Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

Academe has grown edgier. Many still drowse in the sun

  but intellect sounds like the cocking of a sten gun.

  allusion to little-known Names in a special accent?

  It persists – but war’s grown; war, snarling out of that trip

  in which Freud and Marx are left and right thongs in a goosestep.

  Mind you, Jane Fonda plays in it too. It’s fairly thin war.

  The tiger is real, and in pain. He is fed on paper.

  When the decorous towers were shaken by screams and bare hands

  they deserved to be shaken. They had sought to classify humans.

  The kids were constructing a poem of feathers and pain,

  a prayer, a list, a shriek, it reached no resolution

  except to stay crucial. Their prophets said different things:

  Pour wax on the earth. Beat spirals into rings.

  But though they shamed Magog their father and crippled his war

  their own gnawed at them. They colonized one another.

  With the cameras running, somehow the beat had to go on

  (in times of trend, death comes by relegation)

  but selfhood kept claiming the best people hand over fist

  in a few months a third of mankind had been called fascist –

  as the music slowed, the big track proved to be

  ‘Fantasia of the World as a Softened University’.

  Some things did change. Middle class girls learned to swear

  men walked on the face of the moon once the Pill had tamed her

  and we entered our thirties. No protest avails against that

  the horror of Time is, people don’t snap out of it.

  Now student politicos well known in our day

  have grown their hair two inches and are running the country.

  Revolution’s established. There will soon be degrees

  conferred, with fistshake and speech, by the Dean of Eumenides.

  The degree we attained was that brilliant refraction of will

  that leaves one in several minds when facing evil.

  It’s still being offered. The Church of Jesus and Newman

  did keep some of us balanced concerning the meanings of ‘human’

  that greased golden term (all the rage in the new demiurgy)

  though each new Jerusalem tempts the weaker clergy.

  Academe has gained ground. She is the great house of our age,

  replacing Society, granting the entree to privilege

  likewise a museum, of peoples, of scholars, of writing –

  vampires at times may tend an iron lung.

  Her study is fashion, successive lock-gates leaking Time

  she loves this new goddess for whom abortion is orgasm,

  the talkative one. Nothing, now, less intense

  could thrill an elite above unwilled experience.

  When our elders, the castes who live by delegation,

  turned in, like unlicensed guns, imagination,

  thought, spirit, ideals to the all-wise University

  there were aspects of learning they did not foresee

  like being the Masses, Funny Little Men

  who live in the Suburbs and resemble Eichmann.

  Academe is the class struggle, and whatever side

  prevails will be hers. But I’m no alma-matricide

  her task’s also central: not making chemists and lawyers

  but getting the passionate through their mating-and-war-years

  to compromise. Remember? These shibboleths seem very real

  in the light of a burning green stick. But where death’s not literal

  grace must be discerning. We have seen noble minds become rabid

  and, as democrats, treat the Union stewards like dirt –

  doctrine take such a long view, especially in colonies

  that I’m grateful, like you, for downtown and country-town eyes

  that glint and stay subtle while knowledge is power and foreign

  through these, and some clowning, we master generalisation

  the blade of Caesarean rebirth which, day after day,

  freed words in us. And cut our homes away.

  That’s the nub and the cork of it. Most rhymes in -ism and -ation

  are nothing but cabals, though, out to take over the nation

  compared with true persons: with Peter who sought gallant war,

  with Herr Doktor Kurt H., who was a Siegfried-figure

  by his own admission, with Vanessa Max Laurence Penny

  of Honi Soit then – they were our peerless company –

  with Duncan the Sydney historian who in an Australian

  course might send off the First Fleet by August:

  and Dave Cross who died of a train, having seen much reality

  these dine with my uncles and hills in the restaurant of memory

  (which is also a starship, a marriage, a crystal of heaven)

  with the droll men of Physics who one day would capture the Quark

  with Germaine a few tables off winning a hard conversation

  and Lex who cried Poetry is not the wine but the cognac …

  Les A. Murray

  (from The Vernacular Republic, 1976)

  Couples

  this is a song an epithalamium it is also

  a requiem this is a poem about couples

  it is called racked and ranked

  the title comes from william faulkner

  who said

  ‘and thank God you can flee, can escape from that

  massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which

  overlays the earths, in which men and women in couples

  are racked and ranked like ninepins.’

  this is a poem for couples from which i cannot escape

  this is a poem for people who are not couples but who

  want to be couples from which i cannot escape a poem

  for all you out there people who are coupling up or

  breaking up just to couple up again and giving me

  second prize because

  kate jennings, lose him, weep him, couldn’t catch a man

  much less keep him

  couples create obstacle courses to prevent me from doing

  all sorts of things easily

  couples make sure i’m not comfortable with myself because

  i’m only half a potential couple

  couples point accusing right index fingers at me

  couples make me guilty of loneliness, insecurity, or

  worse still, lack of ambition.

  what do i do at the end of the day?

  lose him, weep him, think of catching a man,

  and eating him.

  Kate Jennings

  (from Come to Me My Melancholy Baby, 1975 –

  first read at the Balmain Reading of Prose and Verse)

  THE WAR

  What follows is the best personal story about the times of the war that I saw. It was written by someone who cannot be located now.

  John Witzig, who was an editor of Tracks, writes:

  I don’t know anything much at all about Pat Yank. The story came without any author’s name on it, so there isn’t any way of finding out. We used to get quite a few things like that. Strangely enough, the guy and girl who are mentioned in the story picked up hitch-hiking were David Elfick (who was one of the guys who started Tracks) and his girlfriend. He mentioned the incident at the time and later the story came in and we ran it.

  Pat Yank

  (from Tracks, 12/1971)

  Tuesday, 19 May 1971

  It was his third time round that made him decide – after he’d had his leg done in Japan and he was back home and about to be shipped out again – sitting in that Bus (the creeping meatball) watching the FREAKS making on Washington and then t’ remember the letter that his sister in California had sent him and how she’d wrote about what’d happened at ‘Kent State’ – knowing that once he was on that ship there was no
turning back – it was the GRINDER all over again and it was him, it was him on this bus – he choked and his throat grew dry – so now he was going back t’ ’NAM – but with less confusion now than before, knowing now that the whole fucking thing was a con, a massive sick fucking murdering con and he’d been one more faceless sucker – out t’ blow-up a few more villages, t’ torture a land that was already bleeding out of its own blood and in the name of freedom and democracy – he got it from the eyes of the people, everywhere he went – and yeah and I guess in a way he’d almost come t’ hate them too – but he knew they were right and that made it worse – and fuck man, this time he was gonna see he didn’t get his arse shot off … any fucking officer that ordered him t’ risk his neck would have his goddam head blown off … it was by the time ship had reached Sydney that he walked off and kept walking and didn’t turn back – and for most of the day wandered like a zombie with a tingling in his legs and his head spinning – the nightmares he’d had were too real the pain too bad – his knee was still hurting … and it didn’t seem to be getting better – they’d left a piece of shrapnel in his kneecap that someone had told him when he got t’ Sydney (when he got back t’ the ‘world’) t’ have a ride on the ferry – it was just o.k. and relaxing too – and anyway y’ got away from all that R & R routine of the Cross and loud chics wearing sailors hats out riding t’ rake y’ for all they could get … four double whiskies and the fucking knee was still hurting like a madman … when he got off the ferry … the yellow lights dazzled him for a while … but when he got t’ the end of the street he saw something unexpected, he saw waves, he saw them turn, crash, and boom and it was good – it was real good – t’ sit on that seat under those pine-trees and just think about nothing … he was almost happy … a warm February night and the breeze was fresh and cool on his face and he quietly wept – and thought later on how long since he’d been for a surf, and he was no top-star or anything like it but he felt deeply ’bout it (those hot lazy days at Santa Barbara with his sisters stereo playing on the roof and his stepfathers screaming out ‘can’t you turn that thing down a bit’) – it was after he’d sat there for how long he didn’t know … hours … that that voice had asked him if she could sit beside him and talk a bit … it was ANNE and the boy she’d been going with for just so long (yes she was dependent and security-conscious, but right then in a way so was he) had left her the week before and she was lost and he felt a genuine pity and liking for her and after talking for a fair while they decided t’ have a drink … and went t’ the hotel just along the beachfront … with bikes tangled and silver leaned in rows across the road and station wagons, salt-caked with misted windows – it was Friday night and the whole place was packed – he was still in his ‘clown-suit’ and felt more than slightly ridiculous … they hadn’t got more than half-way through when someone in a candy stripe jumper, bell-bottom strides and long hair and droopy moustache called him ‘a fucking poofta yank bastard’ and laid a punch right in his face and sent him crumbling t’ the floor in a spasm of shock and pain – when he regained his senses he was lying in broken glass beer and blood and ANNE was crying and half trying t’ help him up when someone in a white shirt and bow tie lifted him t’ his feet and half carrying and half walking him out the door … ‘we don’t want trouble,

  y’ better take y’ loverboy and go that’s all, just go’ … they went by taxi, back t’ ANNE’S where she bathed his face and he was soon asleep … when he woke she was standing over him, her hand cool on his forehead – it was beginning of the first real happiness he’d felt for over two years … the first morning he spent with her … he spent a full half-hour watching how the sun floated on her hair, went down and melted in little ovals across her face and listening t’ just the sound of her breathing (like when he’d had his motor-cycle accident just outside L.A.) the wind was so gentle through the trees and the sunlight was falling soft and dappled on the blue morning road and he was going in and out of the shadows – but this time there would be no accident he’d just fall into ANNE’S soft singing laugh and he wasn’t afraid t’ sleep now … waking now was like dreaming – for the first week ANNE stayed home from work … in the week-ends they drove up the peninsula t’ the northern beaches and they sun-baked in the isolated corners and he dreamed now, how peaceful it all was (he was living in the world now) he was nearly REAL … he was living PEACE and ’NAM now was only a shadow that the sun was gradually drowning – he surfed and they laughed and they watched the sunsets (instead of hiding from them) he didn’t feel ashamed t’ be a human being (‘there are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning, they are leaning out for love … and they will lean that way for ever while SUSANNE holds the mirror’) – it was almost six weeks now and the air was becoming cool and the days clear … she had started t’ come home unusually late and said that she had t’ work back … he thought little of it till one afternoon the phone rang and when he lifted the receiver a voice answered ‘hello, hello, ANNE is that you’ – he sat for about an hour trembling, falling apart, alone – she didn’t come home that night, nor the next, it was only the following afternoon of the third day that he saw her again and it was then that she laid it on him – she was sorry if she’d hurt him but it was her life and she was free but he was still her friend – he left that evening he went back and sat on the same seat where he’d met her and the sea wept for him as the moon dripped bleeding from the autumn sea and the pines dangled like knives over him – he slept that night on the beach, he thought of drowning himself – next morning he found a flat – just across the road – it was dingy and small but he didn’t care now – he didn’t even hardly look when he crossed the road – his knee started hurting again and his nightmares returned – cockroaches ran across the lino at night – he was afraid t’ sleep, he sat up late and drank by himself – when he did sleep he sometimes woke up breathing heaving in a cold sweat – he lost his appetite and got a job welding chair frames in a factory a few miles up – sometimes on the way back from work he’d seen a shop, a poster and bookshop, an ‘anti-war’ centre – it was two weeks before he felt well enough t’ go there – he found people there who were willing t’ listen and accept him for what he was – it was the very next week that the brick came through the window and hit his knee (his one good one) – he couldn’t go t’ work for a week and when they found out at work that he was American and without a passport and he was probably a deserter – he was axed – they’d rung up the landlady and it was time t’ move fast – we loaded all his stuff into the back of my beat up old vw and he came t’ live at the bookshop – that week-end we sat out the front all afternoon in the sun, PAT in sunglasses and grinning, giving v signs t’ the passing traffic and getting v signs in return and only occasionally getting sworn at by angry sideburned, check-shirt, junior executives in Valiants and Monaros – it was INSANE – it was SANE – we did it … PAT settled in O.K. but he still seemed restless and felt guilty and he was afraid t’ be alone – and still wore a knife he’d bought in Saigon strapped t’ his knee – he wrote a couple of letters back home and on week-day afternoons, I lent him my old board we’d walk across the lagoon t’ the beach and we had some good surfs, some really good ones – and then we’d walk back in the twilight with a light westerly blowing chilly across the deep grass on the edge of the lagoon and he talked ’bout his home, his brothers place in California and everything he missed and he mentioned ANNE and explained what had happened since he’d jumped ship but avoided speaking too much ’bout the war – the sun dropped and the crickets sang and behind us the Pacific Ocean spoke of PEACE – then one night, I decided t’ drive over town t’ see a girl I knew and I asked PAT if he wanted t’ come – ’cos I thought it’d ease his mind a little – when we got there we sat and played with clay while Sue made her pottery and Pat joked and Sue’s tongue was sticking out as she concentrated on her design and we listened t’ Steppenwolf and Led Zeppelin and it was kinda happy – we left ’bout eleven, driving t
hrough town we picked up a couple of hitchers, a girl and a guy who were going all the way t’ Palm Beach, we both felt restless and it started t’ rain so we didn’t mind taking them home and besides we’d kicked up a pretty good conversation when we got there they invited us up for a while – it was a house overlooking the beautiful Pittwater Quays, he was a magazine editor, and his dog was friendly and his pad was a good vibe – we talked about everything from the metaphysics of surfing t’ revolution and Doberman dogs – it was early morning and it was an honest thing and I felt that way when we left and started the drive back down the coast home and it was quiet and neither of us said much, I dropped PAT off at the bookshop – I hadn’t gone a mile when I got hit – it was like a bomb going off – the road was still slippery from the rain – and I ended up in hospital with a smashed-up leg – it was a week before PAT came – I’d already been operated on and my leg was in plaster – PAT had apparently hitched down t’ CANBERRA the night of the accident and he’d only found out when he’d come back and was introduced by the nurse t’ me as someone who claims t’ be ‘your adopted brother from Canberra’ – we talked and smoked and the people in the foyer were freaked out by the ‘hippie’ in the red headband, badges and ‘fist’ T-shirt complete with painted boots – it was the last time I was t’ see him, he’d hitched straight back to Canberra – I was ‘out of it’ for a month – and so glad t’ leave that hospital where I could see the surf from my bedroom window – I was home a further two weeks – when I finally drove back down the shop no one knew where he’d got to – then a couple of days later I went there – and there was still a cig. butt smoking in the ashtray – he’d left his uniform, knife, papers and service ribbons and he’d written something ‘a poem for the living people’ – and a note explaining he had that same afternoon stowed away on an American destroyer that was in port at the time and was sailing t’ California – it was crazy, it was sheer madness, it was like walking into the lion’s den, it seemed deliberate – he was bound t’ get caught. The next letter that came confirmed my fears, I’d just had my first surf in seven weeks after he’d left – it was from HAWAII and he explained we shouldn’t try t’ contact him ’cos he was in jail and it might incriminate us and besides he wouldn’t be round for a while