The Trip
“We don’t want to die young. We will die old together,” she says. Her words drape over me. Her face changes. We’re swimming in the living room of the one-bedroom in Mitchell St, Northcote.
I hold the brass letter opener from Istanbul, in 1987, a miniature replica of an Ottoman sword. Faux rubies in the handle. It’s in my right hand—tight grip. I want to hold it and then I can’t. It goes back on the bookshelf.
The ABC Late News are on, Thursday, July 9, 1999, no sound. Men in white coats litter the grounds around big, spacious nuclear-refining complexes somewhere. The news ticker scrolls with MELBOURNE: COLD FRONT BRINGS RAIN AND STRONG WINDS.
And I put on a compilation CD; I can barely make out the writing scrawled with black marker, “Bn Under Punches.. Talk Heads; Mysterious Trav — Weather Report; Moonlight on Vermont — Capt Beefheart; Entre Dos Aguas Paco de Lucia; Bowie; Omega, Morente.”
Istanbul in 1988 with my first wife, the Austrian. Wet. Cold. The phones didn’t work. The television in the hotel room played German pop-"Yellow". The Bazaar with pillars of pistachios and cinnamon—thimbles of apple tea over negotiations for a leather jacket. Hagia Sophia reeked of sweat, blood, semen, shit, and the piss of my history; the voice in my head is my voice. I am speaking.
“Suck my cock,” I say. Trembling. “We gotta go to Kanela—I told them I’d dance,” her voice a four-four beat, a groove. She’s in no state to dance, in no state for Johnston Street.
We recline on the 1950s couch, the click-open couch from my grandfather’s. My nipples hard, my cock flaccid lies in the palm of my right hand now. “When Paco de Lucía played Melbourne, he wanted to sleep with me,” she says. “We are staying in…I’m not going to Johnston Street… fuck that,” I say.
Rain pelts the roof. Shouts and laughter from young people on the street invade the room. Cars whoosh on the wet street: every sound, every voice, a new raga. “When the dog shit, needles, vomit and cigarette butts wash away, then we’ll go to Kanela,” I say to myself.
“I don’t understand, ¡joder! I wanna fuck, I wanna laugh,” she says.
We move to the bedroom. She takes her jeans off, falls on the bed, then leans on her arm. She’s naked from the waist down. A breast falls out of the blue linen shirt.
I crawl onto the bed, like a monitor lizard, take her hand and put it on my cock. She stares at it, laughs and bends over, runs her tongue up and down the shaft; she stops. She gets out of bed and struggles to stand. She holds the wall as she moves into the kitchen, her shirt covering half her ass. “I can’t stand anymore,” she says, then breaks into laughter.
