Without Number: Global Gay Tourism
David Herkt
Ok, so just for the sake of it, let's go for a proper opener, a grabber as
all of the writing manuals suggest, calculated to grip attention, and so
lets pretend that they're all on one of those modern drugs with the
alphabetic titles, for succinctness one assumes, and, yeah, the K is
definitely already hitting home as they walk across suddenly woozy Hurstmere
Road, into the club.
K is one of the dumb ones, when it's used like this anyway, when it's
snorted off a CD case in an illegally-parked car across the road, when it's
ping-ponging the neurons already as they waver over the street, through
splashy lights, oncoming taxis, blasts of red brake-lights, crash-zoomed
crowds, too much motion, and, hey, its suddenly a Very Big Spongy World here
on a January Wednesday night in Takapuna.
And, whoops, with the K it's also a bit loose-limbed for a second, balance
wavering, the sound already this low-level flub, everything vaguely distort,
spaces, people, radiance, and really you'd wonder why they do it, just for
the sake of novelty one assumes, the desire to experience difference, and
some multi-tasking need to occupy spare brain-cells during a social outing.
Doubtless it is also possible to ascribe this usage of this drug to
traditional reasons like low-self-esteem, unhappy home-lives during
childhood, depression, or a pathological need for risk-taking behaviours,
but, really, upon clinical examination, a, b, and c just won't stand up as
probable causes and what is d anyway but a phrase for having fun?
Then K is one of the short-lived ones, twenty minutes lets say, before Not
So Terra Firma becomes firm again, sounds snap back into normal register,
bodies stop being dumbly slobby, and there is just the residue of the
popular kid and horse anaesthetic numbing things down a little with a
lip-tingling residue. So it really is an easy tolerated flip of
consciousness to the nitrous-oxide side of the circus tent and back again,
with not too much worry about how-long etcetera. It is like amyl-nitrate
except slow-mo'd, one could say.
But before this return to staid old earth, there are the meet and greets of
an arrival, a bouncer negotiated, friends seen, embraces, hellos, and while
all of this is normally a mission to the narrow-focus of everyday
consciousness, it has just been lunar-gravitized here into just plain
dumbness and giggles.
Dumb, dumber and dumbest, but it is all relevant, the perspectives, suddenly
being somewhere else and looking on everything differently, marvelling at
what a change a view-point can make, discovering strange stupid worlds where
no man has gone before, learning new values and alterations, and finally
bringing the good news back home to maybe liven up the ordinary thoughts of
an ordinary evening some time in the future when there might be time to
reflect, in tranquillity, upon such things.
So somehow all the conversations here are groped, grabbed, and uttered and,
you know, well, enjoyed, probably from a great distance, perceptual snaps
and readjustments happening while leaning against a wall for occasional
support, sound echoing and rumbling weirdly in the numbed mechanisms of the
ear with this odd base-beat pervasive, and with the brain ramped-down it is
such fun to smear it a bit dumbly more by comparison and complicity with a
similarly air-headed friend.
'Did you need this?' one of them asks, laughing through the thick spaces
'It sorta fills the time, I guess' the other says with a sort of
whoops-a-daisy lurch that is probably not much noticeable to an outside
observer but certainly feels like some richter-scaled twist from the inside.
EDITING AS A SHARED, HUMAN EXPERIENCE
A music studio and a vision-editing suite are similar places now. The
imaging of sound and vision, the manipulations of, are identical. Time is
the long-line and content it is presented spatially and one cuts and
rearranges, lays and overlays, all of this being seen as coloured blocks
upon a screen. One selects, cuts, refines, orders, according to another
scheme, held in the head, unapprehendable, of which this is the concrete
consequence.
So I'm sitting there with Mark Taylor and I'm entering that complicit space
where I am just one of two, and we are doing it together. I am cutting from
a huge mass of materials, chopping perhaps 30 seconds from a 45 minute
interview, which is all of it that is going to be used. Mark is beside me
doing the fingerwork and I'm just this mind and the words I use to describe
and speak to him.
I like this part of the process. Now we are making something concrete
instead of this imaginary world that I have envisaged for so long.
There are rhythms here, the rhythm of sound and cutting the grabs, honing
someone's phrases to hold the sense, and it is done with in and outpoints,
and we are listening and I'm saying things like 'bonk' at the moment Mark
puts an out-point on the screen.
There is the rhythm of vision where one image needs to end just there and
another begin, or the linkage of a flow needs something else just here to
make the visual beat, and both of us seeing the hole, knowing that it is
there, knowing that something exists that will fill it, but we'll have to
find it...
In the summer heat, we are locked in here for shared hours, looking at
screens, carving out the representation of a representation, together,
sitting at the desk, Mark getting tetchy at my sprawl of paper, our minds
focused and receptive.
DRIVING, HE SAID
'Stop looking narrow-eyed,' he says as we turn into Mountainview Road.
I stare out the window.
'And, for your information, I do know how hard it must have been for you to
handle me and the situation. I do understand, OK?'
I stare out the window still, silent, but somehow mollified by
understanding, though no resolution has occurred unless understanding itself
is a resolution. I also know that this is as close to an apology as we're
going to ever get.
But today I need things. I ache with accumulated tensions. I surmount
several impossible tasks every hour, at the moment. I want to find relief in
him, some pour of bright wet water as escape from the deserts of stress and
all the days' dry gatherings of things that must be overcome. I want to be
eased and relaxed and, yes, I think, still staring narrow-eyed out at the
houses of Western Springs, I want more than I currently have.
GUIDED BY THE BLIND: A SHORT HANDBOOK ON MARRIAGE
'I love you,' I say, eyes still closed, reaching for his warmth.
'You do not,' he states.
'I do so,' I respond, startled by his words, especially half-asleep as he is
in this early morning.
I know I am not giving him everything he deserves at the moment. I am
stinting on my gifts, not out of malice or dislike, but because I do not
have enough of them, and because, especially, the times require me to
achieve so much else in the next months, that I do not have enough time in
the day.
These are poor reasons. There is an acknowledgement here, though, of his
needs and my shortcomings, but we have survived far worse. There are times
and tides in relationships, there are ebbs and flows, there is contact and
withdrawal, and this process must be part of any overview on things.
Sometimes it is personal, based upon needs to share and to withdraw, to open
up yourself or to close it off.. Often it is circumstantial, work, weather,
world...
There is, somehow, in the loose contract of our relating, an awareness of
this. Expectations must be lowered temporarily, saved for future answer, but
definitely not without comment.
THE HEAT, THE HEAT
Sunday and I am on my bed, late in the afternoon, in shorts, having just
woken from a nap, too hot, sweaty, the mind dumb, looking up at the ceiling
wondering who I am and what I have become.
WATCHING THE PRODUCT
I have spent a day in some sort of stress, knowing that, for the first time,
someone outside the making-process is going to be watching the first part
assemblage of episode one. Rachel, my producer came in yesterday and stood
at the back of the edit suite and, knowing exactly the impact of what she wa
s about to say, said that she wanted to view it, tomorrow at 2.30pm.
I imagined every possible thing, from having Rachel completely rip it apart,
and her never been known to mince words, to even worse, getting fired for
incompetence, my confidence shot, my abilities permanently devalued.
I did not sleep well that night, caught between worry and tiredness, in that
half-place where things are magnified and distorted by the fretful mind in
its turnings.
And the next day, just sitting there watching things with someone else is
sufficient to give another perspective on things. So while Rachel is poised
behind me, watching the screen, I'm noting slowness and length and making
mental memos, and we finally make it three-fifths of the way through and
it's crunch-time and she says...
'It's good. It works. You are fifty percent of the way there...'
A FOREIGN VISITOR ARRIVES
It is Monday evening. I am coming in the back gate at a pace. I could not go
to the airport because a computer crashed and I lost the hours work I was
doing to get me ahead so that I could go. By the time it is 1.30pm, I know I
can't make it. So now it's 5:00pm and I notice that the lawnmower man must
have come, and I'm going up the back path and the door is open, me lugging
too many bags.
'Hi there,' I say entering the dimmer, shady house.
I can hear voices. It is John and JohnM. They are on the deck drinking
coffee and chatting.
I hug JohnM, newly arrived. It has been two years probably since I have seen
him. It doesn't feel that long. I do like the ease that he represents for
me. Somehow I just naturally slip into co-existing with him. It takes about
15 seconds, if that.
He looks the same, that Greek face, that deft lightness of manner.
'So you found each other,' I say to John, because he was there, at the
airport, looking for someone he'd never seen, but with a description of a
sling.
'I found him, swdi,' says JohnM, and John giggles.
'I just vagued out,' John says, me knowing what this is like, 'and when I
looked up he was standing in front of me.'
'Like this,' says JohnM , raising the sling that is going to cradle his left
arm until next Friday.
I look at their coffees.
'I've got some beer,' I say.
'Mmm,' says JohnM, 'mmmm, Hoegaarden...'
'I got it for you,' I add.
'No, caffeine first, then beer,' he decides.
I shrug. I'm going for beer here on a hot Auckland afternoon, on this deck,
the sun-dazzle meaning we've all got our sunglasses on.
DINNER-TIME WITH THE STAR
John had prepared what he referred to as a New Zealand meal: roast lamb, a
chickpea salad, a chopped tomato salad, and beans. We're eating at the
table, with wine and champagne. There is Julian, me, Max and John. I sort of
wanted Jonathan to be here but that would have complicated things, not that
I would have minded. Samuel has been uncontactable.
'A gay dinner,' Jonathan has already said, with implication, and it is, with
males being easy about who they are, about what is expected... I'm sitting
at the end, being a smashed paternal figure-head, John delivering dishes
from the kitchen, people making noises of appreciation. JohnM looks like
he's enjoying himself.
The food is lovely. It is simple with John's expert touch. It is going to be
followed by a lovely cherry desert and then by cheese.
And it is pleasant here, dishes being passed, direction being confused, new
bottles of wine opened, and then after the table is cleared Julian is going
to show us the majority of pages of the magazine and they do work for me.
I get a little snakey because Julian is doing 'mine' and 'I' a bit too much
and this concept was my own after all, and I have to say this. Julian has
also ignored my proof-corrections and rewrites.
Julian makes conciliatory noises.
'Oh,' he assures me, 'I have used some.'
But I have an eagle eye for words and I can't find a single instance of my
replacements being used.
However the photos do look good. It does look good. I can't complain about
the concept-execution.
'Nice photos,' says JohnM.
I look at him. He is having a good time, I think. I am pleased to offer it
to him and to show him some of the people who are important to me and the
things that would have been happening anyway, on a Monday night here, Julian
with the pages of a magazine, Max just back from Napier, John cooking, and,
well, me just getting relaxed after a long day at work.
D.