucity of correspondence can be translated as lack of affection from this writer to that reader. Lo, I am rather hurt that you could think such a thing.

Ye art completely rightways to think that staying there will be a good thing, not a bad thing, if that's what yer little Elvis is telling you. (Please however do not as Welkom has indicated to me ridicule us for staying here in the meantime).

The woman speaks occasionally of marriage, not in the abstract sense either. I am really quite confused in general, never having given it much serious thought beyond immediate rejection.

I seek to break with past generations' folly, and consider institution of marriage to be one of the biggest, but I hate America and yet I do not renounce my citizenship. Why? I think because it is being chickenshit to run away instead of facing problems. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. I used to wonder what it was like for liberal folk such as my parents to live in the 50's (they were of course younger and apolitical in a way in which their children are not) and now I think I know since I am living in the age of Reagan, supply side economics, racism, South Africa, fucked up education on every level, censorship, religious revivalism, bad art, selfishness, and an incredible undercurrent of dissatisfaction. If I do not get married (sounds so fucking weird) I will be a poseur; if'n I do I will be a sell-out.

Welkom says he will not let you create a legend out of yourself here, but I say, if people are dumb enough to believe that you have a broken leg, have been in jail for a month, and are lead singer for a lounge band just because I tell them, then so be it.

See ya later...

Maxwell B. Meany

I became a regular fixture at the BLF picket line in Wollongong, which was sadly only populated by the remaining four or five BLF militants in the area who hadn’t signed over to the rival government-backed union, and who were blackballed in any event even if they’d wanted to. I got to be friends with Dave, Doug, Russell, and Paul, and Jayne from Resistance would show up sometimes too as she still carried a BLF union card. Russell nicknamed me Vyvyan, from The Young Ones, because of my wild orange hair and crazy outfits. Russell was a militant old Maoist who didn’t care for the SWP’s brand of socialism, but as we were some of the only people in the area supporting the BLF, he took his friends where he could get them. Doug was barrel chested and brawny and fairly jovial, a dinky di Aussie man through and through. Paul was a quieter, low key younger BLF organizer. I thought it was funny sometimes to skate across the street and roll up to them out of nowhere, and slap my flip flops down hard just before I got to Paul, which made the sound of a rifle shot. He’d nearly jump out of his skin and curse me to hell and back.

Though they tolerated my weirdness and enjoyed talking with me, my psychedelic punk image I think was a bit much for them. I heard through the comrades at one point that Russell thought I was mentally unstable. I probably didn’t do their cause any favors manning the picket line, but given how many people thought BLF members were animal thugs, I probably just looked like a harmless freak in comparison to the common perception. Less so among the Resistance members but more so among the SWP folks, I think there was probably a desire for me to tone it down a bit. We were all about working with mainstream working class groups with mainstream people, so too much flamboyance was seen as off-putting. I definitely toned down my look for selling Direct Action on the pub route, but not too much the rest of the time.

In June, Doug and Russell were visiting a state office block site on Kembla St, to help out workers having problems with delayed workers compensation payments as well as checking conditions on the sites. While Doug and Russell were on the site, they discovered a dogman working a crane without a union ticket. When the foreman was confronted with this, he called the police.

When Russell saw the police arrive, he slipped quietly off the site and so did Doug. Unable to arrest the pair for trespassing, six policeman started questioning them. Demanding names and addresses, the police threatened to arrest them if they didn't comply. A worker from the site came out and defended their presence there, stating that Doug and Russell had gotten him seven weeks of compensation that he was owed. Ignoring what Doug was saying about looking after union issues, the police repeated:

“We don't know nothing about that, all we know is we got a complaint.”

Eventually Doug and Russell moved to the other side of the road to avoid arrest and a standoff ensued. After five minutes, the police called out:

“How long are you going to stay there?”

“Longer than you.”

The police left, and Doug and Russell returned to the picket line to relay the information. I went to get a camera to take some photos of the safety breaches on the site, and by the time I arrived at the site I found Dave and Doug taking pictures there already. After I talked with them some, they left and I continued taking pictures. Scaffolding at the top consisted of a few loose boards haphazardly placed on the framework, and the site was a mess in general.

While standing in the roadway taking photos, I was approached by a bearded man with a hardhat whom I rightly assumed to be the foreman. When he questioned me about who I was and what my interest in building sites was, I gave him a weak story about just being an American tourist. Not really believing me at first, he bluntly tried to bluff me.

“You have to have company permission to take pictures of the site, you know.”

In my time around the BLF to that point, I had heard plenty of strange stories, but this was the first time I had such nonsense directed at me. (A woman in a pub around that time saw Russell’s BLF t-shirt and asked him “Are you really all gangsters?”) Looking at the foreman in disbelief, I repeated his statement as a question. Realizing his bluff had been called, he got to the point.

“You're not with the BLF, are you?”

“No.”

“Oh, it's alright then. It's just we've been having a bit of trouble with them lately.”

A letter I wrote to the Illawarra Mercury about the incident was printed on the following Thursday. When Doug and Russell were on the site on Friday (which had improved after an anonymous call to the Department of Industrial Relations), the foreman called them over to have a word with them.

“You guys got a big Yank working with you?”

“No, we don't have no Yanks.”

“There was a bloke ’round here taking pictures last week, I thought he was from the university. He was a big Yank, I had a bit of a yarn with him. Then I saw that article in the paper yesterday, had to be the same bloke. But he's not with you?”

“No, we were taking pictures, though...”

“No, no, that's alright, it's just this Yank...if I see him around here again I'm gonna steamroll him.”