by Tom Scott
‘What sits on a wall, is hairy and smells like anchovy? Anyone? You’ll kick yourselves! Humpty Cunt!’ He beamed and sucked contentedly on his pipe while Mrs B looked on as proudly as if he’d just performed a Chopin solo piano recital at the Royal Albert Hall. He waved the stem of his pipe in my direction. ‘Your turn, Tom!’
Masskerade 66 made me a star on campus. Pretty girls flirted with me at parties—at least, I think that’s what they were doing, I had no real point of comparison. I alternated between being the life and soul of the party and the moody intellectual in the corner far too cool and preoccupied with world affairs to dance. In this latter state I would slip away and walk back to our flat alone and despairing.
One night a beautiful girl studying food technology was having none of this and invaded my bedroom—perhaps she wanted to borrow a cup of sugar and I am impugning her motives. The room was dark. As best I could tell she climbed onto my bed and hoisted her skirt. A boy with bad acne at high school, Bob Whitehead, had mesmerised a bunch of us with his description of how pubic hair felt under a girl’s knickers. ‘It’s like a tablecloth on bracken, lads.’ Two boys lapsed into a dead faint. With a deft unfastening and shimmy of her hips the food-technology girl was down to her breasts and bracken. For the first time in my life I touched nipples and pubic hair that I hadn’t drawn with a 2B pencil. I have never put my hand into a woman’s clutch purse awash in warm oil while blindfolded, but I imagine the revelation would not be dissimilar to what I experienced next. Sensing that this could take all night if she didn’t take charge, she took charge.
There is a scene in Woody Allen’s great movie, Love and Death, set in Czarist Russia where, after a sleepless night of wild sex, Diane Keaton’s character asks Woody in amazement how come he is such a good lover. Head barely poking out from under the bed-covers he peers at her through thick glasses. ‘I practise a lot on my own.’
Apart from the Czarist Russia setting it was a bit like that in the morning. She was in bed exhausted—teaching can really take it out of you when you have a slow learner—and I was making her toast and a mug of instant coffee when there was a loud rap on the back door. Towel around my waist, full of the joys of spring, I opened it. A nifty red sports car was parked in the driveway. The driver, a tall distinguished man in his late forties with an R.A.F. fighter-pilot’s moustache and a military bearing, hissed at me, ‘If my daughter is here, please tell her that her father called.’
We were a studious bunch in that first Carol Street flat. As exams approached, we worked at our desks in our bedrooms well past midnight most nights, huge coffee mugs hanging from cords around our necks like identity tags, waiting for someone else to crack first and boil the kettle. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones alternated on the record player in the lounge until Johnny insisted on some bluegrass—plunking banjo and screeching fiddle—which had the beneficial effect of driving us back to our rooms. We all passed with flying colours that year.
In subsequent years the music got louder and wilder and my marks lower and lower. The Doors, Cream, Vanilla Fudge, Steppenwolf and Jefferson Airplane blasted out morning, noon and night. Marijuana, morning-glory seeds, datura flowers, magic mushrooms and LSD eventually displaced caffeine. Trying desperately to bridge the widening gap between myself and microbiology, parasitology and pathology I discreetly avoided taking drugs. I had seen my father intoxicated too often for it to have any appeal. I maintained my hip credentials by painting giant murals of Jimi Hendrix, Lightnin’ Hopkins and the formula of LSD on walls in fluorescent paint that gave off a ghostly luminescence under blue light. We had no blinds and the strange glow reduced cop cars to a crawl when they went past, which they seemed to do several times a night.
Before I got a motorbike of my own, Quinny took me to vet school on the back of his scooter, and fretted about my welfare. There were times when I fretted myself. One flatmate, Big Al, had colossal shoulders and even wider hips. He was shaped like a Russian doll with a razor-sharp butcher’s knife in a scabbard on his belt. He owned several rifles and fierce pig-dogs. Feeding them was expensive so he placed an ad in the paper offering a good home for cats. Gareth Morgan would have approved, but we moved out swiftly. None of us wanted to be the stop-gap measure if the supply of moggies faltered.
In the next flat a cheerful guy called Geoff was repeating his intermediate year while working part-time at Glaxo Laboratories, where they boiled down huge quantities of bullock to make beef agar, which was then allowed to set in Petri dishes for bacteria or fungi to grow on. In lieu of rent one week, Geoff lugged back to the flat a damp, Father Christmas-size sack of mince boiled to exhaustion. It resembled white sand. A bunch of hippies from Wellington had crashed with us for nearly a fortnight. They never rose before noon, smoked joints the size of an elephant tampon and were always hungry. Geoff and I added four bottles of Worcestershire sauce, a dozen small cans of tomato concentrate, a brush-and-shovel-full of salt and pepper and served it up to them as part of a spaghetti bolognaise. When I got up next morning they had gone.
It seemed only weeks later that Geoff came roaring up the drive in an old farm truck. He was hitch-hiking back from Auckland and had got stuck north of Taihape in a downpour. Standing out of the rain under a macrocarpa in a woolshed paddock next to this truck, he noticed that the keys were still in it. Having stolen it he now had to dispose of it.
We had a flat conference. Geoff thought he might push it into the Manawatū Gorge in the dead of the night. A paranoia fuelled by cannabis gripped everyone in the room (except me—my paranoia occurs naturally). Terry thought the cops would be combing the country looking for this truck by now—especially in the dead of night. Then Geoff had a brainwave. He would saw it into pieces and dispose of them separately—a sump here, an exhaust there, a radiator somewhere else. He set to the next morning with a hacksaw and two days later was almost halfway through the chassis. On the third day he soldiered on manfully until the chassis suddenly gave way of its own accord and the truck collapsed like a scrum. Geoff was too exhausted to do any more and the truck could no longer be moved forward or back, driven or towed. The only solution was to stop mowing the lawn. When it reached elephant grass proportions and the truck was no longer visible our landlord paid a rare visit and had a fit.
WE GAVE NOTICE AND MOVED to the Palace of Versailles of student squalor—Nash Street: five bedrooms, a huge lounge and so dilapidated that keeping it tidy was pointless. It occupied the end of a short street in a semi-industrial zone, so there were no neighbours to consider. I put the finishing touches on Masskerade 69 here. Murray Bramwell and John Muirhead, two witty and erudite arts students who favoured black turtlenecks and long scarves, one of them short, the other tall, like Simon & Garfunkel on the cover of Bookends, helped with wry and sophisticated contributions. It was Murray who coined the adage ‘Ags talk only to vets and vets talk only to God’. I also got more terrific writing and cartoons from the ever-reliable Brian Dreadon.
Brian was present when the Epitaph Riders blatted into our front yard on snarling Harleys and Triumphs and stomped inside to conduct some sort of drugs transaction with Terry. They had a midget with them wearing an identical black leather jacket with their insignia on the back.
‘This is Stumpy, OK?’ said the gang leader, standing beneath one of my murals. ‘Any bastard who makes fun of him will have shit to pay! OK?’ Stumpy went around the room introducing himself to everyone in turn, politely shaking hands and saying, ‘Hi, I’m Stumpy.’ We bowed like we were meeting royalty—partly nerves and partly on account of the height differential. He got to the second shortest person in the room, Brian, who flashed him a handsome smile from under his bushy handlebar moustache.
‘Stumpy?’ drawled Brian. ‘How did you get a name like that?’
Through all this I was leading a double life. I was still dressing like a Mormon missionary and going to vet school every day, but my heart wasn’t in it. There were small diversions. One lecturer wore shorts made from an old shot-silk ball go
wn, that presumably had previously belonged to his wife. They changed from green to purple depending on how the light struck him and you risked epilepsy if you sat in the front row and stared at them directly. I learned things I didn’t want to know—like that male pattern baldness was a genetic trait that you inherited from your mother’s father. I raced home next weekend on my gleaming BSA 650 motorbike, unbeknownst to me dubbed the ‘chrome coffin’ by bikies all over the Manawatū because several people had died while riding it, to ask Mum how much hair her dad had, and her answer was so depressing that I thought seriously about driving into a power pole myself on the way back. She said her dad had lovely thick hair above his ears, coming out of his ears and on the bulb of his nose. In mounting panic I asked her to describe the follicle situation on the top of his head. Her answer haunts me still: ‘Like a billiard ball, he was.’
I also learned that dissecting diseased liver and staring down microscopes identifying worms in ruminant faeces never grew on me the way that I assumed it would. In one practical exam, asked to identify the origin of various tapeworms, I tossed in the towel completely and scribbled dementedly—Nematodes 2 U, Nematodes Direct and Twenty-Four Hour Nematode—We never close! It was a cry for help if there ever was one.
My dear friend, the late, great Christchurch humourist A.K. Grant, rang me once complaining about Helen Clark’s gloomy persona on television.
‘I accept that she is an admirable woman in many respects,’ he sighed down the phone, ‘but why does she persist in looking as if permanently poised to announce the death of the poet Keats?’ She did and still does, more so since losing the race for the job of Secretary-General of the UN, which she would have done very well. Our parasitology lecturer, Nobby Charleston, wore the same expression after marking our practical exam. Normally a decent, soft-spoken man, he started wailing and beating his breast the moment he entered the lecture theatre—in all his time teaching he had never known such impudence. There was someone in the class who thought he was funny, but he wasn’t. He could see this person now, sitting right at the back, looking very pleased with himself, when this person really needed to wake his ideas up!
I hadn’t joined the dots at this point and was wondering what anyone could possibly have done to rile Nobby like this, and looked around to discover that the only person sitting right at the back was me. It was Nobby, bless him, who first alerted me to the fact I wasn’t cut out for veterinary science, and that I should quit and become a cartoonist or a writer. I didn’t listen to him, however, and struggled on haplessly, wasting everyone’s time for another year.
STRICTLY SPEAKING I WAS NOT expelled from vet school—just asked not to re-enrol. The shame and sense of failure was still crushing. I could hear my father’s voice in my head: ‘Egghead has failed …’
At Oxford and Cambridge disgraced undergraduates are ‘sent down’ and may not enter university buildings, or even travel within a certain distance of them. I came very close to being ‘sent down’ in the wake of Masskerade 69. The Vice Chancellor thought about it then thought better of it. This is a great shame—an exclusion zone around the vet school would have suited me down to the ground.
I had some inkling of the furore to come when I showed the very first copy off the printing press to Mum and she burst into tears. At peak outrage the beleaguered Professorial Board kicked for touch and referred it to the Indecent Publications Tribunal, who came back months later with this ruling.
The dominant impression conveyed by Masskerade 69 is one of barely relieved vulgarity. In word and picture its content is coarse in conception and crude in expression. Its frequent resort to the subject of sex as prop for its humour, the tasteless attacks on religious forms and attitudes and a series of jokes involving disease, bestiality, and racial prejudice undoubtedly offend against normal standards of propriety and good taste.
This is simply not the case. It was actually a carefully thought-out and stylish publication for its time. Its only crime was making fun of things that were previously considered out of bounds, compounded by an obvious glee in doing so. It pre-dated Monty Python’s scandalous (at the time) movie Life of Brian by ten years. It entered the same territory, albeit without their finesse, that Eddie Izzard and Ricky Gervais colonised in their monologues 40 years later. I am still fond of Jesus on the phone talking to Doubting Thomas about the loaves and fishes. ‘Picnic? What picnic? How many coming? Five thousand people? That’s a big picnic, Tom. What are we going to feed them? Seven fish and three loaves of bread! What are you expecting, Tom? A miracle?’
There is nothing Freudian happening here. I wasn’t rebelling against a puritanical upbringing. My father was from Northern Ireland and nominally Protestant. When Feilding was hit by a spate of church arsons he was for a time one of the suspects. I’m not sure on what basis, but he was more than capable of claiming involvement as a joke. When Mum left him for good the neighbours commented that they hadn’t seen Joan for a while. ‘That’s because I had her put down,’ he responded matter-of-factly. They were shocked. ‘Well, she was getting old and smelly, leaking and dripping, with me traipsing behind sliding newspaper under her arse.’ They rang the cops, who turned up asking where Mum was. ‘Palmerston North,’ he replied, ‘which if you believe John Cleese is as close to death as you can get without actually dying.’
Mum had a childhood steeped in fierce, florid Catholicism, which she later resented and rejected to the point that on her deathbed she made it plain she wanted no hymns, no scripture readings and no priests at her funeral. Instead a bottle of Jameson’s was to be placed on top of her lilac coffin along with shot glasses and we were to drink a toast to her as we filed out into the Napier sun while Louis Armstrong sang ‘What a Wonderful World’.
Masskerade 69 reflected the turbulent, querulous tenor of the era—the zeitgeist, as Bunker or Murray Bramwell would have put it. On the cover of the 8 April 1966 edition of Time magazine, in large, bold red type on a black background, the editors asked their famous question: ‘Is God dead?’ It was an age when everything was being questioned, though an old lady tagging along at the rear of an anti-Vietnam War march through Palmerston North provided an answer, at least to her own satisfaction, with a placard that read: ‘God’s not dead. He isn’t even sick!’
Massey students demanded more proof. One night in the refectory we held a symposium that picked up where the Time cover left off. We asked if God had ever existed in the first place. I went along with Bunker and Quinny. There were about 200 students, many of us barely out of our teens, struggling to grow beards, wearing roll-necked pullovers, corduroy jackets, moleskin strides and suede desert boots and smoking pipes. We crowded into a big upstairs room and listened to a procession of impassioned speakers insisting that all religion was hokum and irrelevant in the modern world. There was no dissent. Every condemnation of every denomination was cheered loudly until a monstrous, demented-looking older man with thinning blond hair tied back in a long ponytail, dressed in blue cleaner’s overalls, armed with a mop which he pounded on the floor like a biblical staff, stormed the stage. Pushing a shocked speaker aside he snatched the microphone and in a thick Afrikaner accent began to berate the hall:
‘Listen to yew! Yew are so brafe in your blasphemy! I call on any one of yew to cum up ’ere an’ call on Gawd to proof he exist by strikin’ yew det weeth a bolt of lightning! Hew among yew is brafe enuff to invite the wrath of the Lawd upon yew and be reduced to essh?’
I leaned over to the Bunker and said in a low voice that this was silly and he should take up the challenge.
‘Fuck off,’ he whispered back. I turned to Quinny, who shook his head.
‘Any one of yew?’ the man roared, his eyes blazing like lasers. Two hundred people lowered their gaze and shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Needless to say there were no takers.
WITH PERFECT TIMING, MASSKERADE 69 hit the streets just before Easter and all hell broke loose. The Vice Chancellor at the time, Dr Alan Stewart, was deeply offended, as was a Hawke�
��s Bay priest, Father Duffy, who started a campaign to get Masskerade banned. Letters of outrage and disgust poured into the Manawatu Evening Standard. Overnight a fundraising appeal for student hostels was stalled in its tracks. The Students’ Association was threatened with prosecution and heavy fines. Gallery, a current-affairs television programme hosted by Brian Edwards, wanted me to fly to Wellington to debate the issue with Father Duffy. The Student Union was aghast at the prospect of me being interviewed live on air. I guess they feared I might bring my bag, alarm clock and phone. RING! RING! ‘It’s for you, Father Duffy. God wants a quick word …’ They told me bluntly that if I went on television against their wishes they would wash their hands of me entirely. I would be on my own in the dock if I got sued and they would not meet any of my legal costs. I caved in and declined the invite—more cowardice that I still regret.
I didn’t miss out entirely on going head to head with an enraged priest—the Massey Catholic Students’ Association invited me to their pastoral centre to debate the merits of my publication with Father Jim Kebbell—a rising star in the church and something of a heartthrob with devout Catholic girls and girls of atheist persuasion alike. About 30 students and I sat in awkward silence in the large lounge waiting for my interlocutor to arrive. He swept in, black cassock flying, in full Spanish Inquisition mode. With his sharp features and fierce eyes he looked terrifying. I was terrified. But it was soon obvious that his heart wasn’t really in it and his diatribe petered out. By the end of the evening we were laughing like drains together and became good friends. This sometimes meant a knock after midnight and Jim asking if I wanted a game of chess.
