Tinkering

by John Clarke

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said the bloke. ‘There’s still coffee in that.’

  Holmes slapped the cup back down again and glared at the bloke. ‘Well, fuckin’ drink it,’ he advised.

  Paul and I had grown up with a lot of the same sounds in our ears and he was a particularly keen observer of the cadence and idioms in local radio. If you asked him the time he’d look at his watch, lower his voice slightly and say, ‘It’s Firestone Tyres time, 4.26, Clarkie. Firestone. Where the rubber meets the road.’ John, Ginette and Paul were young Turks in the Downstage acting company but acting wasn’t really what Paul wanted to do. He really wanted to be a radio. His special forte was racing commentators. In a previous show I’d written a piece for myself to do as the race-caller Peter Kelly and had established to my own satisfaction that it resonated with an audience and that racing and its language and associations worked as metaphor. When I met Paul I saw that he didn’t do just Peter Kelly, he did Syd Tonks and Dave Clarkson as well and could confect a broadcast as all three of them. We would sometimes do this together, in pubs. We’d get an empty jug each (try this yourself; it’s better into an empty jug) and we’d make up a race call, crossing to each other when we needed a break. Paul’s favourite race was Peter Kelly’s call of the 1970 Wellington Cup and he’d generally wind up with ‘…and with three great strides Il Tempo will take the 1970 Wellington Cup…’ and the rest would be lost in delight and general uproar in the bar.

  When I wrote a Kelly piece in those days I gave it to Paul to perform. He did them superbly. He would disappear into its rhythm, adding little flourishes and including people he saw in the room as part of the race-day atmosphere. It was a piece of idiosyncratic magic and was a joy to watch. The audience loved the sound. It was the sound of New Zealand on a Saturday.

  That winter, we were asked to provide the mid-evening entertainment for the annual ball at Chateau Tongariro. We tailored the show for the crowd, lacing it with references to Griff Bristed and Grady Thompson and other citizens among the snow community. We had to make do with a very small rostrum for a stage and we changed behind a screen. There was nowhere else to go and as the lights dimmed we might have been Christians at the Coliseum. The crowd was very large and had been engaged in rutting rituals and wassail.

  From the outset the show went beautifully and Holmes doing Peter Kelly was a sensation. When he finished the racing commentary the crowd lifted the roof off. We looked at each other as they roared and whooped and it was pretty clear that he should repeat it immediately, in its entirety, which he happily did. The response was even greater this time because Holmes now relished something he knew was working, and he eased the throttle open and gave it the herbs. The crowd went nuts again when he finished and after we completed the show he moved away to the bar and did it a third time.

  We were all feted afterwards but Holmes was the genius of the night and he was never the same again. He didn’t go to bed that night and he didn’t stop talking as Peter Kelly for the whole rest of our time at the chateau. He couldn’t stop doing the thing they loved. He was captured by the audience’s love for what he was doing and an addiction was born. Holmes could giggle about how silly it all was but these were the first steps towards a towering need and towards a belief that, if you get the voice right, it doesn’t much matter what you’re saying. My very fond memory of Paul tells me he didn’t always agree with this rather dangerous proposition. He was a good fellow and a very gifted natural performer. He was full of affection for others, loved every bit of his life and at his best he was magnificent. We’ll miss him.

  Happy the man, and happy he alone,

  He who can call today his own:

  He who, secure within, can say,

  Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

  Be fair or foul, or rain or shine

  The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.

  Not Heaven itself, upon the past has power,

  But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

  John Dryden, Horace, Odes 3, 29

  Paul Holmes (1950–2013)

  Marcus Craig

  Last weekend in a beautiful area just north of Brisbane, Marcus Craig died, aged seventy-three. Marcus and I worked together in the mid 1970s at a club in Auckland called The Ace of Clubs, an allegedly sophisticated barn in Cook Street run by Phil Warren. In business terms the stage entertainment was part of a smoke and mirrors argument designed to help obtain a liquor license. As I was leaving one night after the show, a quite small and very drunk patron was engaging in racial abuse and attempting to punch the very large and extremely sober bouncer. The bouncer, who had clearly dealt with sophistication before, grabbed the front of the man’s shirt with one hand and turned it slightly so it became a handle and then he ran the surprised loudmouth about a foot and a half up the wall behind him so his feet were off the ground. ‘Listen, mate,’ he said softly to the man. ‘If you hit me. And I ever find out about it. I’m going to be fuckin annoyed. Now, go home.’ And he left the man to crumple gently on to the ground and consider the position in its many aspects.

  Marcus was the main entertainment at the club in those years. He appeared in drag as a character called Diamond Lil, often with the excellent Doug Aston as his partner and a house band led by Doug Smith. When I was there the marvellous Bridgette Allen was also on the bill. Bridgette could sing anything and could still the room to pin-drop or light it up like a Christmas tree. Doug Aston came from a British music hall tradition and often added form and structure to what Marcus was doing. What Marcus most wanted to do was sing opera, so he’d get the drag schtick working and then repay himself with an aria so unrelated to anything else in the show or to the way he looked that the audience was delighted to find itself somewhere it had never been before.

  Aside from being a terrific performer, Doug Aston was a caring and perceptive man who knew Marcus well and looked after him when he struck the occasional iceberg. For Marcus, the club and his work on-stage were life itself. He threw all his energy into it, his timing was fabulous, he was very generous on stage and he could really sing. Danny la Rue and many others specialised in glamorous costume changes and in Danny’s case in representing a cavalcade of great female stars. Marcus simply went out as Lil, with the burners on high and the safety catch off. His costume and demeanour were exaggerated to a point where you wondered whether he was impersonating a female or impersonating a female impersonator. Whatever he was doing, he was very good at it and the audience loved it. I don’t know when it all came to an end but sometime during the 1990s he moved to Sydney and after a period working at the Australian Opera Company, he moved to Queensland where he had a classical music show on Brisbane radio.

  He remembered his days on stage with great fondness and with some pride. He was right to do so.

  Shalom, Marcus.

  Marcus Craig (1940–2013)

  Bob Hudson

  In 1976 I was in the vaudeville business. The odds against this were fairly high. It wasn’t what I’d set out to do and I dropped stones all the way in so I could find my way back out.

  Fred Dagg was working nicely on television but the going rate for two minutes of heroically underprepared material wasn’t sufficient to trouble the scorer, despite having doubled from a base of $38 in 1974. In order to make a living it was necessary to tour the country, take in washing and live on what my father called ‘a glass of water and a look up the street’. One night after a high quality workout at a cabaret in Auckland, I got talking to Bob Hudson, a boy of about the same age who’d been in the audience. Bob was from Sydney and had just had an enormous hit across Australia with ‘The Newcastle Song’, an ironical tribute to the city of his youth. We were both dealing with the Micawberish aspects of being writer/performers and we agreed to meet up again in Wellington the following week. Helen and I were considering moving our base from Wellington to Auckland at the time and we spent a couple of days driving around the beautiful Waitakeres imagining ourselve
s somewhere up there, in the bush.

  When we got back to Wellington, Bob and I had various things to do and we arranged to meet after I’d finished doing a record and book signing at James Smith’s. This was to be done in character so I was dressed in a black singlet and shorts, fashionable footwear of the period and a hat. Fred had a discerning audience of all ages and a large lunch-time crowd had gathered in the great emporium. After a while I noticed that Bob had found the place and it all seemed to be going gangbusters when the police arrived. Three policemen walked purposefully up past the queue of waiting citizens and directly to where I was sitting.

  ‘John Clarke?’ said one, a born leader of men.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Step outside, please.’ They waited for me to stand up, put down the tools of my trade and join them on a very public and completely silent walk out into the street. The population of Wellington quickly poured into Manners Street and watched as I was taken, in full costume, to a police vehicle for questioning. I’m pretty sure the crowd would have ruled out the prospect that I was a murderer. They were probably tossing up between sex crimes with small animals and some sort of tax fraud, possibly involving the $38.

  ‘You are John Clarke,’ checked one of the policemen.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Thought so,’ he said.

  ‘What’s this about?’ I asked. ‘I’m actually supposed to be in there doing a signing.’

  ‘Are you the owner of a red Mazda car, registration number HRV683?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you explain why your vehicle was seen last week in the Titirangi area driving very slowly and sometimes stopping in gateways and looking up driveways?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was driving around Titirangi last week.’

  ‘Were you driving slowly?’

  ‘Yes, we were looking at houses.’

  ‘Your vehicle was seen in that area at that time.’

  ‘Yes. That would be right. That’s where it was.’

  ‘The vehicle was reported as behaving suspiciously.’

  ‘Suspiciously?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘The person who reported it. The vehicle was reported as behaving in a suspicious manner.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have rung me or written me a letter about this?’

  ‘We read in the paper that you’d be here today so we thought it’d be a good time to pop down and clear this up.’

  ‘Do you mind if I go back inside now and do what I came here for?’

  ‘No, that’s fine. Just checking. Thank you, Mr Clarke.’

  I went back into the store and completed the signing, explaining to people that my vehicle had been behaving suspiciously the previous week in Titirangi.

  I never heard any more on the matter.

  Bob Hudson, who tells this story rather well but who requires oxygen around the bit where the police haul me out of the signing and question me in the street, had a radio show on what was then 2JJ in Sydney, and had been playing stuff from the Fred Dagg records, so when I was looking at working in Australia I found that he’d made me quite well known. A very smart and kind person, Bob has also given me very good advice a couple of times, and he and his wife Kerry opened their house to Helen and me when I knew no one else in Sydney and didn’t know what I was doing. We worked together on various projects, notably writing material for Bette Midler’s stage show. Bob later completed a PhD in Archaeology and now works at Sydney University, specialising in the mediaeval Buddhist period in Burma.

  The Fred Dagg Advisory Bureau

  Frederick, of the House of Dagg

  Many older readers will recall an earlier time in New Zealand, a vivid and exhilarating time when a young nation, poised on the threshold of greatness, called forth from its ranks a natural leader.

  From the starkly beautiful central North Island, erosion capital of the world and home of the Raurimu Spiral, came a figure uniquely attuned to the hour. No problem was too great, no matter so Byzantine in its complexity that he could not cut to its heart. He was fair-minded in all things, graceful under pressure and was capable of developing strong opinions unspoilt by knowledge or formal logic. He specialised in the common sense solution and the self-evident truth, and his language was that of Arnold, of Herbert and of Trevor.

  His name was Frederick, of the House of Dagg. Born many years earlier, for reasons which need not trouble us here, he had undergone a comprehensive training in all aspects of farmwork and had then attended school from the age of five. His schooling was typical of its time and extremely effective in every way. The New Zealand Education Department had set rigorous standards. Fred learnt that the angles outside parallel lines were equal to the opposite ones inside the lines. He learnt the French for ‘big absorbent bath towel’. By the age of seventeen he knew the valency of carbon and the German for ‘I have fallen in love with the exit to the static air-display’. These skills have not been required nearly as often as the department led him to believe but there is still time and, should the need ever arise, Fred and a whole generation of New Zealanders will be able to calculate the compound interest on the square root of x, or the use of irony by Jane Austen, whichever is the lesser, and discuss its impact on the Chartist Movement. (30 marks).

  As he obtained to the estate of adulthood, Fred was already instinctively grappling with important issues of nationhood and philosophy. He supported the dropping of superphosphate on farms because he had a brother-in-law with a dung-dusting concern up the Pohangina Valley, but he was troubled by the realisation that the cobalt in the soil of the volcanic plateau was building up to a point where they would soon have to drop soil on it to prevent it from becoming a cobalt deposit.

  Matters came to a head when Fred received a letter from his friend Bruce Bayliss, who was at that time a seasonal mutton-birder on Stewart Island. Bruce was not a man given to display but it was obvious that he had a problem. There was no work on the island and Bruce was obliged to pick up the unemployment benefit, which at that time was $137. There was no unemployment officer on Stewart Island and in order to obtain the benefit Bruce caught the boat to Bluff, travelled by bus to Invercargill, collected the emolument and arranged lodgings for the night since the next bus back to Bluff did not leave until the following morning. The next day he caught the boat at Bluff and arrived home in the middle of the afternoon. The total cost of this exercise was $138.

  Bruce wrote a letter to the department. The problem with collecting the assistance, he pointed out, was that it was not commercially viable. The department replied that Bruce was the victim of an anomaly in the system. They thanked him for calling it to their attention. The reason there was no unemployment office on Stewart Island, they explained, was that for some time there had been no unemployment there. But since he was now unemployed and since he lived there, would he care to become the unemployment officer for the island? Bruce accepted the post and was sent a box of forms which were to be filled in each month, the top form to be sent to Wellington, the office copy to be filed alphabetically and cross-referenced as to date. At the end of the first month, Bruce sent off his first report stating that, since he was employed, there was now no unemployment on Stewart Island. As a result of this, the Department sacked him.

  Fred decided at this point it was time to clear his throat and deliver himself of a few opinions. This book contains some of them. They wouldn’t all fit.

  The Socratic Paradox

  Gidday. I’d like to have a word or two with you about the Socratic Paradox, which, without being too technical about it, is a paradox worked out by the late Socrates in order to explain some of the pitfalls involved in explaining things.

  The argument says in essence that you can’t learn things you don’t already know, and given the widely accepted view that there’s some difficulty to be encountered in trying to learn something you do already know, I’m afraid it’s beginning to look as if the whole business of learning is largely ov
errated and should probably be left alone.

  I personally have always held this to be more or less self-evident, although unfortunately my reasoning turns out to be a good deal less Platonic than I had hoped. Socrates argued that if you don’t know something you probably wouldn’t recognise the knowledge if it popped up in your porridge. And if you did recognise it then in some sense you must already have had the knowledge beforehand. And that, therefore, learning is merely a process whereby we recollect knowledge that is already in us.

  This, of course, touches on the Fred Dagg Theory of the Human Memory and even though Socrates doesn’t, so far as I know, have any real right of reply in the matter anymore, there are just one or two points I’d like to clear up.

  Firstly, if the knowledge is in there anyway, at what stage was it put there and whose job is it to go about the place feeding knowledge in through people’s ears before the memory takes over and renders the whole thing academic? As a matter of fact, I knew a bloke once who thought we were all born with a certain number of words in us and when we talked them out, we died, which impressed me as being fundamentally sound until I found out that he thought ‘Portia Faces Life’ was the story of a woman named Portia Face.

  This knowledge represented the recollection of something I don’t think Socrates has made enough allowance for, and that is that lack of knowledge or the knowledge of things that aren’t quite right can be recalled just as easily and in some cases more easily than good solid everyday stuff like coming in out of the rain.

  It’s also possible to forget things and then forget that you’ve forgotten them. And then if you can recall the fact that you’ve forgotten something does this necessarily qualify as knowledge?

  As a matter of fact I’ll try to get back to you on this one. I’m a little bit confused at the moment and it’s nearly time for my tablet.