The Jesus Man

by Christos Tsiolkas

  Isn’t she fucking amazing?

  I have a theory, just a small one, probably worth shit, but I think Tommy lost some of his soul when he gave up music. That’s how I best remember him, in his room, forbidding me to enter, listening to the radio and playing his records. He would do that for hours and he would spend all his available money on vinyl. He was sick of me, always having to look after me, having to babysit. But sometimes, if he was in a good mood, he’d let me sit in and he’d play stuff to me. He’d laugh at my taste. I was a child and all I wanted to hear was Culture Club and the Thompson Twins. But in the long run it was good for me, I learnt something. Most of the thrashy sounds from the speakers sounded like white noise to me but I remember Gun Club. They had a song with a nursery rhyme kind of chorus. Tommy used to laugh when I’d go around singing it.

  —It’s about a serial killer, you know that, don’t you?

  I just nodded. I don’t think I quite knew what a serial killer was back then. Just another bogey man.

  Soo-Ling says that Tommy had given up on music by the time she met him. That’s so sad. There are so many questions I want to ask him and the fucker is dead. Did it happen suddenly? Did he decide one day that music was no longer valuable or precious to him? Did it remind him of home? Did someone he liked, because Tommy was easily shamed, did someone scoff at his tastes? Possibly. I realised early that was how to get Tommy to do something for me that he didn’t particularly want to do. Just call him lazy, stupid, tell him his taste sucked. He never had faith in his own opinions. Maybe once the music escaped from his room, once it got tainted by other people, maybe it stopped being part of him.

  I found The Buzzcocks, an old EP, in Dom and Eva’s garage. But the vinyl is scratched to buggery. I can’t use it for the tape so I’m going through the racks, trying to find it. ‘Freedom’ was easy. Picked up Listen Without Prejudice, on CD, for six bucks. I’m going to put ‘Waiting For The Day’ on the tape. I think Soo-Ling will like that. But Vanessa Williams is harder. I just want the single. It’s on the Priscilla soundtrack but I don’t want to get that out of principle. I hate ‘I Love The Nightlife’ and that’s on it. Don’t know why, just one of those songs that has no blood. Vampire songs I call them.

  I love going through second-hand seven-inch records. This is a great store for it. Unlike the inner-city stores, everyone feels free here to unload their taste and make some money. Serious hip-hop next to coloured vinyl. The Smiths next to mid-seventies Status Quo. I’ve already got a handful of records. Fifty cents a pop. Madonna’s ‘Burning Up’, Don Henley’s ‘The Boys of Summer’, Mel and Kim’s ‘Showing Out’ and The Saints ‘I’m Stranded’, a twelve inch. I’ve been in here for a couple of hours, smelling the dust, listening to Neil Young being played by the scruffy girl at the counter. Around me the whole country is probably voting in a new age. I don’t want to go out. I’m protected in here.

  Dominic was into music too. I still call him the disco king. But he has stopped as well, he’s not listening to new music, not going forward. And not going back. What he has in his collection is incredible, from his old dj days when it was all bonging on, screwing the chicks and playing at being Travolta. But it all starts at the Pasadena sound and stops at Michael Jackson. I try him out on new things but he thinks it’s all crap. I’ve mined his collection for all it’s worth. He’s got original Parliament and Funkadelic from back in the seventies, when you could only get funk through mail order. And when he dances, even I want to fuck him. Eva says, all the time, that’s what made her love him. Turn up the bass, clear the floor and watch the man dance. Mum loves it when Dom dances, she claps her hand and sings along. Ah, freak out. She says he may be an Aussie, act like an Aussie, dress like an Aussie, but he’s got Greek hips.

  Tommy never danced.

  Mum went apeshit at me one day soon after the funeral. She said I wasn’t allowed to play music, not for three months, out of respect for Tommy. I thought that was bullshit but Dad asked me to go along with it, just for a while, just until she calmed down. I lasted a week then I was home alone and I put on the radio. And the radio made me think of music I’d like to listen to. It was such a shithouse time, such an awful collapse in our lives, that all I wanted to hear was something that spoke of light. I put on a dance compilation, I put it on loud and I roared in my bedroom. I danced up a mighty sweat. I was the bass and I was thunder. I didn’t hear Mum come in.

  She slapped me and I went ballistic.

  —What the fuck you do that for?

  —Your brother is dead, shame on you. She started crying and because I hated to see her cry and because I know how to lash out at her, I said the first thing that came to mind.

  —Shame, always fucking shame with you. That’s what killed Tommy.

  There are moments of regret in everybody’s life. That’s one I live with. Her face just went white and she looked so vulnerable and so scared. I reached out to her and she wrapped her body in mine. She pulled away, kissed me, and left my room. I stopped the tape. From inside the kitchen, on the little cassette player she’s had for years, I heard the sound of Greek music. A slow painful dirge.

  The funeral was small. None of the Western Australian relos came down. Dad didn’t want them there. Tommy’s death changed everything, changed Dad. We all, used to depend on him, he was the calm that made it safe for all of us to go crazy from time to time. The suicide made him, finally, sad. He held Mum’s hand throughout the service and he cried. That shook us all up. He held her hand throughout the burial. On the walk back along the cemetery path, back to the cars, he turned to Mum and said, not angry, not bitter, he said just quietly: That’s the last time I enter a church. He let go of her hand.

  The Catholics and the Orthodox refused to bury Tommy. They make their rules. Dominic, Dad and I, we stopped going to church after that. I’ll go to a wedding, I’ll do that for someone, but my brother’s exile is my exile as well. Mum, it’s hard on Mum because God has been the only constant in her life, but I think she also understands. I think she might even respect us.

  —God is a drug, she told me once.

  They didn’t bury Tommy because he offed himself. If it had just been the murder, it would have been okay.

  Soo-Ling was at the funeral. I hadn’t seen her for months and I leapt towards her. My mother pulled me back. Instead she walked up to her alone, hugged her and Soo-Ling began to cry. The two women held onto each other for a long time.

  Eva had told us about the pregnancy the day before the funeral. Dom lost it, thought she should have kept her mouth shut, but she did the right thing. Dom didn’t want Soo-Ling to keep the baby, he thought it was a mistake. He wanted an abortion, I guess a cleaning of the slate. For the rest of us, maybe even for Soo-Ling, from the start Betty was a way of going back to Tommy, rescuing him from the past. We all adore her, including Dom.

  —Aren’t you glad she was born? I asked him recently.

  —Of course, he grumbled. She’s a fantastic kid, a great kid. But that’s just fate. Imagine if she was sick, imagine if she was a real fucking brat. How would Soo-Ling have coped?

  —Soo-Ling can cope with anything. I immediately sprung to Soo-Ling’s defence.

  —She couldn’t save Tommy.

  That silenced me. I know that, for all of us, Tommy’s death is possibly hardest on my oldest brother. He never liked Tommy and while Tommy was alive the contempt between them was manageable, did not necessarily intrude on Dom’s life, did not disturb him. But the suicide changed all that. Dom, among all the sorrow, is grieving for an absence of love.

  For two years Soo-Ling lived in Ballarat in her parents’ house, looking after Betty and doing a TAFE course. Community development. I’d hitchhike up every couple of months, not stay with her but spend a day walking the town, being with the baby. The house was dark, there were subtle borders between Soo-Ling and her parents. I didn’t mind them. They just seemed scared. Her father was tough. A big Chinese man who smoked and swore a lot. He was handsome even though he wa
s well into his sixties. Her mother was small, disappeared in the silences of the house.

  —You can’t stay here, I argued with Soo-Ling.

  —Where should I go?

  I didn’t have an answer to that.

  There’s no Vanessa Williams, only the Priscilla soundtrack. And it’s fifteen bucks, an expensive second hand. I count out my money. I can afford it, but then I can’t afford a present for myself, and I’ve still got to find The Buzzcocks. I give up my independence and ask the girl behind the counter for assistance.

  She finds me a compilation of punk and new wave. It’s eleven bucks but it’s worth it. ‘Anarchy’. ‘Eton Rifles’. And The Buzzcocks. I ask for Vanessa Williams on an off-chance and she laughs. I buy the soundtrack. Twenty-six dollars and I’ve got what I need. I hit the brisk cool air and I’m happy.

  Soo-Ling told me that once, long months after the suicide, she was changing the baby’s nappy and ‘Video Hits’ was on morning television. She looked up and saw the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. The song was sad and optimistic. The tears would not stop. She so missed Tommy. Her mother came in and, seeing her heaving daughter, rushed to her side. They could not talk. Tommy was an impossible subject. Her family had been hurt by the media frenzy, as had mine, as had all of us. Tommy had been news. He was page one on a Thursday, page three on a Friday and page twenty-six after the funeral. He was copy for Woman’s Weekly and for Woman’s Day. He was even a joke.

  —Hey, Stefano, heard your brother’s starring in a snuff movie.

  Giggles.

  —Hey Stefano, here’s a blade. Show us what you can do.

  This was my final year at school. The good people told me they were sorry, the strangers didn’t talk about it. The fuckups told me jokes. Soo-Ling could not talk about any of this with anyone in her family. So when her mother found her crying, shaking, all they could do was touch heads across the struggling smelly baby. And in the background a beautiful woman was singing ‘Save The Best Till Last’.

  I’ve got my tape. I jump on the train, head home, ready to compile it. I’ve just moved back home after six months away. I know, I know, pretty gutless. But Jesus, I can’t bloody afford it. Rent is really ridiculous. I’m not going to stay there long, I’ve told Mum and Dad that, and I know that Dad definitely understands. My father is an Aussie, though he looks what he is: Southern Mediterranean. But when he opens his mouth, you know he’s Aussie. He’s comfortable in jeans and overalls and pyjamas. Dad’s retiring; that means he’s doing less and less work. A roof for a friend, a neighbour’s loo. He’ll freak, I know, for a while when he finishes working, and unlike my mother he doesn’t have the garden. She’ll be all right. She’ll be forever sad, but.

  Mum’s cleaning at the moment, a factory in Abbotsford, an office building on Burwood Road, so she’s not around in the early evenings. I do all my shit then because Dad will be at the pub. I wank, I watch porno, I smoke grass, I get ready to go out, not always at the same time but always in combination. It actually beats living in a shared household. I didn’t dare watch a porno in the houses I was living in. I picked badly, virgins in many things. I don’t mean sexual virgins, I mean life virgins, experience virgins. Everyone I lived with—mostly students, and some people on the run—they thought I was uptight about sex. And I thought they were upright about everything else.

  It cost seventy dollars a week for a shitty little box in Fitzroy and when I had to leave that, I paid fifty-five for an abomination in Kensington. I liked the areas. Christ, they were much more interesting, much more appealing than where I grew up. I don’t live very far from where the ‘Neighbours’ house is situated, that round the world TV show about the average Australian. I didn’t get a chance to become addicted to ‘Neighbours’. Mum has always ruled over the six o’clock to seven-thirty timeslots. The television is now in the kitchen, that’s where she spends her time. It is so bizarre the way my mother interacts with the split, dislocating segments of the news. She damns the television for its lies.

  —That is bullshit! she roars. She knows her stuff. I’m out in the eastern suburbs and that’s solidly middle class. And my mother is one of those people born working class who will die working class and let no cunt tell her otherwise. She reckons her years of factory service entitles her to that. I tell you, she knows her stuff. She’s always gets the blue cheese in Trivial Pursuit. She did it all herself, on her minimum English and her will to know. And her English, though she still finds the written word difficult, is pretty good now.

  —That’s how I survived all of you, you bloody Australian drongo men!

  Off she went. We just ran. She lost the battle in giving us Greek; it began with Dom and then it was easy for me and Tommy to follow. So she cursed us when she was upset, and of course she was upset a lot in a household of men. In some strange way, and I am not justifying myself here, I think she gained a dignity from me, I respected her precisely because she was a woman. You’ve got to understand, my mother experienced, at the exact same time, the commencement of menopause and the suicide of her second child. Her otherness from me—I was a male and a native to this country—meant I knew there was a limit to how far I could understand anything of what she was going through. I was the baby of the family and she was the head of this world. Tommy died and I responded by wanting comfort and reassurance and she was only too happy to grant that to me.

  I’m very self-conscious about living with my parents. It’s kind of daggy, I guess.

  When we cut ourselves from the Greek tongue, we also cut ourselves off from the Greeks. This was probably inevitable, nothing any of us did could have stopped it. My mother, the only one of us a migrant and therefore unapologetic for her right to be a Greek, thinks we’re a failure as a migrant family, not a success story to write back home about. But I guess that’s the rub: we weren’t really a migrant family. I’m not even a wog. Or at least that’s what the wogs tell me.

  I’m very self-conscious about who I am.

  But I always thought I was lucky, until I became the very public evidence of the tragedy of our situation. There’s a picture of me, in New Idea, which I hate. Don’t know what soulcatcher took that one. I can’t stand to look at it. I’m obviously freaked out, just a scared kid, and I’m a little scrawny and I’m dressed in black. I look pathetic and tearful. So now everyone outside the family treats me as unlucky, but I can’t afford to do that. I can’t do it to Mum, I can’t do it to Soo-Ling or Dad. I can’t do it to Betty. Tommy has forced me to survive and to live, that’s the curse he’s given me. Maybe he did love me. I won’t ever know.

  Mum is not happy when I get home. She’s got the Age in front of her, the Australian on the floor, the radio on the Greek channel. The TV’s on Channel Seven with the sound off.

  —Hi, Mum. I kiss her. She pats me on the arm but she’s far away, listening to the radio. The announcers are way too fast for my Greek, I only catch names and exclamations. I go to the lounge, grab the remote and switch on the stereo. A flash of shrieking. I hastily turn it down.

  —Lou-ie! yells Mum.

  —What?

  —No bloody music today, not with the elections. Elections is a word she always says in Greek. For her, that English pronunciation is difficult.

  —Have you voted yet?

  —No. She’s in the lounge, looking down to me. I waited to go with you.

  I whine, writhe to get out of it.

  —Mum, you know I don’t believe in elections.

  She cracks it.

  —That’s so stupid. So so so stupid. You know how many countries in the world there are where people are dying for the freedom to vote? She holds up her hand, ready to begin counting.

  —Okay, okay. In Greek, You win. I hold up a hand. But can I listen to some songs first?

  —One, she says.

  —Three, I counter.

  —Two, she answers firmly, it’s in Greek. And I concede.

  She prepares to vote and dresses up for the occasion; there is a ritual to he
r participation in democracy. I, of course, am going to escort her exactly as I am. Dirty black jeans, runners and baggy T-shirt. She thinks I’m a boor.

  I play the punk CD first, shuffling through the tracks, listening to a few seconds, skipping boring bits.

  All my music is in my room, the records and the CDs. So’s my turntable. Mum and Dad have one shelf of records and a handful of CDs. Mum used to collect music, her kind—the Greek or show tunes. Whatever records Dad has they’ve been presents. I’ve got to admit to thieving some of their records for my collection. From Dad, Ray Charles and Herb Alpert; from Mum, Zorba, West Side Story, Cabaret and Folk Tunes of Arcadia. The vinyl of the last one resides in a white label twelve inch sleeve, DJ USE—NOT FOR SALE marked in black. The cover was on the lounge wall of my place in Fitzroy, a hefty peasant woman digging the earth, another woman, mouth open in feverish song, brandishing a pitchfork in the air. The jacket, the glorious reds and yellows, were perfectly social-realist kitsch, but the music was quite incredible. I used it on my house-mates when we got really stoned. Very trance. And the singer was good, a banshee. But yes, there’s certainly nothing recent in my parents’ collection. Not since Tommy and all that … all that bullshit.

  I’m trying hard not to blame Tommy.

  I go into my room and play ‘The Boys Of Summer’ because it was the last song I can remember Tommy liking. I look at myself in the mirror, ruffle my hair, it looks stupid, needs a cut.

  —Mum, I’m ready.

  She’s voting at my old primary school. The day is not cold, not quite warm. Mum looks pretty good, a white vest, a long skirt with a discreet split. The grounds are full of people handing out leaflets, how to vote cards. My mum dismisses all of them and goes straight up to the Labor Party representative. The smiling woman tries to hand me one as well.