by Nigel Latta
BEWARE THE ROAD OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR
MY FAVORITE LINE from The Lord of the Rings is one I use in my work all the time. Bilbo, the old hobbit, warns Frodo, his nephew and the ring bearer, of the perils of the road: ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door…there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.’
Good advice.
We should all be wary where we tread.
First I need to tell you a little bit about how I came to be doing what I do, about the road I’ve travelled. Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with stories about childhood exploits and the annual family caravan trip in the Christmas holidays. These stories are only interesting if you were there, otherwise it’s just other people’s dust you have to politely endure.
There is the dead man who vomited in my mouth though, you probably need to know about that, and an old black Imperial typewriter, and an interruption. All three were life-changing, although in quite different ways.
The typewriter first, because that’s what led to the dead man, and by a longer and more winding path to the interruption, and finally to this book. Doors are where you find them, and they hardly ever look as you’d expect.
I grew up in Oamaru, a small town on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand, one of those small towns where the locals pronounce the name differently to how the weather people say it on the telly. I’m the second of four children, with an older brother, a younger brother and a younger sister.
I was blessed with the best of parents. My mother is a strong woman. She takes people as they are, and isn’t afraid to stand up for the things she believes in. She is both compassionate and kind, and was always there for us as kids, day and night, without fail. My father was—amongst a host of other remarkable things—a passionate musician. He was a good man who lived his life for all it was worth, and he loved us in a quiet unassuming way that I never fully appreciated until I became a father myself. He died shortly before this book was finished, and even though I miss him terribly, I know his life echoes on through mine. Whatever good things I do are only possible because of where I came from. I had the very best of starts.
They were also patient, my parents. In truth I don’t know how they got through my teenage years without hitting me on the head with a brick, burying me in the garden and telling the neighbours I’d run off to join the circus. Like all kids with loving parents, I took them completely for granted. There isn’t a day that goes by now, as I listen to the horror stories of other people’s childhoods, when I don’t think of my own parents and feel profound gratitude for all they did for me.
When I was 13 I found an old black Imperial typewriter at the back of a second-hand shop. I can’t remember why I went in there, but I do remember it was sitting between two battered office chairs, brooding in the shadows as if it was pissed off I’d taken so long to get there. It cost $50, which was a lot of money for me back then, but I bought it without even stopping to think. How could I not?
That old black Imperial looked positively evil, as if it couldn’t wait for my fingers on its keys. In truth it looked as if it wanted to eat me whole. It was a real Stephen King moment, and back then Mr King was da man in my eyes.
I lugged that old Imperial all the way home. It was so heavy it felt as if it already had all the words stacked inside. By the time I got it home my arms were aching, but I set it up and started writing, and it felt wonderful. Really wonderful. Just like the real thing.
I still have some of those old stories hidden away. Odd little bits and pieces, like the one about a tree with human heads for fruit, and a man sitting in the hot sun who gets turned into a giant cocoon by a freaky little caterpillar. Arguably one could say that my gaze has always fallen a little outside mainstream.
After a while though, I started to feel as if I needed to know more about the world. I needed to experience a bit of life if I was going to write about it. So, without too much thought, I set out trying to find the world, to see what was there. Which is what brought me—some six or eight months later—to the dead man.
Here’s the thing—if you really want to find the world you often don’t have to go very far. Heaven and hell are usually just around the corner. In my case I found it in a bedroom in a house which, by a strange coincidence, was only about a hundred yards from the second-hand store where I bought my old typewriter.
I can still remember the room—two single beds, one on each side, a window set back in an alcove. Old-people carpet, old-people curtains. On the wall over the body a watercolour painting of some Chinese junks. For some reason that picture is the clearest detail of all, even though this scene took place over 20 years ago. Perhaps it’s because I stared at it so hard for the 10 or so minutes I was up there alone with him. Some things stay with you, I guess.
And then there’s the dead man, lying sprawled across the bed in a dressing gown. He’s old, 70-something probably. Mouth hanging open, eyes too. Staring at nothing, or maybe he’s staring at something the rest of us can’t see. His skin is grey. Whatever the case he looked dead to me, but what did I know? I was only 14 and this was pretty much my first real live dead guy.
It was a fluke my being there, one of those unforeseen things. I was visiting someone who worked for the local ambulance service when the hospital called to tell him about the dead man. We went round to see if we could help. I went because I was a cadet in St John’s and aspired to working on the ambulance with the big boys and girls.
An old woman greeted us at the gate, upset, babbling something. I don’t remember much about her, probably because at that age babbling old ladies weren’t as cool as cardiac arrests. Then next thing we’re upstairs and I’m doing CPR.
‘You start and I’ll see where the ambulance is,’ said the other guy, disappearing out the door.
Oh shit, was all I thought back then.
Fifteen compressions to two breaths. It sounds easy, except in real life it’s anything but. What the books and the plastic resuscitation dummies don’t give you is the real deal, and that beats just about everything. You do chest compressions on a dummy and you don’t feel the click of ribs breaking the first time you push down too hard because you’re too juiced and not thinking. You also don’t get the noises. The dead man groaning as you one-one-thousand two-one-thousand three-one-thousand your way through the drill. Life leaking out in little protesting grunts. And then there’s the smell, the stomach-turning acidic stink of vomit. And the taste. Except it’s so much more than just the taste, it’s the slick feel as you try and seal his mouth with your own. The slippery rubbery cave of an old dead man’s mouth.
Breathe…one-one-thousand two-one-thousand three-one-thousand…
And you can’t stop, because that would be weak. There’s no room for weakness here. This old man’s life was in my hands, a stupid boy who wanted to find the world and then discovered when he did that it was too late to cry stop.
On and on, the taste of vomit filling my mouth. Staring at that picture on the wall as if my life depended on it, two Chinese junks sailing down a grey river. Trying not to think, willing myself to keep going. The old man was dying, and I couldn’t stop trying to save him.
Except there was a moment when I paused, simply unable to continue. The stench and the taste were horrific. I remember kneeling over him, trying to contain a desperate urge to bolt, not wanting to put in another breath. Feeling revolted, scared, guilty and useless at the same time, all in a swirling mess. This man was dying because I was too chicken-shit to keep going.
And then, at the very edge of my ability to function, it happened. Something inside moved. Actually it felt like it reached out and pushed me. In that moment I discovered something fundamentally important that would carry me through many more dark places in my life: I discovered that when shit came to shovel, I didn’t fold, I shovelled.
I leaned down and sealed his mouth with mine, closing my eyes. Breathe.
Soon after that the ambulance arrived. They burst in with all the ge
ar and went to work. It was no good. Ten minutes after they arrived a local GP turned up and pronounced him dead, saying he was probably dead before we got there.
I felt like crying and giggling all in the same breath. Instead I tried to look as if I was cool with the whole thing.
‘You OK?’ one of the ambulance officers asked me later outside.
‘Sure,’ I replied, lying as all 14-year-old guys do about such things. ‘It was kinda gross was all.’
Now, whilst I’m not arguing that this sort of experience is necessarily a good thing for kids of that age, I know that in the long run it was good for me. People often comment about how ‘laid-back’ I am, how I don’t seem to get ruffled by things. In truth, most of the time, I don’t. The reason is that I grew up using a dead guy’s vomit in my mouth as the yardstick. That was bad. Most other things, in comparison, aren’t so bad. It may not be the most orthodox approach to life, but it works for me.
It also gave me a taste, so to speak, for the more extreme experiences the world has to offer. I don’t mean extreme as in climbing mountains and jumping out of planes, but extreme as in the human experience. After the dust settled I found my horizons had been recalibrated. I didn’t want mainstream; I wanted more of what happened at the edges, the places where the human condition fades into black. Not death per se, but certainly the points where the jitterbugs really start to jitter.
The place where shit comes to shovel.
It would be another 10 years before I’d finally have a name for that place, a name I found in the middle of my second Master’s degree, late one night as I was sitting thinking how on earth to describe what I’d seen in my ‘research’ evaluating a sex-offender treatment programme. I typed it out on my little Mac Powerbook without even thinking:
Into the Darklands, that’s what it felt like…
Which brings us to the interruption. The point where the first part of my life ended and the second part began. It’s funny, isn’t it, that a whole piece of your life can finish, and you don’t even know it? That was how it was for me, and a phone call in the middle of a meeting was all it took.
I was sitting in a small nondescript building in the middle of the city waiting to talk to a bloke who ran a men’s stopping-violence programme. I was at the beginning of the clinical-psychology programme at Auckland University and was looking for a research project for my master’s thesis. The stopping-violence programme was 10 weeks long and, ever the pragmatist, I’d leapt at it. The idea of being in and out in two and a half months appealed greatly. I’ve never had too many pretensions about contributing to the great onwards march of knowledge. In truth I didn’t give a shit about any of that stuff, I just wanted to get my ticket and get out as fast as I could.
‘Hi, I’m Nigel,’ I said, sitting down across from the programme manager.
‘Hi, Nigel…’ he began, and then the phone rang. I sat there politely for a few minutes while he spoke to a client.
‘Are you the student?’
I turned round and nodded at the man at the other desk.
‘I hear you’re going to evaluate their programme?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why don’t you evaluate ours instead?’
I laughed. ‘What’s your one?’
‘The SAFE programme.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a sex-offender treatment programme.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Why do you want to evaluate a boring old stopping-violence programme? Sex offenders are far more interesting.’
‘Umm…it’s just I did kind of tell these other guys I was interested in theirs.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ he said, waving a hand dismissively. ‘They’ll get over it.’
‘What kinds of things have your guys done?’
‘Sexually abused kids, some flashers, peepers, obscene phone callers.’
‘How long is the programme?’
‘Six months to a year.’
Bugger, I thought, that’s a long time. ‘That’s a long time,’ I said.
‘These guys really need it,’ he said. ‘It’s incredibly difficult work. Far more interesting than a stopping-violence programme. We see them in groups each week then we take them away for a weekend and do victim-empathy work.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Understanding the pain they’ve caused their victims.’
‘Oh.’ Then I had the thought that always precedes both the best and the worst decisions I ever make: That sounds pretty cool.
By the time the other guy finished his telephone call it was a done deal.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, putting the phone down. ‘Now, where were we?’
I turned back to him. ‘Well, actually, the plan’s changed a little…’
And that’s how the second part of my life began.
Just like that.
That research project was the point at which everything changed. Within a month I would have observed my first victim-empathy weekend, and after that there was no going back.
WATERSHED
watershed (waw’-) n. 1. Line of separation between waters flowing to different rivers or basins or seas. 2. (fig.) turning-point e.g. in history.
Concise Oxford Dictionary, seventh edition
I BELIEVE SOME moments resonate long after others have faded. Some moments hum all the way through to the end.
Imagine if you will a little flat in Mt Eden, and a young man sitting on the edge of a bed. There’s a bag lying at his feet, half unpacked, and he looks exhausted, unshaven.
In many ways that young man seems a stranger to me now. He’s very young, and very naive. He thought he knew a lot about the world—as young men invariably do—but he’s just discovered the world is deeper and darker than he’d ever imagined.
He’s too tired and ragged to know it as he sits on that bed, but the physics of his world have been altered forever.
It didn’t sound like that big a deal: observing the sex offenders’ victim-empathy weekend. In fact it sounded kind of cool. This was the real deal, working with bad guys just like on telly. The group started on Friday night and went through till Sunday afternoon. There’d be two facilitators and all I’d have to do was watch. How hard could that be?
I was nervous on the Friday night. In fact, truth be told, I was scared. I’d never been in a group of sex offenders before, and the idea of what I was about to embark on had put the jitters up me. I also hadn’t met the group facilitators before, so I had no idea who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.
‘Hi,’ I said, just a little too loudly as I walked down the drive of the complex in the middle of suburban North Shore. ‘I’m the researcher from the university. Where can I find the group leaders?’
The last bit was especially loud. I’m not one of you, is what I wanted them to know.
‘In there,’ one of the men said.
I walked into the kitchen and found a group of five or six men standing around. Some with coffee, some without. Only one of them actually looked like a sex offender.
‘I’m the researcher from the university,’ I said again in my slightly too-loud voice. ‘Anyone know where the group leaders are?’
‘That’ll be us,’ a man said, stepping forward. There were two of them, Tom and Andy, both complete strangers to me. Little did I know that in the years to come they would both become valued colleagues and friends. Back then they were only slightly less scary than everyone else. In fact, in some ways they were scarier because they were both experienced clinicians. What if they could tell what a fruitcake I really was?
‘What do you need from us?’ Tom asked.
‘Nothing really,’ I replied, trying to sound like a seasoned researcher. ‘I’m just here to observe.’
‘There are no observers on this weekend,’ said Andy. ‘If you’re here then you’re part of it. Everybody works.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘No problem.’
Holy shit, I
thought.
It took another hour or so for all the men to arrive. There were 12 in all. Some of them looked the part, but most of them didn’t. One of them looked as if he’d be more at home in a boardroom.
The men gathered in a large room, sitting in a small circle of comfortable chairs. The conversation was tense, subdued. Just before Tom and Andy came in, one of them leaned over and offered me a bag of pineapple lumps. ‘Would you like one?’ he asked.
I thought I should be polite. ‘Sure,’ I said, reaching out. At that precise moment I realised what had just happened: I was taking lollies from a sex offender.
Then Tom and Andy came in, and we were off.
My naivety was immediately apparent. During the opening round, one of the men, Stuart, said he didn’t want to come because thinking about his offending made him feel like killing himself.
‘Really?’ said Tom.
‘Yeah,’ replied Stuart, his voice sounding flat. ‘I thought about killing myself just to get out of coming here.’
Now, at that time I was an impressionable young clinical-psychology student, full of earnest good intent. At that stage I still believed what people told me. As a result I was expecting Tom to do a suicide screen and all this warm and fuzzy empathic stuff.
‘Well,’ said Tom, as if he were discussing what was on telly that night, ‘are you going to top yourself here? Because if you are I’d prefer you do it now so we don’t waste any time on you.’
I was stunned. This was not how we’d practised it in psychology school.
