The Jesus Man

by Christos Tsiolkas

  I go out on the back porch and call softly. The cat swiftly runs to my feet and I scoop it up, rub my face in the soft short hair.

  —How are you, Man, how are you?

  He is immediately purring.

  I take him into my room and I put on the stereo. A world music show on 3PBS. I keep the music low and keep stroking the cat. Mum doesn’t like him in the house but my rule-breaking is tolerated. Man is not yet two, he’s sleek and mischievous, the perfect cat. Bass Guitar was like that, except Bass had no markings, just pure black. Man is black and white, Man is pretty sexy. Bass Guitar I had for years, she died at fourteen. She died not soon after Tommy. I cried more at the death of the cat. This doesn’t mean anything except that the grief was simple. Bass Guitar loved me more than any other thing on the planet, a reciprocal love. That’s a guarantee I have never achieved with an adult. I let Man sit on my chest and I am lost in some Arab rhythm.

  When I think of Soo-Ling I think of my vast stupidity. This is a love that refuses the reality of my own body. I can’t even love her in my imagination. This more than anything is the proof of my failed heterosexuality. I can love women but I consider it shameful to fuck them. I can fuck men but I consider it impossible to love them. I think of Soo-Ling with a man called Patrick, a dark shadow in my mind, and I am bereft of life. I sigh. I am immobile.

  My treacherous libido resurrects me of course. I am patting the cat and my cock twitches. I try to think of a woman but it is only anatomy: fingers darting up a cunt, the silk taste of breast. Faces destroy the illusion.

  I can’t love those I fuck. Even Sean is impossible to wank to.

  Instead I think of footballers and create a vision. I’m in a room, a motel, with a footballer. He is forcing me to his cock. On my chest the cat swirls, licks at my nose and then jumps off, angry. I unzip my fly and start tugging.

  The image changes.

  The footballer turns me over and enters me. Even as the fucking begins, I come. The cat jumps back on the bed. I clean my pants and shirt with my hanky. It stinks of decay. I pocket it.

  I fall into sleep, Man on my shoulder, purring, my heart hurting, thinking of Soo-Ling. It takes a long time to leave consciousness behind.

  3

  Thesis: Taxi Driver

  In 1968, as she was having a quick cigarette break outside her workplace, the Smithies & Sons Ladies Wear warehouse and factory, my mother was interviewed as part of a vox pop by the Channel Nine television program, A Current Affair. The reporter was asking people on Johnson Street for their views on conscription and the war in Vietnam. According to my mother’s telling—for this story is now a family legend, and therefore there are numerous versions I have heard—she answered that she was opposed to conscription and, further, she was opposed to the war itself. She cited the United States’ support for the military junta then in power in Greece as proof of America’s selfish interference in other countries’ affairs. She added that it was foolish for Australian young men to die for a cause they were ignorant about.

  But then, Mum thinks that all of us Australians are ignorant about politics.

  The journalist promised her that the segment would be televised that evening. Dominic says Mama was excited and proud. Everyone in the house, my brothers, my parents, Yiota and Spiro who were then living with my family, everyone was crowded around the television. The program comes on and the item is kept till the end. No-one can recall what the news story was that prompted the vox pop. Dom says it probably was more footage of soldiers dying in Vietnam but he can’t really remember. But he remembers Mum.

  For a few seconds she’s squinting into the black and white sun and she says, War is bad. That’s it, that’s all they had of her.

  That incident changed my mother’s attitude to the media forever. She was outraged. Growing up I remember a constant flow of invective hurtled towards the screen whenever the news or current affairs programs were on. Liars, fakers, charlatans, whores. Devils! She didn’t mind the sitcoms or the nature documentaries, or the soaps and movies; they were fine because they did not conceal their fictions. She warned all of us against the deceits of the television but her three sons refused to listen; we found much solace there.

  In the end, I think she was proved right.

  The story of the interview just doesn’t go away. I’m fascinated by it and angry about it, even though I was not yet born when all this occurred. They cut her up. I can see how it happened—her accent must have been much thicker then, and her emotive response a bit of an anomaly on Australian TV of the 1960s, which preferred to provide information with a Mother Country’s stiff upper lip. When I see old black and white docos from the sixties, I mostly see frightened old ladies in Queen Mother hats or slightly pissed old guys. I never see anyone who reminds me of my mum. There’s more hesitation, for me, about telling my mother’s stories than there is about anyone else in our family. My mum’s English is pretty good, it’s excellent, but it’s not her first language and I’ve seen her struggle with it, try and learn a vocabulary anew; to name things, to name herself. What she hated most was to be thought stupid. That’s what hurt about the interview. War is bad. That’s nothing, she still yells when telling the story, everyone knows war is bad. I said so much more and all they think fit to use is something that everybody already knows.

  In 1997 an interview appeared in the English weekly, New Musical Express, an interview with the Anglo-Asian musicians Asian Dub Foundation. One member, speaking of the mythical aura surrounding the London of the 1960s, the swinging London of high fashion and high pop, sarcastically asks, What was so special about England in the sixties. Why don’t you ask my mum about London in the sixties?

  What would a Paki migrant woman in 1968 have told us about England? It wouldn’t be a glamorous model’s story, it wouldn’t be Nicholas Roeg’s Performance. But just because no-one sang the story, no-one wrote the book, no-one filmed it, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

  But as my mother would counter, even if someone had bothered to ask the wog Londoner a question, would it be the right question, would they have listened?

  Mum has another great story, about a Yugoslav woman she worked with, Zita. Zita was an artist, had even trained in Belgrade, and she worked with Mum in the factories. She saved up and bought herself a black leather folio, quite expensive, gathered her drawings and her canvas and walked into a gallery in Toorak Road which specialised in modern and contemporary art. She had done her hair, she wore her new navy skirt and a white silk blouse she had bought in Myers. She walked into the gallery and the man behind the counter smiled, asked what she wanted. She started to speak and he stopped her and very slowly explained that the position was taken. What position? The cleaner, for the gallery. Oh, said Zita, and she turned around and walked through the door.

  —What stopped her, Mum?

  —History, she replies, history can be very wearing.

  She was surrounded by men, my Mama. A husband and three sons. She always said of us that we were gullible, that our thinking betrayed a slackness which came from being born in the place we were born. All of us, I guess, were in awe of her strength. During the war, living in Athens, my mother had seen her youngest brother, still a toddler, die from starvation. Not that she talked much about her own suffering, not that she was any kind of martyr, but I think her three children grew up fearing that we could never live up to her strength. It hurt, a little, that she considered us gullible, merely Australian. It hurt that in small ways we were always reminded of being exiled from her.

  No-one bothered to ask questions of my mother and the one time they did, they edited her out. Mum laughs at the crows, says they are a fairy tale. But, Mum, I’d argue as a kid, Dad believes in the crows.

  —Lou, she’d tell me, just because you believe in something doesn’t make it true.

  There are maybe fourteen people in my Propaganda, Pornography and Dissidence tutorial. I say maybe because no-one, including myself, turns up regularly. There is a certain familia
rity I have with these people, we acknowledge each other when we cross paths, but there are only three people in the tute I could confidently assess as personalities. The others all remain strangers. Sometimes, when I’m bored, looking out the window across the campus grounds, I start fantasising. There is a woman, Chloe, long red hair, quiet, private, who stuns me with her sweet beauty. There is Clinton, a simulation of an American; I wonder if his name is real. He is good-looking, blond, fit and healthy. What is he doing here, debating the intricacies of theory and culture? In my fantasies his soul leads a darker life. And there’s Must, Mustapha, who is a bit of a joker, real sexy, and who likes an argument. The others, just faces.

  The pressure is on. This is my final year. Sometimes, very occasionally, I think of going on, doing a Masters. But I resist. The pressure is economic. It will cost another two or three grand in fees to keep going. As it is I’ll owe the taxation department twenty thousand when I graduate. There’s no career path ahead of me. I contemplate journalism, I contemplate public relations, I contemplate film, I think about being a teacher, I contemplate being an office stiff. None of these options seems honest, from my core. I’m still fucking around, working out a direction, avoiding a white collar future.

  —What are you going to do, asks my father, when you’re finished?

  —Don’t know. Get a job somewhere.

  The answer does not satisfy him but he is content to let me explore. My mother too, though she keeps her eyes on the unemployment figures.

  —You should have done computers.

  —I’d be hopeless.

  —You’re smart, you could have picked it up. She sips her coffee. If I was in your place, I would have done computer science.

  That, of course, is not true. Maria Stefano, who loves her coffee and her wine, who adores argument and conversation, Maria Stefano, who still believes in struggle, would be in my tute if she ever had the chance. She would be arguing the world, class and politics, and getting straight As. But my mother never had the chance of any of this, never studied beyond the sixth grade. So I can’t fail study, I couldn’t betray her like that.

  Maybe I should have done computers. This will be the last year for this seminar, the uni is going back to basics. Reading, writing and arithmetic. The humanities are dead.

  Manoli, Mannie, is my boss. He’s a bit of a wog, up himself and thinks he’s God’s gift. But he’s fair. He doesn’t pretend that we can or should be friends.

  —Lou, next time you’re even one fucking minute late, you’re out on your arse, right?

  —Sorry, Mannie.

  I don’t go in late any more.

  —I hear you’re in the union.

  —Who’d you hear it from?

  —Forgot. So, are you?

  —Yeah.

  —Fine. Can you do a shift on Thursday?

  —What time?

  —From five-thirty.

  —Sure.

  That’s how we talk to each other.

  I work in a video shop in Nunawading. It has a section of Greek, Italian and Indian movies. Next, Mannie’s bringing in some titles from Hong Kong. He can see the market for the product. Where I grew up prides itself as an anglo enclave but I can’t ever remember that being true. It is not a wog area, we don’t dominate, but we are there, in every street, in every classroom: Vietnamese, Chinese, Greeks, Indians and Italians. Mannie stocks the usual titles from the US, a tiny art-house section, and he gets the wog patronage as well. Times are tough.

  —Mannie, I reckon you should expand into cult.

  —We got some.

  —Yeah?

  —Yeah. Blue Velvet.

  —That’s not cult. That’s like a classic.

  —Yeah, that’s right, a fucking cult classic.

  The shop is clear of customers. He calls me into the back and I stand in the doorway while he lights a cigarette in his office.

  —That fucking cult shit costs. Those distributors are breaking my balls. All that poofter shit you like, all that Japanese sicko stuff, it costs heaps. Show me requests, a few of them, then I’ll think about it. Not till then.

  He winks at me.

  —This is the fucking ’burbs, Lou, you got to take it slow.

  There is a message book by the computer terminals. It’s for the staff to leave notes to each other, keep informed about any harassing customers, any problems during the shift. After the discussion about unions, I leave this note:

  Which one of you cunts informed on me about being a union member? When I find out, you’re fucking mince.

  Mannie has not said one word about it. Janet, who I can’t stand, replied:

  I find the word CUNT offensive.

  Eva’s favourite record is Honey’s Dead by The Jesus and Mary Chain and the song she loves most from it is ‘Good For My Soul’. A friend, Sando, has a four track studio at home and he taught me some simple tricks with wires and buttons. I did a bit of a remix for Eva, taking the song and cutting it into the dub B-side of an old SOS Band song. I burnt it on a CD for her. It’s simple, embarrassingly so, but Eva loved it. She hugged me and told me I was very talented. I blushed at this, I knew how naive it really was. But I was happy she was happy.

  I’m working from their place, crashing a few weeks to complete my thesis. Ringwood, where they live, is on the train line, a quilt of red brick housing. It takes me half an hour to walk to the nearest convenience store. I don’t mind. I like the walk.

  Dom just smiled when Eva played him the song. He’s made it listenable, is all he said, but he was proud of me. This is the generosity he was unable to offer Tommy.

  They’ll probably fail my thesis. It sure the fuck isn’t classical, it sure the fuck isn’t writing, reading or arithmetic. I’m not quite sure myself what I’m doing, but I’m trying hard to write something accessible and honest and which is worth spending a year of my life doing. I’m writing about a man who might be a rapist, Barry Bond, and I’m writing about Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and a film called The Sum Of Us. Two very different films, all very different stories. But I’m asking questions and making connections and hoping the connections spark more questions.

  And I’m writing about Tommy.

  I’ve cut down to two shifts a week at the video shop, just till I finish writing up the thesis. I should explain it, explain how it works, explain why it is. There is only one thing I know that I can do, and I don’t even know if I can do it well. I can write. Somehow, I’ve got to trust it, somehow writing has to give me direction.

  I have this theory that Taxi Driver vindicates the suburbs over the city. That might seem a fragile theory; after all, it’s such a New York movie. But everything the protagonist Travis Bickle detests is a product and an effect of the urban. The fags, the whores, the niggers, the spooks. He wants to save the little whore-child, take her out of Manhattan, place her back into the womb of suburbia. Even though we, the audience, understand his mania, the coda of the film indicates that he has been made a hero. This is irony, quite thickly laid on irony, but I don’t particularly wish to dwell on this. The ending is open to a variety of readings. I like that. I don’t like anything being settled too comfortably.

  Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay, and he’s also a film director. Now, I’ve got another theory. I reckon Schrader is the brains. Scorsese is the more talented filmmaker but the script of Taxi Driver goes to places where Scorsese hasn’t gone since. Reading the literature, the critical reception to his films, Schrader got his arse kicked in the US for being a reactionary, for being an intellectual. They’re like Australians the Americans, suspicious of thinkers. That’s why Scorsese gets the kudos and Schrader gets silence. This is a tangent, I can’t explore it in my thesis, but I don’t think Schrader is reactionary. A puritan, sure, but that allows him, in a film like Hardcore, to go places where the sexual liberationists can’t go because they’re protecting their turf. And in Patty Hearst Schrader deals the final blow to a politics of commitment. Natasha Richardson, who plays Hearst, delivers a l
ong final monologue to camera. Fuck them, fuck them all, she finishes. That’s it. That’s the politics of the post-Cold War, a fatigue with the right and with the left. And who better to know that than Patty Hearst herself? Growing up in the heartland of the right, grand-daughter of Randolph Hearst, Mr Citizen Kane himself, kidnapped and then a revolutionary member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (what the fuck is Symbionese?). What happens? Whatever role she assumes, she can’t win because every act is open to criticism. So in the end, Fuck them, fuck them all.

  But in Taxi Driver we still haven’t got to that stage, there’s still the game of morality and principles. If you were to remake Taxi Driver now, Travis Bickle wouldn’t care a shit about some twelve year old hooker. Fuck, we all know twelve year old hookers, even if they’re just the ones you pass on the streets. You don’t need a reason for a massacre any more.

  The thesis is really about the media, how it works. I feel that I can substantiate ideas with my own experience. Tommy’s murder-suicide, the cameras and the papers were right on it. Great story. Tommy was:

  Page 6 in the Age.

  Page 3 in the Herald.

  Page 7 in the Australian.

  Three page spread in Who Weekly.

  Interview with the man who owned the house in which it happened: ‘A Current Affair’.

  Interview with Mum on Channel Ten news. She regrets it, they caught her, a camera in her face, asked the questions. She broke down. They played that again and again.

  A photo of Tommy. We, the family, refused to give them anything. But someone contacted the place he worked. They found a file of photos from a Christmas bust-up party. Tommy, glass of beer raised, trying to hide his face from the lens, still smiling. This image was everywhere; blown up to half a page, full colour, in the Who Weekly spread.

  I hate the media. They have made their image my last memory of my brother.

  I don’t use them, I avoid them. I don’t read the papers, I don’t watch the news. The most astounding thing I discovered in those first few hallucinatory months was how the story being communicated in the news is so removed from your everyday experience. I don’t think I thought at all about the guy who was murdered. Just once, really, seeing footage of his family at the funeral.