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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Elegy for Boyle Crescent

Elegy for Boyle Crescent

‘Where there is no love, put in love, and you will draw out love.’ – St John of the Cross.

1

Among the Pentecostals in a house in Masterton I read a mad brochure on drugs. Truth and nonsense are mixed together. Hash and heroin get the same kind of writeup.

There are pictures too. An old barrel stuffed with pillows on the concrete at the back of a house. A table cluttered with books, butts, plates, pills, and the inner guts of a radio set. An unmade bed with striped crumpled sheets. A fireplace filled with torn magazines. The pictures were taken at No. 7 Boyle Crescent before the bulldozers pushed it down. I remember that event.

John H— had cleaned the house up. After a year or two on morph and smack, and then a time of being clean, he was trying to get Narcotics Anonymous on the move in Auckland. He knew the extreme horror that the pigs have for untidiness or dirt. So he had cleaned the house up and piled the rubbish in the yard at the back.

The fuzz photographers arrived. They found the house tidy. Photographs of a tidy house would have been useless for their police files. Junkies have to be squalid. If they are not, what is the moral difference between a cop having a shot of whisky after work and a junkie having a shot of peth?

They remedied the defect. They rumpled the beds. They threw ash trays on to the floor. They tore up magazines and dropped them in the fireplace. They ignored the clean yard and took a photograph of the garbage pile. Thus, as in Orwell’s 1984, history was set right by the history-makers. The photographs went into the police files. Now the same photographs have surfaced in what the publishers call an authoritative book on the New Zealand drug scene.

Truly Y— may have contributed a small amount of the clutter. She was John H—’s de facto wife, a keen user of stoppers, an explosive girl and a professional untidier. In any house you find one or two of them. You need professional tidiers to follow them round with a shovel.

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In three days Y— could get a room to look as disorderly as the sleeping quarters of the pigs look before the cleaning staff wade in to tidy up for them. Their uniforms are cleaned by the Maori girls who work at the local laundry.

2

The young refugees from middle class homes used to pour into Boyle Crescent. They had nowhere else to go. At home Mum and Dad and Sally and Willy were still watching the telly. The demon of acedia had fixed his talons in their skulls. The refugees brought him with them. They had a hope that there was a magic somewhere that would get him off their backs.

They did not get away from him. He is a hard demon to dislodge. The death ship of our culture moves on darkly between the junkie id and the cop shop super-ego. Whirlpool or cliff. Neither is an answer.

Yet the love was there too. How can I interpret the beauty of that house to a culture that has burnt-out eyes and broken ear-drums? I think it has to be said in Braille, as a man under a blanket touches with his fingers, one by one, each muscle of a woman’s body. To learn the language of Thou in place of the language of It. A plantation of love on the mountains of the moon.

Pardon me. The facts are simple enough. The junkies loved one another. When I saw the bulldozers crash through the walls of the house, for the first time in years I began to weep. In the dust-laden clouds a great wild bird rose and fluttered and died. And the souls of the confessors of the junkie church who had taken an overdose and died in that neighbourhood blazed out to meet it like white stars in a black sky.

3

Freedom. The word is not well understood. Te Atua gave us freedom because without it we would not be able to love one another or love him. Freedom is the mother of evil and the mother of love. But the greatest evil comes when freedom is taken away, and a good cop knows he is right to bang a girl’s head on the station wall for an hour, to find out where her drugs are stashed, because he is on the side of the obedient angels. The greatest evil is the abdication of inner decision.

The just cop, Q—, once said to me, ‘They will corrupt you. You will begin to see life through their eyes.’

His words came true. A corrupt man can sit on a dike and watch a tree beginning to blossom in the yard after a long winter. He becomes the tree. And the smell of his own shit is good in his nostrils. And he is able to praise the unjudging God who made the world.

A corrupt man will find the smell of a woman’s body good because he loves her.

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A corrupt man will hold the strap while a friend injects himself with smack, because he knows the friend has made the choice to have a hit, and a wrong choice made of your own free will is a million times better than the abdication of choice.

A corrupt man has begun to understand the meaning of freedom, the weight that the just man finds too hard to carry. His heart begins to burn within him in the company of his friends.

The junkies taught me how to love.

4

Burst mattresses. Broken chairs. A sofa with half the springs exposed. A table littered with the remains of fifty meals. Cigarette butts trodden into the carpet.

These are the holy objects of the town marae. The mattresses, the chairs, the sofa, the table, the kai, the cigarettes, have all been shared. Therefore they have been put to the purpose that Te Atua intended.

Nobody is ever turned away from the door. A great lamp shines invisibly from the centre of the house. An old woman sits under it. Mother Mary has come to share the sorrows of the poor. Because in the middle of their sins they love one another.

The pain is part of learning to love. When the Son of Man died the rock of the world split and he came to share the condition of the souls in prison. That hollow in the rock is the place where we gathered together.

5

K— would come into the house, through the always open door with its lock ripped off by the fuzz, after midnight. A white face framed by red-gold hair. She would clink as she walked with the pills she was carrying. Five times in the bin, on account of dropping speed, and due for another trip back there.

She would go into E—’s bedroom, and sit down to rave to him all night. She would share her pills with him.

Her clothes were neat. She had a job. In her own house everything was as straight as a matchbox.

She came to revisit the tribe of the poor. If she did not come to them, there was nobody in the world for her to talk to.

The first time I saw her come in from the street like a ghost, fear gripped my mind. I don’t like having to meet a ghost. ‘I’m K— the raver,’ she said. Then she went noiselessly through to E—’s bedroom.

After that I used to put my arms round her whenever we met. The fear left me.

Where can a rich woman come to get love except to the house of the poor?

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6

Summer and winter I would sit each day under a tree at the top of Vulcan Lane. To meditate. I experienced the Sorrowful Mysteries of the junkies and the Joyful Mysteries of the sun on the leaves.

Often one of them would sit or stand beside me, holding a flower. Blue for meditation. Yellow for the Divine radiance. Red for aroha and the blood of Te Ariki.

I saw the branches grow black and leafless. I saw them become green again.

The Glorious Mysteries were hidden from me. For them to be real the flower has to become a star.

We would share the nothing in which God is born.

7

A delegation of students came to me. They lived in the house next door. One of them told me that D— had stolen five dollars from him.

‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

‘I want to get it back.’

‘You think I should call the fuzz?’

He said nothing.

‘It’s hard to prove, you know. She’ll have spent it already on kai for her friends.’

‘I’m saving for a trip to Australia.’

‘Maybe you should carry your money in an inside pocket. There are sick people in this house. If I spend my time interrogating D—, it’s not likely she or anybody else will get off the pills. And we’ve got no kai except for some bread and some milk. You’ve eaten here often enough yourself. Maybe the problem would have been solved if you’d spent the five dollars on kai for the rest of us.’

He said nothing.

‘D— has done one or two things for you on occasions.’ I knew he had slept with D—.

‘What should I do then, Hemi?’

‘Forgive her and forget it.’

He did that. But the children of the affluent take time to learn the ethics of the poor. When it comes to the crunch, they are very inclined to put property before people.

8

There was a time, before I came to the house, when a jar of morph and a jar of smack stood at each end of the mantelpiece at Boyle Crescent. The junkies page 540 hit up whenever they felt like it. They stayed smashed out of their skulls for days on end. This went on for several months.

Then the fuzz arrived. They arrested some of the junkies. The rest scattered to other houses in Grafton or Parnell. But the fuzz knew what was what. They had found the junkie house. Houses are magical. They knew it was a bad house. Even a year later, they would still walk in for a tour of inspection every second day of the week.

A few junkies did always come back. The house was their mother house, not because of junk, but because it was the house of the tribe. And the fuzz would tramp through the house at eight in the morning, hauling people out of bed. They never found any drugs. But they still called in.

They were like dogs barking outside a burrow from which the rabbits had gone.

9

At two in the morning, J— had turned up his radiogram to full volume, and the Marihuana Mass thundered out. A great angel of sound was shaking the house. I lay awake for half an hour in the grip of his fist.

Then I went through and knocked on J—’s door. He opened it. ‘Turn it down a bit, man. I need to get some sleep.’

‘Sure, Jim, sure.’

He was stoned and drunk and his face was blazing with joy. Like a wild horse sniffing the wind as he gallops in the mountains.

Five minutes later the Mass was crashing out again at full volume. But I did not tell him to turn it down. If you have once seen the wild horses in the mountains, you fall in love with them, and whenever you see them afterwards with saddles on their backs, it makes you feel bad.

This is another side of being corrupted.

10

People use junk because the lack of love is too hard for them to bear. They get love as well as junk from their friends. But junk bridges the gap when the love wears thin.

To have neither love nor junk is no solution.

I never met a junkie who was incapable of love. They may exist. I have met many who will share a last taste with a friend, knowing that the pain of withdrawal will keep them awake that night because of sharing it.

This is the core of junkie ethics. To protect your friends from the fuzz. To share a last taste of shit with them as men in a lifeboat share out the last drops of water. While this is done, the soul remains alive behind the mask of shit.

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When the love is strong and there is no junk, junkies are able to get along without the chemical. This doesn’t happen in the suburbs.

To go back and watch the telly is to climb into your own coffin.

11

The bulldozers had left a verandah decoration lying on the ground. It was about three and a half feet in length and shaped like a square-based wooden phallus. I picked it up and carried it four miles across town to Sussex Street. There I gave it to Z—.

‘You have it,’ I said. ‘It contains my mana and my sexuality.’

‘You shouldn’t give it to me, Hemi. I might do something bad with it.’

‘You have it.’

She heated some butter in a small saucepan on the stove. She stood the object upright on the floor. Then she poured butter over the wooden knob and stuck flower petals to the butter.

‘This is Hemi’s prick,’ she said to H—. Then she and H— sat down in front of it and began chanting, ‘Hari Krishna, Hari Krishna, Hari Ram, Hari Ram.’

It was a peculiar occasion. I feared I might have started a new religion. But I suspect it was a very old one. Somewhere inside me the rock sprang apart a little. Something was being honoured that had never been honoured before. In our culture the male organ of fertility is usually regarded as an unlovely drainpipe.

A month or two later Z— decided, rightly, that I was not her man, and left the wooden knob out in the winter weather.

12

Trix came into Boyle Crescent. He moved into a vacant room. He painted one wall of it orange.

Then he set down his personal possessions. A mattress and blankets. Two Indian drums. A small statue of Buddha. One oil lamp.

When the lamp was lit in front of the statue, a beauty without physical origin seemed to shine from the walls of the room and from the faces of the people who came into it. The beauty of poverty.

When he played the drums at midnight, arrows of sound went through your body and soul. It was as if the music rose out of a hole in the ground, out of nowhere. The terrible laughter of the Zen patriarchs. A music out of the gap that lies behind all appearances.

Trix taught me the joy of poverty.

page 542

13

The weeds are growing high on the site where the house stood. The landlord has not yet erected the new honeycomb of concrete in which people will be able to watch identical programmes at different tellies, not knowing their neighbours’ names. When he does, he will get four times the rent that he got from the house that stood there.

Where are the tribe of the young to go?

14

The house of prudence is different from the house of love.

A part of my heart is buried in the empty section where the junkies’ mother house once stood. Because she gave me life when the city was killing me. She taught me that I can become Us.

Broken pill boxes and rusted needles are also buried there. The furnace of the winter stars blazes above the spot.

1972 (698)