The backyard concrete is my dancefloor and the tarpaulin, suspended from the pergola is a wall keeping the night-time out and good times in. Tonight, my house is jazzed up—alive! I’m dancing Samba—these beats are pounding and slapping, like they’re trying to knock you off balance or something, but nothing can stop me now. My buddy Tony is right with me, laughing, and I’m yapping—I dare say positively yelling in this poor guy’s ear but neither of us catch a hot word from each other because these frequencies are blasting—blasting!
Tony’s wireframe glasses have him looking like a punk-rocker from back when photos had to be developed at a chemist. Anyway, I was sipping away at one of them fancy little things they pass around on trays at soirees.
“When’d I become the sort to use soiree in a sentence for the sentence’s sake?” I say to him but he’s up and left and I’m talking to a brick wall so I ditch the whole scene and take a breather out on the grass where it’s only the realm of stars and their flicker dance is talking to me saying, Now listen here, you go back inside because that’s a mighty-fine time in there if you’d only let a second crystallise long enough for it to be a proper memory. I took that advice and plunged back in, back into the fray, and I found my girl there seeking me out. I took her hand and we danced for a few measures, but that was long enough to establish a freeze-frame moment in my head, just the way that celestial council told me.
See, now I’m saying to my close buddy Jay that that snapshot picture I have of that moment is everything! It’s the whole jig! The Holy Grail of what we’re on about! Little did he know I’d be telling him for years that every party since has been us trying to recreate that one night.
“Yeah, say what you want,” he says. “That’s Jamieson talking.” You know we had words about that, oh in that moment the pounding beat in our souls from the playlist had driven us to a frenzy, driven us properly up the Congo and back!
It was when the sun was still meandering on the horizon that I bumped into my one-and-true, my pal-of-pals. Let me ask you, what does that say about us, all those names we give each other?
He’s telling me off saying, “You’ve changed,” and “See kid, the institution changes you,” and as I go to reference old pal Kerouac he looks at me and we both know he’s right.
We find ourselves on the dancefloor and I’m in the vibe—the groove—the beat is in me and around me—I am the groove and all I’m feeling is the hop and pop-skip-bounce of these hot dance beats. I’ve got the fellas and the ladies all crowding and vibing and it was then that I was really on top of it—like on top of the world like they say—and even now as I’m telling Jay I see his eyes twinkle because he knows full well, that night was a clear sky that we’ll never get back. It was a perfect night of exploration—of daring and plotting and planning mischief on the edge of legal with overly sugary mixers spinning away hours into the night. There was not a soul getting sick or miserable with the melancholy of a man long acquainted with the bottle.
Picture this, we’re at Jay’s folks’ place down San Remo way and there’s this porch out the back. Everything is ritardando. Time isn’t pressing anymore. It’s like we’re all having silent conversations with the drinks in our hands, and with the starry host watching over us.
“Fellas?” Tony’s got the wistful look behind the wireframes. He gets this look when he’s musing about the beauty of the Iliad.
“What’s good, T?” Danny replied, what, like thirty seconds later when we realised it was a question. Danny had been doodling away. I looked over his shoulder at what he was drawing.
“What do we do now? This week is all I’ve thought about since, like, Year 11.” I think we all just nodded. Times moved in blinks and breaths on nights like those.
It wasn’t until an absolute cascade of electrifying beats broke through the stereo system that the tendrils of dance and testosterone-craze had us back up on our feet, all of us, tipping our hats goodnight to the sentinel star and back we were, back into the drinking and grooving that was reaching a fever pitch.
“Lads! This track throws me back to my 18th! What a night!”
“Say, G-man, why’s it gotta be that every time we’re chilling you keep rattling on about that night?” That was Jay having a go.
“Buddy, back in the day wasn’t nothing as rowdy as this here man,” piped in Danny. I tell them though, raising the ever-diminishing toast with a glass or whole bottle, exactly this:
“Look at this here fellas, we have all this burden now of ease and abundance! Gone, I tell you, is half the fun! Gone is the titillating dare of the illegal age and the written consent and the smuggled drinks! Gone is the element of infamy that is lent to the brave soldier sent forth as representative of all men with the noble task of domesticating the Grey Goose!”
And the fellas laugh, of course they do, and of course we roar on into the night past when cars used to pick us up, past where school-demands required submission to the reality of Monday morning. Still, even the cosmic majesty of the stars doesn’t last forever and as the heavenly fires recede behind the clouds, the sparks of light that are my mates recede too.
“Got work at eight, lads,” Jay confesses, putting down the bottle.
“Uni is tearing me a new one,” is Tony’s excuse.
“Yeah, sorry, it’s about time,” is the final excuse, killing off Danny. Each of those fine fellas was a different shard of glass taken away, we nearly had a complete image. We leave one by one, and all I’m left with is a set of watermarked photos of the one perfect night when ladies and gentlemen sang and partied, lights chose to illuminate and conceal, cake chose to bring speeches and hollers, a private moment brought a private ecstasy, and the strike of midnight brought my 18th trip around the sun.
Two years later, some things change. It’s not ‘G-man’ they’re calling me but this name ‘Poe’, whatever that’s about. Some things don’t change though, like the way alcohol and mateship on a cool night remind me of a night I had two years ago.
“Hey Poe, you there?” These words reach me, I think they came from the mouth of this person-shaped phantom before me.
Time must move at a different speed for everyone else, I think to myself. I didn’t quite catch who it was that spoke. Or what they said. I’m somewhat aware that my right hand is exceedingly cold.
The string of lights spiralling down from the ceiling is what I’ve been looking at. I wonder if being a moth is like this. Is it this peaceful? “Maybe,” I reflect, “I actually am a moth.”
“Poe, you did not just call yourself a moth. That’s hilarious.” That human-shaped phantom was still in front of me and appeared to have reacted to a thought that I didn’t know I vocalised.
With the effort required to step out of the shower in winter, I tore my eyes away, and martialled my attention to consider the person with whom I was speaking. The thought of winter made me think.
Oh man, my right hand is so very cold.
“Hey, that’s what I was thinking a moment ago before I lost my train of thought.” I probably didn’t need to say that out loud either. The phantom before me looked an awful lot like a girl I know called Anna.
“I think you should have a break from these,” said Anna, and all of a sudden, my right hand stopped growing colder. It took a conscious effort to turn towards my hand. When my eyes finally got there, I deduced that a pint of beer had been mounted in the cup-holder that one calls a ‘right hand’ and that she had freed me of that burden.
I thought, Thank you Anna, and said, “I’m glad she did that.” Oh, wrong way again. Something about that exchange brought me back to reality. It was like I’d been watching events through a Tupperware container or an empty beer glass. The frozen hand had been a frozen anchor. It had anchored me down, tied me in like a boat at dock. But now warmth was regaining territory and the ceiling web lights began to spin into an unruly mess of netting—I was learning the ropes. I sauntered over to a little patch where a couple friends of mine were all smiling and laughing.
There were three of them there: the one they called ‘Aunty Jo’, Dreads, and Red Jumper. I’m looking at them but I’m also looking past them, looking into the past like it’s a new future, hoping the past will yet present herself here for a dance. I’ve still got that image in my head, and even the netting lights on high won’t distract me.
My eyes snap away from the empty door. One of the three girls was looking my way. They had those darting eyes that tell you that you were the subject of conversation but right now that washes right by me because my anchor is up! I tell you, I’m climbing the rigging and I’ve got to be careful because otherwise I’ll fall but I’m talking about dancing! I’m dancing now with that one girl, Dreads, and she knows the rigging, in fact I see it on her face that she traces the words I say back to the thoughts that commanded them and so that’s why I’ve got to be careful where I put my feet and hands. By this age I’ve learnt the ropes and I know not to fall, it looks like she does too because everything forms a messy blur behind her head as we spin around, a centrifuge careering crazy like a starry satellite in rogue orbit-
Slowly now. The sky faces me. I’m looking at the faraway stars. My vision is running like Starry Night crying. There’s an almighty beating behind my right ear. Slowly, the sounds match up with the pictures and I begin to understand what the giants above me are saying.
“Poe, you’re an idiot mate.” That would be my best mate Jay talking.
“Poe, are you OK? Can you hear me?” Ah, it’s Mum. Well, she’s my mate’s girlfriend, but she acts like everybody’s mum.
“Why am I on the ground?” I demand answers from the place of no elevation. Jay speaks again.
“Buddy, you and Ruth were spinning around like crazy people. This is a beer garden, not West-Side Story. You slammed your head into the gas heater.”
While I am still processing this revelation, and remembering that Dreads does in fact go by Ruth, I am lifted by Anna, Jay and Mum, who sit me on a chair out of the way.
“Hey Jay,” I begin.
“Yeah man?”
“You’re not drinking tonight?”
“Nah man, I drove the lads. Anyway, I’m on set super early tomorrow. I gotta win over this guy to be D.O.P. for my short film, gotta be on my game.”
“And maybe you, sir, shouldn’t keep being such a high-functioning alcoholic,” says Ruth through broad grin. I shoot her a smile back, but it fades as I turn to Jay.
“Yeah man, it’s just-”
“Don’t tell me: not like the old days?” Jay knew. He always knew.
“Maybe it’s time for some new memories.” Ruth extends her hand to me, and in that moment the shattered glass of a crystallised moment of long ago is perfectly reconstructed, and upon being perfected in recollection, dissolves like a million fireflies going haywire. I’m no longer tied down, tied back, tied up by a memory. A good memory, but an old one. The hand before me is an invitation to take part in the future, leaving Jay behind on the chair with the past. Only then do I see: Jay left the past behind long ago and had just been waiting for me to follow suit.
So, I take Ruth’s hand. Under a different but not dissimilar night of stars, there is joy and gaiety and celebration and dancing, and the stained glass of a new memory holds fast: a new masterpiece.
Distilled Orthopraxy 