When I think over the time we knew each other Ray, I can’t for the life of me remember the when or the how of our first meeting – nor can I recall what we talked about. Arguably, this is shaky ground on which to build a eulogy but what’s more important is where we first came face to face: the Central City Library in Auckland.
I was working there as a librarian at the time and you were a regular visitor to the branch – one of the many Streeties who wandered in to escape the rain and cold; who fought the dull-eyed students and scruffy backpackers for the divine right to charge mobile phones in the all-too-rare power sockets; who sank into those odd ladle-shaped chairs to nap.
With the daily rhythm of the library as it was – people beating paths past each other to camp out in front of computers and study desks, or slipping through the door to grab a book on their lunch break; bodies rolling in and pulling out like the tide – we would’ve seen each other many times before we actually met.
Working in so public a space as a library – in particular, the Central City branch, like Rome in that all roads led to it – meant that when one met a patron once, one ran into them a lot. After discovering we both lived and roamed locally, our first meeting (whenever and however it happened) would’ve been a matter of equation, not destiny. But that’s where the maths stops, for what came next was nothing less than art.
After you entered the library, you’d sight me from a distance, shelving books, teetering on a ladder, hanging posters from the ceiling for displays (such is the fate of the lanky) or rushing between floors organising all manner of events and programmes. We’d acknowledge each other with a smile before you strode towards me across that lurid, brazenly nineties carpet (I presume it still furnishes the floor of the library; it will outlive us all). You’d have your backpack slung over your shoulder, your creased shirt billowing, baggy jeans bunched at the ankles skimming tattered black sneakers – all the while your deliciously anachronistic ponytail flounced in time to your steps. ‘Young Todd,’ you’d say – too archaic and formal an address for it not to have been a performance – before you pulled your red puckered face into a chimpanzee grin (sans a few unnecessary pearly whites). A greeting as much as any smile, but on you it also heralded the arrival of Ray: Out-of-Work Humourist.
When we established Monday movie screenings in mid-2015, you began frequenting them with the other Streeties, dishing up folk philosophy and wry observational humour in equal measure: a veritable Shakespearean foil, slumped in a chair, sardonic and sparkling with wise-cracks.
And as if being yourself wasn’t enough, you’d inhabit all of the characters in the stories we read aloud during Reading Revolution on Thursdays – always eliciting either muted appreciation or eye-rolls from other attendees. On Wednesdays during the City Mission Book Club, you waxed lyrical about whatever novel you were reading (the gorier the better), only breathing long enough to issue a misplaced apology to my colleague Simonne when your yakking took a turn for the gutter – as if a proud and long-time Westie like her cared whether you dropped f-bombs.
Ray – you read voraciously and I liked that you possessed a penchant for the earthier side of fiction. I recall the momentary blindness I suffered when your face lit up after I recommended you Denis Johnson’s ‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’. It contained what I knew you liked: immorality, black humour, blood and death. The impish smirk on your face was priceless.
Full disclosure: Early on, after having only witnessed a few of your performances, I decided you were just another one of our more distinctive patrons – equal parts chatty and mouthy. All I knew then was that if you were in the library, my entertainment was assured. In my defence, Ray, librarians don’t always find the time to get down and dirty in the 746s; we grab our fun wherever we can find it. But that’s neither here nor there now because you were undoubtedly my favourite patron: cheeky, heretical all the way down with a singular ability to spin a yarn.
And the yarns you spun! Many and splendid, like the one you wove about how, as a young man, you had an illustrious career writing and directing children’s theatre productions on a cruise ship. Random enough to have actually happened but had you stretched the truth? Highly likely. When your default setting was Sly Motherfucker, can you blame me for taking some of what you said with more than a few grains of salt? Did I balk at the possibility you might not have always been spitting the gospel truth? As an aspiring Sly Motherfucker, I can’t say I did.
This doesn’t mean I never tired of you. In fact, let the record state that I contemplated slapping you each and every time you derailed group conversation in book club with an anecdote too long in the wind. However, I saw myself in the way you talked. Your eyes darted around like mine did, never settling on anyone’s face for long. I knew this didn’t necessarily signal evasiveness, nor were our gestures – twirling hands and sweeping arms – mere distractions. These were the signifiers of our full commitment to telling a story.
The thing about storytelling is that the energy of it matters as much as the content. One can hit the stage in possession of the world’s greatest plot but if one mangles the delivery of it, one may as well have just performed for the dead.
Our talk meandered; our words sloshed in the va between us, punctuated by frenzied nods and shakes of the head in surprise and incredulity, all to the chug of our wind-up laughter. I think to some degree we both knew that all of this had as much to do with communing as it did with transmitting information. We played with the truth because we knew it was malleable, understanding in our bones that adhering so strictly to something as humdrum as verisimilitude would’ve transmuted the gold to dust.
You and I had the comfort of each other without the burden of responsibility. You could swoop in to the library on any given day, shoot the shit with me then leave whenever you wanted to.
And leave you did – for months, at one stage. Thankfully you returned. You waltzed into the library and informed me that you’d shacked up in a short-term lease in South Auckland but decided to ditch it – again, the story you told me and again, the version I accepted because you were you and I was me. There we were, carrying on the same as before save for one difference: You’d traded in your ponytail for – as you slyly put it – a suave short-back-and-sides ‘do.
I’ve changed, you’d said.
No shit, I thought. Why the hell would you lop off your signature ponytail?
I’ve gone cold turkey, you added, buoyed by your decision to kick the habit for good. Grinning, you told me not to worry. I wouldn’t run into you outside the Victoria Park New World on your way to your dealer’s house anymore.
Change, right? The thing that comes knocking when we don’t want it to; the thing that seemingly never graces us when we wish it would. I wished that you’d really kicked the habit for good. I wished that you hadn’t asked me a few months later to pinch a spoon from the staffroom for you to borrow. (I appreciate that you respected me enough to apologise profusely after I’d refused.)
When I didn’t see you in my final weeks at the library, I wasn't sad about not being able to say goodbye before jetting off to Melbourne. After years spent fending off the government, Work and Income had finally caught on and was shipping you off to Blenheim to slog it out in the vineyards. Any day now, you'd said, the last time we saw each other.
So imagine how unsettling it was for me to receive a message from Simonne on January the 20th that your body had been found in Pigeon Park – the same day a crazed man driving a stolen car mowed down pedestrians in central Melbourne. You overdosed on the drugs you’d scored on your birthday. Picking grapes in Blenheim, you were not. Seated in a library (of all places!), I felt an unwelcome, visceral change, a tug at the animal place in my gut. I’d never be able to convince you to bring back the ponytail.
After nearly nine months living in Melbourne, busied with the labour of building a new life, I’ve lacked both the inspiration and motivation to write anything substantial, let alone craft anything as daunting as a dedication to someone’s life. Especially so, given that a lot of my memories of you have faded.
However, a change occurred today. After inexplicably waking up at four in the morning, I decided to read a book. In the middle of reading it, blankets pulled up to my eyes to stave off the chill in my bedroom, I stopped on this sentence: ‘Sometimes, if the hand moves, the mind can rest.’ Re-reading it conjured a vivid image of you, huddling in the shrubs in Pigeon Park, clutching the drugs, your hands working to administer them, your mind still.
Lacking an available memory, my mind has slipped into idealisation – it has smoothed over the edges of a rough situation. While there’s no harm in imagining what took place, I’m aware just how much of your life I have to imagine because I know so little about you. Then again, how can one ever hope to sum up a life when one can only use words? It's an impossible task but one accepts this fact and tries anyway.
So, to you Ray, I offer these words. I value what we shared and writing is the most effective way I can lift that up and sanctify it. In writing this, I’m ensuring that there exists in the world at least one thing about you that I know of – words garrisoned against memory’s oblivion.
But in my effort to conserve the past, I won't lose sight of another comfort the mind affords: tinkering.
And just like that, I’m back between the shelves with you, the genesis of a story on my tongue.
‘Well, Young Ray,’ I say, leaning in, conspiratorial, doing my best to ape your piano-key grin. ‘Guess what?’
You cock your head and smile, divining the change in the air. ‘What?’ you reply, anticipating with glee the hilarity to follow.
I stare at you, straight down the barrel and say, ‘I like dick’.
- August 2017