Tug Dumbly # 73 - Alpine & Creme de Menthe

Alpine & Crème de Menthe

That voice you did on the phone

I called your beetroot voice.

It blushed red, was too effusive and gushy.

Same tone you used with lavender ladies

on the church buffalo, after one

of the Reverent Garlick’s brainbakers,

me dragging your dress to the car:

c’mon mum. And stop being so christly nice.

Drop the drapes and talk straight,

like those hardbit mums of my mates,

with the cold green crème de methe eyes,

squinting smoke and suspicion,

leaking Alpine from pinchbar mouths,

downturned tight like snappers on ice.

Other mums were Vasso and fabric softener 

young Shirley Maclaines and Glenda Jacksons

to me now as I smudge their faces to some

greasy gladwrap mashup in my wild young eye.  

Even now I see Charlotte Rampling flick a

cigarette to curl tresses of smoke beneath

a yellow moth halo outside the scouthall,

dark cherry lipstick thick on the butt 

and there!

right there’s an Aladdin’s lamp to rub

through the pocket of your scout pants,

a cony snare sprung, whorled pube’s boing!

whipcrack of pissed on electric fence kicking

sharp to imprint soft loam with hoof of desire

that crimson butt compactly primed with a

thousand and one nights of total sweaty recall,

of purest carnal creation, a dna ladder

up a stocking to where all fictions start 

Swiss Army lipstick, personal Grecian Urn,

that forever fusing fag a Proustian bunger

ever ready to explode like a shook Fanta can

with a mere elbow greasing of the mind.      

+

Other families went fishing Sundays,

caught Kingies and Wahoos out at the shelf

while I caught sali-vation in stale flecks flung

from a fossil pulpit, stewed in tales of the Lamb,

the Fisher of Men, the Kingdom of Odd.

How I greened over them straight talkin bent

heathen families and the glorious loose way they 

smoked and drank and swore, how they

went to the Club and violently barbequed.

Realists, they were, those salty mums and dads.

Knew they were raising cobras, not kids.

Had a healthy medieval view of child rearing,

copped some attrition like a bad gas bill.  

So, you might lose a few.

Kids were little disease and weather dependent

crops, seed scattered on nightsoil before the black

bibs of crows and floods and fate, and the

whittling whim of some great unguessable fish.

What cha gunna do? Just follow the

instructions on the packet you can solidly

grasp, not the ectoplasmic tiller   

of god’s pleasantly scented butcheries. 

Trust in cottage industry’s sweaty rut

and shudder of kid makin, manure well,

plough your bed, so sew sow your furrow,

drill deep your seed where choughs don’t burrow,

and if some blindworm, bus or canker pluck

a few, well, just imagine them taken by the Turk

for Janissaries in some mini-series.

… Fuck must be pleasant that, I thought,  

rockin back in the arms of the pagan

on some cool throne of stone, of living on

guts, gristle, pure peasant superstition,

solid meat, splintered bone.

+

Another scene:

Here’s you and me mum reading in bed, 

our wet brown dairy cow eyes spilling torrents

over the death of little Fiver in Watership Down.

Didn’t know this stuff got harder to take than

shooting Blinky Bill’s dad

                                   (or watching in real life

that Kookaburra pumped full of slugs by louts

at a van park, the bird just sitting there taking it,

patiently absorbing death, pellet by lazy pellet. 

Why don’t you just fly?) …

Justa couple more pages, please mum, please,

just one more page before …

lights out …  

+

Dodge City the old man called the place

where lived those commission house kids

with ribby brown bodies, hard and sharp,

whippet wiry like a copper brush kept in a

tin of dirty kero to scour greasy engine parts

good at skidding bindies barefoot

or rippin off on a stolen gold dragster

from the pool, tarwalking bubbling roads

on faith to take cuffings and beatings

as pa for the course unbelts from the pub,

the drink-drive no probs in those days,

as he floats home like a boat in a Kingswood

station wagon colour of a KB can,

and whaling the kid’s an appetiser to chops

or like taking a piss, better out then in  

+

One afternoon I walk from a scumbled sky

past corrugated chickens of a hot sirocco

thumb-smudged greasy orange sun filtered

through bushfire Somme      a moted eye

flecked with longline drifts of ashes, cinders,

cicadas and cinders of cicadas, and black

cockatoos and crows cawing baleful auguries

like black waves of Heinkels heading

to nightbomb London over a melting plastic

bush run through by the Devil’s thumb …    

… the sound of sirens wailing over town

a carrion antiphon to hellbreath Westerly    

choir of infernal shadow-puppetry     Punch

& Judy treeline thrashing and bowing heads

thirsting for the promised end …

… this hot wind about licks my lungs out

as up a concrete ramp I blow through the

backdoor of a green fibro box of a place

into a back kitchen thicket of fag and wood-

smoke      where at laminex sit a pair of

freckled toad sisters smoking with snapper-

faced mum, and the old Kookaburra’s

chainin on too - something in there, probably

fish - and there’s streaks of bark and kindling,

red splinters and dust to be swept from the lino

round the empty woodbox (which you should

have refilled by now ...) 

flyscreen smacks three times     

I say hello Mrs Saunders     she grunts

with green eyes and the toads

don’t look up from savagely ashing

into a scallop shell and picking

at chipped nails

as I walk through to the front …

+

… it’s Satdee arvo coz old man Ken’s

in front of the wrestling, Mario Milano and them,

and the tele’s black and white

and Ken’s smoking Black & Whites

(‘they’re smokes for blokes’) …

and he might have a pearly shell ashtray too,

choked with a Giant’s Causeway of butts …

but who knows, could be that mermaid

ashtray with the novelty swinging boobs …

… and let’s say he’s got a can of KB 

in a foam holder printed with a rude joke …

He looks at me in his doorway: ‘ee’s in ‘is room’,

he thumbs, face redder than a cooked

tiger prawn, almost permanent puce 

from being out in his boat, the salt sea and sun,

and he’s lubed with Brylcreem, nicotine

beer, Old Spice, an ancient source

of fear and awe, could lasso a kid

from a block with his voice       one of them

mythical old men, Yowie Men, Banksia Men,

Babadook in terms of now,  

frightening creature insides unknown …

I’m an old man now, older than him then,

but can’t see myself as one, not like him

who’ll always be older and more astounding

in his way, a maker of things with his raw hands,

like his house his boat his shed …

                                            and I wonder

where his knowledge to make things came from,

and who his old man was, and who everyone’s

old man is, whole chains of old men stretching

back to Charlie Mane and beyond …

Anyway

I spose he’s red too from his job

as a council roadganger, laying hot tar

under a bubbling sun … all this heat -

of wind, of fire, of stove, of a cooked face,  

of smoke trapped in the logs of lungs … 

+

… my friend’s a little saucepan

bubbling on his bed, crewcut head

burrowed like a puggle in his pillow,

digging for the life of him to get away

from that beltin old Ken out there

just give him - who knows why, maybe

the woodpile, maybe just a regular

hangover hittin 

but now he’s more digging to get away

from me seeing him unmanned

by a mere whippin  

face down trying hard

not to let me see him cry 

his dad musta done him good

coz it’s not like the belt’s a novelty.

  

and I poke his shoulder,

then shake him rough

then touch him more gentle

and that just makes him shudder like a ship. 

Come on Shane

let’s get outa here, get the bikes

go and look at the fires …

they’re up Hidden Valley,

along the river, round Cat’s Cave …

and all he can do is not cry.

Musta been a beauty alright  

but we’d be over the bush soon enough  

whittlin spears and chucking rocks

at the bomby cars slept in by tramps  

and sucking Alpines at Big Rock

C’mon Shane …

and he’s not going to cry

he’s just not going to cry

and then he’s really crying

and I walk home feeling light

and think then, or soon, or years after,

or all three, I got a pretty soft cocoon

to retreat to after an adventure

nice place to gobble toothpaste

and scour hands fleshless with a bar

of Solvol, to absolve me of the thrilling

taint of Alpine transgression; place to

relish my goddy little guilts in peace

  

and like the dog that didn’t bark in the night

I come to see what’s missing in some places

is books and bookshelves

and encyclopaedias and a piano

and music and records, and getting

read to every night, and hardly ever getting hit,

and then with only half a heart’s hand on the bum 

So please, pass the beetroot mum.